It’s been reported that over 2 billion people have some type of visual impairment and their first interaction with a brand is most likely via Mobile devices. Yet, 72% of the Business’ creative assets were not best suited for their digital channels and not tested for Visual Accessibility at all.

At the time, there was no Creative Production tool in the market that could pre-test digital creative assets for digital mandatories, visual clarity, color contrast and scale the production across Digital Advertising and eCommerce channels, split by formats, sizes, shapes and lengths.

The solution? To partner with leading Accessibility experts and a Creative Automation provider to build a bespoke tool and revolutionize the Digital Creative landscape to speak to all.

To successfully scale Accessibility pre-testing, the Business needed to move away from fixed assets produced manually to Modular assets adapted via automation.

Modular Design brings significant efficiencies and benefits to the digital asset creative design and adaptation process. It is a digital creative design system that operates based on a template subdivided into smaller component parts that can be independently created, modified, optimized or replaced. The Master template is pre-tested to comply to Digital Mandatories and Visual Accessibility Standards.

The selected Creative Automation partner ensured that the Master Creatives could automatically be tested and adapted into all required variations spanning different asset layouts, formats, messages, and languages.

The templatized design approach paired with pre-testing and scaled through automation enabled the Business to meet their Digital Mandatories, deliver strong creatives to all and inadvertently sped up production and drove down costs.

The first step to drive more accessible creative assets was to develop a testing approach that could enable designers to understand the perspective from somebody who has eyesight challenges and is trying to consume content on mobile screens. The second step was to identify a Creative automation partner that could integrate multiple tools and tests within the platform. We also needed to ensure the Business had sufficient benchmarks to validate Digital Mandatories and Visual Accessibility standards to properly test all new asset creations.

The Business partnered with their preferred Creative Automation provider due to their enhanced capabilities and integrations with major ad networks and DAMs and could deliver Globally. Their initial solution, however, didn’t involve the ability to pre-test within the platform.

In partnership with a team of Accessibility experts from a renowned University, the Business worked alongside the Creative Automation provider to embed a solution within their Asset Builder, to test Master assets for colour contrast and a pioneering visual clarity test (AA minimum compliance).

For the Business to achieve 100% compliance in these two tests and scale the overall automation solution, both creative agencies and brands needed to be fully equipped and prepared to include these in their current creative process.

The Business created an 8-step process that integrated all elements of the digital creative journey to embed the process across both Brand teams, Creative and Media agencies. The Business also created e-learning modules and implemented a Change Management approach to embed the program within the wider business.

Overall, the Business drove adoption to over 35 Brands in 31 Markets, delivering 100% Digital Mandatories compliant and tested for Visual Accessibility in 2022. Assets that pass the Accessibility test also had significant sales uplift and a media CTR of twice as high, making creative assets more effective overall.