Creative management in the age of dynamic content

Using traditional creative management processes to deliver today's content-rich, personalized experiences is like driving a Model T down the highway. You might slowly get somewhere, but only with a lot of bumps and coughs along the way. Meanwhile, everybody else is zooming by, leaving you in the dust. 

Rather than one set of creative for every campaign, today you might produce dozens. Instead of managing hundreds of assets, you might be managing millions. Your creative bullpen might span time zones, even continents. And the proliferation of tools and platforms giveth new capabilities with one hand, but taketh away efficiency with the other.

Fortunately, new solutions are rising to meet the times. By integrating your work tools through a single operating system of record (OSR), your team can satisfy your content supply chain's voracious appetite - and actually be less stressed and more engaged in the bargain.

Take the guesswork out of requests and resourcing

Hands up, everybody who's sure that every creative request your team receives gets exactly the priority it deserves. Anybody? No? 

Too often, creative managers don't have clarity into the full context they need to make those priority decisions. How long have similar requests taken in the past? How committed (or over-committed) are we right now? What impact will request X have toward our performance targets vs. request Y? 

Now imagine a single dashboard with strategic goals, current project status, available resources, and historical data across your entire department. Imagine fielding every new request in the calm confidence that you can accurately set its priority level and distribute resources accordingly - and have the data to back up your decision.

That's just one thing an OSR like Adobe Workfront offers, when it's integrated with your full suite of work tools. As resources get tighter and dynamic content demand skyrockets, informed prioritizing will be more and more crucial.

Let creatives create, without drudgery or distractions

You can't have creative without creatives. No matter how sophisticated the technology, strong creative work remains the essential X factor for powerful digital experiences. 

But just when you need creatives to be producing more, other stuff keeps getting in the way. An Adobe survey of U.S. creative professionals found that they now spend, on average, just 30% of their work time doing creative work. Project management, meetings, and other administrative work take up a whopping 59%. Getting even half of that admin time back would be a major win for any creative team.

Chaotic creative management also means lots of ad-hoc requests, which account for the rest of a typical creative's day, and worst of all, interruptions. A UC-Irvine study found that it takes information workers an average of 23 minutes to get back to where they were before an interruption, while a joint Michigan State-U.S. Navy study found that even brief interruptions doubled a worker's error rate.

It doesn't have to be like this. When the Adobe Workfront plug-in is added to Creative Suite apps like Photoshop or Illustrator, creatives can check briefs, review feedback, and submit assets to the library without ever leaving their favorite tools. There's no need to open a new app, keep an eye on their email, manually move assets to shared folders - or even to create those folder structures. That admin work can be automated (more about that in a minute). 

That means the work itself and the work-about-the-work all happen in the same place. Creatives can stay in their favorite tool and in the zone.

Asset management that's built for speed

Of course, asset creation isn't the only part of the process that's under soaring demand in the dynamic content era. All those creative pieces have to be organized, easy to find, and adapted for different audiences, channels, and formats. Oh, and ready to deploy at a moment's notice as opportunities arise.

That's where a next-generation digital asset management (DAM) system like Adobe Experience Manager can transform your content operations when integrated with Workfront and Creative Cloud.

Assets are automatically connected to their associated projects, including feedback and version control. Forget about laboriously entering meta tags for every asset: AI can handle that. Creatives don't have to spend their valuable time grinding out minor variations of the same assets, thanks to AI-powered cropping, sizing, and iteration.

It's a quantum leap in asset management, just in time for the personalized experiences that drive digital success today.

All you need is the right partner

As Adobe-certified Workfront experts, WNDYR has helped creative teams of all sizes bring this future to life, today. Our philosophy is simple: successful change begins and ends with people. 

So we build solutions around the people they serve. We go deep on training and process design to ensure healthy adoption of the tech. And at every step, we imbue a change-ready mindset into the organization, so you can embrace whatever's next. 

Digital business just keeps getting faster. Reach out to WNDYR and we'd be happy to bring you up to speed.