Our tips for making free visuals for your ads
To create the visual of your advertisement, you can go through a creative agency if your budget allows it or do it yourself if, on the contrary, your budget is quite restricted. Because yes, (you certainly know it already) the creation of a visual of campaign is not included in the price of purchase of an advertising space, since they are two different services, realized by distinct entities. And to reduce the costs of your campaign, it is necessarily easier to create your poster or your advertising video by yourself. To help you in this process, here are some tips and tools to use to create your advertising visual for free!
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Summary of the article: Our tips to create free visuals for your ads
- Find inspiration for your advertising visuals, look at what is done elsewhere
- Tools to creat free advertising graphics online
- Free video editing tools
- Free image banks
- Create an advertising poster with artificial intelligence
Find inspiration for your advertising visuals, look at what is done elsewhere
Creating an effective and aesthetically pleasing campaign visual, well, that's quite an art. Before jumping headfirst into creating your campaign visual, try to refine your artistic sensibility, but especially your advertising sensibility, by looking at what other brands and especially your competitors are doing!
To do so, there are many advertising monitoring sites that allow you to discover the plethora of marketing actions undertaken by brands, such as Packshot or Culturepub. You can also have access to all the advertising campaigns launched by brands on social networks thanks to the advertising libraries set up by them, including :
- Meta Ad Library, which lists all campaigns on Facebook and Instagram
- TikTok Ads Library for ads running on TikTok
- Snap Political Ads Library to discover all the campaigns done on Snapchat
Adintime also offers you to discover every Friday the advertising campaigns that have marked the week, with its advertising news published on LinkedIn:
Tools to creat free advertising graphics online
There is no lack of tools when it comes to creating an advertising visual. Indeed, for a few years, platforms allowing you to create online visuals for all communication media have multiplied. And you don't need to be a graphic designer to use them! One of the most popular tools, as much by content creators as by amateurs, is none other than Canva.
Easy to use, Canva allows you to create static visuals for your posters or displays, as well as short videos for DOOH displays or social networks. Available in freemium, this tool also has a large library of templates that you can use to create your advertising, as well as a free image bank that you can use to enrich your visuals.
Note, however, that the free version of Canva does not allow you to use all the tools that the platform offers: you will not be able, for example, to erase the background of an image or use all the images and icons made available to subscribers. This is also the case with all other online creative tools similar to Canva, such as Vista Create, Visme or Adobe Express.
>>> Check that your advertising visual respects the regulations in force
Find your color palette for free with Adobe Color
Adobe makes it easy to find your color palette with its free online tool: Adobe Color. You can either use a color wheel to find similar colors, complementary colors, the same shade... or extract the colors from an image that inspires you.
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Free video editing tools
If your goal is to create a video ad that's a little more elaborate than what you can get with Canva, it's best to use specialized video editing software. Crop, transitions, video effects or even subtitles: there are programs that allow you to do all this for free, like Shotcut.
As powerful as Premiere Pro from the Adobe suite, Shotcut video editing software is available for free in open source. It has all the features to edit quality video up to 4K formats. And, as an added bonus, the numerous tutorials available on YouTube allow you to get to grips with Shotcut quickly and easily.
Free image banks
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so you will certainly need images to illustrate and flesh out the message of your ad. To do this, you can either produce your own images and video, or use an image bank. Most of these platforms are not free: you must have come across images with watermarks from sites like iStock, Getty Images or Shutterstock. But don't panic, we have found for you a free and royalty-free image bank: Pexels.
Pexels allows you to download photos and videos in high definition, free of charge and without having to register. You just have to type in the search bar the keyword that the image should express. It's that easy!
Need more images for your visual advertising? You can take a look at Unsplash or Videvo: these two freemium banks allow you to download some of the images and videos from their catalogs for free.
Create an advertising poster with artificial intelligence
Of course, we couldn't end an article on tips for making an advertising visual without advising you to use artificial intelligence. Even if you don't use AI to create your final poster, you can rely on its proposals to compose your advertising poster. You might be surprised by the results of your tests: a good "prompt" (command or instruction given to an artificial intelligence) can give you exceptional results. Paul Parsons' fictitious posters, created for Valentine's Day, are good examples: with the help of the AI Midjourney, he managed to create visuals that perfectly reproduce the visual identities of 6 major brands.
@adintime Challenge : créer une affiche parfaite avec l'IA #challenge #defi #chatGPT #DallE #ia #ai #intelligenceartificielle #test #communication #business #socialmedia #entrepreneur #entreprise #marketing #marketingtips #tips #conseils #publicitaire #publicitaires #digitalmarketing #marketingdigital ♬ FEEL THE GROOVE - Queens Road, Fabian Graetz
@adintime Réponse à @hissoka Challenge : créer une affiche parfaite avec l'IA - Partie 2 #midjourney #chatGPT #DallE #ia #ai #intelligenceartificielle ♬ A Cup of Coffee - Muspace
Midjourney is another platform available in freemium: with the free version, you have 25 credits and thus generate 25 images (this is enough to make nice "AI-esque" creations). To access Midjourney, nothing could be easier: you just have to register with a Discord account. And if you want to make more than 25 tries, you just have to register again with a new Discord account...
Now you know how to create great free visuals for your next advertising campaigns. All you have to do is let your creativity run wild!