Graeme Blake, CEO of Blutui, has worked in the creative industry for over 30 years. In 2018, he created Blutui after realizing that agencies worldwide in the marcoms industry were using inappropriate technologies to deliver their clients' digital projects.
With a full understanding of the advertising industry and its specific requirements, we asked Graeme how Blutui helps agencies realize better productivity, more margin, zero chaos, and exceptional levels of creativity.
Can you tell us a bit about your background in the advertising industry and what led you to create Blutui?
I’ve been in digital design and advertising for over 30 years, owning and managing indie digital studios for most of that time. We were early adopters of various creative and content management technologies to deliver on an ever-growing scope of client projects. Our success began to strain our studio's bottom line. We realized that delivering and supporting a growing team of technologists required a massive, multi-disciplined team, including back-end developers, infrastructure specialists, sys-ops, database engineers, front-end developers, project managers, and administrative staff. As a result, the studios encountered additional costs, operational complexity, and inefficiencies as the business grew.
What specific problems did you observe in agencies that inspired you to develop Blutui?
Agencies often adopt mainstream technologies to avoid paying hefty enterprise licenses, but these technologies are limited in utility for how an agency studio operates and responds to project briefs. Agencies typically struggle to justify the overhead of an entire development team and opt for lower-level technologies or opt out of digital project delivery altogether, leaving mountains of client cash on the table.
How do a good ecosystem and processes add to an agency's efficiency?
Implementing the Blutui agency-native platform in any studio is powerful. Blutui allows agencies to deliver on a universal scope of projects, from microsites and landing pages to complex, data-driven sites, with a single front-end developer. This drastically reduces overhead and enables studios to take on more projects, leaving less cash on the table. In addition to cost-effectiveness, Blutui offers exceptional productivity advantages, ranging from 244% on average to 400%. This increase in productivity allows agencies to realize more margin and increase throughput and capacity without requiring additional staff. Add to this AI-powered component generation that lets your staff prompt-to-code any of the components required in a client project, and you have a fully rounded, easy-to-access tool to power your agency studio, no matter the scope or creative brief.
With the rise of AI, how do you think agencies can embrace the latest technologies?
Embracing the latest generative AI technologies is easy, depending on how much money and spare time you have. The challenge lies in evaluating these technologies before diving headlong down the AI rabbit hole. Every generative AI technology holds the potential for either utopia or a trainwreck of unintended consequences, making it crucial to understand the likely outcomes.
It is important to comprehend the "whole solution" and how AI integrates into the workflow. A word of caution: if an AI technology claims to eliminate the need for human intervention completely, be wary. Maintaining granular control over a project in the future should always be considered. While focusing solely on immediate use cases may be tempting, today's decisions to introduce non-human, non-craftable elements may seriously impede a project's evolution.
That’s why we built Blutui AI Components, our prompt-to-code web components generator, to provide a fast and accurate way for developers to generate performant code based on Blutui and web best practices. Our approach has been to harness the power of AI to assist, providing a sophisticated launchpad for UX/UI creativity. We understand clients come to an agency for a unique and on-brand experience beyond what they can do themselves or ask an AI app to create. At Blutui, we believe in the magic that happens through the creative process, thus creating Blutui AI Components to help create that magic, not steal it.
Additionally, you may consider the ideological standpoint of the vendor. Some may aim to eliminate humans from the process, while others seek to empower or assist human endeavors. This philosophical and societal perspective is important, as it reflects your agency's brand and the ethics you uphold concerning creativity, craft, and community.
What advantages do independent agencies have over the bigger agency groups in the current environment?
Indies adapt to a changing environment more easily, typically due to fewer layers of internal bureaucracy and more direct decision-making. If it makes sense to implement a technology, it can be in place, working by the end of the day or within the week. This gives Indies a significant advantage over their larger global rivals, where heavy-duty licensing agreements and workforce-wide implementation and training programs can take considerable time and cost to roll out.
This allows the advantages offered by technology to be realized more immediately. The improved cost, usability, and speed to market can be demonstrated to clients in real time, giving them a significant edge over more institutionalized players.
Which regions or countries does Blutui support?
Blutui is a cloud-based SaaS platform available worldwide, with 24-hour support for enterprise accounts. Blutui offers AI tools and an AI-powered helpdesk in any language, making regional applications easy and accessible.
What are the most important Key Performance Indicators to your clients?
Agencies seek technology that helps control creativity, productivity, and cost overhead. While winning awards for creativity is subjective, productivity and cost overhead reduction are tangible. Blutui delivers on all these aspects of an agency's wishlist:
