How Leads.io optimized their After Effects video versioning flow

Leads.io is a tech-enabled, performance-driven lead generation agency operating across North America and Europe. Their creative teams deliver high-end video content for paid social platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok, with a laser focus on performance, speed, and volume.

With editors, animators, producers, and designers from backgrounds in film, advertising, TV, and even video games, their creative process is as diverse as it is fast-moving. With clients running multiple strategies simultaneously, the need for speed and volume in content delivery is critical. Hundreds, even thousands, of video assets are in motion at any one time. Doing it fast, doing it well, and doing a lot of it is their daily reality.

You can also watch the full story in our interview with Leads.io below.

The Goals

As their client base and campaign volume expanded, they needed a way to scale production without compromising on quality, speed, or team efficiency. Their team needed a way to:

• Deliver high volumes of creative quickly and reliably
• Handle growing project complexity without expanding the team
• Free up the team from repetitive editing tasks
• Avoid hardware overload and the need for new infrastructure

Put simply, they wanted a solution that could help them deliver more, faster, while protecting their team’s time and sanity.

The Challenges

The team was constantly managing huge volumes of video output, with render queues filled with hundreds of files and a lot of manual work involved in the process. The combination of repetitive workload and technical limitations had become a major bottleneck that slowed everything down..

They explored several options to solve the problem. Upgrading all their hardware or building an in-house render farm seemed too expensive. It also required ongoing technical management that would only create more complexity.

They tried remote desktops but ran into constant issues with missing software, license activation errors, and unpredictable reliability. These tools were more frustrating than helpful.

They also evaluated a few cloud-based render tools. Some were promising, but most required scripting or developer-level setup. With much of their process already tied up in manual tasks, the creative team needed something that just worked, not another system that required even more hands-on time.

Every solution fell short. Nothing matched the needs of a high-output creative team working in After Effects.

The Solution

Plainly stood out right away.

It was built specifically for After Effects, which is the core tool used across all of Leads.io's creative workflows. It did not require scripts or custom configuration. It supported expressions. Layouts did not break. It worked exactly how their team expected it to.

With Plainly, they could move rendering to the cloud and free up their local machines. They could generate assets dynamically using CSVs and customize everything from text to music to voiceovers in a single automated process.

The platform was easy enough for junior team members to learn quickly and powerful enough for senior designers to use at full depth.

For the first time, they had a solution that didn’t feel duct-taped together. It was reliable, accessible, and genuinely built for scale.

The Implementation

Onboarding was quick and smooth. The Plainly team supported them every step of the way and adapted to their pace and workflow needs. As they put it, it felt like having an extension of their own internal team.

After rolling it out in North America, they quickly trained and onboarded their European team using the same materials and best practices. Within a short time, they had both regions working inside Plainly as part of their daily production workflow.

The Results

With Plainly in place, Leads.io eliminated its biggest production bottleneck.

Rendering is no longer a burden. Creative teams no longer wait on their machines or deal with unstable tools. Every part of the process is streamlined. Assets are generated faster. Workflows are cleaner. Designers are focused on strategy and creative execution instead of render queues.

They initially wanted to automate text updates across multiple assets. What they ended up with was a system that allowed them to dynamically update backgrounds, music, voiceovers, and graphics across hundreds of files at a time. And it all worked exactly as designed.

Plainly is now a critical part of Leads.io’s global creative infrastructure. It supports their need for speed, quality, and scale across two continents.

If you are looking for a way to scale content production and give your creative team more time to do what they do best, Plainly can help.