During the last 5 years of making video advertising for Verkkokauppa.com, I've made multiple template files for different types of ads depending on if the ad is going to TV, YouTube, social media, or digital signage.
By making these template files, I've been able to make new ads just in minutes to a couple of hours instead of working a whole day or two on them.
This is something I learned early on when I started doing freelance work. By making templates with multiple variations I was also able to price down my commissions and being competitive against other designers. This is something that works with almost anything and I originally began doing so with Photoshop mockups and text effects I sold in various marketplaces.
I've noticed it's easy to sell good templates for other designers when it's something that is saving them hours of work, but rarely anyone actually makes templates of their own. I only see people using the old design files again and again, but they never really make the files easily editable and so far in every company I've worked for just using Photoshop smart layers seems to be fairly rare. In a similar way After Effects compositions can be used to add content like text for multiple formats. This works really well when making product ads and it's still customizable unlike the templates sold specifically to digital signage software as an example.
For December we planned 2 tv spots for each week before Christmas week. At the time we also had a longer brand ad highlighting one of Verkkokauppa.com cave people characters called Peli Pia (Gaming Pia) and Manuaali Make (Manual Make). The last four of the ads are also used in YouTube advertising, but they were not specifically planned to be used there.
Filming: Otto Productions
Speaker: Sami Virkki