Understanding Adaptation Studio

The relationship between a template and an adaptation is the core idea in Adaptation Studio.

A template is a reusable, centrally governed starting point. It defines the design and fixes what stays on-brand, while leaving certain fields open for you to fill in, such as a headline, a price, a logo, or a background image.

An adaptation is the finished piece of content you produce from a template by filling in those fields. A localised banner, a market-specific social post, and a print-ready poster can all be adaptations of the same template. An adaptation is a type of asset, distinguished by the fact that it was generated from a template.

Because every adaptation comes from the same governed template, the brand stays consistent no matter how many pieces of content are produced, or by whom.

Adaptation Studio covers two distinct activities, usually done by different people.

Building a template means creating the reusable template itself: deciding which parts are fixed and which are editable, and setting up the fields that others will fill in. This specialist work is done by template builders: people with the Builder role for Templates, working in dedicated template-building tools. The Template Builder role preset, which shares its name with the in-browser tool, gives a user this role.

Producing an adaptation means starting from a published template and filling in its fields to generate finished content. This is the everyday task for most people who work in a portal, and it needs no design skills, because the template controls what can change.

Most users only ever produce adaptations. If that is you, start with the guides on producing adaptations. If you build the templates themselves, see the guides on building templates.

Templates come in two kinds, and they are created in different ways.

Digital templates cover formats such as banners, video, and images. The in-browser Template Builder is the main template-building tool, and produces display banners, video, and images. The Extension for After Effects, which runs inside Adobe After Effects, is a power tool for video that needs capabilities the in-browser tool cannot offer, and it also produces images. Once a digital template is published, it becomes available in portals for people to produce adaptations from.

Print templates cover print-ready formats such as posters and point-of-sale material. Print templates are produced with Storyteq’s managed service rather than built by you directly, so there is no self-service building step for print. Once they are set up, you produce print adaptations from them in the same way as digital ones.

You produce adaptations in Content Portal, which you open from the application switcher at the top left of the platform. Published templates appear under Adaptations, grouped into digital and print templates. From there you can produce a single adaptation at a time, or produce many at once from a spreadsheet when you need volume.

Templates themselves are built and managed in the Adaptation Studio application, which template builders open from the same switcher.

The finished adaptations are stored alongside your other assets, ready to review, download, and share.