Dynamic Media Templates

To explain the value of dynamic media templates, a variable data image or composable image asset, let’s consider our content hungry digital world. The demand for content to drive personalization is skyrocketing, while budgets are tightening. But that means more content, lots more content. In this real example of an Adobe manufacturing customer with a catalog of 1,000 products, you can see how the math plays out. With a fairly modest 25 assets per product and 15 regions to support, this customer is having to plan, create, manage, share, activate, and store a whopping 375,000 assets. And once you begin adjusting your assets for granular customer segments and contexts within their journeys, this number can balloon up to the millions. Dynamic media templates are the right asset type to solve this content at scale problem. Dynamic media templates are powerful, adjustable images created by changing simple URL parameters, driving sophisticated and fundamental changes to the nature of the image content itself. Templates allow for hundreds, thousands, even millions of just-in-time image renditions to be created when a template URL is rendered. To explain some best practices for developing and using templates, let’s redo the content at scale math problem with this illustration. With this set of product images as one set of variables, I’ll make a design that can show any product image with any set of text variables, here messages times languages. With this unrealistically small content at scale illustration, a solution relying upon batch processing and scripts would generate 1,000 individual assets. A better solution is a variable data dynamic media template. There are three basic steps to create a dynamic media template. Create a template asset and edit the design of the various elements. Then add and assign parameters to any template element you wish to expose and change in the URL, and then produce the copy URL with the parameters exposed, as the copy URL is the deliverable generated from this process. Let’s review a few best practices by making a simple template. Create templates by navigating to the dynamic media assets filter button and navigate to the folder you want to create a template in. Click the create template button and define the size in pixels for the template. I design my templates to render at 100% scale and will often start with a common known web ad or banner size in pixels. With an empty template canvas on screen, add image elements by clicking the add image button and search on files to drag onto the canvas. Here I’ll add a chair product image and also my background gradient image. I’ll reorder the background image to appear at the bottom of the layer stack by using the send backwards layering button. I’ll add a text layer and fill it with more placeholder content, some lorem ipsum wording, so I can resize the font sizes to be smaller for my large amount of product description text. Add another text block for the product title. Enable smart text resize to allow the text to render with a smaller font if more text is passed in a URL parameter than the design can accommodate at the current font size setting, a helpful tool. With my design elements in place, the images and text blocks, I’ll now add parameters to the elements I wish to expose as variables along the URL. You can add more parameters that you may wish to actually use at this stage as the preview tool allows you to pick and choose which parameters are included in the URL. You can also use the same parameter name and assign it to multiple elements. Here I’ll add the parameter font to text blocks and any time the font parameter is used, it will affect all the elements with that same name parameter attached. With my template now designed and parameters added, choose preview to select which parameters you wish to add to the URL and even change out the values in the editor to preview the template in action. The copy URL button will provide a copy URL with the selected enabled parameters. I now have a fully working template and can manipulate the parameter values in any web browser to further preview how this template will render. A simple test here is to change the product image as well as the font style used. Designing media templates are powerful tools for solving the content at scale and personalized content at scale problem, the increasing need for yes, more content. And templates provide a powerful and flexible just in time URL to render any combination of design template elements. Provided here are some helpful production tips that will make template creation and usage simpler. Thank you for watching this tutorial on Adobe Experience Manager dynamic media templates.