How Digitas Germany Powers 140+ Dealer Campaigns Across 10 Automotive Brands

Digitas Germany is a leading digital agency under the Publicis Groupe that combines data, creativity, and technology to deliver “Connected Marketing.” For one of Europe’s largest automotive holding groups, Digitas built a self-service marketing portal that lets 600+ dealers across 9–10 brands produce campaign assets, social, print, and video, without depending on outside agencies.

The portal runs on IMG.LY’s CE.SDK. Here’s how it came together, and what changed inside Digitas as a result.

The Challenge: Manual Processes and Rising Costs

Before the portal existed, the automotive client ran campaigns the way most enterprise marketing operations do: a central team commissioned creative from external agencies, dealers requested local variants by email, and someone (often several someones) hand-produced every asset for every market.

Across 9–10 brands and 600+ dealers, the costs added up faster than the campaigns did. Each campaign required separate design iterations, multiple approval cycles, and localization for three languages (German, French, and Italian). The team needed a way to unify these workflows and let dealers generate brand-compliant, personalized assets on their own, “within a few clicks,” as Martin Röhr, Senior Project Manager at Digitas Germany, put it.

The wish by the customer was that they can do the whole assets themselves, with a minimum of manual work, to automate and harmonize processes for all brands.

The portal’s job was clear. The question was how to build the creative layer behind it.

Why They Chose CE.SDK

Digitas evaluated several options, including building an editor in-house. The math didn’t favour it. A creative engine that handles video, print, and social across three languages, at the scale of a dealer network, is not a side project. It’s a multi-year platform commitment.

Martin’s evaluation of CE.SDK was quick.

I saw you have an editor that you can configure for different media types, it was not a hard decision.

The decisive factors weren’t headline features. They were the alignment between CE.SDK’s structural primitives and the problems Digitas needed to solve:

• The Template Engine gave them a way to express brand-safe master designs that dealers could personalize without breaking layout or compliance.
• The Variable System made dealer-specific data (dealership name, address, model, regional offer) first-class content the templates could bind to.
• Server-side rendering turned “personalize and export” into a background job that scaled to thousands of localized assets without manual work in the editor UI.

There was no real plan in the beginning. We found CE.SDK, which could solve every problem we had, videos, social media, templates, and then we figured out how to integrate it into every workflow.

How They Implemented CE.SDK

The integration was a multilingual campaign portal where marketing managers distribute approved templates and dealers customize them in context. A Node.js pipeline drives the background asset generation: when a dealer selects a template and supplies their data, the server renders every required variant (social square, vertical story, print A4, banner ad, short-form video) in the dealer’s language, ready for download.

The first campaigns went live in mid-2024. The team kept iterating on the portal as they expanded scope.

We shipped a much better product than initially planned. Building something like this ourselves would have taken years or ten times the budget.

Support and partnership were a quiet but real differentiator. Throughout the build, Digitas’s developers had direct lines to the CE.SDK team.

You offered us your support, and our developers always got quick responses, sometimes even hints that helped us rethink how we do things. Nothing bad to say about the whole experience.

The Results

Within months of going live, the portal was driving real campaign output.

140+ campaigns are now active across all brands. Dealers can download, localize, and ship assets in seconds, or minutes at most, instead of the days that manual production used to take. Across the three supported languages, the system is generating thousands of assets per month with no manual intervention.

Dealer feedback has been unambiguous. Martin reports it has been near-uniformly positive, and so has the marketing-manager response on the central side.

I built a better-looking asset in the portal than the agency ever did.

The qualitative read inside Digitas mirrors the data.

In all meetings, we had no negative feedback, absolutely nothing. Dealers are downloading, managers are happy, and we’re already planning the next automation features.

Overall Impact

The portal didn’t just replace agency dependency for one client. It changed how Digitas thinks about its own service offering.

Engineering capacity that would have gone into a custom editor, and into the perpetual maintenance an in-house editor demands, stayed focused on the portal’s automation, integrations, and roadmap. The visible win for the customer is faster, cheaper, on-brand campaign output. The less-visible win for Digitas is that the same creative infrastructure now scales horizontally across other clients.

I showed the project internally to hundreds of colleagues. Everyone wants to use it for other clients. It’s a no-brainer once you see what’s possible.

That’s the shape of the result: a single, repeatable creative layer that can power the next 140 campaigns, and the 140 after that.