Build or buy a creative simulator?
Published · 4 min read
Sooner or later almost every sizeable out-of-home media owner asks the same question. Our customers should see their creative on our sites before they book. Do we build the tool for that ourselves, or do we buy it?
We sell such a tool, so let us say that up front. Even so, we do not tell everyone to buy. The question looks like a budget decision. In practice it is usually settled somewhere else: by what the simulator has to do day to day. That part is almost always underestimated at the start.
What a creative simulator has to do
A creative simulator puts a creative onto a real ad surface and shows how it works in its surroundings. That sounds like image compositing. Four requirements make the difference.
- Perspective. A billboard is rarely square to the camera. The creative has to sit in the surface with the same tilt and distortion the surface has in the footage. Laid on flat, anyone can see it is a montage.
- Motion. Digital sites run in a loop. A still frame tells you nothing about whether the message lands in the time available.
- Inventory. A media owner has hundreds of sites, and each one needs footage, a mask and metadata. That work does not stop at launch. It carries on every month.
- Speed. The preview earns its keep in the client conversation. If people wait ten minutes for it there, they will not bring it to the next meeting.
A tool that only handles perspective is enough for a demo. It becomes useful in sales once all four points are solved.
Where in-house builds get stuck
Perspective cannot be bolted on as a filter
The first prototype takes a photo, cuts out the surface and lays the creative over it with a CSS transform. For that one photo it looks fine. With the second site the manual work starts, and it never stops.
Video is a project of its own
Producing a still image is manageable. Holding a creative frame-accurate on filmed footage for several seconds and turning that into a downloadable file is a great deal more work. This is where most in-house builds stop. Or they turn into a rendering project without anyone having decided that they should.
The inventory takes the most time
The software is finished at some point. Loading new sites never is. Unless you plan it as a fixed routine from day one, a year later you have a tool with twenty sites and a long queue.
It has to run on an ordinary laptop
The simulator runs in the client’s meeting room, on the client’s laptop. There is no graphics workstation in that room. That rules out several otherwise obvious technical routes.
What belongs in the calculation
Development days are only part of it. An honest comparison looks more like this:
| Item | In-house | Bought in |
|---|---|---|
| Initial build | several person-months | none |
| Loading the inventory | needs its own process | part of onboarding |
| Video export | your own rendering problem | included |
| Maintenance, browser updates | permanent | with the vendor |
| Time to productive | months | weeks |
| Your own branding | a given | via white-label |
The line most often missing from these calculations is maintenance. A simulator is never finished. It runs in browsers that change every year and shows an inventory that changes every month.
Where white-label shifts the maths
When media owners want to build their own, the reason is rarely technology. Usually it is the brand: you do not want to show your customers someone else’s logo. We understand that. The simulator turns up in client meetings, in proposals and in site conversations.
That is why white-label is the norm for this kind of tool. You get your own design, your own domain and your own inventory, separated per tenant. That removes the strongest argument for building it yourself. What is left is a sober question about how much time and ongoing effort you want to put into the tool.
When we recommend building in-house
If the simulator is your product and you have a team to run it for years, build it. If you need it for sales, buy it. Then what matters most is how quickly it is running in your next client meeting, with your sites and your logo on it.
If you are torn between the two, we are happy to work through the numbers with you against your own inventory.