We speak with Grip, a software product that allows companies to generate on-brand product images and videos, to learn about their latest products, innovations and trends in the industry.

What is Grip and what do you offer?

Grip is a software product from INDG, a company of a little over a 100 people, founded and headquartered in the Netherlands with a presence around the globe. Our clients are typically the global teams in large enterprises that operate internationally, such as Coca-Cola, L'Oréal, Yamaha, Honda, Adidas, Puma, Nike, and so on.

In 2017 we launched Grip for the FMCG / CPG market. It allows marketing users to generate their own product images and videos. The software has a way to encode a brand's style, which ensures the output is automatically on-brand. As a result, endless amounts of visuals can be created in a very short time.

This is ideal for solving two large challenges companies face:

1. To have for all their products proper and complete imagery for e-commerce channels.

2. To create any variation of an ad inside campaigns that run globally or need to be dynamically changing in nature.

Since the launch Grip has been growing fast, year on year, with several companies now rolling out globally and business wide.

Various examples of content generated by Grip:
all kinds of e-commerce images (left) as well as short animations  for advertising purposes (right).

What makes your product stand out?

Compared to other solutions that either require a lot of manual efforts to achieve the same results, or necessary hard-to-acquire skills to operate (in the case of software), Grip allows anyone to generate images and videos that are of high quality and on-brand.

Grip is a software solution that allows anyone to create beautiful images and videos:
fast, always on-brand and at unlimited scale.

Grip takes care of the whole production flow, with full automation at the core. Companies that provide similar deliverables to brands, must put in significant amounts of man-time. The approach that Grip always takes is to start by determine what can be automated and execute on that, instead of producing content first and then automate some, often obvious, parts.

Other software companies focus mostly on a smaller part of the content production process, which leads in the end to a whole chain of bits of technology. Complex and not easy to operate.

As Grip is adding new use-cases all the time, it is easy to start using Grip to solve the biggest challenge and then leverage that initial set up fully across all other scenarios. Often, brands begin by closing the gap of their immediate e-commerce needs (full GS-1 coverage for all SKUs, as an example), but then move on to make Grip the engine behind their campaign initiatives.

How is your product important for design agencies and/or brands?

So much effort and care go into designing products and labels, but equally so in establishing and refining each brand, that we feel it is a shame if that is not conveyed to its fullest extent into the visuals that consumers may see when these products go on the market.

From a brand perspective, one of the biggest barriers to having great content for all products is the prohibitive cost. Grip removes this constraint completely and enables the acute scaling-up of production. Pressure on all activities is lessened, including localization. Budgets and - definitely not to be overlooked - time can be spent on the initial creative again.

Many straightforward tasks, performed by production agencies, do not have to be done manually anymore. That work can be used towards the original creative work, the concept, the 1st of a kind. Actually, this is what agencies like doing most.

Are there any particular trends you’ve seen in the last years?

Digital marketing, direct-to-consumer and e-commerce have been trends long coming and growing, but the recent developments of 2020 seem to have accelerated digitization plans for many brands, especially in FMCG.

Moreover, an enormous, often overlooked trend in the content race is the re-use of content. Technology such as Grip makes it possible to unleash the potential of all the content that was created in the past. It used to be that it could not be reused for the reason it was shot with outdated elements, like a product or a label.

But, with Grip, all those premium videos and images, which we call "pre-loved content", can now be made adjustable, so that it can be used again, immediately, anywhere.

Making existing content (top) adjustable (automatic variations below) helps agencies focus on their creative work
and opens up a plethora of assets to play with from the brand's back catalog.

Can you share an example of a project you have worked or are working on?

There are global roll-out projects in progress with L'Oréal and Coca-Cola, from which we cannot share any visuals or additional details at this time. However, here is an example of campaign content, generated for Heineken, together with their agency Boomerang.

Champions League reminder videos

The objective was to create brand association between Heineken and the UEFA Champions League matches without becoming stale by creating strong brand recall, uplift and favorability. This was a centrally-run global campaign that ended up performing above the existing benchmark in every market it ran in.

The concept was to generate dynamically personalized ads on Instagram Stories and on the Facebook Feed, optimized for each placement. Variations were produced for every match day, customized to each match with different teams playing. Personalization of multiple layers of ad content was done per audience segment. The full campaign from concept to execution was handled by the agency Boomerang.

Grip made it possible to output many variations of the brand-approved 3D model of the Heineken bottle and adding different stadiums, morning/day/evening settings, as well as having specific artwork labels dependent on location. Team announcements plus localized time, iconography, and legal disclaimers were overlaid by the tool called "Pursuit” from Storyteq.

Multiple components are continuously changing depending on the match and the location of the viewer: labels, the setting
(stadium, bar, at home, etc.), the legal disclaimers, announcement texts of the match itself (teams and time).

The results were unprecedented: a measured increase in brand-recall of 7.3% versus the average and most importantly, with all 36 markets performing above the benchmark, which was the first time this was achieved by a global campaign.

Find out more about Grip here or by visiting their LinkedIn account .