Creative Services: How A Collaboration Platform Can Make Your Life Easier
A Challenging Remit
Being the Head of Creative Services isn’t an easy remit. It involves managing a team of people, all of whom have their own ways of creating visual and graphic content. It also involves meeting tight deadlines, which can be tricky on a project that requires a lot of input from different people. And it demands leadership because the buck stops with you in terms of delivering projects to your clients—on time and within budget — that are aligned to corporate goals.
While juggling all of these challenges, you’re aiming to deliver top quality content, cultivate a strong brand voice through that content, and ensure consistency of brand messaging through digital marketing channels.
Ease of Collaboration
Every project is unique, requires different deliverables and involves the collaboration of your creative team. Some projects may involve the input of creatives who haven’t collaborated with each other before. Each user is used to their own way of working, so it falls to you to ensure the workflow is efficient and problem-free.
A technology platform that facilitates a seamless process will be your best friend. You can then be confident that creatives can collaborate on their drafts, including large video files, in a shared private cloud space where each version is saved. This allows you to ensure that everyone is adhering to the remit and is ‘on message’.
Fast Review and Approvals
Once the creative services team has agreed on a close-to-final draft, you’ll need to get feedback from stakeholders, management and clients as quickly as possible. Since some of these may be on the road, they need to be able to share their comments from any device anywhere in the world. Instant commenting — like instant messaging — facilitates real-time feedback. Oh, we need to stamp all comments with timecodes from the video so your team knows exactly what part of the video the feedback refers to.
All of these features of a digital asset management (DAM) platform ensure your reviews and approvals save lots of time — up to 75% time-saving if you use Overcast HQ.
Search and Ye Shall Find
How much time is lost through searching for a clip or an asset, only to discover that it was in the DAM all along but not tagged? This can significantly delay the delivery of a project and compromise your relationships with clients. A powerful filtering system should also allow you to find your content in other ways: by date, file type, project, keyword, image or phrase.
On top of these two fab functions, the secret ingredient is AI! Using artificial intelligence, you can search your video clips for words, objects, colours, events, settings, sounds and facial recognition. So now you’ll have no difficulty locating that clip where your top client endorses your services as “sensational”.
Speed To Market
Pumping out compelling marketing content constantly can also be a challenge, especially since consumers are demanding personalized content. A recent Adobe survey showed it takes brands, on average, 17 hours to create a single piece of short-form content. This rises to 27 hours to create a single piece of long-form content, such as video. The survey concluded that it takes companies, on average, 12 days to take a single piece of content to market!
A key way to slash that time is to use a DAM that transcodes clips at the touch of a button and publishes it in formats optimized for just about everything — from broadcast quality to Facebook or even Kindle.
Future-proof Your Workflow
Planning for future growth is likely to be part of your role and as you expand, so does your team and your content output. You may already be working with a DAM, but is it suitable for your future needs or are cracks starting to show?
We’re in an era where 4K isn’t unusual and resolutions will continue to improve. This will result in larger and larger file sizes. Not only does your DAM need to be able to store such big files, but it must also be able to transcode and render them automatically. Otherwise, you’ll have long delays and may have to engage an editor or technician to break the deadlock.
The Brand Champion
As the champion of your brand, you inspire and lead your team. You manage relationships with stakeholders and clients. You spearhead your company’s culture through marketing materials. Why not invest in a DAM that serves your content needs and allows your talent, capability and vision to shine?
