Five questions marketing procurement should ask before buying creative automation
Creative automation platforms promise to take adaptation cost out of creative production. A license price says little about what you will pay over three years. These five questions help procurement compare vendors on total cost, ownership and risk.
Marketing procurement teams are asked to cut costs in a category where labor rates only go up. Creative production is one of the hardest parts of that category to manage, because much of its cost never appears as its own line. Resizing, localizing and versioning work that already exists sits inside agency retainers, production fees, freelance budgets and overtime.
Creative automation platforms promise to take that cost out. They do it in different ways, and a license price on its own says little about what you will pay over three years. These five questions help you compare vendors on total cost, ownership and risk.
Why adaptation cost is hard to see
Adaptation is the work of turning one approved design into every size, language, market and format a campaign needs. Designers typically spend 40 to 60% of their time on it, and a third to a half of agency spend often goes on versioning.
Because that spend is spread across several budgets, few organizations can put a single number on it. Finding the number is the first step to managing it, and it gives you a baseline to hold every vendor against.
1. Who builds the templates, and what does a change cost?
This question separates operating models. Some vendors build and maintain templates for you as a service, which turns every new campaign or brand update into a change request. Our grocery retail buyer's guide notes that legacy vendors charge upwards of $50,000 for a single template conversion.
Ask who builds the templates, who changes them, and what each change costs over three years. With CHILI GraFx, we provide onboarding to get your team running. After that, your own designers build and change design systems themselves, with Design Agent proposing the build from an approved design.
2. How does the price behave as usage grows?
Procurement exists to prevent unplanned cost. Ask which drivers move the price, and model them against your own plans for the next three years: more markets, more designers, more output.
CHILI GraFx pricing is driven by designers, design systems, renders and whether end users get self-service access, with storage and AI included on fair-use terms. Whichever vendor you evaluate, ask for cost per asset at today's volume and at double it.
3. Who owns the production system?
Agencies and in-house studios both hold knowledge that is hard to move. When a partner leaves or a team turns over, the brand rules often leave with them.
Ask where templates and brand rules live, whether they are in a format your team can edit, and what happens if you change agency. In CHILI GraFx, brand rules, layouts and logic sit in standard, editable design systems in your own environment, so your in-house studio, agencies and production partners can all work from the same source.
4. What does it cost beyond the license?
Implementation, integration and internal time are real costs, and a saving in one budget can reappear in another. Ask for a three-year total that includes onboarding, any services and the internal time to build templates.
CHILI GraFx implementations take about three months, and customers clear the investment within three to six months of go-live on efficiency alone. Results vary by organization, which is why we model the saving on your own volumes before you sign. You can start with our ROI calculator.
Before CHILI GraFx, every new template took months and thousands of dollars. Now we manage it all with a few design systems, enabling local teams to create assets in minutes.
5. How does it handle risk, including AI?
Generative AI can multiply output many times over. If the same few people still review every asset, risk grows with volume. Ask whether brand and legal rules are enforced before an asset exists, or checked by someone afterward.
The stakes are real. In our Brandwidth 2026 research, 71% of grocery retail teams had a promo production failure in the last two years, and only 11% say their current process reliably prevents the next one.
CHILI GraFx builds brand rules into the design system and uses AI inside those rules. Customer data is never used to train AI models, and CHILI publish is ISO 27001 certified. Details are in our trust center.
Putting the answers side by side
The lowest license price does not always mean the lowest cost per asset. Score each vendor on the five questions, and ask them to prove their answers on one of your own campaigns.
If you are at ProcureCon Marketing Connect at Ashridge House on 1 and 2 December, our team will be there and is happy to compare notes.
