If you’ve incorporated video marketing into your digital marketing strategy, chances are you’ve already noticed a change in how your users respond to your brand. Not only does a good video hold their attention a little longer, but when done right it brings a user into your world and turns them into brand promoters.  And that’s ultimately what digital marketing is all about, isn’t it?  But keeping up with this trend is about balancing the number of video assets you create with a storage and management platform that can keep up. Because let’s face it, video requires a lot more storage than other forms of content, and the quicker you scale, the bigger the challenge to keep on top of things becomes.  Before your video assets transform into a monster you can’t control, you need to have a system in place that encourages efficiency early on. To help you save time and resources we’ve highlighted a few things you can do to ensure that your video asset management is seamless.  How do you categorize videos? Losing content can be DAM annoying! Unfortunately, without developing a system that helps you to correctly categorize the video assets, it’s bound to happen.  To avoid spending countless hours you don’t have looking for a video buried amongst hundreds of others, use metadata tags, labels, and folders to categorize videos – depending on which video asset management software you’re using.  Globaledit’s video asset manager makes your life easier by using metadata tags that are searchable based on time, names, locations, and much more. . With such specific tags, you’d be able to find the exact video you’re looking for, without having to watch the hundreds of videos before it.  Where should I store videos on the computer? Where you store your videos is just as important as how you store them because it boils down to security, storage space, and accessibility.  You could possibly store them on your hard drive but, due to how large video files can be, storing them there will bring about storage challenges. And we’ve all been victim to the DAM frustration of sluggish PCs that result from an almost full hard drive. The frustration that coffee or even smoke breaks can’t soothe.  So, not only are you constantly moving and compressing video files, but you’re also battling slower production.  Further to that, when a project requires collaboration, security can become a major issue. How do you manage and track what is sent out and to where? Cloud-based storage specifically for videos provides storage while allowing anyone with an internet connection to access the video assets. That’s not to say that every cloud storage is created equal. To get the most out of your cloud storage, ask the service provider a few questions that may include:  Is there a limit to the file size I store at a time?  What is the upload speed and, Do you offer video-specific features like media streaming?  How do you organize an asset library? Organizing an asset library when you’re staring down an intimidating number of assets can be overwhelming. You’ve categorized each of them so now what? A good place to start is with the most-used video assets. To identify which ones those are, look through which videos are the most requested. If different departments are asking for the same video assets you can regard them as a top priority and start organizing those videos in your asset library first.  After organizing your most important videos, create a customer portal that will allow you to send approved images to distributors. This will save you time searching for images when they’re requested in the future. Another time-saver to consider will require that you create a one-stop-shop for digital assets by sorting through high and low-res imagery, and pre-defined-sized images for social media, in the different formats that may be requested. By cherry-picking the most popular images, you’ll create an efficient workflow for you and your team.  What is a digital asset management tool? A digital management tool helps busy creatives store, organize, retrieve and share their digital content from a centralized location. Digital asset management includes more than video asset management but includes everything that your digital content consists of. Looking for a robust digital and video asset management tool that can handle all of your storage and creative needs in one place? Our video asset management platform allows you not only to store, manage and collaborate on projects but to integrate with your favorite creative tools as well. We understand how much time is wasted clicking between different software and interfaces to complete one project.  After choosing the package that suits your storage needs, you and your team will be able to manage your video assets with an efficient video asset management tool.  Start your free trial today to experience it for yourself! 

Finding effective ways to create, store and manage video assets is as important as making the video itself. If you think that’s an exaggeration, let’s do a comparison. Think about the time it takes to create your next engaging video vs the time it takes to find, and improve on that exact video when it’s saved on a platform that discourages integrations.  With an analogy like that, it’s safe to say that time is indeed money. Especially when the time that could be spent on producing other money-making video assets is spent on creating better workflows.  Not using a video asset management system becomes a DAM liability! That said, creating seamless workflows and time-saving aren’t the only up-sides to using a video asset management system. To familiarize yourself with the other pros of VAM, read our blog that highlights the benefits of a digital asset management system. With a video asset management system like the one we offer at globaledit, you’d save your business money as well as time.  If you’d like to learn how video asset management can save your business money, continue reading as we unpack all things VAM. What is video media asset management? Video asset management is a platform that assists professionals in storing and managing video assets under one roof. With video assets in one place, it facilitates a more streamlined workflow.  How do I set up a digital video management system? Our globaledit video asset management tool is only effective when you know what you want to achieve.  There are many benefits to using what we’d like to describe as the best digital asset management system. However, approaching it blindly won’t provide you with its maximum benefits.  Do you want a centralized place to collaborate with team members? Or, would you appreciate a VAM system as a storage platform? If so, have you decided on the format you’d like your video assets to be saved? Of course, you could use it for everything it is intended to be used for but identifying your end goals will help you plan better. After identifying your goals, upload your video assets and categorize them according to what you’ve previously decided on. You can also categorize them to be SEO optimized after they’re uploaded.  Add team members to the projects they’re working on and instruct them to follow the correct procedures when saving and sharing video assets.  How much is a digital video management system? At globaldit we provide 3 packages that allow you to enjoy certain features, Starter, Team, and Enterprise.  The Starter package is aimed at small businesses and freelancers. For $12p/m you get 250GB of storage, unlimited uploads, sharing, comments, markup, metadata management, and globaledit sync.  The Teams package is for small to medium-sized companies looking to accelerate content creation. Parting with $15p/m you receive the Starter plan features plus, 500GB of storage, projects, approval galleries, up to 10 integrations, and advanced metadata.  The Enterprise Package though last is by no means the least. This package is tailored to whatever your business needs are.  Catering to organizations with a large-scale workflow and asset management needs, it combines the Starter and Teams service offering.  The customizable integrations are powerful and security and management are high-level.  There’s also a white-glove concierge 24/7 support.  Who needs a digital video management system? Businesses that rely on video marketing will truly reap massive rewards from a VAM system. You can say goodbye to drawn-out production timelines that hinge on miscommunicated or lost communication.  A VAM system is also ideal for businesses looking to increase their video asset production in the near future a possibility.  How does our video asset management system save your business time and money? As you know, integration is the name of the game when it comes to creating high-resolution, eye-catching video assets. It’s also the name of the game when trying to save valuable time. Instead of juggling your time between tools, integrate with a VAM system that understands what you need to operate at your peak.  Our video asset management system allows you to integrate with the other creative tools you need to produce the awesome content your audiences love.  Every business could benefit from a little extra money. Whether it’s cutting back on running expenses or finding ways to be more efficient, every dollar counts. A VAM system offers you efficiency. With everything under one roof, video assets won’t go missing and duplications will be eliminated saving on the cost implications that come with re-producing video assets.  A VAM system also saves you on storage costs. If you’re a heavy storage user and need all the DAM storage you can get, we offer an Enterprise package that is tailor-made to your needs.  Save time and money and start your free trial today!

Video marketing has become a formidable and popular force. So much so that 86% of businesses use it as a marketing tool according to explainer video vendor, Wyzowl. If that doesn’t shock you then get this: since 2018, the amount of videos that are watched has almost doubled from 1.5 hours per day to 2.5 hours per day (Wyzolw). It’s safe to say that video is now invaluable. But as this breakout trend continues to skyrocket, two things have become evident. The first is that amassing dozens of video assets is very easy to do. The second is that effectively managing them is difficult. So what’s the solution?  You could continue creating folders and subfolders to manage video assets, but this isn’t a long-term solution. Especially when the quality of the videos produced requires a streamlined workflow.  The upward trajectory of video marketing demands you use effective video digital asset management software. Without one, you run the risk of creating a chain reaction. One that begins with poor video asset management, and ends with the probability of having to reproduce videos. A costly affair indeed.  If you’ve reaped the benefits of video marketing and are looking for the key to effective video asset management, you’ve come to the right place. Digital asset management software for videos is the key to improved efficiency and automated workflows. What is video media asset management? Video asset management (VAM) refers to the process and software related to video and multimedia file management.  A VAM system provides a centralized, reliable source to store and manage media libraries. From this centralized location, your team can organize video files to make them easier to search for – speeding up production. Several companies provide video asset management services.  Who offers video asset management software? VAM software is a service usually offered by companies that specialize in cloud digital asset management. Not every cloud digital asset management software company provides video asset management. For this reason, be sure to check their overall service offerings to see if VAM is included.  How much is video asset management software? Most of the companies that offer video asset management software provide packages that are designed to suit your business or team’s needs. Each structure includes different features, like the number of team members, storage, and integrations. Each package should assist you in making your decision easier. For example, we provide Starter, Team, and Enterprise packages.  Now that you’re familiar with the basics of video production asset management software, let’s discuss how it benefits your video production team.  The benefits of video asset management software Saves time Miscommunication is common when it’s done across several different channels. The email may have said one thing, but the notes on the video itself say something else. When this happens valuable time is spent getting back onto the same page.  Video asset management provides a centralized place to collaborate on video assets so that communication on deliverables between team members remains clear.  Improves efficiency with integrations Let’s face it, using several different software to produce your dynamic video content is both time-consuming and inefficient. Especially when the current system doesn’t allow for easy integration between them.   A VAM system allows you to integrate with the pre and post-creative tools you use daily. When you can choose which software you want to use, video editors will be able to effortlessly move between applications. Store Original and Working Assets in One Place After searching high and low through different file storage formats, have you frustratedly had to ask your team where the video you worked on a year ago is? Or even worse, the one you worked on last night?  Whether you are working with ongoing assets or searching for one that’s completed, having them in one place eases the workflow process. VAM creates searchable metadata tags based on time, name, or location, you’d have different options when searching for video assets.  This gives you total control over your video asset management and prevents duplicate files. Makes Video Versioning Easy Using the right VAM system will facilitate easier versioning through the integration of other creative assets. This will enable you to add markup layers, apply watermarks automatically, give feedback, and compare video assets side-by-side to make improvements.  Unlimited storage  More storage comes as a breath of fresh air doesn’t it? No more notifications of your hard drive being clogged up sound like a dream.   VAM makes that dream a reality with certain plans offering unlimited storage to store heavy video assets.  Post automatically to YouTube A VAM system doesn’t just integrate between the creative tools you use daily but with apps as well.  If you publish your content primarily on YouTube, a digital asset management software video can be set up to auto-post to YouTube.  Timestamp markers When you have more than one way to search for a video asset, it increases productivity. However, searching for video assets isn’t all that VAM systems are good for. Timestamp markers allow for you and your team to collaborate or discuss an isolated section of a video making communication more effective. Globaledit has incorporated all of the benefits above to provide you and your teams with the tool you need to produce the kind of video content that turns heads and drives engagement.  We’d love to share more insights on how our video production asset management software improves your workflow automation. 

Efficient workflows have become fundamental for the smooth running of operations for any business. But traditional workflows have especially paved the way for digital transformation by automating workflows and streamlining creative operations. According to workflow automation stats, digital process automation was valued at $7.8 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $16 billion by 2025. In the motoring era of digital transformation, creative businesses have been motivated to relook their legacy methods as they are becoming more agile in a market that requires creativity and content on-demand. That’s also obvious why you’re reading this. Another interesting statistic shows that 94% of the enterprise business professionals prefer building workflow automation on a unified automation platform where all their applications are connected, instead of relying on disparate systems. And if you’re part of the 94% – you’ve hit the jackpot right here. Because here we’ll talk about how next-generation digital asset management (DAM) systems automate workflows to improve the efficacy of asset management – which is also referred to as a ‘digital asset management workflow’. OK, but what exactly is a DAM workflow? A digital asset management workflow is a series of tasks that guides the asset production cycle and helps to automate each step as much as possible to eliminate manual processes. From the time of asset creation up until distribution and preservation, the digital asset management process flow will highlight the activities on each step and alert for any prompt actions. The structure of DAM workflows can be customized with automation recipes based on the needs of your creative teams – and to ultimately boost productivity and creativity.    What are the types of digital asset management workflows? DAM workflows will look different for each business, but for creatives, the workflows would mostly look like a combination of these elements or entail them in full: Asset production Metadata framework management User permissions for access and control Editing and approval Asset distribution Data and insights analysis of assets How to streamline digital asset management workflows? The key to an effective DAM workflow is organized assets, structured digital asset management processes, and integrated platforms. Remember that unified platform we mentioned earlier? That’s it – right here. Digital asset management software has tons of features that automate and streamline the workflow process. And here’s how your business and creative teams can benefit: Creative project management Globaledit’s DAM workflow already has an added layer of security with its built-in project feature for full control over all your digital assets. This gives you the ability to view, allocate or reassign project tasks to creative teams with granular access permissions so you can manage what’s displayed on their workflow dashboards. Store and organize with metadata All your digital assets and process indicators are stored and managed on one central platform. And with metadata, you can upload and store assets using tags and keywords that’ll make them instantly searchable. This cancels out the wasted time of looking for files, as they are readily available and accessible to all team members and stakeholders. Fast-tracked approvals A quicker approval process means faster distribution times. With DAM’s workflow approval features, all parties involved in the creative process will have access to the asset to give comments and instant approvals. You can smooth out any bottlenecks as DAM’s workflow voting system allows parties to view, make comments and approve assets at the same time. It’s really a core feature for an effective and streamlined workflow. Tech stack integrations This golden feature enables you to connect your most used systems and apps to the DAM workflow platform with simple API integrations. Your team will be able to centrally work on multiple systems. From PIMs, DAMs, CMS and comms app channels plus more, you can truly create a seamless workflow experience Workflow automation recipes Last but definitely not least. Avoid repetitive tasks by setting rules, triggers and actions with workflow recipes. When these recipes are joined by tech integrations, each action on a system will prompt a task on the other system for action by the assigned team member. Find out how globaledit’s can help you affordably elevate your creative workflow operations with digital asset management workflow solutions.

If you’re a creative industry professional, working either in e-commerce, retail, media, a marketing agency, or any other business alike – you’ll understand the headaches of scattered digital assets, broken communications, and delayed delivery times. The ultimate cause of disorganized chaos and disrupted creative workflows. And no matter which tools you invest in, you still find yourself navigating through multiple platforms to create, store, locate and share your digital assets. So, here you are. Because you’ve obviously heard that digital asset management tools help streamline your creative operations. And we’re here to tell you exactly more of that. Digital asset management (DAM), is also commonly referred to as the ‘virtual hub’, ‘a single source of truth’ or ‘a truth repository’ where you can store and manage all your brand’s assets on one centralized platform. What type of brand assets do digital asset management store?  Your brand assets are considered your visual and creative assets – from images, photos, videos, audio, graphics, and even brand documents needed for creative processes. Globaledit’s digital asset management features have been creatively designed and developed to capture the stages of the asset content production cycle and to best cater to the needs of creative professionals. What are the features of digital asset management? Here we’ll dive into the core digital asset management software features that’ll help you scale your creative operations with streamlined workflow processes: Search One of the most powerful digital asset management features – is the search tool. DAM systems have enriched metadatawhich makes it extremely simple to store and locate digital assets. This is done by customizing your assets with tags and keywords most related to the content of your assets. By searching relative tags, such as file type, date, location, or keywords associated with the asset, you’ll be able to see the results in seconds. This feature is especially popular because it saves tons of time by no longer needing to spend hours trying to find what you’re looking for. Upload and download Part of digital asset management products is Syncing multiple assets in real-time onto the DAM system as content is being created and captured. Bringing in the element of metadata, by adding simple tags, keywords or rules, DAM will automatically sort the assets under preferred collections. Sparing the extra need of spending hours sorting and renaming files. When something goes up, it must come down. Equally, with uploads, there’s also a smooth downloading feature. At a click of a button, you can bulk export your files as an XMP file. Sharing and automated distribution Once the production process of your assets has been finalized and approved, you’ll be able to set up a workflow automation rule in your DAM to instantly share the finalized assets with team members, stakeholders and clients. This streamlines communications and speeds up distribution times. Flexible permission and user controls DAM has secure user control and protective rights features, meaning that you won’t compromise your assets and system when sharing externally. Protecting your assets with watermarks is also an effective way to make sure that your assets can’t be reproduced when landing in the wrong hands. Asset version control When you work with 100s and 1000s of assets, it means that there are quadruplicate versions of the same assets lying around. Increasing the risk that the wrong version may be sent to distribution. Digital asset management’s capabilities stretch to cater even in these situations – by preventing them from happening! DAM’s versioning control features keep every team member or stakeholder that is part of the creative process in the loop when changes on a specific asset are made. Fast-tracked approval channels You’ll agree when we say that the approval round is the largest roadblock when trying to get your assets to distribution quickly. DAM’s unique features include the ability instantly annotate or approve or kill an asset version before it gets stored in the asset library and reaches other stakeholders. Headless API integration The new era of digital asset management has become ‘headless’ in the sense that it can easily integrate with your existing tech stack of most-used systems and favorite apps and tools. Some of the popular types of systems used by creative professionals are WordPress, Slack, Google Cloud Storage,Photoshop, Akeneo, but there are so much more to choose from. Connecting these programmes with the use of respective API keys is smooth and painless. How do I organize my digital assets? The beauty of a digital asset management system is that it has a built-in visually intuitive asset library that organizes your digital assets for you. But – only if you have used the right platform integrations and workflow automation rules to effectively organize assets, as well as provide a clear portal of comms between collaborators to ensure assets are produced without any hiccups. Managing your creative workflow and digital assets shouldn’t be hard. And with globaledit’s powerful digital asset management tools, it won’t be. Get in touch with us to chat about flexible and affordable solutions to elevate your creative operations.

OK, so you’ve heard a lot about digital asset management systems, and that they can help you better scale the creative operations of your marketing, e-commerce, retail or agency business. But it’s a tech new to you, you’re a little wary – worrying if it’s the best fit for your business and teams – also it’s a big investment and can be daunting without the right guidance. We get it. So in this piece, we hope to relieve some of the pressure.  Consider this your simple ‘digital asset management best practices guide’. And you will see here why and how it’s something that you really need to add to your tech stack. First, let’s rewind a little bit. What is a digital asset management system? (If you know this already, feel free to skip this part).  A digital asset management system is an integrated space where you can easily store, organize and manage your digital assets. It’s a platform where team members and stakeholders can cohesively collaborate. What are digital asset management examples?  A DAM system is a hub for all your visual- and medial-like content assets. While it mostly focused on digital, visual and creative assets, DAM systems also make space for storing documents with Google Drive or Dropbox integrations. Examples of your digital assets are: Images and photos Videos or audios Graphics and illustrations Document reports, contractual agreements, KPI’s, etc. What are the core elements necessary for an effective digital asset management strategy? As with any type of system, it can’t work efficiently and serve its purpose when there isn’t a proper strategy in place. In the motoring era of digital transformation and the constant pressure to produce and deliver eye-catching content in a churning market – an agile strategy is a must to maintain a serene and creative ecosystem. Here we identify 5 steps to help you navigate and update your digital strategy when implementing DAM solutions.    Define your objectives First, ask yourself why you need a digital asset management system.  You can do this by identifying your pain points and measuring them against DAM’s best products and features to see how they can help you solve them.  Some of your pain points might look like: Constant disarray of digital assets Communication gaps between your teams and stakeholders Drawn-out editing and approval processes Increased distribution times Once you have determined the issues, you can structure the DAM system and its workflow automation recipes to better support and streamline your existing processes.       Audit your existing assets Take a look at your existing assets that are stored on the current systems, platforms, or apps you and your team use. You’ll need to establish an organizing and sorting process at the start to see if you want all your digital assets to be transferred to the DAM or only parts of them. Ideally, you’d want all your assets in one place – and with metadata, you can. DAM’s rich metadata cancels out all of the laborious processes of sorting and renaming your assets.   Create a structure for your assets You’ll need to create a structured naming convention for your assets to ensure that they are searchable and discoverable for all team members that use them. Enforcing this asset taxonomy will ensure that your asset will never be misplaced again.   Make a list of the existing tools and systems Not only do you need to look at your assets, but also the tools and systems that are currently used. If you were worried that you’ll need to do away with platforms and apps that are used on a daily basis – don’t be. DAM systems can seamlessly integrate your most used platforms onto the centralized platform with API keys. No migrating teething issues – seriously, pain-free. Allocate system project and management responsibilities While DAM is a unanimous system to encourage collaboration, you can control who sees and who does what. Because there are different stages in a digital content production cycle, there are different roles and responsibilities allocated to team members, stakeholders and clients. Accordingly, the digital asset management process caters to each step in the production cycle. Meaning that you can allocate access and responsibilities to the relevant parties – giving clear expectations and manageable tasks. How do you practice digital asset management? To master any system is an art on its own. But what sets DAM systems apart, is the simplicity and ease of use.  So, what are some of DAM’s best practices? To really get the DAM best out of your asset management system, you’ll obviously need to maintain a clean house to be able to maximize the benefits of a DAM system. You can do this by: Audit your assets regularly to address and maintain asset taxonomy. Maintain consistency of your assets, workflows, and processes (but always improve where you can). Leverage data and insights to identify your high vs low performing assets. By analyzing data and insights, you can copy or rewire methodologies to get the best out of your assets and boost ROI.  Maintain licensing and compliance so that the security of your assets and the work of your team members are protected at all times. This is however taken care of by your DAM system provider. Let us know what your creative business’ pain points are and we’ll show you how globaledit’s digital asset management solutions can intuitively and affordably, elevate your creative operations.

The phenomenon of digital transformation has about 40% of companies wanting in on the automation of graphic design processes. Why? Because another 40% of creatives spend about a full day per week on admin-related tasks. Sound accurate? For designers and design teams, you’ll know that a single day could’ve been used to refocus on more important projects and increase the ability to keep up with the constant demand for high-level content. You’ll also relate to the fact that being bombarded with requests for new designs, edits, and changes – can leave a deteriorating effect on your creative juices. We’ll bet that bottlenecks and ineffective system processes are only some of the reasons why you’re struggling to scale design assets and workflows for that high-quality output. But what if we were to tell you that you no longer need to imagine a world of centralized and organized assets, structured workflows, cohesive teamwork and real-time edits?  In the evolving era of tech – allow us to introduce digital asset management (DAM) for graphic designers. DAM is a creative asset management tool that has been developed by creatives for creatives – to help scale and manage the asset creation process so that there’s more freedom for creation and innovation. Let’s explore a little further, shall we? Why is DAM important for designers? Digital asset management software is a centralized platform that creatives, designers, and creative businesses use to store, sort and manage their digital, visual and creative assets.    It’s a one-truth repository for all your designs, graphics, images, illustrations, videos and more.  So, if you’re currently using a filing system with a naming convention that looks a little like this: ‘Product_Final’ ‘Product_Final1’ ‘Product_Final2’ ‘Product_Final3’ ‘Product_Final4RealThisTime’ You can probably already sense what we’re about to tell you – it’s time for an upgrade. What are the benefits of DAM software for design teams? Graphic designers play an essential role in the creation of visual and marketing assets. While the marketing team might be writing the content for that digital asset pre-distribution, the onus really lies on the designer to produce a beautiful image or video to go with- or even without that text. Whichever works best in the end. Visuals have become so important, that posts with images generate 650% higher engagement than those without images on social media. Now, imagine having a DAM system that intrinsically coordinates creative materials and streamlines workflows. An integrated asset library that’s filled and sorted with high-quality digital assets – ready to be repurposed at any given time. Your client engagement will be through the roof! Sales engagement is just one of the benefits that DAM solutions can offer. Here are some others:   Productivity and creativity boosts  Enhance your brand’s reputation (they say a good design accounts for 75% of a website’s credibility) Effective collaboration among designers and teams Streamlined, structured, and organized workflows More time and reduced costs What features does digital asset management offer designers? Digital asset management for graphic designers has a wide variety of features that’ll help prevent that admin-snowball effect – and give back more than that one day of capacity.   Simply store, find and share Easily store digital assets by creating your own unique search terms to be able to quickly find and share assets with custom metadata. Customized Collections Create collections of your favorite templates and fonts that you use on a regular basis. Real-time edits and approvals Annotate directly on the assets in the asset library that’ll give live notifications to team members or collaborators. You can also request instant approvals to speed up the GTM times. Get the right version out  Make sure that you’re working on the most recent version of assets by being able to compare versions side-by-side. Unlimited and secure storage Don’t worry about running out of storage – ever. DAM has secure cloud-based storage solutions, which means that you can save hundreds and thousands of assets without compromising their safety. The sky is your limit. Smart API Integrations Constantly switching between multiple software to design, communicate and distribute? Forget it. Integrate your most used channels and apps, like AdobePhotoshop and Slack onto the DAM software.  Creative Project Tracking Add structure to your daily workflows by assigning project tasks with deadlines. DAM has a built-in project feature that’ll give you a broad overview of projects, pending assets, and insights on asset performances. How can designers use digital assets management software? DAM software is compatible with Mac products, Windows – and even mobiles when creating and sharing content on the go. If you want to find out how globaledit’s DAM can elevate your graphic design workflow, chat with us at the bottom of our page and we’ll be happy to share more information.  

What is digital asset management software? Digital asset management (DAM) software is a simple and intuitive cloud-based solution that helps creative businesses optimize their digital transformation efforts.  This is done by storing, organizing and centralizing digital assets – which makes it simpler for team members to locate and collaborate on creative assets under a single cloud-based roof.    How does digital asset management software work? A DAM system can help you securely ingest your creative business’ digital assets, which are: Photos and images Audio and video content Graphics, illustrations, or animations Or basically, any non-text related files (but with the right integrations, it can do that too) DAM’s smart product features also streamline creative operations by automating workflows with API integrations.  These integrations seamlessly connect apps and external existing systems that are used daily by your creative team members. A DAM system further elevates the digital content production cycle when following these steps: Capturing and ingesting of assets: Instantly upload and Sync your digital assets either during or post-production. Storing and indexing of assets: Store and organize assets by simplifying their searches with metadata’s custom schemas which will enable you or your team to easily find assets by file type, date, location, or even unique search terms that have been created. Versioning of assets: Avoid human errors by ensuring that your team is working on the most up-to-date versions of assets even when there are 100s of similar versions available. Workflow automation and project management: Create rule-based workflows that automate processes within the digital content production cycle. Plus, allocate tasks to specific team members and monitor statuses with the integrated project management tool. User authorizations and asset security management: Securely allocate tasks and give access rights to correct team members, stakeholders and external collaborators. This protects assets from landing in the wrong hands. Review, edit and approval of assets: Fast-track the retouching and approval processes by giving live feedback directly on assets and/or instantly ‘approve or kill’ assets. Automated distribution: Once assets have been approved, the finalized versions will automatically get distributed to the authorized stakeholders or clients for access directly on globaledit’s DAM platform. Performance metrics tracking: Measure the performance of your creative assets to see which assets are high-performing and use those metrics to optimize assets that are not performing that well. How do I organize my digital assets? You might already be using data-based folders, CMS, PIM and other systems to best manage your digital assets. But these dispersed systems can create disorder and disconnect between collaborators when not effectively managed. The antidote to these challenges is to get DAM organized with a visually-intuitive digital asset library. What is a digital asset library? An asset library is the centerpiece of your digital asset management system.  It’s the single integrated space where all your digital assets are created, stored, located and managed – as well as a platform for live collaboration. Effectively scaling and organizing your assets with globaledit, will ensure seamless collaboration and secure storage of your digital assets. What are the benefits of DAM? We’ve already established the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of digital asset management software – but what really makes a good digital asset management system? Glad you asked. We love an opportunity to reiterate the benefits of globaledit’s worthwhile DAM system.  By spotting any of these improvements within your current content production cycle and creative workflow operations, you’ll know that you’ve found a good one. Time- and cost-savings Boost in ROI and GTM times Maintain brand integrity Increase in productivity among collaborators Keen on finding your right fit? We are too. Sign up for a free demo and globaledit will show you how you can simply scale and manage your digital assets.

Ineffective scaling and managing of creative workflows are blocking the growth of many creative SMBs. But why is this? Because, the primary function of creative teams are to create – right? And on a daily basis, they create 100s to 1000s of creative assets. So the effect? The more assets that are created and the more collaborators that jump onto a creative project will eventually slow the entire creative production cycle down. And often causes: Unsecure asset storing spaces Running out of storage Disconnected communications Dispersed and missing assets Drawn out editing and approval times Do these sound familiar? Sure, they do – that’s why you’re here reading this. But the real and inadvertent growth blocker might just be the lack of awareness that digital asset management software is the actual key to your creative- or marketing teams’ challenges. What is a digital asset management solution? Digital asset management (DAM) software has become an essential tenet across creative industries that kills redundant admin tasks and accelerates the entire creative asset lifecycle – from planning to preservation. How? It creates a centralized hub for all of your creative assets onto a single platform that brings all the collaborators to work on assets under one virtual roof. Loosely, it can also be translated as a creative project management tool that streamlines creative workflows and accurately keeps track of creative assets. What makes creative project management tools so important? Creative project management tools, such as the digital asset management (DAM) or its wider subset, creative asset management (CAM) –  is the crux of running effective creative workflows among teams. Creative teams need efficient workflows to be able to produce high-quality content so that assets can reach markets ahead of schedule – and in turn, boost the ROI and brand value of the business. How is an efficient creative workflow developed? A streamlined creative workflow is the result of an effective creative asset and workflow management system – and when all the benefits, features and integrations are fully utilized. So, what are the benefits of creative asset management software? Creative asset management software helps businesses to smartly manage their creative assets and alleviates the dreadful admin-snowballing effect. Here’s how it’s done: Simply sync and navigate your creative assets globaledit’s Sync feature automatically ingests your creative assets into a centralized platform which are easily navigated with the versioning feature – this helps to ensure that your team is working on the correct and latest version of assets. Easily locate and share with metadata CAM systems have clever meta-data that reduces search times by making it easy for teams to store, locate and filter through 1000s of assets at a time. Creatively manage your projects As we’ve already established, CAM systems have integrated project management features that help organize and manage creative workflows. So, to better manage capacity and monitor the statuses of creative projects, you can assign specific briefs to specific team members and give authorized access to external collaborators and stakeholders. Giving you a real-time and holistic view of all your creative projects at a glance. Real-time reviews, edits and approvals globaledit’s markup editing– and approval features transform the time-consuming elements within a creative workflow by creating a central line of comms and feedback among collaborators.   Protected assets Never leave your creative assets compromised by securely sharing your assets with selected team members, stakeholders or clients. To further enhance the security and preempt unauthorized access or distribution, you can configure watermarks to your assets. Contact globaledit to find out how their flexible and affordable digital asset management products can help your business effectively scale its creative workflows.

There are two important components that drive a successful creative business, which are a) its creative brand and b) most importantly, the smooth running of the creative operations. However, only 27% of marketing teams use established processes to collectively store, organize and manage their visual assets. This means that about 70% of marketers face disorganized chaos when working on their creative assets on a daily basis. If you feel that your creative- or marketing teams might be one of the statistics that are yet to implement effective solutions to better manage creative processes and operations -then you’re in the right place. What exactly are creative operations? Creative operations encompass the creative processes when curating content for segmented customer audiences. But there’s also the organizational aspect to ensure that creative projects are delivered on schedule. As your company grows, it creates a ripple effect on your marketing efforts, an expansion of your creative asset library (yay) – and the need to source new employees or outsource creative briefs to keep up with creative workloads. And when creative operations aren’t optimally managed, it will create an increased budget, fractured workflows, displaced assets, and disconnected team members. How can you better manage your creative operations? We have four words for you – Creative Asset Management Systems. It’s a one-size and one-time solution to fix the broken components within your operational flow that also helps streamline creative operations. How does a creative asset management system work? A creative asset management system is an expansion of headless digital asset management systems (DAM) that combines all the moving parts of the digital content production cycle into one platform. ‘A single source of truth’ as we’d like to call it. As it brings all of your media-focused creative assets (photos, videos, graphics, illustrations – any non-textual files), workflows, team members, collaborators and stakeholders together. What makes creative asset management so important? As the name implies – but the management of your creative assets is the backbone of smooth creative operations. What type of solutions does creative asset management provide? Creative asset management systems can improve any inefficiencies within your creative- or marketing teams’ creative workflows by:  Centralizing creative assets and files Creative assets and files are stored on one central platform which makes it incredibly easy for team members to store, locate and share assets from one location. With smart metadata, you can easily filter through millions of assets, and ensure that the correct asset versions make it to distribution. Creating a safe collaboration space Whether teams are based in the office or dispersed, communication can fall through the cracks when there are multiple collaborators working on the same assets. But with your creative assets available in one space, your team can work on the most recent versions of assets, and share live comments and feedback for real-time comms. All this while ensuring that there are no duplications or incorrect versions that go to the clients. A creative asset management system also has enterprise-level security that will ensure that the safety of your team, external collaborators, stakeholders, and of course, creative assets – is never compromised. Boosting productivity and ROI   When you bring together a well placed team on a centralized platform, you’ll soon notice that saving those few seconds (or minutes) in locating assets – and integrating comms channels onto the creative asset management system (yes, it can do that too) – will not only boost your team’s creative juices, but you’ll also see an increase in revenue. Request a demo and see how you can start to effectively scale your creative operations with globaledit’s creative asset management solutions.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a creative professional looking for ways to scale your team’s creative workflow. Or maybe you want to master the art of managing your creative brand. Maybe a little from column A and a little from column B. Either way, you’re in the right place. If not, well – we’ll assume that we’ve landed in your search results for basically the same reason. We’ve got you this far. As consumer and industry appetite for creative digital content grows, creative industries have been left in the wake of demand for digital assets; some struggling to produce high-quality content at scale and at lightning speed. It’s a tall order. Keep CAM and carry on with creative asset management As demand for creative brand assets has outstripped supply, what has been the net impact on industry creatives? In short, cluttered, chaotic creative workflows and businesses straining to keep up with managing creative assets. Now creative industries are turning to cloud-based creative asset management software (CAM). Why? Because it’s the best way to create streamlined and centralized workflows that help break silos, protect creative assets, and decrease creative-asset distribution times. So, what is a CAM exactly? A creative asset management (CAM) system is a wider extension of headless DAM solutions that acts as the ‘single source of truth’ for the more media-focused assets, such as images, videos, audio and graphics and so forth. And with the DAM market’s size that’s expected to grow from $4.2 billion in 2022 to $8 billion by 2027, it’s a no-brainer as to why creative industries are jumping toward these cloud-based solutions. It’s a hype for a reason – and totally worth it. To give a better idea – the type of businesses in the creative industry that already use creative asset management software is catered mostly in the sectors of: Retail and e-commerce stores Talent agencies Studios Media and entertainment Do they all face the same challenges with their creative assets? Well, the answer is yes and no. Each industry has its own set of challenges and needs, but there are general takeaways that many creative businesses struggle with: Ineffective communication and collaboration Displaced creative assets Stretched out approval processes Delayed distribution processes Frequent changes in market and customer demands So, how exactly does creative asset management benefit the creative sector? Whether you work in a studio, retail, e-com or other businesses alike – you can start by picturing your digital content production cycle running flawlessly – from capturing to preservation – simply because of centralized creative assets and streamlined workflows. Canceling out industry pain-points really is that simple with globaledit’s creative asset management services, and here’s why: Quick-and-easy reviews and approvals One setback for a faster distribution process is the stretched-out approval process of an asset that must go through multiple layers of comms via dispersed channels – or even just finding the original assets from already used content. But, with CAM’s markup, approvals and versioning features – you can ‘stash or trash’ the correct asset version securely from or into the asset library. Efficient communication and effective collaboration Communication is an area of improvement for all industries. But with CAM’s smart features and integrations – creative industries are already basically one step ahead. With centralized assets, integrated communication channels and live feedback features – the collaboration between team members, stakeholders and clients is fast and extremely convenient. One platform for one team. Centralized assets with unlimited storage Lessen the tech hardware of external hard drives or supplementary laptops to store and manage creative assets. With the help of metadata, CAM systems enable organizations to upload, store, sort and filter millions – yes millions – of assets into one central platform – seamlessly. Eagle’s eye view of creative projects CAM also encompasses project- and document management systems that track the statuses of creative projects that also help manage capacity and assets to see which assets might be stuck – and if so – at which stage in the production cycle. The greatest part of these benefits? It doesn’t stop. Other positive advantages of creative asset management solutions are: Content repurposing: to help accelerate content creation and distribution. Empower your creative brand: with a stable creative workflow, you have more flexibility to focus on elevating your brand. Save costs and boost ROI: by saving countless hours with securely placed files and an asset library full of preserved assets ready to be used again. Safe and secured assets: with enterprise-level security that helps minimize risks and ensures compliance through user authentication and policy verification. Can you see it yet? With globaledit’s holistic creative asset management solutions, your digital content production cycle will soon run like a well-oiled machine.  Learn more about the creative industries we help or contact us to find out about our affordable range of solutions.

As a creative professional, whether it be in retail, e-commerce or studios – you may have seen metadata mentioned once or a couple of hundred times when following digital asset trends. You know when you’re searching for something on Google, but you can’t exactly remember what it’s called, so you throw in loose words here and there, hoping that Google will know what you mean? And voila – a sense of relief washes over you as a page of results pops up with exactly what you’re looking for. Well, metadata plays a large part in generating those results via metatags that are included in the contents that are published on Google. So similarly, when typing in a loose or not-so-accurate term for an asset that you’re looking for in the asset library’s search bar, you’ll get the results you’re looking for – because metadata is just that smart. Ok, that does make sense – but what exactly does metadata mean in layman’s terms? Put simply, metadata is the data of the data – which in essence describes and gives information about the other set of data. Got it! And what is metadata’s role in an asset library? Just like a cloud-based asset library that’s the heartbeat of its Digital Asset Management System (DAM), think of metadata as the coronary artery of that visual asset library.   The metadata pumps and correlates the data and information of assets throughout the centralized asset library that enables robust search capabilities. We hope that you’ve gotten the short-just of what metadata is in the sense that it helps to organize, store and locate creative and digital assets easily – but it really is more than just a search tool. There’s a flip-side to metadata and it plays an instrumental role in scaling creative workflows and the preserving of assets. Here you’ll learn how metadata can help optimize your digital asset library: Custom organize and sort with meta-schemas Metadata makes it easy to organize and sort your digital assets by type and location – but it can be taken a level further. With custom schemas and metadata’s expandable search variations, you can personally create and add more search tags to speed-up search results. Upload and export smartly Metadata’s custom schemas coupled with headless DAM’s smart integration features, make it incredibly simple to quickly bulk upload and migrate your digital assets from one platform to another. A cloud-based asset library also enables you to export or update your uploaded content in CSV / XMP format files. Do you know what this means? No need to spend countless hours in locating and renaming your assets – metadata does that for you. Group data-information-assets Metadata makes it easy to navigate through your 1000s of assets and product versions by automatically correlating the information of creative products and combining them into groups or specific recommendations. Track project and product performances Yes, metadata can do this too. With an asset library’s project management extension, metadata can help track creative assets and the progress of projects from start-to-finish. But also – you can scale creative production performances against your product performance metrics.    To get a taste of metadata’s smart creative features, you’ll first need to invest in a headless DAM with a cloud-based visual asset library. Globaledit offers flexible and affordable solutions to help you scale your creative workflow and preserve your digital assets seamlessly.

Content marketers in general face a host of challenges when managing their creative workflow and digital assets. However, with the rise of demand for visual content across studios, e-commerce, retail and other markets alike – the production of high-quality and high-volume creative assets with low budgets, has created another set of challenges that content marketing teams face in their ever-evolving industry. A cloud-based visual digital asset library and its workflow automation recipes can help content marketers remain agile with their market’s demands – while staying on top of their creative assets throughout their digital asset lifecycles. Automate your DAM digital asset lifecycle with workflow recipes It’s been a while since we’ve punned it. *Cough* – ok, and we’re moving on. In a DAM’s asset library, there’s a workflow automation recipe creatively mixed and integrated for every stage within your digital asset lifecycle – from asset planning and capturing right through to distribution and asset preservation. Here we’ll dig into an asset library’s 6-a-grade workflow recipes that you must try to streamline and ease your creative workflows, while scaling your creative brand for success.     Plan, organize and search instantly Planning of digital assets sets the flow for the rest of the creative process.  A digital asset library can help you organize and store your assets on a central platform under specific metadata tags that will enable instant search and location of your creative assets. Throwing a DAM’s project management extension in the mix will help you securely allocate projects to team members and monitor their individual progress.     Smart integration for efficient collaboration and communication An asset library gives centralized access to team members that help them cohesively collaborate on creative assets in real-time no matter where they are based. The custom API integrations can easily blend into your existing communication, collaboration or project management tools, such as Slack, Adobe Photoshop and Asana – to name a few.     Retouching and editing made simple Avoid waste communication and streamline the process of retouching, editing and approving creative assets with an asset library’s markup and approval integrations. Here you can make live comments on creative assets that will instantly notify retouchers of changes that need to be made before ‘approving’ or ‘killing’ an asset version ahead of distribution. Teams and collaborators can view comments and changes on assets to remain in the know – eliminating duplication of work and siloed efforts. Quick and accurate distribution No more searching for needles in haystacks – easily locate your creative assets with metadata tags and compare your latest or repurposed versions of assets to ensure that the correct version goes out to distribution. Enterprise-like security A cloud-based DAM and asset library offer detailed user management, automated cloud governance scans and customized policy management – ensuring that the safety of your creative digital assets and teams are never compromised. Asset insights and management An asset library can give you a ‘birds-eye-view’ of all your creative assets and projects in progress. Metadata can be used for much more than locating assets – it can track the metrics of your digital assets to spotlight any areas that might require optimization within your digital asset lifecycle.  Globaledit’s visual cloud-based asset library and its workflow automations, can help you streamline your content marketing team’s creative workflow while scaling your visual content, affordably and seamlessly.

There’s a reason why digital content such as images, videos, and other creative media are called “digital assets.” The operative word here is “assets” – because that’s exactly what they are. Digital assets bring value to your digital asset library, even when they’re already ‘out of the door’. When studio creative teams are creating visual content, they’re actually doing so much more. They’re building resources and expanding an already-vast asset library. There are two things that can happen to those resources: Your vast digital asset library can become a hard-to-manage liability, brimming with resources that jam, clutter and frustrate creative workflows.  Or, they can become a true asset; one where visual resources can easily be traced, organized, managed and repurposed, to scale creative workflow output. So, what are the benefits of recycling content and how can an asset library help?  OK, but wait. Let’s rewind quickly:     What’s the difference between digital content and digital assets? Post-production-and-distribution content ultimately becomes a digital asset that’s preserved in a digital asset library.     What’s an asset library? An asset library is the centerpiece of a DAM (Digital Asset Management for the novices) as it creates, stores, organizes, manages, and retrieves digital assets. Getting there: What’s content recycling?   Content recycling is just a greener term for “content repurposing”. But, in its name(s), it basically implies the reuse of existing content that has already been approved and distributed to one channel, but then using and adjusting them again for content needed elsewhere. Think of all your digital assets as extra ‘mini-resources’ that are ready to be accessed within your DAM’s asset library when inspiration or productivity is running low. How does an asset library help with content repurposing? A cloud-based visual asset library has tons of perks, but these workflow recipes are particularly ‘right-up-there’ for content repurposing: Track your metrics with smart metadata By using metadata that’s already integrated into an asset library, you can track the metrics of your digital assets and strategically repurpose your content by looking at your high-performing assets. This will guide you on which assets can be repurposed as content, with predictable outcomes. More-so, by analyzing the metric data of your best-performing assets, you can scale those metrics against assets that aren’t performing so well. Doing this, you’ll be able to see how assets can be better adjusted to increase their performance values. Rest assured, the version is correct Have peace of mind that original assets won’t be replaced by any repurposed content.  Simply labeling the reworked asset with metadata will create its own original version. This will make it easier to ensure that the correct and most up -to-date version is distributed.  Collaboration made easy A next-gen asset library streamlines the content creation process with a centralized platform that helps collaborators quickly organize, search and source digital assets (with the right permissions). Content creation can be a slow task in itself, and even slower with plenty of collaborators digging in while waiting on long-pending approvals.   An asset library is a great tool to collaborate cohesively and accelerate the approval process.  What are the benefits of content repurposing? Let’s see: Slash production costs and scale your ROI: Quite the no-brainer. Why invest time and money when you have an existing asset library as a standalone resource with tons of pre-approved assets to choose from? Increased efficiency and distribution: By repurposing content, you’re essentially fast-forwarding the whole digital content production cycle. Can you just imagine how swiftly you will be producing repurposed content with an added collaboration tool?  We’re thrilled for you!  Brand consistency:  Maintain your brand’s reputation by ensuring consistency with DAM’s smart metadata and versioning features. Claim the benefits with globaledit’s next-gen asset library which can help you scale your repurposed content and digital assets effectively and securely. 

One of creative talent agencies’ biggest challenges is collaborating with talent, internal and external stakeholders and clients – whether it be the lack thereof, or the abundance of trails of emails, calls, or quick ‘check-in’ meetings. While you’re scoping for talent, you’re also chasing stakeholders and need to ‘hop on a quick call’ for client updates.  And we’ll bet that while you’re juggling all these balls, there’s a high probability that your digital asset management is placed on the back burner to ‘deal with later’. But, what if we were to tell you that you can bring your stakeholders, talent and clients under one headless DAM roof – eliminating those unnecessary time-suckers? Camera. Lights. Action – right, that’s our cue.  Collaborate on a new scale Headless DAM and its next-gen digital asset library create a single truth repository for all your digital assets with controlled access to stakeholders, talent and clients. The digital asset library’s workflow automation recipes can help you integrate and sync creative assets in one central place with centralized access. Here’s how: Automate uploads: no more manual uploads and spending hours naming and sorting your assets. Watch how your digital assets are uploaded into your digital asset library in real-time, while preserving the structure of your folders with its smart metadata.  Consistency is key.  Compare and manage versions: no need to go and find needles in haystacks – with an asset library’s versioning feature, you can view the latest and untouched versions side-by-side to ensure the correct version is distributed to the client.   Get notifications and set alerts on your assets: once markups have been done on an asset or a status of a project has been updated, you’ll be notified immediately with the projects feature.   Remain in the know.  Simply integrate your creative tools Break siloed comms by integrating existing creative tools and preferred client software with DAM’s smart API integration solutions into your asset library.  All the tools you need, in one place. Approve and kill, quicker Did we mention that digital asset libraries can remove those time-sucking impromptu meetings and back-and-forth emails? We weren’t kidding. Streamline your digital asset distribution process with DAM’s integrated approval feature by getting approvals from talent or clients instantly and securely. Keeping digital assets safe, secure and under control   Using a headless DAM’s next-gen digital asset library is as safe as you can get – with its cloud governance and built-in security compliance features, your digital assets won’t be compromised. You’ll be able to: Add watermarks onto your digital assets  Allow or deny access from collaborators Set expiration dates for user controls – once that project is done, there is no need for a stakeholder to have access to certain assets If you’re used to keeping digital assets on a hard drive or USB-stick, maybe rethink that. There are countless ways your data can become corrupted or compromised. Work with need-to-know access security With a next-gen digital asset library you control with custom access privilege settings, there really can’t be any uninvited prying eyes. Global edit’s project management extension features let digital-asset managers securely allocate assignments to specific collaborators, while also tweaking permissions to others that aren’t part of the circle of need-to-know stakeholders. This custom-access approach not only keeps assets secure, but it gives real-time visibility over assets with a clear picture of who’s working on what. Giving you full and transparent control of your digital assets. Put globaledit in the spotlight. We’ll show you how a next-gen DAM system can free up your creative teams’ talents like no other. Making collaboration easy and asset distribution faster.

While driving solo has its perks, being a creative freelancer comes with its own set of challenges not everyone can appreciate – one of the least-obvious yet most burdensome is when your creative digital assets scatter uncontrollably. Before you know it, all hell breaks loose and you’re steamrolled by an avalanche of unstoppable daily admin of your own creation. Top work. A freelancer’s unique sense of autonomy is what sets them apart from others. That said, managing your brand, creative workflows and centralizing assets –  while collaborating with external partners – are other common challenges many creatives are facing. Digital Asset Management systems (DAM) and asset libraries are a simple fix for bringing order to the spiraling chaos your daily work can turn into. With headless DAM, your creative assets, workflows and collaborations all come under single mode of total control while letting you scale your freelancer proposition competitively. Here’s a quick guide on setting up your freelance DAM asset library in 5 steps: Step 1: Better-organize and annotate digital assets If your OCD flares up and you find yourself manually obsessing over organizing your digital assets, we applaud you. Though manual OCD costs you a ton of time. If, hand-on-heart, you know your digital assets are in total disarray, we feel your pain. Well, fret no more as headless DAM makes it incredibly easy to quickly bulk-upload and migrate 1000s of assets from your existing digital assets digital library. How can you navigate 1000s of digital assets, versions copies and a jungle of files? A next-gen asset library cleverly associates  metadata to each asset, making it a breeze to organize, search and group assets by automatically correlating creative products together.  No need to spend hours renaming and sorting your assets.  Step 2: Integrate your existing platforms into your asset library Centralize your digital assets with a DAM’s painless API integration solutions from your existing platforms and apps (Adobe Photoshop, Email Management, CMS, Project Management systems etc.). It really is that simple. Step 3: Define and manage creative workflows Once the integration has been done, now the fun begins! Keep the momentum going by organizing your assets with DAM’s metadata feature where you can tag the type, date, location and any other preferred search term for your creative assets. But wait, there’s more: An asset library’s markup feature allows you to add real-time comments, provide feedback on creative digital assets or decide whether you want to ‘save or trash’ a version before it goes to distribution. Did we mention you can share the approved version directly with the client from your asset library? Easy-peasy. Being able to quickly search and locate your (most up-to-date) digital assets within your digital library will boost your productivity and streamline digital production output processes. You know what this means, right? Less admin. Less emails. Protecting your DAM creative flow. Step 4: Set up security for your assets and collaborators Ok, now back to being serious – and by being serious, we mean ‘protecting- -your-DAM-digital-assets’ serious. Fortunately, next-gen headless DAM platforms already have built-in security and compliance features, making it easy for you to: Grant or deny access requests from collaborators Set expiration dates based on estimated completion of production and revoke access from users who would no longer need to enter your digital library  Add watermarks onto your digital assets so they don’t fall into the wrong hands Step 5: Manage your brand by scaling your asset production output Even as a one-man band, you still somehow need to keep track of what you’re doing. An asset library also has a project management extension where you can create projects, update and monitor the progress and output. An asset library gives you a holistic view of your digital assets and products, as well as key indicators on areas that might be lacking within your digital production cycle. Hey, you’re doing great! By reading this article, it has put you already one step forward by reaching your business goals. Put back the ‘free’ in freelancer and let globaledit show you how their DAM’s next-gen digital library solutions can be a great fit for your freelancing business. 

This is our final article in our DAM Basics series— if you’re a startup hungry to scale creative workflows quickly, then this is for you. You’ll learn how you can achieve that using smart digital asset management (DAM) and a next-gen  digital library. If you’re new to this space, you might be wondering what a DAM is. If you’re a DAM veteran, perhaps you’re suffering decision-paralysis triggered by the multitude of DAM software in the market. For startups, selecting the right DAM platform before firing-up those creative workflows can make the difference between ‘hitting the gas’ with growth, or ‘hitting a glass ceiling’. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Let’s start with the DAM basics. Some of these will be to some as obvious as charging your MAC before leaving the house to work in your favorite caffeine dispensary. If you know this stuff, fast-forward a little. DAM Basics 1: What is digital asset management? In short, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is, and as we like to call it, the ‘one-truth’ repository for your business’ creative digital assets.  DAM Basic 2: What are creative digital assets? Creative digital assets are considered media, images, videos, product catalogs and other non-textual related content used within your business.  Basic 3: What is  an asset library? An asset library is the centerpiece for all the processes that create, store, organize, manage and retrieve digital assets. How can an asset library help scale startup success? Startups can be hair-raisingly exciting and terrifying in equal measure. All that potential for growth, all of those big ideas—but also all of the risks and ‘what ifs’. What’s more terrifying than the potential for startup failure? The thought of failing because you didn’t get the DAM basics right. You may already have some traditional DAM system in place to manage and track the production of your creative assets – but do you find yourself often working on isolated platforms? If the answer is yes, then the chance of a disconnected team is probably high.    With a next-generation digital asset library inside of a headless DAM system, workflow automation recipes can help integrate and synchronize creative asset management and all of the stakeholders What’s a better recipe for success? Let’s dig in. Recipe 1: Centralize and organize assets Adding your digital assets to an asset library and organizing it with metadata tags, makes it simple to access and locate a file at any given time. Recipe 2: Add markups and track project status on creative assets Ease workflow by sending or receiving notifications on comments, markups and overall status of the performance of a project.    Recipe 3: Streamline team collaboration on assets Increase your team’s productivity by ensuring that they are working on the latest version of an asset without needing to tackle the first few 100’s versions first. The added quick ‘approve or kill’ functions will streamline workflow and the distribution of assets. Recipe 4: Manage your brand and content product output Globaledit’s asset library brings next-gen versioning features that give a bird’s eye view of all your assets and those your team has been working on – maintaining and ensuring consistency across your brand. Take back control of your startup by scaling it for success and eliminating disorganized chaos with a digital asset library. Connecting your tools to maximize efficiency Integrating your existing platforms and apps doesn’t have to be DAM difficult. From Adobe, CMS, Email and Project Management systems, an asset library has smart API integration solutions for painless platform migration and to streamline workflows. An organized asset library is key  To get the most out of an asset library, it needs to be organized properly. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get started: Define a workflow Scale content creation Data-based folder names Labeling assets with meta-data Manage user access and controls Measure your asset library’s performance Don’t become a cyber-stat Cyber-attacks have been rated as the 5th top rated risk in 2020 and IoT cyberattacks are expected to double by 2025. Protect your assets with DAM’s built-in security, cloud storage and compliance features. With full control over the safety of your digital assets, your employees and users won’t be at risk. Wrapping up Wondering if globaledit is the right DAM solutions provider for carrying forward your startup goals? Instead of wondering, find out with a demo tailored to your plans, circumstances and creative workflows. Depending on your start-ups’ needs, globaledit can set up your DAM solutions with pricing that will suit your budget. Just ask and we’ll show you hands-on how globaledit integrated with your creative tech stack to ensure you can quickly ramp up digital asset distribution securely.

This is the small-to-medium business edition in our DAM Basics series on scaling creative workflows using digital asset management (DAM). This is for SMBs keen to streamline and organize business assets while accelerating creative asset production. We’ll cover why next-gen DAM software can and should become a core part of your business-growth strategy. What Is Digital Asset Management (and Digital Asset library)? Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is the ‘one-truth’ repository for your business’ digital assets.  If you’re still wondering what digital assets are – they can be considered as media, images, videos, product catalogs and other non-textual related content used within your business.  An asset library is the DAM heartbeat for all the processes that create, store, organize, manage and retrieve digital assets. Why is an asset library important for SMBs? Scaling and managing workflows pose real growth challenges for SMBs greatest. Many SMBs still haven’t discovered that a digital asset library (and not just any) can play a huge role in overcoming certain growth blockers. Here’s one of those growth blockers, for example: Creative assets create value. But the creative production cycle slows down as the more creative assets are collaborated on by more and more collaborators. From planning, creating and optimizing, to organizing, scaling and preserving—digital assets created at scale also scale communication, admin requirements, mixups, human error and the sheer time it takes to get things right. In such a highly competitive market for SMBs, it’s wise to manage digital assets smartly from day-one to avoid the DAM-admin snowballing effect. Not only does it relieve the admin burden, but it’s a great tool to bring your teams together to collaborate cohesively. How does an asset library actually streamline SMBs workflow? Streamlining creative workflows for SMBs is particularly tricky because many SMBs approach this challenge unguided for the first time. DAM. Here’s why: Remember the digital asset lifecycle? DAM workflow automation recipes can automate from start to finish Can’t find that DAM file? Quickly organize, search and source digital assets using clever meta tags Need to give quick feedback or approval on digital assets? There’s a feedback mark-up tool for that Assets need to go out quickly? DAM helps decrease production lead times. DAM and your SMB strategy  Another challenge for SMBs is creating an effective strategy to enhance business growth. Without DAM, the very process of organizing, creating and accelerating digital asset distribution can start to decrease the value of your rich media assets. If you are currently using in-house systems or isolated tools to manage your business and its digital assets, it is inevitable that at one point or another there will be disorganized chaos – and not to mention financial losses in some shape or form. Less is more, right? We get it. Asset libraries offer the flexibility and simplicity you need in your business.  How? Based on the scope of your business, your asset library can be set up on a month-to-month basis or long-term according to your budget. Forget about complex set-ups and lengthy migration processes, with DAM’s API custom integration solutions, it can blend easily into your existing systems or creative tools. DAM security must be a priority, always Did you know that 4/10 businesses experienced some form of cyber security breach in 2021? – Cyber Security Breaches 2021 The safety of your assets, employees and users should never be compromised. And with the two-factor security authentication, they won’t be. You’ll have full control over the security and access of your assets. Reduce to eliminate all these risks with a DAM asset library (seriously, we can’t help it).   Wrapping up If you are serious about taking your SMB to new heights, globaledit’s flexible and affordable DAM solutions are just what you need.  Seamlessly organize, assign and scale your digital assets in one place with globaledit.  

The wind changes direction fast in fashion and fashion retail, but if you’re reading this, you probably know this already. While you’re here, let’s talk about why and how you can manage your digital assets with an asset library.  Demands placed by consumers on the fashion-industry’s output, changes with the seasons – and with whatever trend’s hot (remember bring-back the 90’s?), so a lot rests on fashion-retailers’ ability to keep creative assets and workflows manageable, for quickly refreshing and re-organizing product lines.   No pressure! Statista reports that the apparel-market revenue in the US was approximately $1.55 trillion in 2021. According to the Consumer Market Outlook, it will likely increase to almost $2 trillion by 2026. If these projections are to come true, fashion retailers and creative partners will need to streamline with better creative-asset management strategies. That’s where a next-gen digital asset library can help. Let’s start simple: what is an asset library? An asset library is the centerpiece of your Digital Asset Management (DAM) software. It’s the ‘one-truth’ repository for all the processes that create, store, organize, manage and retrieve digital assets. Ok, but why is an asset library important for fashion retailers? You know better than us; a lot goes into generating revenue from creative visual assets. From dealing with constant product changes to dealing with a siloed network of partners, vendors, influencers and collaborator brands – and then some – it’s a lot of hard work. An asset library is a simple solution to reducing the admin headache, bringing teams together, reducing costs, scaling visual assets and having full control over your digital apparel assets.  Yes. A smart digital asset library helps achieve all of that with an all-in-one approach to creative asset management.  Don’t debate. Create and collaborate The workflow structure for fashion-retail creative teams can get messy with constant miscommunication or misplacement of files.  Time is money, and with each second looking for an unallocated file or arguing about the location thereof, you could have been creating more knockout visual content. Traditional digital asset management using folders, uploads and downloads creates a snowballing admin. Nobody needs that. A cloud-based visual asset library helps collaborators in different locations quickly organize, search and source digital assets using clever meta tags. Meta tags mean better creative asset management Using metadata tags means assets carry date created, location, date modified, creator and other other smart metadata for easily tracking, locating and sharing relevant assets. Even better, an asset library enables fashion creative teams and partners to collaborate effectively and work on the most up-to-date file versions, while also giving live updates and feedback on products. Forget migration teething pains, transferring your existing data and platforms with headless DAM integration, is quick and painless.  Another upside? No more flooded inboxes and unnecessary distractions. Create better and personalized experiences for your consumers Creative energy is DAM precious. The less time teams spend organizing and sorting your digital assets or personalizing consumers’ experience, the better. Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences? DAM can also be used to track product performance which cross-measures against creative performance metrics. Why is this important? Well, here you can monitor your consumers’ trends and scale your campaigns’ performances to identify areas that require a bit more personalization. Centralize, streamline and simplify content production Asset libraries centralize, simplify and fast-track the content product cycle in a myriad of ways. To give you an idea: You want to instantly upload assets to a central platform? Done. Identify the latest version of an asset? Here you go. Securely share and protect assets with the right people? No problem. Need instant approvals from collaborators? You bet. Gain better control over brand identity and sustainability Managing your products and brand has never been this simple. By being able to set asset rights, there is no risk of your content landing in the wrong hands, even by accident.  With globaledit, you will have complete control over your digital assets and see who has worked on them – allowing you to monitor and ensure brand consistency across the board.  

Digital asset management (DAM) for video-hungry industries brings a subtly different set of challenges. As soon as video production is in the mix, your DAM system needs full-blown media asset management (MAM) functionality to keep video versioning intuitive and practical. Without smart video versioning features, video versioning becomes a high-friction chore that gets in the way of producing profitable video assets at scale. And boy, do video assets get produced at scale today. Media Asset Management Software: Why Video Versioning Is Becoming More of a Challenge With smaller-scale video libraries and light video production workflows, manual video versioning can just about hold things together. At larger scales, manual video versioning becomes worse than just unsustainable—eventually it becomes an actual growth barrier. According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing Report 2022, the quantity of video people watch has doubled since just 2018. Of the 582 unique respondents Wyzowl sampled as part of the report: 86% said they use use video as a marketing tool 92% continue to value video as an ‘important part’ of their marketing strategy 79% of non-video marketers say they expect to start using video as a marketing tool in 2022  With these kinds of figures in play, continuing with clunky, manual video versioning methods will no doubt incur a competitive opportunity-cost. For PR, media, marketing and merchandising, effective creative workflow management—that allows rapid distribution of original content—can become a key contributor in creating and sustaining competitive market advantages. Besides Easier Video Versioning, What Are The Benefits of a Modern Cloud DAM Platform? Here are a few of the usual benefits to expect from a modern DAM system that’s worth the subscription fee. One single repository for all of your digital media assets Top-tier security with customizable asset access rights (why is digital asset security so important?) More collaborative efficiency, control, agility and content scalability (how does a headless DAM system help scale content?) You know the score. Better, stronger, faster, less stressful. These benefits are exactly what you’d expect as a bare minimum from a next-generation cloud DAM platform. Global edit takes these perks further by bringing MAM functionality that enables a whole series of video creative workflow and video versioning perks. Once you discover them, you’ll kick yourself for having struggled on for as long as you did with manual video versioning. How Does a Next-Gen Digital Asset Management Platform Make Video Versioning Easier? Ok. Here’s the important part. How does globaledit make video versioning easier? Side-by-side video version comparison After you’ve uploaded your high-res video assets, you can add markup layers to provide collaborators with feedback. Watermarks get added automatically. Then you can dynamically view video versions side-by-side in a single intuitive view before approving priority assets that make the cut to be progressed to distribution. Easily store and find video versions using metadata What happens to video files that don’t make the grade in side-by-side versioning comparison? You can discard them on the spot. Alternatively, you can securely store in your video asset repository ready to be repurposed and edited. All of your video assets will be easily searchable via metadata tags based on location, time, names, and more. Delight Clients and Collaborators with Flawlessly Intuitive Media Asset Management If you work with large volumes of video assets, simplifying video versioning alone can break the glass ceiling toward better asset scalability. Request a demo and we’ll show you globaledit’s video versioning features in full flow. Or read about other ways to organize your creative workflow processes.

Next-gen digital asset management software needs to evolve as quickly as its users’ needs and the creative workflows that serve their clients. More than that, an uncompromising creative asset management tool should anticipate and design for emerging creative workflow needs. With eCommerce, fashion retail and media and entertainment overflowing with visual content, that’s what creative teams, marketers and visual merchandisers should expect and look for to scale both the quality, output and profitability of creative digital assets. If your creative production weapon of choice has an Apple logo somewhere on it, we’ll stick out neck out and assert that globaledit remains the best dam for Mac. What Makes globaledit the Best DAM for Mac? First off, if you’re in the market for a digital asset management (DAM) platform for Mac, you should decide if you want or need a headless DAM software or not. What is a headless DAM platform? Headless DAM means your developers can use APIs to integrate natively with other platforms in your creative workflow tech stack. In other words, a headless DAM system can be custom-developed to dovetail with your native environment, connecting processes and collaborators upstream and downstream into a single fluid workflow. Meanwhile, traditional DAM platforms do a good job of building digital asset repositories, albeit siloed and fragmented. Already using globaledit? Looking for API documentation? You’re welcome. Why is globaledit the best DAM for mac? Did someone say “Workflow Automation Recipes?” Mac users love brilliant design—and we don’t just mean visually. Brilliant design doesn’t have to be pretty. Apple products just happen to be beautiful to look at. At its core, stunning design is functional and the best design is almost invisible. Globaledit’s creative workflow automation recipes are exactly that. In short, they make your creative workflow management seamlessly manageable. Workflow automation recipe 1: Centralize and organize creative digital assets Custom integrate globaledit with Dropbox to automatically share approved assets into specific Dropbox folders. Your digital assets will stay synced too; if any updates are made in globaledit, they’ll be reflected in Dropbox. Workflow automation recipe 2: Track project status of retouched assets Traditional creative workflows require a post-production manager to match and send the right assets individually to the right collaborators. If you’re an Apple fan, this is almost as irritating as a smashed screen. Globaledit’s Projects custom integration lets you automate this instead of sending assets one by one. Need a retoucher to only view assets from specific, approved folders? Done. Workflow automation recipe 3: Streamline creative workflow collaboration Monday.com, Asana, Airtable, you name it. globaledit custom-integrates with any project management tool worth its salt. You know the rest. Say goodbye to delays, manual grunt work and admin while scaling quality visual content production faster. View a bunch more creative workflow automation recipes integrating Salesforce, WordPress, Marketo and Adobe. Here’s the kicker: globaledit’s DAM platform for MAC OS includes MAM If you’re using a separate media asset management system for video and visual media, globaledit will give you everything you’re used to in one space. Auto-interest and cloud-render video files using globaledit SYNC, delegate video production tasks alongside other creative asset deliverables, or give collaborations intuitive side-by-side comparison views for faster approvals with notifications.

This is the first of our DAM Basics series starting with creative asset management for enterprise. Want the DAM basics for SMBs or for startups? This is for enterprise marketing teams hungry to extract optimal value from their growing inventories of creative digital assets. The aim here is to help you understand what digital asset management is vs. creative asset management and how both can and should be part of your growth strategy. What Is Digital Asset Management (and Creative Asset Management)? Let’s start with the DAM basics of core definitions. What is digital asset management? (DAM) Besides being a bottomless resource for DAM puns, digital asset management (DAM) is a collection of processes that encompass creating, storing, organizing, managing and retrieving digital assets. What is creative asset management? Creative asset management is a subset process of digital asset management more concerned with the features that enable creatives working in media, marketing and production teams. To unify the two, you could think of creative asset management as “the work-in-progress DAM” as it’s sometimes referred to. Why are DAM and creative asset management important for large enterprise content and product marketing teams? Think of the avalanche of digital assets produced by enterprise creative marketing teams daily. Even traditionally photo and still-image oriented industries like e-commerce and fashion retail are turning to heavier rich media digital assets like video. Video is the number one format marketers used in their content strategy in 2021. Some e-commerce enterprise brands are even rolling out realistic, interactive 3D product modeling using CAD, STEP, or STL files. The results are impressive. Imagine zooming right inside a piece of footwear, street-view style, to the point where you can almost smell the leather. Terabytes of rich media assets require a DAM miracle. We said no DAM wordplay in this article, right? That didn’t last long. No more, we promise. As enterprise creative digital assets snowball almost exponentially, creative teams need to work minor miracles to keep creative workflows streamlined and scalable. Just consider all the moving parts of enterprise creative workflows that make up the digital asset lifecycle from creation, through to deployment and optimization. Digital asset planning Digital asset creation  Digital asset management Then distribution Optimization Asset preservation In enterprise creative workflows in particular, any one of those digital asset lifecycle stages involves further sub-processes. Sustaining high-quality content distribution at scale Without a clear, universal DAM strategy and creative asset management system in place, all the moving parts of production constantly drop out of alignment. For smaller teams, it’s not so much of a problem. For large-scale enterprise and global teams, high-friction creative workflows translate into massive opportunity cost. Confused feedback, lost digital asset files, mixups of wrong on the wrong version; constantly falling out of step not only diminishes content quality and value—it makes scaling content creation almost impossible. For enterprise, DAM security is an increasing priority Access control, security and cloud compliance. It’s always high on the list. The larger your digital asset libraries, the more valuable they are to would-be cybercriminals and rogue insiders, and the heavier the penalties for compliance gaps. The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches 2021 Survey discovered four in ten businesses experienced some kind of cyber security breach or attack. It’s no surprise that enterprises that want to master DAM and creative asset management prize latest generation cloud DAM solutions able to offer detailed user management, automated cloud governance scans and customized policy management. Defining a Clear Enterprise DAM and Creative Asset Management Strategy Without DAM and creative asset management, the very process of creating, collaborating on and retrieving digital media assets incurs new costs that start to eat away at the value your rich media assets are supposed to generate. Preventing the disorganized chaos, friction and actual financial losses means revamping your DAM strategy early before the scenario moves from loss-prevention to damage limitation. This is especially true if you’re currently using a traditional DAM strategy with traditional tools disconnected from one another. Wrapping up For enterprises serious about maintaining the kind of creative asset workflow fluidity that small businesses enjoy, it’s worth switching to a modern headless DAM platform. The rich availability of API custom integrations, workflow automation recipes and extensive security features makes a latest generation cloud-based DAM solution the way to go.

Ok, that’s the digital asset management pun taken care of in the title. If you’re a globaledit content regular, you probably groan at all the DAM wordplay by now, (or maybe it never gets old). Just like you groan every time you spend an entire lunchtime comparing video assets to track down the latest, usable version. That gets old pretty fast. Video Media Asset Management Should Be an Asset, Not a Liability You know video versioning in digital asset management for media and entertainment is a drag. Namely, the kind of drag that persists in even smaller video-creative teams. That’s because it only takes one person to put a foot wrong in the video-DAM samba for the music to stop. So what do you do? How about another Zoom meeting to align. Pass. Training away the video versioning problem (good luck with that) One approach for ensuring video and media asset versioning doesn’t unravel into total disorder is to get everyone on the same page. But, let’s face it, it sounds good on paper. Aligning anything from 10 to 100s of collaborators around the same video-versioning housekeeping and protocols is a pipe dream in practice. The bigger your video-creative team, the harder the struggle to manage clunky media asset collaborations and increasingly cluttered workflows. If just one person doesn’t get the ‘video versioning protocols’ memo, workflow efficiency breaks down. Even when all collaborators are all in-tune, video-versioning and managing digital media assets collectively is always high-friction. Ok, so what’s the solution? Let’s explore how cloud-based media asset management software simplifies video versioning to an effortlessly intuitive process that virtually runs itself. How the Right Digital Asset Management System Makes Video Versioning an Absolute Cakewalk What’s actually at the heart of the video versioning headache? It’s the fact that digital media assets have a habit of replicating. Yesterday there was one single video thumbnail in the folder, today there are five and tomorrow there may be 20. Here’s the kicker—they’re all identical. That explains the painstaking forensics you go through to find the right one. “If only I could view all video versions under one single thumbnail” Well, hold the front page, because you can. Out of the box, single-thumbnail version tracking is one of the baseline perks globaledit brings to your video digital asset management workflow. Better still, you also get to see: Which collaboration created which video version How many hours or days ago each video version was created Who uploaded or downloaded the video asset And who applied certain labels and changes In other words, if a video-team collaborator so much as breathes on any given media-asset version, everyone else will know about it. Don’t think of it as surveillance. Think of it as an intuitive, mutually-shared audit trail to simplify everyone’s work and video workflow. “If only I could use video versioning to distribute our best media assets” You guessed it. This is also a very real possibility with the right video media asset management software for creatives, freelancers and marketing teams. To give you just one example, globaledit’s cloud-based digital asset management software lets you edit, then compare and finally distribute creative video assets seamlessly, in a single workflow. Save and edit video assets: right inside your globaledit user interface. You can even include comments, ratings and markups. Easily compare video versions: either in an overlay view, side-by-side or in an asset-slider comparison view. Finally, distribute your best video version and media assets: using in-platform sharing and distribution to project partners and collaborators. Sound familiar? Maybe you’re already a globaledit user. If you are, here are some useful video asset library ‘how-tos’ to refresh and sharpen your globaledit DAM knowledge. What Will It Take for You to Make the Switch to the Right Media Management Software? Whether you’re a large enterprise, a small-to-medium business or a startup, video versioning friction and complexity adds up to frustrated teams at best. At worst it can also equal lost commercial potential. Especially if you’re not able to easily and consistently assess and distribute your best work. To see what video asset management success looks like with globaledit, read some of the case studies.

Spoilers: there is a difference between DAM and MAM and it kind of matters. The blurring of the line between the two is partly owed to the way ‘digital asset management’ (DAM) and ‘media asset management’ (MAM) are used interchangeably. How much it matters depends on a few things. We’ll get to that. The ground-level fact about both is that they’re in hot demand. Projections for DAM market value in 2022 were $5.09 billion, growing to an estimated $9.42 billion in 2026. You can take MAM for granted as part of those figures, given that it’s essentially a subset of DAM. So, what actually are the differences and similarities between MAM and DAM? And what exactly is the overlap that clouds their distinction? DAM vs MAM: What’s the Difference? People who wonder ‘what’s the difference between MAM and DAM?’ might also be asking the question ‘should I use MAM or DAM?’. Let’s answer the latter as a route to answering the first. Digital asset management (usually) excludes video (but not always) MAM systems typically offer media asset management focused almost exclusively on video, though there are exceptions of more modern, cloud-based DAM solution providers that offer video media asset management as a nice extra with significant benefits. No prizes for guessing who (*cough*). That’s pretty useful when you consider things like: 1. In 2013 60% of marketers used to create at least one piece of content each day. Nobody seems to have updated this stat. Just imagine the figure today. (Source: eMarketer) 2. 80% of video marketers claim that video has directly increased sales. (Source: Wyzowl via HubSpot) With photo and video visual content likely to continue carrying brand and marketing strategies, an all-doing DAM and MAM platform is a no-brainer. Media asset management systems are essential for audio-visual production If you’re a video editor, your MAM system is priceless for storing video content while you work in offline editing tools environments like Adobe Premiere. If all you do is edit video, there are tons of dedicated MAM tools out there. That said, there are creative production DAM platforms that include MAM features like video versioning, auto-ingest and cloud rendering that some standalone MAM platforms may not offer. DAM vs MAM: How Are They Similar? Ok. That was the main difference between DAM and MAM. How are they similar? From the moment digital assets are created, through to maintenance and content distribution: Both help securely store and organize digital assets in one place Both optimize resources and content distribution Both simplify creative workflows and collaborative interaction Both help break collaborator silos (internally and externally) Both help moderate content ownership and access Whatever benefits you notice from your MAM solution, you’ll almost certainly also get on a DAM platform. The one exception might be custom integrations. Those can vary from platform to platform. Legacy platforms If you’re using a dated MAM platform that doesn’t provide true creative workflow automation, then it’s worth switching to a modern DAM platform that can. DAM Integration vs MAM Integration All of those handy custom integrations—into other tools like Slack, Airtable, Salesforce and WordPress—rely on a headless digital asset management platform. Headless DAM integration In a digital asset management context, headless architecture offers a single, unified media asset library with multi-context utility across teams, functions and systems. The ‘headless’ part means developer-friendly API availability (Application Programming Interface) for creating seamless custom integrations across entire creative workflows that include other apps in your creative tech stack. MAM Integration Ok, so how is MAM integration different? The answer is that it’s not really too different. Any video media asset management software worth its subscription fee should offer similar API-based open architecture. With that in place, you’ll achieve seamless communication between other tools. Ultimately, that’s how you keep your content distribution pace up, and cost of ownership down over time. Wrapping up: DAM v. MAM, Which Comes Out on Top? So. Which is better in the DAM vs MAM arena? There are two answers. The simple answer is ‘it depends’ on the nature of your digital business and needs. If you handle video and audio content exclusively and need smart integrations with editing tools, then a dedicated MAM is perfect. That said, MAM-inclusive digital asset management solutions like globaledit come with sophisticated integrations for audio and video creative workflows that legacy media asset management platforms can lack.

Where to start with photography digital asset management (DAM)? Most photographers and studio teams have at some time or other stared into a Mac or asset library with eyes glazed, asking this question. It all starts so promisingly. One day you’re naming your first few files. The next you’re having blood-pressure spikes caused by the cryptically-named jungle of folders in front of you. How did it come to this? The dawning realization hits you that it’s time to start getting a grip with smarter digital asset management. Digital Asset Management for Photographers: Why Is It so Complicated? Photography digital asset management starts the moment you click the shutter. From that moment, there are countless steps before your beautifully re-touched assets are fit for purpose. Why the organized chaos of your asset library eventually just becomes chaos When you’re at a shoot getting snap-happy with whatever it is you’re paid to snap, you’re in the zone. Meanwhile, your SD card is getting hit with dozens of photos that soon turn into hundreds. Back at the studio, you fire-up Adobe Photoshop and hunker down to some serious editing: Filters  and touch-ups Cropping and aspect ratio Maybe manual tweaks if you’re feeling really OCD As you get creative and obsess over filters, 100s of original photos turn into countless copies to discard, keep, rename and manage. Not only does it cost time and hard work, the creative energy you spend leaves little in the tank for organizing and managing digital assets. Why digital asset management is so hard Ultimately, actually managing digital assets loses out to the priority of creating, editing and delivering great work. You tell yourself “I’ll organize all these files later.” Often, that “later” never comes; your next shoot rolls in and your asset library takes another big hit. The result is what you like to call ‘organized chaos’ that you learn to live with. Managing folders and files is just the start Once you add a collaborative layer to managing digital assets, things get worse. Just the time it takes to send files back and forth seriously limits your ability to scale work.  Approval requests, uploads, downloads, collaborator communication, samples for potential prospects; it goes on and on. Time for a DAM reality check The truth is that it really doesn’t have to be such hard work and there are antidotes to the chaos. We don’t mean simply tidying folders and naming files strategically. No matter how diligently named, asset libraries eventually succumb to the creeping chaos. Finding smarter antidotes can be the difference between growth and stagnation. How to Bring Order to the Chaos of Manual Digital Asset Management Here are some good places to start if you’re serious about scaling your workflow, winning bigger clients and minimizing the grunt work. Stop relying on email for digital asset management workflows Email is an essential tool. We’re not telling you to switch to smoke signals. But we are telling you to think about how you’re using email. Log into your inbox once you’re done here and get auditing. How much time do you spend searching attachments and deciding which emails actually need your attention? All that time builds up and keeps you off of more productive ‘to-do’ items. Streamline your DAM tech stack If you’ve already stopped relying on manual backups, then perfect. Maybe you’re using Google Drive or Dropbox. It’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. especially if you want to reduce redundancy in your workflows. Globaledit makes other cloud storage spaces almost redundant. Most of your workflow lives in one place, reducing countless moving parts into a simple integrated workflow. Maybe It’s Time to Switch to Dedicated Digital Asset Management Software (That Makes You Look the Part) Here’s the bottom line. As a studio or photographer, it’s painful to live with the day-to-day knowledge that you could be spending your time more efficiently on growth. That’s why you’re reading this. The punchline is that you’ve probably lived with this uncomfortable truth longer than you like to admit to yourself. Until you take a big step forward, the feeling that you could have grown better these past 12 months will linger like a bad client. Dedicated DAM software holds the key to unlock all of that uncaptured  growth. Why? At the most basic level, it helps increase efficiency while decreasing cost. Not to mention all the digital asset security, collaboration, access control and versioning perks. Start with a DAM demo. Trust us, you won’t look back Just ask. We’ll show you how globaledit’s digital asset management software for photographers and studios integrates with Adobe Photoshop. We’ll also show you how to search, track and securely store assets. All while collaborating with other people using on-platform communication and approval. No time-consuming uploads and downloads. No back and forth communication and delays. Just beautiful, powerful simplicity.

Why does digital asset management exist (DAM)? For a few reasons. One of the most overlooked is digital asset management security. For the talent agencies, apparel brands, ecommerce stores, and others that use DAM, ‘digital asset security’ can slip down the wishlist of ‘must-haves’ beneath things like pricing, integrations and the highly coveted user experience. Actually, it should be right up there with all of them. Why? Because DAM’s value is worth little if your DAM system can’t keep your digital assets DAM safe. Ok, so… let’s recap on why digital asset management security has become more critical than ever. Then we’ll explain the ‘how’ of setting up a secure DAM environment. Digital Asset Management Security: Why Has It Become Such a ‘Thing’? If you’re old enough to have created or owned non-digital data assets, you’ll remember that data security wasn’t much of a ‘thing’ before the digital era. Remember polaroid pictures? Each one was forever unique  Try going back to the pre-digital age and right-clicking an instant polaroid photo to make a copy or save it. You’ll struggle. Back then there was no need for watermarks on images and photos because the technology for instantly creating and distributing countless perfect new copies of something just didn’t exist. Today, digital asset management security has become ‘a thing’ because digital copyright and hacking are also ‘a thing’—as are the risks of your digital media and repositories falling into the wrong hands, or being accessed by the wrong people. “Of course I can send you that copyrighted image via Slack” Sometimes digital assets fall into the wrong hands by accident. Other times there’s bad-actor intent. The Guardian, UK, reported that in 2021 North Korean hackers stole $400m in digital assets. As the not-so-old adage goes; it’s not if you get hacked, it’s when. On a more mundane level it could be a new-starter sharing something with someone they shouldn’t via Slack or Dropbox. Or it could be an external partner careless being granted access to your media library. In either case, it doesn’t matter who or why. The risks can escalate into a rolling security fiasco resulting in reputation damage at best and legal disputes at worst. Not anybody’s idea of a good time. How to Create a Secure Digital Asset Management as Good as the User Experience If you’re already using a DAM system like globaledit, you might already benefit from things like: Built-in asset rights Auto-expiry dates Asset access permission settings Usage tracking Digital asset watermarks And more  Now it’s time to take those safeguards seriously and make sure you’re using them properly. Here’s some extra advice for configuring your DAM system environment. Know what your most valuable assets are The UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches 2021 Survey found that four in ten businesses (39%) reported having some kind of cyber security breach or attack. If your workflows involve sharing unedited videos or pre-retouch images, use tools with transport layer security and data encryption for secure sharing. Build your security in layers As we mentioned, it doesn’t take a North Korean hacker to ruin your DAM day (hackers from other countries of origin are available). Something like 35% of breaches originate from third-party vendors. Give as much thought to protecting networks, servers and digital assets from internal mishandling as from unauthorized external access. Find the balance of DAM security and user experience Asking teams to pivot to new passwords every few weeks is a drag, but it’s an important drag that actually holds valuable security impact. Whoever you collaborate with internally or externally, balancing DAM security and user experience is about compromise, trade-offs and finding a sweet spot between protocols and workflow. All that lands differently for different teams, so work it out between you. Find a DAM platform that designs-in all of that balance between security and user experience.

Let’s start with the jaw-dropper. Businesswire reported in 2021 that the global digital asset management (DAM) market reached a value of $ 3.88 Billion in 2020. The surge of DAM demand signals the growing importance of visual content—particularly for offline retail pivoting to online. Smarter digital asset management for e-commerce newcomers is about getting DAM right from day-one, before it all goes DAM wrong with snowballing chaos and complexity. For e-commerce veterans, it’s about maximizing digital asset management efficiency; to keep vast asset libraries workable, navigable and easily deployable with as few moving parts as possible. Whether you’re starting out or have been online as long as Amazon, it’s about scaling up meaningful e-commerce experiences while scaling down the cost, time and all-out headache of legacy approaches to digital asset management. Here are some of the ways to organize e-commerce digital assets. But first, the challenges smarter DAM solves for e-commerce brands. “Where’s that DAM File?”: Digital Asset Management Challenges e-commerce Loves to Hate Managing e-commerce digital assets is so dauntingly complex, studies have been done pin down the top challenges that are: Finding global assets Granting collaborator access  Granting partner access Repurposing digital assets Version control Sound familiar? Generally speaking? All of that can be summed up in three words: chaos and disorder. The more e-commerce content you create, the more chaos and disorder snowballs, the more collaboration falls apart. What Does Your e-commerce Digital Asset Management Process Look Like Right Now? The antidote to DAM chaos is to get organized. You’re probably already doing things like product information management (PIM) or using some of these best-practice methods for managing digital e-commerce assets. Using folder management to organize and find digital assets If you’re already using a date-based folder system as one of a number of ways of maximizing digital asset management efficiency, how is it working out? Honestly? What would you change? Or what do you wish was easier? Date-based folder names For example, you could be using a year-month-day naming convention—and why not? It’s intuitive and structured. For smaller-scale e-commerce stores, this approach works just fine. Once your asset library and/or your asset-management team grows, date-based folder management can reach its limits. At a certain point, simply navigating folders becomes a time-consuming task all of its own. Over a year, imagine how many hours you’ve lost. Descriptive file names The non-numeric approach to organizing e-commerce digital assets is to be descriptive. That way you can just search stuff, right? You can even add image width. For example: Product name + image width: womens-yoga-mat-2-960 This can actually be an effective approach to organizing folders and files, but it’s a best-practice technique that relies on further best practice of ensuring all collaborators actually stick to the naming format. At even medium-sized e-commerce content teams, manual error and variations can creep in, causing needle-in-a-haystack situations. Mirroring your website to organize e-commerce assets A common alternative to date-based digital media asset management is to mirror your asset folders in-line with website product categories and subcategories. This approach seems intuitive, though it doesn’t work for all e-commerce stores. What if, for example, your online store has 100s of products that include countless more sub-variants? That’s a lot of visual assets to store, organize and find. Getting Smarter About e-commerce Digital Asset Management To wrap up, remember the challenges we covered? Finding assets Version control Collaborator and partner access Repurposing assets You’ll hit hard limits with all of them when trying to organize and scale DAM workflows using even the most sensible traditional methods. Even if you keep tight best-practice rules, all the moving parts means constant effort, uploads, downloads, access admin and delays. Everything exists in different layers and locations. What does smarter e-commerce DAM look like? Whether you’re the e-commerce team trying to scale content and increase DAM ROI, or an external digital asset partner collaborating with them, Globaledit brings all the smarts. Imagine one visually-intuitive asset library. One multi-stakeholder comms and collaboration in a single, integrated space complete with user-comments. Discover how you can create e-commerce collections with custom metadata tags and more—all while collaborating securely and seamlessly outside of your emails and WhatsApp.

The market of digital asset management is expected to reach more than USD 8 billion by 2026. This is because of the increasing need to automate tasks to keep up with the rising content demand. A significant chunk of time across every team in an organization is eaten up by recurring tasks.  This is where a DAM comes in – it brings efficiency to the workflow and increases productivity of every team member. Here’s how you can use DAM to utilize its maximum potential: 1. Find your assets on time How many times did your team need to recreate an asset, just because they couldn’t find it on time?  If you had to measure the cost of reproduction of existing assets, it would justify the investment in a DAM software really quickly.  DAM allows your team to look for the right assets at the right time, just with a simple search. Need that picture with a model in red dress on a skateboard? It’s just a search away.  That’s the power of metadata. With a DAM, metadata is automatically set up with the ingestion of your assets. Your team can further define keywords and taxonomies to have a better result.  Similarly, file naming conventions and upload locations need to be frozen so you’re not left in the lurch later while discovering collaterals. globaledit’s Metadata allows automatic metadata tagging in bulk, so your creatives always have what they’re looking for, eliminating the inadvertent creation of duplicate assets. The result? A lot of time is freed up which can be used for creation of assets, helping the scalability of your content creation. With that, a huge cost of reproduction is saved. The ROI from a metadata-powered search is immense. 2. Control assets and monitor projects Project managers have a lot on their plate, from assigning roles to tracking deadlines, from sharing assets to streamlining the workflow. If you’re a project manager, you might’ve faced challenges while: Assigning the right asset to the right person Getting a centralized view of workflow  Sharing assets with third-party vendors Also, you have to make sure that creatives get access to only those assets that they’re supposed to. For example, a retoucher might need access to only the asset that has been approved by a stakeholder, rather than a complete folder.  globaledit’s Projects enables you to do all these tasks on a single platform. Be it controlling your assets, assigning roles, or tracking projects, you can perform every task related to project management on your DAM. 3. Automate recurring tasks Creatives are best at (and most happy) doing creative work. But the traditional workflow requires them to do many routine tasks, which can be easily automated. This can, on average, save 16 hours per week of each creative.  DAM can automate tasks like manually uploading and downloading assets, maintaining versions of assets, going through the long approval cycles.  For example, a DAM like globaledit has features like Sync to automatically upload assets while they’re created. This frees up the time of manually uploading the assets once the shoot is over. Not only that, it also lets you integrate your workspace with your favorite editing tools like Adobe Photoshop. This means editors can edit without having to move the asset to several different platforms.  Versions of edits through the approval cycle are maintained by the DAM itself. You can compare the versions with comments to select the best piece. Your team doesn’t have to look for the versions in their library or send back and forth emails.  Unleash Growth with DAM There are many ways to use a DAM, but it generates the maximum ROI for you when you use it the right way. Using its metadata to search for assets and project management features to streamline the project frees up a lot of time for your team members. This impacts the efficiency of your projects directly as your team can be more productive.  globaledit’s digital asset management solution gives you the key to success with its cutting-edge technology. Request a demo with us today to discover how you can utilize the DAM in the most powerful ways.

Studies show that the number of video content watched by the global population grew by 85% in 2020. The demand for content, especially rich media content is exploding all around us. Consumers are, well, consuming more content than ever before and brands are responding in full force.  To scale up and meet current and future content demand, organizations need to take stock of their creative workflows and adopt technology solutions and processes that will allow them to do so. In such a scenario, solutions like Digital Asset Management are game-changers when it comes to streamlining creative workflows.  To achieve the maximum potential of your team, making your workflows highly efficient and productive is the only solution. And DAMs can help you do just that.  How to Use a DAM to Scale Content Creation Any creative workflow is riddled with inherent roadblocks limiting your efficiency. These roadblocks arise from a variety of factors which can ultimately be boiled down to a lack of standardization and automation in processes. To remove the uncertainty from your content creation pipeline, you need to implement a method to the madness—a structure that standardizes and optimizes every stage of your workflow. With a DAM, you can avert the impending ‘digital doomsday’, the inevitable state when you’ll no longer be able to keep up with content demand.  Here’s how  you scale content creation in five actionable ways: 1. Define a Workflow The sheer number of organizations that simply go about creating content without a proper workflow is mind-boggling.  From designing project briefs and storyboarding projects to collaborating on assets and distributing them, your entire content creation process has multiple moving parts. It’s nearly impossible to achieve efficiency without a structured flow to your processes. With a robust DAM, you can streamline all the stages of your workflow, where every stage organically flows into the next, and you always have a handle on your project status. This will prevent wasted bandwidth, enable you to take on more projects, and most importantly, allow you to scale your production pipelines to handle the growing demand.  2. Integrate Your Production Tools Once your workflows are properly defined, you need to take stock of your production process. If you’re struggling to work with multiple production tools, you’re crippling your productivity as your creatives don’t have a single view of the production process and are losing details juggling multiple platforms. Scaling your workflows is naturally much easier when you’re no longer wasting man-hours manually uploading assets and hopping between tools and platforms.  A DAM brings together your favorite tools on a single platform, be it Adobe Photoshop or your CMS tool. This makes life simple for your creatives and boosts project output, hence eliminating workload bottlenecks. Plus, powered by your DAM’s real-time cloud ingestion, you always have your digital assets present on a single repository, easily accessible from anywhere, on any device.  3. Simplify Collaboration An integrated production brings much-needed efficiency to your workflow, but what about collaborating on assets?  Sharing digital assets multiple times to multiple stakeholders for edits and inputs delays your projects and wastes hours of effort. A DAM can enable granular collaboration directly on your assets with comment layers and powerful annotation features. Moreover, it integrates your communication channels with the same platform as well, removing the need for emails and other outdated communication tools.  And the problem of losing assets in the millions of other files is solved with intelligent metadata-powered search. Your assets are bulk-tagged with various contextual parameters, allowing your creatives to instantly find whatever they’re looking for. In the presence of such powerful features, your team can create content quickly, allowing you to scale much more efficiently.  4. Automate Tasks After all the changes above, there still remains a host of repetitive tasks that end up wasting precious bandwidth of your creatives, 16 hours a week, to be precise.  Maintaining convoluted file names for every version of every asset and going through multiple rounds of approval just to get assets signed off for use are just some of the most glaring time sinks. Your creatives can leverage DAM’s ability to automate version control and enable instant ‘kill or approve’ functionality for reviewers with side-by-side asset comparisons.  By automating operational tasks such as these, you create a rewarding production environment for your team and make them hungry for bigger and better projects. 5. Adopt Smart Distribution Lastly, painstakingly curating assets for every digital channel or outside stakeholder can be extremely cumbersome. A DAM allows you to share curated asset folders with the desired target audience, allowing you to simplify asset sharing and maintain access control at the same time. And with the ability to instantly share finished projects with agencies, vendors, and retailers, you never have to bother with manual sorting of finished assets. Unlock Scalable Growth A vision for scalability is indispensable for your organization to tackle the challenges that come with growth. A DAM that’s right for your business will ensure that you’re well-equipped to combat these challenges. globaledit’s future-proof asset management solutions enable you to maximize your ROI, automate processes to eliminate wastage, and streamline workflows to maintain brand consistency. Request a demo with us today to discover more about our suite of content creation and management tools.

The unstoppable demand for rich media content is here to stay. The number of video content watched by the global population grew by 85% in 2020. The uber-competitive space of content-heavy media production requires technology solutions to enable creatives to produce content at the most optimum efficiency.  The Digital Asset Management (DAM) industry is expected to cross $8 bn by 2026, owing to organizations increasingly regarding a DAM as an indispensable weapon in their arsenal. And the reason is obvious. DAM eases the entire content creation workflow from ideation to distribution, unlocking maximum productivity while maintaining creative liberty. Let’s discover how exactly DAM can create highly efficient workflows for your organization. Why Do You Need an Efficient Workflow? There is a myriad of challenges faced by creative operations in the absence of a comprehensive content creation and distribution platform. Unprecedented demand for digital assets: With the explosion of social media and the number of consumer touchpoints, brands require top-notch creative assets at their fingertips. Expensive communication & collaboration: Studies show that organizations lose, on average, $62.4 million per year due to poor communication. Countless hours are wasted on emails and disconnected messaging tools. Brand Inconsistency: Growth in your business and managing multiple parallel projects creates room for brand inconsistency due to unstandardized assets being shared and distributed by your creatives.    Studies prove that 51% of creatives end up wasting time and resources duplicating assets. Moreover, they spend, on average, 16 hours a week on redundant, non-creative tasks. How Does DAM Maximize Efficiency From Start to Finish? Creating content is a rewarding but arduous process. Designing creative briefs, brainstorming ideas, collaborating on assets, and going through several rounds of reviews and approvals are just some of the stages before your content can see the light of day.  The fundamental reason for you to have in place an efficient creative workflow is to take the uncertainty out of the creative process and make your team work as a whole.  So how does a DAM help extract maximum efficiency from your workflows? Ideation & Discovery Ideating and creating briefs for your project and your creative professionals is rarely a smooth process. But with a DAM, the briefing and storyboarding processes become as smooth as possible, thanks to standardized and reusable templates that can be easily tweaked to suit any project. You will no longer find yourself searching in the dark and praying for the project to take shape in front of you.  Intake & Storage Managing hundreds and possibly thousands of digital assets manually is an invitation to creative hell. Not only do you create wide-ranging issues with asset upload and discovery, but you also actively become a laggard in the industry by not investing in a modern asset storage solution.  With real-time and automated ingestion of assets to the cloud, a DAM ensures secure and always available storage for your files. And with intelligent, metadata-based asset discovery tools, your creatives can leverage bulk tagging of videos and images, always finding what they’re looking for. Production & Approvals When all your production tools are integrated on a single platform, your DAM becomes a one-stop shop for your team and your workflows are no longer crippled due to siloed creation and collaboration. Moreover, your team can take advantage of granular editing directly on your assets. Advanced approval tools give reviewers instant ‘Approve’ or ‘Kill’ functionality, reducing the number of approval rounds for assets and improving project completion times. Distribution Curating assets for every digital channel or outside stakeholder can be cumbersome without a robust DAM. A DAM allows you to share curated asset folders with the desired internal audience and also share finished projects with agencies, vendors, and retailers. Your teams can focus on putting their best work out, leaving all the hassle of content curation and distribution to your DAM.  Wrapping Up A DAM that is built to create highly engaging customer experiences through a suite of modern, integrated production solutions is indispensable today. Organizations can no longer strive for success with outdated tools and processes. Request a demo with us today to discover how globaledit can maximize efficiency for your creative workflows. 

The integration of different software and the agile delivery of the results is the key to smooth digital experience.  Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) are integral tools to make your business better when implemented congruously. These tools are the right combination and one of the beneficial system pairs when utilized for your business. Content management system is already used in many businesses, at the least, on their website alone. Let’s dig into various ways your business can squeeze in the benefits of these management systems. 1. Right Asset at the Right Time  Let’s take an example of your daily schedule on WordPress with CMS. When publishing a picture with a piece of content, you have to search through a library. What you see then is a mess, multiple images confuse you, and none of them is relevant to what you wanted it to be.  But there’s no doubt your CMS helps you publish content effortlessly. With the integration of DAM and CMS, you get the best of both worlds. You can make the process of deploying images quickly. The right asset at the right time is managed by these system integration.   2. CMS – A Good Publisher But Bad Storage Manager CMS is a great tool, which helps even a non-technical user to publish content online without much hassle. This management system is definitely an excellent platform to format, design and align the online world of your brand. Moreover, CMS drives the behavior and accurate metrics according to your needs.  But at the same time, the content management system is bad at storing your digital assets. Every blog post needs a cover image and other graphics to keep the audience engaged. The CMS doesn’t have the flexibility or room in its basic media library to store the data.  When DAM works with CMS, a rich metadata is added to each asset! This makes your process easier and solves all the issues that arise with storage. DAM works by storing your data while CMS efficiently manages your content. 3. DAM it! If you have a business that’s built on multiple SKUs, data management is difficult. You could use SQL database but this further would extend to need DAM for accessing the data by social media marketers.  DAM lets you upload your digital assets, tag, and track it for future promotions and present analytics easily. DAM does its functions efficiently and simultaneously provides access to CMS without any compromise, creating a single source of truth for your business.  CMS alone is unsuccessful when dealing with multiple SKUs, multiple platforms, and thousands of images. DAM is what helps you streamline your assets with content. 4. Keep up with the growth rate  Competition is wild. And for organizations to be seen, they need to be on their toes, constantly publishing relevant content and be organic. This is both expensive and time-consuming. And as the savior, DAM deployed with CMS is here to make your life easier.  CMS is beneficial with codefree and rapid production and publication of content to the entire world. While DAM on the other hand, helps you align and categorize these assets, thus, improving the rate of production. Here’s how:   Right digital assets can be found quickly with the help of DAM and reused multiple times. Producers don’t need to create new content for the same purpose. The creative assets can be copied and put in interesting ways. It can also help in various marketing campaigns by reusing the same image.  Your content is put in a better position by repurposing and reposting previous blogs, ebooks as case studies and white papers. DAM takes care of the entire management system smartly.   An Integration for Growth Acceleration  DAM helps you easily find and deploy your assets. Storage gets easier, content is repurposed and DAM helps you create a single source of truth while being able to function with CMS with no compromises. On the other hand, CMS is what eases your publication. Overall, DAM delivers digital experience smoothly and efficiently once deployed with a CMS.  globaledit, a DAM solution, allows you to integrate the DAM with your favorite CMS. Request a demo to take your digital content publishing to the next level.  

E-commerce and retail brands have the necessity to have an online presence, which calls for the centralized management of their digital assets. As your business grows, the requirements for a smooth workflow also grow. Without efficient operations, you risk facing roadblocks that can be easily avoided. Considering the competitive nature of the e-commerce business and the rising demand for digital content, you need to fast-track the rate of publication of your online content. This can be achieved with integrations of your existing systems, which can drastically improve your team’s productivity.  Here are some creative tools that work with your DAM to align, sort, control, and publish content: Content Management System (CMS) and DAM A content management system (CMS) is integral to the online marketing efforts of any brand, especially e-commerce and retail brands that need to have a significant online presence. The content management system (CMS) helps you create, publish, and edit the content on your website. In other words, it’s foundational to the administration of your website and web content like blogs. The demand for rich media content has grown 80% compared to 2019. In this scenario, the management of media content can’t be ignored. This is where its integration with DAM becomes almost unavoidable. While CMS publishes written content seamlessly, it’s not the best fit to store, search, or share media content across your online channels—tasks that are possible with a DAM.  For example, with the integration of DAM and CMS, you can add metadata to media files accompanying the written content, helping you to search for the files later. Not only that, having relevant metadata also helps you in ranking on search engines. This, in turn, helps your business get new organic customers. With DAM, you can significantly increase your publication rate. This is because your team can find the assets when they need them, without getting frustrated for hours. All the media files of your business that require editing in the CMS are available in the DAM. This integration provides you with a swift way to share files in the CMS. The overall productivity of your team increases, resulting in the creation of a successful brand. Product Information Management System (PIM) and DAM Detailed information about products is the key to converting a lead to a paying customer.  This is where a PIM comes in—it stores rich information about products with minute SKU details. This makes managing product data and catalog much easier. However, PIM doesn’t include digital assets such as product images and video. PIM provides you with a single source of truth for product information, but without the accompanying media assets, there remains a constant back and forth. On the other hand, digital asset management software (DAM) helps in storing the rich media assets, including product images and other marketing collateral. Integrating the two directly results in an unbreakable synergy. Firstly, you ensure brand consistency across all channels as you have access to the product information and media assets on the same interface. Secondly, the integration significantly reduces the time required by your team to distribute the content. But more importantly, it also reduces potential human errors when sending product information to different channels, regardless of the size of your catalog. This also helps you analyze the reason behind your top-performing products by having a bird’s eye view of the pictures, descriptions, and sales analytics at the same place. Is there a certain kind of description that’s performing well? Is it the angle of the image? It’s not just the distribution process that becomes easier, you also gain clarity on where your brand is headed. Enterprise Management System (EMS) Globally operated e-commerce businesses use an EMS because it simplifies the management of their international trades. This functions across customers, partners, and suppliers. EMS provides real-time data that helps make quick and smart business decisions using up-to-date information.  The integration of DAM and EMS brings the following operations on a single platform:  Sales of your business Finance management HR management Inventory management  This provides access to necessary crucial data required for both the employees as well as the management. Project Management System (PMS) Every e-commerce platform needs a Marie Kondo hand when it comes to project management. And this is exactly what the integration of DAM and PMS helps you with—keep your projects on course.  The project management system helps you clear out the mess of deadlines, important projects, potential client meetings, and timings overlapping. On the other hand, DAM helps you keep all the necessary client information including brand style guide and other brand collaterals at the same place, helping your team access client information smoothly.  The integration of the two allows your team to: Keep a track of ongoing projects on the same interface Manage project from the start till the end Hit deadlines and milestones timely. For example, if you have an upcoming product launch, PMS and DAM together will help you sail through the product shoot to the social media campaign. With globaledit, you can seamlessly integrate your favorite platforms, be it a CMS or an email management system. Request a demo today to learn more.

In today’s hyper-interactive marketing and brand communication space, it’s hard to survive without having a robust Digital Asset Management system (DAM). With all the efficiencies and business benefits it brings, implementing a DAM is not a one-shot job.  Narrowing down how exactly you can maximize value from a DAM can be daunting, owing to hundreds of use cases a DAM can fulfill. It needs careful considerations to perfect both the initial setup and the subsequent refining and tweaking of the system to your organization’s unique demands. Let’s look at a few things you can ensure to get it right. How Should You Manage Your DAM? Picture this: Your organization has green-lit a shiny new DAM and expects to create a smooth workflow with it. What do you do now? Implementing a DAM will require you to clearly define the ways of working that will guide your team on using and maximizing the system.  Here are five tips that can help you ensure you’re getting the most out of your DAM: Define a Workflow A successful DAM allows you to create highly customized and detailed workflows. With the help of a solution like globaledit’s DAM, you can standardize all the processes underlining every stage of your workflow – from automating project briefs and simplifying collaboration to approving assets and archiving them. Defining your workflow is the very first and the most critical step in deriving the most value from your DAM. Control Who Can Access What When dealing with hundreds or thousands of digital assets, it becomes imperative that users can access only the files that they need. Whenever you’re implementing a new DAM, access controls need to be clearly defined to prevent misuse of assets that can harm your brand consistency in the worst case. With tools like Collections, you can create custom access rules by mixing and matching user permissions as you like. Manage Metadata & Taxonomy Metadata sits at the core of intelligent and instant discovery of assets. But to use it to its full potential, you need to ensure that proper metadata and keywords are being populated for every asset before they’re ingested into the system. Similarly, rules for file names and file locations should be clearly defined. A DAM admin can be appointed to review whether users are following the rules and send assets back to them in case changes are needed. The DAM admin can also be responsible for initial training of the users and regular review of the defined processes. Build an Asset Library Your valuable digital assets are not supposed to be haphazardly dumped on the DAM system. You should utilize albums and folders to organize your assets and make sense of thousands of images and videos. With globaledit’s Sync and Versioning, you can be rest assured that your assets are automatically ingested during production itself and always remain up-to-date.  Measure DAM performance No tool is good enough until you can measure its usefulness. For measuring how successful your DAM system is performing, you need to track metrics like asset performance – where users can score each asset on its usability and relevance – and the speed of approval rounds that quantifies the efficiency of the entire asset lifecycle process. Harness DAM for Explosive Growth A DAM provides multiple benefits for your employees, your brand, and the ROI for your business. Harnessing automation to prevent wasted hours, standardization to ensure brand consistency, and streamlined workflows to maximize ROI, a DAM is downright essential if you value scalable growth. Request a demo with us today to discover how you can enrich your workflows with globaledit. 

Companies with a heavy focus on creative operations, especially those in the fashion and retail space, need to constantly be on top of managing thousands and even millions of digital assets showcasing their products. You need to ensure your creatives are working in the most efficient manner possible. That’s where DAM comes in.  DAM streamlines your creative operations so that your team can perform at their peak and not get frustrated with the logistics of creating, collaborating on, and distributing product collaterals. Let’s see why using a DAM platform effectively is equally important as implementing one. How Does DAM Help Your Customers and Your Creatives? DAM is aimed at a very fundamental tenet – taking the uncertainty out of your creative operations. From shooting product images and videos and collaborating on multiple editing tools to sharing final approved content with stakeholders, your designers, editors, and marketers have a lot on their plate. DAM streamlines your entire asset lifecycle so your creatives don’t waste hours on redundant tasks.  When your team is busy producing great content and acing project management and content distribution, your business ends up cutting down GTM time and your products get in front of your customers faster. Your ROI goes through the roof and your brand recognition gets bolstered. How Can You Use Your DAM to the Fullest? Once you’ve successfully managed to jump the budgetary and leadership hoops and implemented a brand new DAM software, it’s natural to be confused as to how you should go about using it. You need to clearly put in place specific ways of working that will help you and your team derive the most value from your DAM. Step 1: Define a Workflow Picture this: Your brand needs to fast-track the launch of your latest winter collection. To even begin work on this project, you need to define a clear flow of steps from ideation to delivery. globaledit’s DAM allows you to standardize every stage of your workflow with its suite of industry-leading tools aimed at streamlining the entire process and simplifying life for your creatives. Step 2: Define Asset Permissions With multiple projects running parallel for different apparel lines, it becomes essential to allow people access to only what they need for their own projects. Collections allows you to group together different assets in contextual groups which you can share with targeted people in your team. They can then view and edit only the assets in that group. Step 3: Define Metadata and Taxonomy Rules Metadata allows fast and accurate discovery of assets. But you need to clearly define the rules for populating the metadata for digital assets Similarly, file naming conventions and upload locations need to be frozen so you’re not left in the lurch later while discovering collaterals. Globaledit’s Metadata allows automatic metadata tagging in bulk, so your creatives always have what they’re looking for, eliminating the inadvertent creation of duplicate assets. Step 4: Build an Asset Library Once you’ve defined your workflow and worked out access controls and taxonomy rules, you need to organize your assets in albums and folders, to make sense of the thousands of files. globaledit Sync helps you with the automatic ingestion of your files to the cloud in real-time and Versioning helps you maintain an easily navigable collection of each version of your assets, each with its own edit history. Step 5: Measure Your DAM Performance After all the steps you go through from producing and distributing product images and videos, you need to prove that the organization’s investment in the DAM software was justified.  DAM allows you to track asset performance with your creatives being able to score every collateral for usability and relevance. DAM offers a powerful way to maximize the potential of both the tools at your disposal and your creative team.  Schedule a demo with globaledit today to find how our innovative solutions can help transform your creative workflow.  

Every organization is going through a fundamental upheaval. Knowingly or unknowingly, from rigid enterprises being run in siloes, organizations are transitioning into ultra-collaborative and digital-focused creative teams. Consumer demands and industry standards are far outpacing the traditional pace of organizational innovation. Conventional storage solutions, even cloud-based ones, are not well-equipped to deal with the demands of modern creative workflows. Today’s creatives require more than just data repositories. They need an organized workflow powered by comprehensive digital solutions that help leverage thousands of digital assets, multiple running projects, and globally-distributed teams—and not get bogged down by them. Digital Asset Management systems or DAMs satisfy this very need and go even beyond streamlining workflows. Let’s look at how exactly DAMs can organize your creative workflow. What Is a DAM System? A DAM system helps a company store, organize, access, and distribute its creative assets, in a centralized and cloud-hosted repository. Typically composed of a suite of products, DAMs aim to bring order and simplicity to your chaotic workflow. With the DAM industry estimated to reach $8.1 billion by 2026, DAMs have never been in more demand.  Digital Asset Management was born out of the need to manage innumerable digital assets as organizations grew in size and scope. With time, DAMs have evolved to encompass every stage of the creative workflow and have also taken over branding and marketing responsibilities.  As your business grows and you take on more projects, it can become extremely difficult to be able to make sense of the sheer scale of the content your teams need to work with. This quickly leads to precious hours wasted in searching and duplicating content, scattered collaboration, brand inconsistency, and doing redundant tasks.  How to Use a DAM to Organize Your Workflow? The most critical aspect that a DAM needs to take care of is organizing your content. With automation and AI-powered features, DAMs help you give a method to the madness, organizing processes scattered all over the place into a cohesive flow.  But how exactly can you do this in every stage of your creative workflow? Store and Find Your Assets Easily With growth comes challenges. Right from uploading your digital assets to a database, you are bound to encounter pain points. You can use unlimited cloud storage and intelligent, metadata-powered search to never run out of space and ensure that your creatives can always find the assets they’re looking for..  Use DAM for a Unified Production Shuffling between multiple tools and communication channels might sound familiar to you. It’s another reason your team might not be performing at its maximum potential. With a DAM, your team can produce all content and communicate on a single platform, seamlessly integrated with all your favorite tools.  Collaborate Directly on Your Assets It’s a pain to depend on back and forth sharing of one version after the other simply to get your edits across to a team member. DAMs can help your team ditch outdated platforms with on-platform chat, and use tools like Markup Editor to enable granular collaboration directly on your assets.  Remove the Grunt Work for Employees Creatives spend, on average, 16 hours a week on routine tasks. Imagine if they could automate uploading of assets, maintaining versioning, and the multiple approval cycles, and just focus on creating brilliant work. It will translate to happier employees, more projects being completed, and more ROI for your organization.  Ensure Brand Consistency When your digital assets are always up-to-date and standardized to the latest brand guidelines, your creatives find it a breeze to find and work on the latest brand templates. With a quick ‘approve or kill’ functionality, any changes can be approved instantly. Your content will always be on brand, no matter the campaign or channel your assets are being used in.  Leverage DAM for Scalable Growth A vision for growth is absolutely essential if your organization hopes to tackle the challenges that come with scalability. A DAM solution that’s right for your business will ensure that you’re well-equipped to combat these challenges. Globaledit’s cutting-edge asset management solution not only organizes your workflow but also guides you across the asset lifecycle. Request a demo with us today to discover how you can easily organize your existing workflow.  

Contemporary industry standards and ever-changing consumer demands have led to creatives facing immense pressures. They are expected to deliver on-brand content within the budget, on time, every time.  Doing this successfully requires an organized workflow that takes the stress out from the creative process and primes your organization for scaling seamlessly as your business grows. Let’s look at what benefits a structured creative workflow can reap for your organization and how exactly your creatives can leverage it to help grow and scale your business.  What is a Creative Workflow? To put it simply, a creative workflow refers to the tools and processes an organization or a brand puts in place to streamline its operations and maximize performance. In the absence of a structured workflow, your creatives are left fending for themselves, with production and collaboration taking place separately.  The most fundamental reason for you to implement a standardized creative workflow is to take the uncertainty out of the creative process and make your team work as a whole. Studies show that 51% of creatives end up wasting time and resources duplicating assets. Moreover, they spend, on average, 16 hours a week on operational, non-creative tasks.  As your organization grows and needs to scale effectively, a standardized creative workflow is essential to make that change happen. Why Do You Need an Organized Workflow? Brands are facing more competition than ever before and need to tackle a host of challenges, as a result. Unprecedented demand for creative assets: With the explosion of social media and the number of consumer touchpoints increasing rapidly, brands require top-notch creative assets at their fingertips. Inefficient communication & collaboration: Studies show that organizations lose, on average, $62.4 million per year due to poor communication. Countless hours wasted on emails and disjointed messaging tools can be better spent on creative work if a structured workflow is in place. Brand Inconsistency: The bigger your organization gets, the more complex managing your processes and creative assets becomes. This creates the perfect storm for accidental brand inconsistency due to unstandardized assets being shared and distributed by your creatives.  These inefficiencies stem from the lack of proper tools and processes that can make life easier for your organization’s creative workforce. When your team is not wasting precious hours doing guesswork on ambiguous briefs or duplicating assets, it automatically translates to more time being spent on actual, creative output.  Benefits of an Optimized Creative Workflow A creative workflow, tailored to your organization, and having the buy-in from the leadership and the creative team as a whole, is bound to generate tangible and intangible benefits for your business. Not only does it set the stage for scalability, but it also revamps your entire creative process for the better. Integrated Production: Seamless integration with all your favorite tools ensures your creatives can work on a single platform. For example, globaledit’s marketplace integrations make it super easy to connect to popular tools like Photoshop, Slack and Asana. Effortless collaboration: Having a standardized process for creative briefs, editing, and asset sharing makes collaboration a breeze. For example, Markup Editor lets your team comment directly on assets and collectively edit and approve them. Enhanced Productivity: Your creatives get to work in a stress-free environment without wasting time on operational tasks. This leads to more projects being completed on time and within the budget.  Brand Consistency: Your branding is how your audience recognizes you and thus, it needs to be treated with the utmost care. Standardized asset management practices ensure that everything that goes out is always on point.  Leverage the Power of Organized Creative Workflow It’s no longer an option to have an optimized creative workflow in place. The alternative is creative obsolescence. With AI, automation, and newer cutting-edge technologies playing a major role in creative operations, you need to be at the top of your game. Request a demo with us today to discover how you can unlock scalable and forward-looking creative workflows.  

Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions help organizations store, organize, access, and distribute their creative assets, in a centralized & cloud-hosted repository. With modern creative workflows increasing in complexity, DAM solutions are near-indispensable if you want your enterprise to scale with the growth of the overall industry. With the DAM industry set to grow to $8.1 billion by 2026, organizations need to reassess their existing systems and solutions. The industry’s accelerated shift towards remote work and automation has disrupted traditional workflows. It’s more relevant than ever to leverage the functionalities and superior benefits DAM can bring to your creative workflows. Let’s look at how DAM can not only plug existing inefficiencies but also unlock unexplored avenues to generate value. What does DAM do? As organizations grow in size and take on more clients and projects, some typical challenges surface naturally — countless hours wasted on operational tasks, duplicating assets due to inefficient search systems, scattered communication & collaboration platforms, and overall brand inconsistency due to lack of standardized systems. How does a DAM solution tackle these challenges and many more? Modern DAM solutions offer the following features to revamp your workflows: Store all your assets in a single, secure repository Use intelligent metadata for fast and easy search Ensure access control with granular and customizable permissions Collaborate directly on videos and images across teams and devices Ensure assets are always up-to-date and consistent with your brand Archive expired assets with automated rules Why Does Your Organization Need DAM?   It’s important to fully understand what a DAM solution can do for your organization before investing in one. The benefits offered by a solution that’s right for your specific needs can be manifold. Let’s look at some of them: Unlimited cloud-based storage: As you grow your business, your asset storage needs will be taken care of with a globally accessible cloud-based ingestion system like Globaledit Sync. Fast Asset Discovery: With tools like Metadata, your creatives will no longer waste precious time searching for assets, translating to enhanced productivity and increased ROI as you scale your client base. Seamless Collaboration: Production, editing, and communication don’t need to happen in silos. Marketplace Integrations allow your team access to all their favorite tools on a single platform. Asset Lifecycle Management: A DAM solution enhances not just your creative workflow but the overall journey from project initiation to asset archival.  Brand Integrity: When your assets are always up-to-date with Versioning, your brand communication is on point, every time. Accelerated Approvals: You no longer need to go through 2-3 rounds of approvals. With tools like Approvals, your team can review asset versions side-by-side and approve or kill actions. Prepare Your Business For Growth   With growth comes a flurry of challenges but also an opportunity to unlock hidden value for the business. As your brand takes shape and your business grows, there is a real possibility of hitting scalability roadblocks that can threaten to eat into your profits or even dismantle your processes.  With a successful DAM solution that is suited for your unique needs, you can prepare your business to manage these challenges and more, and overcome them to take that next step in your journey. The adoption of AI, automation, and newer cutting-edge technologies in asset management solutions is raising the bar for what DAM can do for creative organizations.  And with rich media assets, especially video, taking center stage across platforms and content types, DAM is more relevant than ever.  Request a demo with us to discover how globaledit can help you with your asset management needs.

Creative workflows need to be optimized and streamlined for them to be an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘liability’ to your creative professionals. As a creative agency or media house, you always find yourself grappling with how to manage your creative assets better. Your ever-growing asset libraries make it a mandate to use a robust digital asset management (DAM) solution.  But the industry standards and consumer demand for increasingly immersive audio-visual content have now created the need for a specialized Media Asset Management (MAM) solution.  But what exactly constitutes ‘media assets’—video, audio, photos, or all of them? Media Asset Management: The Age of Specialization MAM is a niche subset of DAM, highly focused on the unique features needed for managing audio-visual assets like videos, audio, and images. MAM does for media assets what DAM does for general digital assets including documents and sales collaterals.  Video content has long been the dominant format, dictating not only marketing and business strategies but also internal communication and training programs in virtually all production companies.  But even then, the importance of images and audio has not been reduced. The success of your creative outputs hinges on video, image, and audio equally.  A photoshoot or video shoot goes through multiple stages—production, storage, transcoding, adding metadata, editing & collaboration, and delivery or broadcasting. These increasingly complex steps require your asset management solution to be advanced enough to handle both the technical and visual aspects of the entire creative process.  As a result, a successful MAM solution needs: Seamless ingestion and storage of your media assets Quick and easy search with analytics-powered metadata Granular access & security controls Streamlined collaboration tools and Versioning control Integration with your organization’s existing tools and technologies Your team might already be using a DAM or even a MAM solution for creative workflow management, but is it really the right one for you?  Is it helping you find your media assets when and where you need them, enabling granular collaboration, and integrating the system with your existing software environment?  What Qualifies as Media Asset Management? Media asset management helps you manage rich multimedia files including video, audio, and photos. It’s designed to handle high volumes of rich media and create a seamless workflow for your organization. MAM largely deals with the following media files: Photos represent the visual identity of your brand and hence, play a key role in communicating your unique brand voice.  Audio plays its part as well, as countless brands have shown with their iconic, timeless themes and motifs.   Video offers your customers a highly immersive medium to connect with your brand.  The right MAM solution for your team needs to take a holistic view of your entire media asset library and enable you to tell an engaging and complete brand story. It needs to extract actionable insights from the tons of data your production generates. And it should be able to do the heavy lifting of intelligently keeping your videos, images, and audio at your fingertips and managing multiple approvals. As we discussed earlier, you need to ensure that whatever MAM solution you’re choosing, it should be able to handle the requirements of your organization and should scale with your growth. Owing to the increased complexity of managing rich media assets as compared to documents, your chosen system should also be built around audio-visual assets  from the ground up. With a comprehensive MAM solution, your media assets are automatically ingested and made cloud-ready to be shared with curated stakeholders. Automatic metadata generation and analytics-powered search save you hours of hunting for existing content.  Moreover, collaborating on videos and images is easier than ever with comment layers and asset ratings. Once your creatives have leveraged assets from all your favorite pre and post-production tools, approvals are a breeze with side-by-side comparisons between asset versions. Managing media assets, especially rich video files, is not simple but with globaledit’s video management solutions, you can be rest assured that you’re part of the future and primed for growth and scalability. Talk to us so we can partner with you on your quest to master MAM.

Asset management solutions enable creative teams to store, access, and distribute their digital assets in a centralized repository. Propelled by the increasing importance of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions, the size of the industry is expected to reach $8.1 billion in the next five years.  Creative workflows surrounding rich media production and distribution have evolved rapidly and have made robust DAM solutions indispensable assets for organizations. Traditional data repositories and basic asset management solutions are not sustainable in today’s world of complex and layered digital assets—especially video files. The right asset management solution for your organization’s unique needs will not only plug existing leakages in your creative workflow but will also unlock new avenues of value generation.  What are Digital Assets and Why Do You Need DAM? Digital assets include everything from videos, images, and audio to presentations, PDFs, and design mockups. With the explosion of social media and ever-increasing customer experience demands, the growth of video has far outpaced other media.  With creative workflows compounding in complexity and globally distributed teams fast becoming a reality, every stage in your asset lifecycle is being impacted. From production and storage and discovery to collaboration, approvals, and distribution, there are innumerable ways for things to go wrong. The very purpose of a DAM solution is to streamline this entire workflow and make your life simpler. In addition to accelerating all stages of the creative process, DAM solutions also produce enhanced value through intelligent search and seamless integration & collaboration.  With your creatives no longer spending more than 10 hours a week on administrative tasks, you will find your team completing more projects on time and within budget, contributing to the bottom line.  What Does a DAM Solution Actually Do? What are the features of a DAM solution that make it so essential for your business?  Store all your assets in a single, secure repository Use intelligent metadata for fast and easy search Ensure access control with granular and customizable permissions Collaborate directly on videos and images across teams and devices Ensure assets are always up-to-date and consistent with your brand Archive expired assets with automated rules But how does this translate to actual functionality for each stage of your creative workflow?  Production: Your creatives don’t need to manage multiple tools & platforms to create content. Seamless integration with all your favorite tools ensures all production takes place on a single platform. Storage: High-res assets like videos can quickly fill up your storage space. Cloud-based DAM solutions with unlimited storage and advanced versioning capabilities take your mind off storage woes. Collaboration: Your team members can discover, edit and comment directly on videos and images from any device or location around the world. Approvals no longer delay project completion, enabled by side-by-side asset comparison. Distribution: Sharing assets with your media partners can be done from anywhere, owing to cloud-based publishing. Access controls ensure asset security so you can share what you want with exactly who you want. Measurement & Archiving: How do you measure which assets are performing better and are leveraged the most by your creatives? Detailed analytics allow you to generate these insights. When needed, automated rules can be used to archive assets to avoid unnecessary clutter. What is the ROI for Your Business? It all comes down to the return on your investment in a DAM solution. The business benefits you can reap from a successful DAM implementation are manifold: Optimized Workflow: The productivity benefits from an efficient workflow alone are immense. Organizations worldwide can save over $5 trillion annually by automating routine tasks and speeding up time-to-market. Brand consistency: When every asset shared from your organization is up-to-date and automatically aligned to the latest brand guidelines, customers consistently get the experience they demand, and your brand value benefits as a result. Long-Term Savings: Your initial investment in a DAM solution will be recouped many times over due to non-duplication of assets, enhanced communication & collaboration, and analytics-powered asset performance measurement. Scalability: You’re investing in an asset management solution for the long term and as your organization grows and your asset demands increase, a DAM solution will ensure it scales with your growth.  Request a demo with globaledit today to discover how our asset management solutions built for creatives can benefit your organization.

Globaledit, the leader in Creative Workflow Management solutions announces a new, comprehensive integration with Adobe Photoshop to allow for a more seamless creative workflow experience.  The globaledit integration with  Photoshop allows users to manage creative projects, scale output and collaborate without leaving Photoshop. This integration revolutionizes the way creatives manage digital assets in crucial post production steps. Users will be able to streamline communication with peers, manage tasks by project priority, access markup layers, comments and other notes, update project statuses,  receive notifications when you have new work to complete, manage versions in real time, and focus on creativity without switching between tools.  Users will also be able to save versions of their creative from Photoshop to globaledit and load markup layers, without leaving their workflow management tool. The integration with Photoshop is part of globaledit’s focus on its workflow automation and creative ecosystem, one of several tailored solutions for the core users of globaledit.  For more information on how to get started, check out this quick guide to the plugin.

If the year 2021 has been about one thing, it’s learning from 2020’s disruptive forces and adopting essential best practices for tackling future challenges. Creative workflows were turned inside out by the pandemic and creative professionals were forced to reckon with new challenges that came with permanent remote working.  In order to achieve consistency within your creative workflow, you need to take an inside-out approach towards optimizing all aspects of your workflow. A consistent workflow eliminates chaos and confusion and standardizes processes to ensure your team works as a whole. The importance of consistency in creative workflows has grown immensely, not just as a band-aid for ‘the new normal’, but also to anticipate and solve the challenges yet to come. From Creative Asset Management and a streamlined collaboration system to minimizing approval timelines and automating routine tasks, let’s take a look at how exactly you can arrive at a consistent creative workflow. Creative Assets at Your Fingertips It turns out that 51% of creatives waste time in producing duplicate assets and almost 40% of creatives don’t have a single source of truth. With solutions like Sync and Versioning enabling real-time access and up-to-date assets, you’re always on top of your game.  Your assets are available to you whenever you need them. You can share them with the right people by creating custom Collections. Not only that, Metadata makes your asset search extremely easy. A successful creative asset management automatically increases your workflow’s consistency by eliminating human error and standardizing asset management practices. Collaborate to Dominate Working with hundreds of assets uploaded by dozens of team members, you need a robust collaboration framework powered by innovative tools working in synergy. With Markup Editor, your creatives can annotate directly on assets and communicate within the ecosystem of connected tools without having the need for countless emails. Projects power your project management needs with features like targeted asset permissions and role-based access. Again, eliminating needless emails and thus strengthening communication and collaboration taking you a step further towards a waste-less and hence, consistent creative workflow. Automate the Redundant Any creative workflow management solution is incomplete if your team members are spending 16 hours a week on operational tasks. Not only does this lead to precious time being wasted, but it also leaves room for ambiguity, the very antithesis of consistency. Collections allow your assets to live in a virtual folder where you can leverage powerful analytics by sorting them based on rule ratings, retouching status, dates, metadata, comments, and more. Your creative workflow is getting improved daily simply by adopting a more consistent system, which is what an ideal approach should be.  Create a Consistent Creative Workflow A consistent creative workflow is achieved when a family of tools work together to achieve a single source of truth, remove redundancy in processes, enable simplified asset discovery and leverage the power of analytics-driven collaboration.  By streamlining all aspects of your creative workflow and automating the non-creative, operational tasks, you open the door for consistency to grow organically in your workflows and your organization. You’re no longer struggling to make sense of what is where and can focus on harnessing your creatives’ limitless potential, saving hundreds of hours, and contributing to the bottom line. Your creatives are energized in the absence of your old, tiring processes and complete more projects within the stipulated budget. Your clients are happier, your brand grows and your revenue grows as a result.  Request a demo with globaledit today to unlock the potential of a consistent creative workflow.

Creative projects are extremely grueling and demanding. It’s no doubt that creative workflow management tools simplify the tasks for your creative teams by automating operational work and streamlining the complete workflow.  However, finding the correct tool can be a difficult task depending upon the performance, usability, and how it enhances your workflow. With so many tools and solutions, how do you decide which tool is right for you?  Tools To Empower Your Workflow  Sync helps you to automate the upload of your creative assets as you create them during a shoot. It cuts down the traditional waiting time to receive assets at the end of the shoot. With a one-time hassle-free setup process, you get all the assets right at your workspace. Best for: Photo studios, agencies, and in-house production team at the production stage Markup Editor is a revolutionary tool for creatives like photo editors and retouchers. Markup Editor makes the review and approval process seamless as it lets you access, highlight the required changes, drop comments and finally approve the work in one single common platform. Best for: Photo studios, agencies, and in-house creative team at the review and approval stage Collections helps you organize and manage your creative assets in one place. The greatest challenge of a creative team is to find the right assets, at the right time. Instead of looking through multiple files and folders, you can create a “Collection” based on your requirement like project, client, and product, which helps you find all the relevant assets at the same place. Organizing and tagging these assets with the help of efficient creative tools makes it easier to assemble, search and administer while foregoing the risk of losing or reproducing pre-existing assets based on labels like active, archived or expired.   Best for:  Photo studios and marketers throughout the creative process Versioning helps you compare the different versions of an asset and pick the best one. Not only can you view the final assets, but also view comments, ratings, and markups on individual files. You can easily track the edits with Versioning and pinpoint any missed edits. It keeps the entire workflow transparent and streamlined. Best for: Creative agencies at the post-production and approval stages Metadata enables you to search for assets faster with the help of expandable tags and asset recommendations, update and export metadata in and out of the application in bulk. You can easily find files on the basis of metadata tags like location, time, asset description, and so much more.  But Metadata is not just a search tool. It also helps you keep track of the process, providing you enough data to help in decision making. Not just that, you can easily share files with other teammates, as well.  Best for: Marketers, media and entertainment industries during post-production,  Watermarks are essential to enhance the security of your original assets. This tool allows you to watermark pictures easily with texts or symbols so that your organization has the sole proprietorship. You can create watermarks including brand name or logo and further customize them to any size or pattern. Its flexibility allows you to hide the watermarks based on your audience selection.   Best for: Any enterprise company, retail and fashion industries during the distribution phase Approval Galleries allows talent and management to “Approve” or “Kill” assets according to studio obligations—in just a click after you integrate “Collections” or a part of it into an approval gallery to be reviewed by stakeholders. Inbuilt data analytics allows key people to see the entirety of live statistics on the platform and assign roles to your team members and grant permission for access to these assets in one place. You can further automate the process of choosing assets individually to determine what performed well or underperformed as per targets by providing real time insight to speed up the production timeline.  Best for: Producers, marketers, and retail display managers during the review and approval phase Projects automate the process of managing roles and assignments individually while also keeping a tab on the progress. Simply create a “Project Assignment” and a creative brief to keep track of your workflow. By having maximum control over your assets, you can assign roles and permissions to share or hold back information through folders, assets, and even workspaces from specific users and decide which part of the asset is visible to the user.  Best for: Art directors, creative directors, management during the workflow process Pinpoints lets you share very specific assets with your team members through a unique link and alert notifications on emails. You can then share the link anywhere, be it Google Sheets or a creative workflow software. Everyone assigned to an individual project can add and view comments, ratings and markups.  Best for: Creative management, talent management, retail display management, brand management teams throughout the workflow. These easy-to-use tools can help simplify your creative workflow management to a great extent. A single platform that automates a wide range of processes can take a lot off the stress quota of your team members while slashing production time and budget.  Request a demo with globaledit to help us identify the specific tools that your business needs.

Monitoring metrics like the estimated deadline in comparison with the actual one determines the pace at which your project moves and should move and the creative bottlenecks that should be solved, which ultimately helps in slashing down the time for future projects. This makes measuring the creative output with key performance indicators a significant part of your creative project. When the actual budget is less than or in alignment with the estimated one, the value of creative output by your organization is also made clear. This enhances the ROI and helps secure future opportunities and profit while also gaining customer loyalty. This can only be done by enhancing your workflow process and continuously measuring creative workflow output. But can you really measure the creative workflow output? The answer is a definite yes. Let’s take a look at how you can do it. Why Do You Need to Measure Creative Workflow Output? An effective creative workflow includes these primary phases: Conception of the project, definition, execution, review and approval, and the final project distribution. Several processes are implemented for these particular phases based on the type of content you produce, which differs from company to company.  Standardizing work intake is important to effectively measure your output. Here’s how having a standard work intake process and a measure of creative output help the entire process to flow smoothly: Clarity Enhanced and Improved Efficiency If your team members have a better understanding of how project proposals are brought forward, their participation will be higher and more effective. A standardized work intake enhances clarity, which in turn increases efficiency that helps speed up the process of creating and approving proposals. Higher Quality Standardizing work intake helps to clarify the exact information that is required in the proposal and also the clear reason behind it. This leads to higher quality work while also decreasing the approval time.  Unsurpassable Consistency  A standard work intake process includes a single source implemented by employees to forego chaos and confusion that follows if you use numerous tools and software for a specific purpose, breaking the chain of consistency. The utilization of common tools and templates will help maintain consistency in proposals.   How to Measure Your Creative Workflow Output Prioritization of projects and tasks is important in a creative workflow to determine whether something is a value-add. Let’s take a look at the basis on which the workflow output should be measured for maximum efficiency: Identify Urgency Urgency is the stipulated timeline within which clients want their deliverables. It is the timeline within which the tasks have to be completed for the next process to begin quickly and efficiently while also retaining the quality. Identifying urgency is important to work on the immediate important projects.  The scales used to measure and define urgency are critical, major, medium, and minor, critical being the most urgent. Calculate Priority Priority is a term that is dependent upon the impact and urgency of a project. Anything with a high impact and high urgency gets a higher priority whereas a low impact and low urgency gets a lower priority. You can measure the impact based on the following aspects:  Business impact Customer experience impact Brand awareness impact New market impact Deadline A high business impact, customer experience impact, brand awareness impact, and new market impact have the highest priority with deadlines being rigid and urgent.  A low business impact (less than targeted potential), customer experience impact (low value), brand awareness impact (rebrands), and new market impact (minimal) weigh the lowest and have a deadline that is made flexible.   Assign Schedule  For the workflow process to operate within the stipulated time and various tasks to be completed in the process, it calls for a fixed schedule. Adhering to this schedule can help deliver the project on time or even faster. With the help of assigning and monitoring the schedule, you can also determine creative processes that take longer to finish and why while working on the same.  Communicate Schedule  Once you have determined the schedule, communicating it to the team members who are responsible for delivering the work, is a necessity. Clear communication and cooperation make the process much more efficient leading to a high-quality output that has been envisioned by your team.   How to Increase Your Creative Workflow Output to Get Better Results There are certain steps that you should follow from the get-go to have a clear idea of the output at the end: Clarification of project scope for a clear-cut vision about the client’s product statement and perception. Having a systematic approach often saves the team from missing out on important details. Use a creative brief template to monitor each phase of growth and provide a better framework that eases the communication process. Assign roles and responsibilities according to every team member’s skillset, thus facilitating healthy team management. Chalk out your creative workflow for a better understanding of the end product. A blueprint streamlines the process making it a smoother ground for communication within the team and with the client as well. Keeping track of creative workflow output right from updating metrics to reviewing creatives will ensure a step-by-step review and documentation of the entire creative workflow. Measuring creative workflow output is a necessity in the digitally expanding world wherein the creative processes are getting much more refined and streamlined in accordance with the requirements. Consistency is key and in order to deliver consistently good work output, it is important to periodically assess, compare and work on areas to see how far you have and can go.  

Creative projects are best executed when they’re divided into phases and task orientedThe reason lies in the simplification and optimization that these phases provide. Else, the creative workflow becomes chaotic, confusing and inefficient quickly.  According to a globaledit analysis, 50% of their enterprise and mid-market clients are interested in optimizing and simplifying their workflows to focus more on the critical objectives. That’s exactly what creating phases does—simplify and optimize.  Here are six phases that’ll streamline your creative workflow and increase its efficiency.  Phase 1 — Project Intake  Traditionally, project intake involves the creation of a brief that identifies the goal and requirements of the project, timeline, budget, and other primary information.  You can optimize this phase by creating brief templates and getting all the key information at the onset of the project. This helps save time in potential sessions where several meetings have to be held while also waiting for the client to agree with the given input. This phase is the most crucial step as it lays the foundation of the workflow. Based on the clarity of the requirements, automating downstream tasks becomes easier and streamlined. From assigning and scheduling tasks to tracking progress, project intake remains the foundation of the following steps.  Automation streamlines the process of gathering feedback and creating briefs. Depending upon the requirements of the requester, dynamic intake forms with flexible fields can be generated. Automated reminders and feedback are directed to a central hub to kickstart projects immediately. Phase 2 — Discovery Discovery sets up the foundation of the project. It involves everything from researching on competitors for product differentiation to identifying the risk areas, mitigating them and setting goals for different phases of the project.  This helps in optimizing the creative workflow process while also enabling the client to know what to expect during each phase of the project.   Phase 3 — Concepting The stage of concepting is not homogenous. Clear-cut objectives for a project do not always lead to the same ideas by two different creatives. It involves a lot of brain-racking, sharing of ideas, sometimes a combination of these ideas that finally lead to the concept that has to be implemented.  With the number of ideas communicated in this phase, a creative workflow management tool like globaledit makes collaboration simpler and easier. It brings all the project materials and creative assets into one place making accessibility and locating these files easier than ever. Being able to comment on drafts also makes it easier for all the stakeholders to be aware of the progress of this phase. Phase 4 — Implementation After conception of the project, the implementation phase begins. But before that, tasks and resources have to be assigned to team members, which is one of the defining factors of project efficiency. How do you accurately set your team structures and responsibilities without any delay?  Again, a creative workflow management software will be your savior here. Project assignment and tracking are not difficult when a central dashboard keeps it organized for you. These solutions also allow you to share content and collaborate on each project layer with granular control, updates, comments, and feedback.  Phase 5 — Production If you’ve optimized the previous four phases, production won’t be too chaotic. You can also leverage creative management tools to make this phase much smoother, faster, and efficient. For example, having metadata assigned to your assets automatically will make the post-production, searchability, and distribution seamless.  From set up and uploading assets to editing and retouching, all the steps of production of assets need to be optimized for maximized ROI.  Phase 6 — Close-out Close-out includes getting feedback from the client and key stakeholders, making the required changes, and handing out the final piece. This phase includes the most grueling part of the workflow: review and approval. How do you ensure that you gather accurate feedback from the client or stakeholders?  There are various tools and creative workflow management software like globaledit that involve a single platform where clients and coworkers can collaboratively comment, vote, and provide feedback on various assets. They can illustrate the changes required with Markup Editor where annotation can be added to one or many assets.  Once the project is completed, you can have an overview of project metrics like time taken for overall approvals and edits, the number of versions of assets per project, and the overall length of the project cycle for future predictions regarding similar projects.  Globaledit helps you in every stage of your creative workflow by serving your unique business needs. Request a demo to find out how.

The value of the digital asset management market in 2020 was estimated to be USD 2,962.2 million. Digital Asset Management or DAM software creates a centralized space where organizations can access their digital assets.  Creative DAM solutions help teams and keep exclusive materials relevant by centrally storing large amounts of digital and branding content which leads to enhanced security, organization, and searchability of these assets. It empowers employees to be equipped with data that truly matters! How Does a DAM Deliver ROI Investment in DAM solutions, just like any other business investment, should reap some profit for your organization. This is assessed by the return on investment (ROI). Getting a higher ROI is based on sharp decisions. The proper implementation of a planned DAM solution delivers a guaranteed ROI. Here are three ways the implementation of a creative DAM solution helps increase the ROI of your business: 1. Reusability of Assets  With the volume of assets produced in companies, it’s common for creatives to face difficulty in finding an asset at a particular time. How do you find the exact file where the model was wearing a red shirt against a white background? Not being able to find the required assets ultimately leads to the unnecessary reproduction of similar assets. So, there are two kinds of losses incurred: expenses of reproduction and the expense of earlier production. DAM solutions help save time and cut the cost to reproduce assets. This also reduces the wastage of already existing assets.  By tracking the usage of digital assets and analyzing them according to the measurements of a campaign helps deduce the true value of an asset. 2. Optimized Search Having your highly paid creatives search for assets manually through the archives is not the best use of their paid time and puts a strain on finances. DAM makes it easier to find digital assets with the help of keywords and metadata which significantly reduces time spent looking for specific files. DAM also helps bring efficiency to the approval process. 3. Compliances and Commercial Rights There are usage terms, intellectual property(IP) rights, and legal regulations for every set of original and unique data. Complying with these usage terms, verifying the usage information, tracking information regarding the usage of your assets are all within the purview of a DAM solution.  It is crucial for a company to invest in DAM solutions that ensure compliance through rights management as it helps in detecting mistakes that can become a heavy dent in the budget and can also land in legal battles. Additional Benefits Of DAM Every penny that goes into business matters. So does any third-party agency cost that can be reduced with the implementation of a creative DAM solution. They help in eliminating or minimizing the cost that goes into the transfer and management of content. It also increases the transparency within an organization.  How to Select a DAM software for the Best ROI? The following factors will help you while finding the perfect creative DAM solutions that work for your organization: The DAM system should be flexible and versatile to achieve effectiveness in enhancing business goals. Diverse metadata can help the searchability of an asset to enhance reusability purposes. Choosing a user-friendly DAM with simple navigation systems and a simple user-friendly interface makes it easier to grasp the tools by employees and improve operational effectiveness. For example, globaledit provides an intuitive user interface that your team members can get accustomed with easily. Your organization can measure the ROI with the reduced admin work and time saved, while you as the leader of your team or your organization can measure the ROI with the reduced frustration and the happiness of your creatives in finding information easily. Increasing your ROI requires keeping up with evolving DAM trends. It is important to work in close coordination with your DAM provider to tailor solutions according to your organizational needs to reap maximum benefits.  Talk to us to find out how DAM solutions can help your unique needs.

Be it for an ecommerce store or a company’s social media, the importance and demand of visual content are increasing exponentially. In 2020, the majority of content marketers said that more than 90% of their content included visuals. This is no surprise since visuals like images and videos play an integral role in driving sales and capturing attention.  However, the increasing demand creates equal challenges like efficiently producing a high volume of assets at a low cost. This is where workflow automation comes in. Automation solutions for photography studios optimize every aspect of production and make it scalable, cost-efficient, and streamlined. You can save up to 30% of yearly revenue with an efficient workflow. Importance of Workflow Automation for Photography Studios Instead of spending days perfecting a shoot, automation can help you wrap it up in minutes. This turnaround time is significant when you’re dealing with a large volume of assets. The faster you create photos, the faster it can hit the market, which means you are making the asset profitable sooner. As a result, photography studios are shifting towards creative workflow management to handle their everyday projects. Here are some important benefits of automating your workflow: Keep a Track of Clients  It can get overwhelming to manage the records of multiple projects with various clients at the same time. A creative workflow management software can relieve you from this pressing issue by taking care of the admin tasks. Most DAM solutions will have a dashboard that shows the active jobs and the progress of the work for all your clients at one glance.  You can pace up your projects in accordance with the deadlines. For example, you can create workspaces and collections per client in a DAM solution like globaledit. This ensures you have all the assets in one place without the risk of losing an important file.  Organize Information  Creative workflow management software and enriched metadata allow you to find assets exactly when you need them. Sorting can be automated based on rules of metadata and other tags.  You can easily organize files by the date of their creation, edited date, asset information, and the like. This allows you to retrieve the information you want just when you need it. Create Consistency Automation provides the opportunity to create repeatable templates. From angles and lighting to camera settings and edits, you can store templates for different types of shoot. This eliminates human error, ensuring consistency in shoots of a certain type.  Not only this, by having a bird’s eye view of all the assets and visual language, you can maintain brand consistency. For example, Amazon has set standards for product images where product photographs must have a white background with 85% of the product appearing in the image. On the other hand, eBay allows a light grey background.  Similarly, image requirements can vary from client to client, and having a depository to maintain the records will make the task much easier. Manage Revisions  and Approvals One of the key issues faced by photo studios is being able to manage edits. How do you avoid confusion and know exactly what to change?  This is where a creative workflow management software significantly helps you. For example,  Markup Editor allows you to add annotations directly on your assets. You can use the brush tool to highlight a section and include comments to minimize any potential confusion.  Automation solutions like file Versioning significantly ease the post-production tasks. You can maintain a record of iterations of an asset, allowing you to compare different versions side-by-side with their own comments, ratings, and markups. Once you have a set of assets reviewed and edited, “Image Approval Gallery makes it easier to “kill” or “approve” assets and stay in constant touch with your creatives. Create Rich Content  With increasing competition, high-quality images are non-negotiables to drive sales. But you can take it up a notch by including rich content like 360-degree images, which show a boost in conversions by nearly 47%.  But the creation of such images is costly and time-consuming with traditional photography. With automation solutions like camera integration with motorized rigs, the output time can be as low as three minutes, making the production faster than ever.  Promote Creativity  Research shows employees spend up to 16 hours per week on admin tasks that could be automated. That’s two full working days.  As the repetitive admin tasks get automated, extra time and energy can be channeled towards exploring creativity. This includes more A/B tests or trying out different methods for the shoot. For example, you save a lot of time with the help of features like Sync that lets you upload assets during the production, as you create them. Not only that, you can customize file extensions as you import them—think about all the time saved in separating raw files from the processed ones.  Above all, workflow automation makes operations simpler and easier to access for all. It helps meet deadlines by cutting production time and creating consistent results. Ready to automate your workflow and make your production more efficient? Request a demo with us to learn how we can help.

Over 90% of marketers say that the majority of their projects don’t move along efficiently during the content creation process. This data proves the need for an efficient creative workflow in organizations.  Meeting deadlines with quality and creativity intact is only possible in a robust and streamlined system. That’s exactly what creative workflow management solutions help in creating. From role assignment to review and approval—a creative project management system keeps creative workflows on track. It sets up responsibilities and steers the work in a direction that helps save time and money.  How Is Creative Workflow Being Adopted? The workflow automation industry is expected to reach $18.45 billion by 2023, which points to the rapid adoption of the system. Creative workflow management solutions are being implemented across various industries. Few examples include: Branding and advertising agencies Digital creative agencies Graphic designing firms Enterprise in-house agencies App development companies According to a report, 66% of project managers have expressed their intentions of using workflow management tools extensively given adequate support from their organizations.  Benefits of Creative Workflow Management Solutions Creative workflow management solutions help project management and creativity to coexist.  Implement in the Entire Creative Process  Do you have to use a different tool to track time and another for review and approval? Creative workflow management solutions are built specifically for the creative process and help throughout the lifecycle of a creative asset. Here’s how:  Definition and ideation: According to a report by Project Management Institute, 37% of projects fail due to the lack of clearly defined objectives. Creative asset management solutions help set initial goals clearly, which in turn, helps in assigning responsibilities and tracking progress. Creation: During the creation process, creative project management tools promote collaboration. From managing files to tracking time, these tools offer a 360-degree approach. Review and approval: This can be the most time-consuming step of the creative workflow without a system in place. With review and approval tools and the ability to comment, you get to receive feedback in an organized manner and respond accordingly.  Reduces Cost  Workflows with defined goals and assigned responsibilities boost productivity, which reduces additional costs by sticking to the stipulated budget and avoiding budget overruns. With a creative project management tool, 43% more projects are completed within budget. Project planning becomes a smooth sail as workflow management software can help predict deadlines with the help of AI, including constraints like cost, schedule, and scope. Establishes an Effective Communication System Poor communication not only hampers the quality of work and the time taken to meet deadlines, but it also costs businesses a tremendous amount of money. According to a study, companies with over 100,000 employees have faced losses of over $62 million due to poor communication.  With an efficient management solution, you facilitate effective communication among the team that helps maintain transparency, keeps team members organized, and boosts productivity. It ensures that everything “flows” smoothly, thus avoiding confusion and chaos while working. Encourages Feedback A management tool not only invites feedback from the team but also allows your clients to input their requests directly into the project database themselves. This leaves no room for confusion as the requests are recorded exactly as envisioned. Creative operations can benefit to a great extent from creative workflow management solutions. The tools facilitate success while narrowing your goals and focus, hence improving the rate of success as observed by major companies who adopted these tools.  Request a demo to accelerate your creative workflow with us.

Consistent branding builds trust and authenticity. With inconsistency, your customers get confused and lose trust in your brand. 18.6% of companies say that inconsistent branding damages brand credibility. This becomes significant when up to 80% of customers find authenticity to be an important factor when trusting the brand.  Not only that, but organizations also expect a 33% increase in revenue with consistent branding.  However, with multiple teams creating assets for your company, you run the risk of losing consistent branding. Employees might develop alternate logos, colors, photography treatments, or tone of voice that contributes to the loss of consistency over time.  How to Maintain Branding During a Creative Production? Messy creative workflows can easily make branding inconsistent. Here are five ways to take control of your branding: 1. Create Brand Guidelines A brand style guide, or brand guidelines, is a document that outlines rules regarding your branding elements. It contains your strategies, brand mission, value proposition, tone of voice, logo, color palette, fonts, photography treatment, media formatting, photography and graphic styles.  But only creating a brand guide is not enough. 95% of organizations have brand guidelines, but only one-fourth of them enforce them consistently. Make sure you distribute the brand guidelines throughout the organization and train employees to use them properly.  Another benefit of a brand guide is the ability to share it with third-party vendors, freelancers, or consultants who create assets for your brands. As a result, you receive content aligned with your brand. 2. Create Templates Creating every asset from scratch wastes an excessive amount of time. Plus, it exposes your brand to the risk of having altered branding.  Templates can make content creation as easy as drag-and-drop for your team and keep branding consistent. For example, you can use templates for your social media graphics or business cards.  In addition, using templates allows you to create and publish content faster, boosting the productivity of your creative workflow. Creating recurring content becomes a breeze instead of a hassle. 3. Have a Centralized Storage Location Inconsistent branding is created overnight. It’s the result of several loose threads.  Imagine a team member unable to find brand collateral because it’s buried under hundreds of files. They would have to create another from scratch. And such instances keep altering the branding slightly.  Even when you’ve created templates and guidelines, storing them properly in a central location where employees can access them is crucial. You can use a digital asset management system (DAM) for this purpose. DAM solutions make it easy and quicker for teams to store and find creative assets. You can also distribute updated guidelines and templates throughout the teams with a DAM. This avoids miscommunication and keeps everyone on the same page—a simple way to help the production team stay brand compliant. 4. Set up an Approval Process An approval process is important to ensure your assets have the needed branding. But approval time can be one of the major bottlenecks of creative production. Only 8% of marketers say the majority of their projects move along efficiently.  To avoid that, set up an approval process where everyone can collaborate easily which saves everyone’s time. An efficient approval process will avoid delays and help publish content faster, while also ensuring the branding is in place.  A creative asset management system like globaledit can come in handy here. It makes the approval process easier for creative teams by allowing convenient commenting and ratings on assets. 5. Audit Your Brand Regularly Use your brand guidelines to audit your branded assets like webpage, social media posts, brochures, letterheads, business cards regularly. Every brand touchpoint should be examined from time to time to make sure things are on the right track. This can’t be ignored since 60% of millennials expect a consistent brand experience. Having branding in control during creative production ensures a consistent branding of your organization. This, in turn, maintains customer trust and facilitates the internal teams, as well. Employees have clarity on the type of assets they need to create which saves time in approval. Request a demo with us to help you take control of your branding.

A Product Information Management system or PIM system is a process of gathering and distributing the specifications, descriptions, and other information of a product needed to sell and market them. The platform assists brands in preparing product listings across a range of distribution channels, including e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay, as well as local stores and dealers. Metadata tagging improves the PIM system by supporting your creative asset management. Access to Product Information helps improve metadata tagging because it leads to smarter assets. Leveraging product information metadata such as SKU, style number and unique ids allow you to standardize file naming and eliminate human error. When you tag your assets or standardize filenames the result is more searchability and accessibility. This can happen within your Creative Workflow System, DAM or Marketing Tools. Why Do You Need to Integrate Metadata with PIM System Today? Following the pandemic, online retail sales increased by over 32% in 2020. Earlier, buyers used to rely on physical product catalogs and in-shop purchases. Today, as the world is shifting online, buyers gain the same product information online. Therefore, there’s an increased competition for attention, leading to the production of a massive chunk of digital content. Moreover, according to a Google Consumer Survey, 53% of online shoppers are inspired by images to make a purchase. Hence, your creative assets like images, videos, and social media content should be taken extra care of as they shape your brand identity. With creative DAM solutions, you’ll be able to manage your creative asset needs better. Here are some bottlenecks of a PIM system that metadata solves:   No Human Error  The most accurate information about a product image is available during the production stage. Product characteristics and attributes like color, model number, and size can be stored with metadata instead of getting lost in the further process. Each product has many product SKUs having unique attributes and metadata. This ensures that the information received is highly detailed and specific.  On the other hand, if the images are manually tagged post-production, human errors, such as mistagging, duplicate tagging, typing errors, are common. Several organizations manage the product information on spreadsheets or platforms made for technical staff, which often doesn’t sit well with the marketing systems.  That is mainly due to the people implementing manual tagging lacking the level of detail and the production team’s expertise. According to Professor Raymond R. Panko’s research, the probability of human error in manual data entry is between 18-40%. With cutting-edge AI doing this task for you, the errors are reduced, time is utilized better, and the data is more accurate and reliable. Eliminate Wrong Information While PIM helps you organize data, it can get overwhelming when working with a number of SKUs. But with custom metadata schemas, you can quickly identify and differentiate variants. Customers are increasingly relying on digital media for their purchases. In fact, 85% of millennials make a purchase after watching a video. This makes accurate information about your digital assets like images and videos extremely valuable for your sales.  For example, on social media, if you get a customer inquiry for a specific product shown in an image, and you are not able to give the correct product information like color and size, you stand a high chance of losing a potential customer.  With metadata, you can easily retrieve such information through the product image metadata. For instance, if you are advertising an image for the dress but the buyer is interested in the shoes of the model, you can easily find that information with its metadata instead of guessing and giving wrong information. In a competitive digital marketplace, the visual assets accompanying a product listing are critical in acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers. A PIM system helps in getting your products to markets, while a DAM attaches the right product attributes to the product imagery. As more people turn to online shopping, rapidly building online sales channels aided by a PIM system integrated with a creative workflow management system like globaledit will give you a competitive advantage. Request a demo to improve your project management systems to boost your sales.

Register here! globaledit is hosting a 3-part webinar series to discuss all things Workflow Automation from the Creative Operations perspective. The second part of the series includes speaker David Iscove, Creative Technology Practice Lead at Cella and Brian Gavin, President at globaledit.  The webinar will speak to how workflow automation improves creative operation throughout a production. Session 2: Workflow Automation and Creative Operations Wednesday, August 18 – 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT / 6PM BST / 7PM CEST Bottlenecks within Creative Operations Integrated campaign management of Creative Operations Implementing technology to trigger workflow automation How integrations can fuel workflow automation Importance of including rule exceptions Speakers: David Iscove, Creative Technology Practice Lead, Cella Brian Gavin, President, globaledit

With the plethora of social media channels, brands are under pressure to produce fresh content. Top brands must have enough content to be omnipresent on all channels and mediums. The demand for more content and hyper-sensitivity of “time-to-site” has incentivized brands to utilize a variety of technology including Creative Workflow Management platforms. There are a number of ways through which globaledit’s Creative Workflow Management platform removes manual, disconnected obstacles commonly found in creative production. Get Automated  Whether creative workflow automation occurs within tasks themselves or in the way systems communicate with each other, having automations in place allows brands to have quicker production time. When creative workflows are automated, Creative teams are able to churn out content faster. Getting started with automated creative workflows requires a few simple steps: identify the business logic that needs to be automated, and which systems need to communicate with one another. From there, globaledit’s prebuilt workflow automation recipes provide step-by-step automations, or custom integrations can be used to link proprietary workflows.  Remove Redundant Tasks  Automating Creative Production minimizes redundant tasks. With automation, a creative team is able to spend more time on high-value creative work instead of routine administrative tasks. Collaboration is more efficient, with fast hand-offs and requests that contain all the context necessary for work to begin. Teams avoid the frustrating cycle of rework and revisions due to miscommunications.  Collaboration is easily facilitated within globaledit. Stakeholders can create projects to ensure each team member has the correct assignments, comments and @mentions are used for transparent communication, and globaledit SYNC automates assets into proper folder structures so that no work ever needs to be repeated.  No More Human Error With automation, creative production is standardized, streamlined, and automatically assigned to the appropriate party. No important details are miscommunicated, left out, or overlooked. Processes and policies are consistent, fewer tasks fall through the cracks, and everyone is clear on responsibilities and deadlines. According to Oracle, 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one key function that leads to time savings and increased productivity.  Request a demo to find out how to churn out quality content more efficiently.

Ahead of Independence Day and the official nod to summer here in the States, globaledit wants to recognize the amazing adaptation our creative and marketing team members have undergone over the last year. Working remotely has a whole new meaning. Not only does remote work now allow our Industry to function autonomously but this has spurred a revolution across content creators to think differently. At this point, working from home is a part of our DNA; hard-drives are mailed to home, VPN access to servers is at an all time high and garages are day rental studios. There is still more to make this entire process more efficient. As a creative or marketing team, working from home there remains challenges with efficiency due to aging or disparate technologies. Luckily, there’s a solution to collaborating while being remote (especially in the summer months when all you really want to do is enjoy the weather). Get Full Content Visibility With globaledit, the entire creative team can have access to an entire asset library in an instant. Rather than sifting through endless assets trying to find the correct one, globaledit’s metadata enrichment can find assets in seconds. Globaledit can also act as a DAM, a repository for an organizations entire asset library. This allows for a decrease in the time spent searching for assets and instead, be able to find the right assets every time. Communicate Effectively  Projects, comments, and @mentions are just a few tools globaledit offers to help creatives communicate with one another. Globaledit allows for communicate within the platform, so there is no need to toggle between email, Slack, or any other platform. There is visibility of stakeholder needs every step of the way. Communication between a creative team is made easy with globaledit because it facilitates collaboration.  Save Hours of Time  Globaledit offers integrations with an organizations entire tech stack. Integrations and creative workflow automation can shave hours of time off of creative workflow. Automating workflow reduces redundant tasks, human error, and mismanagement of time. While working remotely, allowing these integrations to take over manual tasks will make it easier to prioritize tasks that need attention.  Have Team Transparency  The looming problem about working remote is that a single team isn’t collaborating face-to-face anymore. However, that same transparency can be achieved with globaledit tools such as Markup Editor, which allows a stakeholder to leave notes on an assets for a retoucher, Projects, which create assignments for specific team members, and Approval Galleries, which allow for a full view of every assets stage in production. Globaledit makes collaboration easy and more efficient when working remotely. Book a demo today.

Register here! globaledit is launching a 3-part webinar series to discuss all things Workflow Automation. The first part of the series includes speaker Rana Dutt, Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services and Brian Gavin, President at globaledit.  The webinar aims to understand how workflow automation has revolutionized the creative industry and evolved over the years. Session 1: What is the History of Workflow Automation and How Can it Help you Scale?  Wednesday, August 4 – 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT / 6PM BST / 7PM CEST What has cloud done for workflow automation? How has workflow automation matured over the years? How are we seeing tech solve ground level challenges? How are the workflows changing with the rise of tech? Speakers: Rana Dutt, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services Brian Gavin, President, globaledit

Visibility is vital for any brand, and getting yours in front of as many eyes as possible regularly can be the key to increased sales and brand loyalty. Social media has developed into an unrivaled marketing tool. However, with so many platforms, which require varying types of content, how do marketers find enough time to keep all their accounts ticking over while ensuring their campaigns are effective? Workflow automation can help social media marketing by taking some of the high-volume tasks out of the marketer’s hands and allow them to focus more on engagement and content production. Automation allows them to reach a larger audience, fast and more consistently. This can considerably increase ROI and free up marketers for more value-added tasks. Saving time and making money Automating social media marketing can help maintain brand visibility and regularly updated profiles will give users a positive image of your brand. It also helps to save time which can be devoted to other areas of marketing.  Automated social media can save more than six hours a week, which is nearly a whole day’s work. With that time, a marketer can work on strategy or concentrate on customer engagement. And as the old adage declares that time is money, introducing automation into your social media marketing strategy can prove profitable. Of companies that have implemented automation in social media, 75% of them report seeing an increase in ROI within a year. Go where the action is With 2.6 billion users around the world, it’s hard to underestimate the reach of Facebook. The world’s most popular social media platform is fertile ground for marketers. It is primarily helpful in raising brand awareness and advertising.  It can also be used to interact with customers and, with automation, marketers can increase this engagement. They can use social software to schedule posts and curate content, meaning they are getting their brand out there and having the time to spend engaging directly with customers. While it is the most popular platform, Facebook is not the only one, and it is vital that marketers must maintain a presence across all platforms. It is estimated that active users of Instagram in the US will exceed 120 million by 2003.  Look and listen Using automation not only allows you to schedule posts so that you don’t have to upload them to a range of different platforms manually, but it can also help you keep tabs on how you are performing. Social listening tools allow you to check mentions of your brand across various platforms. More importantly, you will understand what people are saying and how positively or negatively your brand is perceived.  Automation can help hone in on areas that require attention. Where your brand experiences negative mentions, it can allow you to engage quickly and resolve the issue. Listening tools will also help you get a handle on competitors’ performance and other brands in the same sector.  Integrating your DAM with social media marketing A digital asset management system (DAM) that stores your assets for distribution can help with seamless social media marketing automation. You can set up automation tools to send data from your DAM to your social media accounts or your content management system (CMS), informing content creation. Although a DAM does not have an engagement platform, you can use it to store versions of assets, quickly find and distribute the creative you need, and build a cadence for future distribution.  Automation for social media marketing helps boost brand awareness without the laborious task of uploading content to multiple platforms. You can get your message out quickly and effectively, leaving you with the time to spend seeing where and how it lands.  

Customers can now integrate their entire technical stack to create workflow automation recipes saving time and money on their creative workflow. Globaledit the leader in Creative Workflow Management solutions, is disrupting how creative teams produce and distribute content. Globaledit already solves the challenges in producing high quality visual assets at scale all from the cloud. In 2020 globaledit launched its cloud based Digital Asset Management platform & took big steps into solving Project Management for Creatives & Marketers focused on producing visual Assets. Now, the company is providing a way for Creative and Marketing teams to automate essential steps throughout the entire creative & marketing workflow. Globaledit is introducing its Marketplace and, Custom Integrations and Workflow Automation Recipes to optimize your workflow through the complete lifecycle of an asset, ingest to distribution. According to analysis done by globaledit on its enterprise and mid-market clients there is a need for automation to solve the pressures of today’s demand. 50% of all users have expressed interest in the ability to simplify workflows & to focus more time on critical objectives. Globaledit strives to provide clients with a Digital Asset Management platform that optimizes their creative workflow. Now, with this release, globaledit has taken the vast feature set it already offers, and has created workflow recipes and integrations to aid any organization in creating an optimized workflow. Globaledit’s Marketplace will allow organizations to choose from hundreds of the most popular apps that will natively integrate with globaledit. Organizations can choose what part of their creative or marketing process they want or need to automate and curate integrations accordingly. Integrations can be pre-built with workflow automation recipes or have custom triggers and actions. Globaledit’s team will integrate these apps for your organization so there is no extra development work on the client’s behalf. Organizations can choose from apps across the entire creative ecosystem. including project management, product such as Slack, Marketo, Adobe, Asana, MailChimp, and many more.  Globaledit will now also offer access to APIs (Application Programming Interface) that allow for proprietary programs to communicate with one another as well as with globaledit. APIs will allow developers to quickly and easily integrate with a Project Management System, a Content Management System, an Email Automation System, a Digital Asset Management system or any other system an organization needs for their creative workflow.  Globaledit’s Workflow Automation Recipes will allow users to create workflows based on their own business logic. Each step of production your creative team takes can be mapped out based on pre-written automations that will make your workflow more efficient. Our workflow automation recipes automate bottlenecks within your production processes and demonstrate how your entire technology stack can communicate with each other. Globaledit will also be releases new iteration of existing features:  Sync 2.0 The upcoming iteration of globaledit’s Sync tool will now allow users to automatically sync new versions of an asset, upload attachments, and setup the application to self update with new versions. Metadata Search This updated feature set will allow users to search for assets via metadata with expandable search terms, faster results, and asset recommendations. About globaledit Globaledit is the leading cloud-based SaaS application leveraged by brands, agencies and studios to manage high volume photo & video content creation and delivery. As a Creative Asset Management solution, globaledit solves for asset management, collaboration and workflow within one tool. Assets move from the point of capture, editing, retouching, approvals and distribution seamlessly, thereby reducing production costs and improving time to market. Learn more about our products here: Creative Workflow Management Predictions for 2021 or Creative Asset Management is at the Forefront of GlobalEdit 

After one of the most unpredictable years in living memory, 2021 looks to be the year when we learn many lessons from the unprecedented shifts in technology in 2020. Creative workflow management systems got stress-tested like never before in the year the Covid-19 pandemic turned the world on its head. Although the next 12 months could see a return to normality, some stitched-together solutions from 2020 could become part of the furniture this year. Work from home makes a centralized asset hub more important Few people could have predicted that for many of us our homes would become our offices at the start of 2020. Working from home wasn’t invented in 2020, and it didn’t take a global pandemic for the notion of some work-life balance to trigger a relocation to a more homey setting. However, it will be forever remembered as the year when a huge chunk of people suddenly had to get to grips with the limits of their home broadband as well as Zoom meetings, Slack chats and a host of other apps and forms of communication. Even after the virus will be banished, though, the trend towards work-from-home looks set to continue, which is why 2021 will be a big year for Digital Asset Management (DAM). Team members on any particular project could be scattered across a dozen different locations, but that won’t change the fact they will need access to the same creative assets. Creative DAM acts as a central hub for all assets required for creative production. This year will improve many DAM systems’ functionalities to take into account more permanent remote working arrangements.  Making files, dates and creative assets more accessible no matter where a team member is will be key in 2021. Using DAM for brand consistency Although the trend towards online shopping and e-commerce was very much on an upward trend before 2020, the pandemic confined most people to their homes, with a large part of their purchases being made online.  Most significantly, the uptake rate in online grocery shopping accelerated in 2020, and studies show that this could be a tipping point for e-commerce. Previous online grocery shopping skeptics have had a taste of it in 2020 and liked it, meaning 2021 looks set to be the year when those abnormal rates start to become the norm. And with increased commerce online comes the need for more digital marketing across the many different platforms that find themselves in front of consumers’ eyes daily. DAM will play a huge role in omni-channel marketing this year as brands try to grab consumers’ attention wherever they are looking. A DAM allows marketers to create different content for relevant platforms that retain consistent brand identity with a centralized source of assets such as logos and branding. Greater reliance on automation for creative workflow DAM helps you find relevant assets at the touch of a button. Still, given that creatives might need to use that asset in several different programs, it must be compatible with the various platforms it gets used on. To do this, it requires metadata and tags be added, which will allow for it to be repurposed for each particular use. Automating this process is essential to the smooth running of creative workflows, but studies show that only 6% of users of DAM systems are on board with AI. That gives enormous scope for an increase in reliance on automation in 2021. Integration for greater efficiency With an increasing number of SaaS players, it is more important than ever that whatever creative software you use, it is compatible with other platforms.  Software integration is crucial to an efficient, creative workflow. While software purchases should be carefully considered and weighed up, this year could also see companies putting significant stock in plug-ins and APIs. This will make software investment much more valuable if users know that content can be created and shared seamlessly across different programs and platforms. While 2020 may be a cautionary tale for making predictions, it seems that the many ways we were forced to adapt to new ways of working quickly have encouraged us for what’s to come next. Many of the last 12 months’ developments were already in the pipeline and had been accelerated by outside events. In 2021 comapnies should adapt trends which have made workflow management more efficient and sustainable.

You may know that old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, when it comes to processing, editing and sharing images using your software of choice, storing the metadata in an XMP file ensures those “thousand words” aren’t lost. If you frequently work with RAW images, you’ll know that there can be a varying amount of tweaks and retouches involved. Keeping track of all these changes is the job of the XMP file. XMP files allow you to transfer your image metadata, ratings, tags, keywords, geolocation, and other attributes about the image outside of the actual JPG, CR2, or other file. The XMP format is a standard way of recording these data so that other programs can carry all of the additional data you added to your images. An XMP file acts as a roadmap for the editing process of a RAW image. This means that when the image file is shared in another application that is different from the one it originated in, the XMP file will allow it to be read.  Often an XMP file is known as a “sidecar” file, meaning it travels alongside the RAW file to make sure that all the metadata is retained through editing and sharing.  This is especially beneficial when files are shared across different applications. For example, if a RAW file is edited in Lightroom, those changes are recorded in the XMP file. If the image is then opened with Photoshop or Bridge, the XMP file means that the original edits are not lost and the image appears as intended by the creator. Compatibility can be a major stumbling block when sharing image files, therefore, storing metadata on an XMP file is one way around this. Another benefit of using XMP files is that it allows you to store important information about an image which will follow it through a series of edits, often involving multiple applications. You can create the RAW file in your chosen application, add metadata to it such as geo-tagging and file info on who or what is in the image and assign it to a particular category. Storing that information in an XMP file will make sure that all that information follows the image file wherever it goes, making filing and organizing your images much easier. Most creative work doesn’t live in a single piece of software. You might start by capturing images in Capture One. There you might do your quick selects, add job information, and other relevant data. Next, you might organize the files using Adobe Bridge. From there, you might pass the RAWs off to a retoucher and get back a finished TIFF file. When you to import this into your DAM – the TIFF file may no longer contain the job information, photographer, talent, or the other metadata you meticulously added earlier. This is where XMP files save the day — when you import them into your DAM, your software can read the metadata and append all of the missing information to the asset.

You can’t rush the creative process, we’re often told. Whether it’s crafting content, finessing a photo or imagining the right image, time needs to be taken.  However, while quality is key in any creative project, it’s equally vital to keep on top of all aspects of the process to complete it on time and on budget. Sure, the creative process can’t be rushed, but that doesn’t mean missing deadlines due to poor project management. The best way to do this is with a reliable project management system. This will allow you to track tasks, share creative assets and conduct real-time reviews on what’s working and what isn’t. Keep Things Flowing Effective creative workflow management is essential to the formation and completion of any project. Bringing creatives and marketers together to focus on a defined goal can be a time-consuming process. However, with a project management system,  there is a more efficient flow of resources, ideas and communication. All members of the teams can get an overview of what is happening, from inception to delivery. Creative workflow management means everyone can contribute ideas and review progress as the project is going on. It cuts out the need for various proofs to be sent back and forth for approval and sign-off. That whole process can take place in real-time, with revisions able to be completed much quicker. Creative workflow management can allow you to set deadlines for projects and individual tasks within those projects. You can assign tasks to team members and track their progress to make sure everything is on schedule. Closer Collaboration The collaborative aspect of a project management system is one of its most significant selling points. Not only does it allow multiple inputs into a project, but it also allows for creative assets to be shared and accessed more easily.  Digital asset management (DAM) allows for a centralized store of assets, such as images, artwork, graphic files and video footage, or just about anything which can be used in a creative project. An innovative digital asset management solution will allow that library of assets to be made available to all creatives on a team, whether working remotely or in an office setting.   Creative asset management allows for closer collaboration and sharing of ideas. Increased Integration From a purely practical point of view, having countless different applications from a range of various providers can lead to a bumpy ride for your project.  Downloading individual apps can be expensive for a start, and there’s no guarantee that they will work smoothly together. Given that the creative projects involve a range of different apps such as photography software, illustration and design platforms and video editing suites, it’s essential to have a project management system that will allow them all to seamlessly integrate. Increased Revenue   A steady workflow, greater collaboration and increased integration can contribute to the quicker completion of a project. However, because creative project managers can constantly review a project, increased speed does not mean decreased quality. A project management system allows for a significant volume of projects to be completed and approved by stakeholders. Real-time reviews and revisions mean you can get feedback from stakeholders along the way to make sure you are delivering to the brief. This not only saves on time but means you can deliver the project on budget and to the required specifications. That allows you to take on more projects, safe in the knowledge you can provide and generate more revenue. 

If 2020 has taught us anything it is that we should be wary of making predictions. However, just as everyone’s plans went south, new living spaces were etched out online thanks to a global pandemic. While grounded at home, reaching out online became one of the many things that got branded with the label ‘the new normal.’ To call last year unpredictable may have been an understatement, but it did map out some paths for what to expect in the journey ahead. We relied more than ever on technology, and work was no exception. So what do the next 12 months hold for creative management? Let’s discuss. Normalization of Creative Workflow While Working Remotely Working remotely in 2020 required a lot of learning on the job for people from all walks of life, and many of the solutions which were stumbled upon were merely a Band-Aid.  Even though digital technology played a huge role in more centrally-based integrated creative environments, the move to remote working still required new solutions to be found, and tweaking of creative asset management tools helped keep maintain creative workflows.  Collaborative creative workflows that took root in 2020 will need to blossom in 2021 as working remotely became more normalized, even post-pandemic. Cloud-based Solutions Will Be Key Remote collaboration has strengthened the need for creative DAM solutions, which has elevated the importance of cloud-based solutions. Having members of the same teams spread out int different locations needn’t be a spoke in the creative wheel.  Cloud-based DAM can give everyone the same access to the resources required for any given project, ensuring that projects run smoothly despite the distance. Creative Management Will Be Grounded In Technology  Technology will arguably play an even greater role in creative management in 2021. Many creative PMs have relied heavily on digital management platforms in the past, and there will be a rush to seek out more reliable tools this year. One-stop-shops like Adobe Creative Suite will be increasingly important as the need to integrate various aspects of the creative process becomes stronger. PMs will be looking for digital asset management and collaboration tools that can help streamline projects. Tools that can integrate with photography software and DAM systems will be in demand. Creative Processes Will Become Mainly Digital  2020 was the year of the virtual tour. When galleries were closed to the public, new ways were found to bring the experience to them. Visitors could immerse themselves in creativity from the safety of their own homes. This year, creative processes themselves will become predominantly digital. From preparation and incubation right through to evaluation, creative management platforms mean every stage in the creative process can be digitized. Platforms with built-in reporting tools can give users insight and real-time reports on creative projects, giving them a greater understanding of what’s going on and what tweaks need to be made. Creative Marketing Will Be Driving Revenue  Marketing is increasingly being seen as part of the creative process, and the best revenue can be derived from a creative approach to digital marketing. Marketing teams are increasingly looking at ways to develop creative content to be aimed at consumers whenever they spend time online. This has led many digital marketers to rely on automation to help scale up creative content and develop greater reach. With the pandemic, many more people are ‘living’ online these days so, becoming more creative with digital marketing will be even more important. What are your priorities for 2021 and how is technology going to empower your processes? Learn more about our products here: How to Make the Most of Your Creative Workflow or Globaledit Introduces Creative Workflow Features Focused on Automation

What is a PIM? PIM stands for Product Information Management, a system that manages your content for marketing and selling purposes. PIM systems are typically used for e-commerce businesses, and for good reason. A PIM can store all the data of your e-commerce company from SKUs, to product images, and descriptions of items.  The e-commerce industry is growing rapidly, especially in these unprecedented times. Because shopping and retail have shifted more online, it’s imperative that businesses that want to grow to scale have a PIM to manage their daily needs.  Why is having a Product Information Management (PIM) system important? Think about what goes into selling a physical product online. If you’re buying an electronic, you’re going to want the details of the year, make, model, reviews, photos, etc. On the contrary if you’re buying clothing you’re going to want to know the material/fabric used, size, color, etc. Keeping track of all of these things to make sure the consumer is getting the best possible description of a product is difficult; nearly impossible if the product is sold in different languages, through different vendors, or in different variations.  That’s where a PIM system comes in. A PIM can help with sales organization, up your revenue, and make sure the right products are being shown to the right potential customers. A PIM can even go as far as cross-selling and up-selling products when a customer is already interested in something. It’s the ideal way to keep track of products and increase conversion.  Does a PIM help with efficiency? The traditional way an e-commerce business keeps track of their inventory/product is through spreadsheets. Numerous spreadsheets spread across departments show how much a specific item sells, the details of the item, even the previous conversions. Unfortunately, this takes endless hours and manpower to keep track of these spreadsheets.  With a PIM system in place, a company can organize sales information and have classification of products. The PIM system will internalize all of the information and give your business a workable solution for understanding your inventory and sales. It also helps when working with creative assets to help sell your products.  How does a PIM system work with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system? When you consider everything that goes into an e-commerce company, the most important thing is the creative assets. No product sells without images. Hence, you need a DAM to be able to support your creative asset needs. For example, if you have a PIM system and join that with a DAM system like globaledit you will be able to facilitate a workflow that is coherent and multifaceted. Using globaledit as a DAM will enable you to store creative assets that feed into your PIM (and vice versa), you’ll be able to easily search for images via custom metadata schemas, edit, comment, and share on images, and even create versions of the best images that will lead to conversions. Having a DAM system is essential when using a PIM system because they work together to create an efficient and effective workflow. Learn more about our products here: Creative operations process makes perfect or New Webinar! Ramping Up your eCommerce Production Workflow

Cloud Asset Management, in its simplest form, is managing what’s stored in the cloud as it pertains to your business. For example, if your company has a creative sector (marketers, retouchers, digital asset managers, etc.) they can store assets within globaledit. In this case, since globaledit runs on cloud governance, your Cloud Asset Management (CAM) system for your creative assets would be globaledit. Having Cloud Asset Management for your business ensures that processes run smoothly and securely within the cloud infrastructure. Is there value in a Cloud Asset Management system? In short, yes. Having Cloud Asset Management ensures that you have visibility and control over all of your assets. Let’s say your creative assets were stored within globaledit, you would be able to use the integrations of the software to control your assets from ingestion to distribution. This provides you with unparalleled control over what those assets are being used for. What are the benefits? The first thing to consider when looking at Cloud Asset Management is automation. The process of asset discovery and inventory of assets is automated because there is one source of truth for all of those assets. With Cloud Asset Management, you will no longer have to spend endless hours looking through data. Instead, your business is becoming self-serving in a sense because you’re feeding the data you need into the system. Another important part of Cloud Asset Management is accuracy. If we’re talking about creative assets, you’re essentially removing human error when searching for, editing, commenting, or rating a visual. The key here is that there’s visibility across the system. Asset accuracy ensures the optimization of your business by taking the guesswork out of data. Lastly, a Cloud Asset Management system ensures your assets security. Cloud Asset Management systems allow your business to see potential risks to your cloud infrastructure. That way, you can act before the threat occurs, make sure your company’s assets are always safe.

Omni-Channel Marketing. It’s a term we’ve all heard over and over again. But really, what is omni-channel marketing? How will it help your brand? How do you put omni-channel marketing to use properly?  Those are all questions we’ll be answering here to help you understand how to grow your business.  What is Omni-Channel Marketing? We’re connected to our devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc. Why? Because the internet is a place where things are constantly changing, evolving, and growing in order to help user experience. Bottom line is, the more convenient something is for the user, the more likely they are to come back. Hence, omni-channel marketing. Make the user experience so seamless from point A to point B that they can help but come back to experience it over and over again.  Omni-Channel Marketing is a solution that looks at the entirety of your brand rather than just mobile, desktop, and tablet experiences. It looks at the transition between platforms and how a user moves from one place to the next. More than Omni-Channel Marketing, we’re looking to create an Omni-Channel experience.  How can you create an Omni-Channel Marketing Experience? Essentially an Omni-Channel Marketing Experience is how you market, sell, and help customers. It’s an integrated experience, meaning no matter where the customer is, the experience is the same. So, when your marketing, the messaging, imagery, and branding need to be the same across the board. When engaging in an Omni-Channel Marketing Experience, your social media, website, all allow for interaction with the company.  For example, let’s say a potential customer sees a social media post that peeks their interest. That customer should be able to be routing directly onto the website where the experience would be the same. They would receive the same messaging, same visual branding that engaged them in the first place, same goals and objectives. The channels all work together to hook the customer.  To build a truly successful Omni-Channel Marketing Experience you need to connect your product, marketing, and customer success.  Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy: Content “Content is King.” We’ve heard that time and time again. But, it’s true. Content is the first thing a potential customer sees. You want your audience to understand your message first and foremost. What does your company do? How can they help? How can your company create a good experience for them? These are all important points that content marketers want to tell their audience.  Customer Most importantly, you have to have a deep understanding of your audience. If you’re trying your hand at Omni-Channel Marketing, you have to know who you’re marketing to. Learn everything there is to know about your potential customer. What do they search for? What do they like? What do they buy? Once you know your customer, you can gear your content specifically towards them.  Integration As mentioned, all Omni-Channel Marketing needs to work together. You need to make sure all of your systems work together to give the customer a seamless experience. Making sure your technology stack works together is key.

globaledit, the leader in Creative Asset Management solutions, is introducing the next generation of its Digital Asset Management platform, a new iteration aimed to solve the challenges in producing high-quality visual assets at scale all from the cloud. The launch of globaledit’s new software includes new capabilities added to the platform that further enable creative teams to collaborate, communicate and execute while minimizing production timelines and maximizing output. globaledit strives to provide enterprise clients with a Digital Asset Management platform that optimizes their creative workflow. Now, with this release, globaledit can take a product that has already been successful for these clients and make it even better. “This is why globaledit exists. We build software that makes it easy for any creative to manage and navigate the production and distribution complexities,” said Brian Gavin, President of globaledit. As enterprise companies identify the need to scale creative, asset management and marketing functions, globaledit is pivoting with the times to advance necessary technologies. This next-generation release allows organizations to innovate their workflow with a tool that’s dynamic & immediately customizable. globaledit is currently utilized by the world’s top-tier companies in media, entertainment, retail, eCommerce and many others in order to have one source of truth for all of their creative assets. “It is ideal for team communication and collaboration both in office and remotely,” globaledit’s Vice President of Product, Mansoor Basha, said. “In the fast-evolving, new dynamic of creative production, where a lot of remote work is done, the new release allows for techs, creative directors, art directors, talents and agents to collaboratively work effectively and efficiently.” globaledit promotes through its feature functionality the ability to import every creative asset, from all stages, streamlining how users communicate with their teams through ratings, comments, permissions, markups using the built-in markup editor, comparing different versions of a single asset, and searching for assets using metadata that makes assets readily available. All of the existing features live on the backbone of secure cloud-based governance that ensures your assets are safe, always. Now, globaledit is aiming to take the existing platform that allows enterprise organizations to thrive and doubling down by making it even more intuitive and collaborative. How globaledit’s new release will help organizations across industries: Watermarks: globaledit customers now have a vastly improved watermarking process which permits additions of watermarks to all of their creative assets based on specific customizations such as size, opacity, logos, usernames, and even patterns of the watermarks. Once set up it can be assigned based on collection or folder requirements as well. Approvals: Approval Galleries are a required step for Media and Entertainment (M+E) industry workflows. Our approval gallery setup will allow talent and their agents to “Approve” or “Kill” assets based on their contractual obligations in a very user-friendly manner. In addition to that, the studio officials can monitor and manage a report of all the galleries in progress and edit as and when appropriate. Contact Sheet: globaledit’s patented contact sheets now come with expanded functionality. In this release, you can expect contact sheets to function as a PDF of your folder/collection/search results. Users like Producers, Marketers, Retail Display Managers and more will be able to quickly create a PDF without using any external tools that fit the assets into a page format. This is a great way to take notes and make approvals by hand if needed. Collections: Users can now organize and manage their collections based on which are active, expired or archived. In addition, they can group their collections based on needs and expiration dates. Lastly, users can now invite others to a newly made collection thereby eliminating the need for setting up library access and building more collaboration into the platform with other users. Metadata: globaledit has made it incredibly easy for users to update and export metadata in and out of the application in bulk. This is particularly useful when data is coming in and out from third parties and want to ensure the latest information is captured in globaledit, including small variations in the CSV and XMP creation. It is an exifTool-friendly format, a standard tool in the photography workflow. About globaledit: globaledit is the leading cloud-based saas application leveraged by brands, agencies and studios to manage high volume photo & video content creation and delivery. As a Creative Asset Management solution, globaledit solves for asset management, collaboration and workflow within one tool. Assets move from the point of capture, editing, retouching, approvals and distribution seamlessly, thereby reducing production costs and improving time to market. Learn more about our products here: Top Reasons to Consider Digital Asset Management and CAM

Organizations are churning out marketing materials more than ever. No matter what industry you’re in, creating visual assets is essential to a successful business. However, keeping track of all of your assets and organizing them properly can be difficult. Digital asset management systems (DAMs) are the center of operation for these organizations.  Choosing the right DAM comes down to ease of use and efficiency. You have to choose a DAM that allows you and your team to produce marketing assets, both photo and video, quickly and seamlessly. Rather than using multiple different softwares to achieve one goal, a DAM can centralize your work and cut your production time in half.  When choosing a DAM, it’s important to take into account the needs of your organization. Globaledit was built by creatives, so we know the difficulties you’re facing and we’re here to help.  For Your Work In Progress (WIP) Globaledit offers streamlined ingestion of your assets, automatically appends metadata allowing for advanced search where you can build collections of your favorite assets and then streamlines sharing or download. Having a bird’s eye view to all of your assets is important. When you upload or download (in bulk) take advantage of custom metadata to append any special tags you care about. Metadata becomes a key part of how your assets are easily searched, filtered and saved for later use. This will slash the time you spend searching and working on visuals because we understand having the right photo or video at your fingertips is essential. To shorten your creative workflow, you can add a new collection based on your search results and filters, then choose to share or download. Once team members have eyes on the right photos or videos, leverage globaledit’s voting and rating system. This allows you and your team to simultaneously choose assets, find what’s best based upon team consensus or that one special approval and move on.  Scalability Security and enterprise solutions are at the forefront of globaledit. When choosing a DAM for your organization, one of the most important things to consider is the security of your assets. Globaledit has top-tier security to ensure your assets are always safe. With globaledit’s asset rights, you can set expiration dates, grant or deny access requests, track usage, watermark, and more. Prevent the use of unauthorized, expired, or inappropriate media.  Customization If you’re working with globaledit, the interface provides you with an incredibly easy way to use the markup editor. While in the interface, you simply press the pen icon to enter the Markup Editor. Once activated, you can swipe through your team’s imported images and see current markups. You can then make your own markups in the editor by using the brush tool, comment section, or text. You can create versions of your visuals to see what is most up to date, and archive for later use.  Customer Service Globaledit prides itself on becoming part of your organizational needs. Once you choose us to become your DAM we are there with you every step of the way. From recreating a more functional creative workflow, to hours of customer support and onboarding, we want to make sure your organization has all the support you need.

Globaledit combines traditional digital asset management capabilities with work in progress scale & functionalities found in creative asset management. What does that mean for a company that utilizes globaledit? The software will be at the heart of your workflow ecosystem. It will allow you to simplify your creative workflow and streamline your team.  The benefits of having creative assets management are limitless. You’ll be able to easily meet content demand and work at maximum because you will no longer need tools like Google Drive or Dropbox. Instead, everything is in one place. Globaledit’s Creative Asset Management is with you throughout the entire asset lifecycle, creating a quicker turnaround for your content, without compromising quality. From the moment you upload all of your images, globaledit makes it seamless to select your desired images, share them securely with your team, rate and vote on the images, and markup the images; no mistakes, no hassle. What can you expect from a creative asset management system? Collections: All of your assets are visible to you at a glance. You can organize your asset collections to streamline work, get asset rights, permissions, and expiration of content to ensure the correct content is sent to the right person safely. Collections make scalability easy because your content is right there when you need it.  Library: Your entire team can organize, rate/edit, and review assets faster in a modern, secure, and seamless workflow. With creative asset management you and your team can see all versions of the asset, essentially creating shorter production cycles and reduced time-to-market for high-impact visual assets.  Metadata: Send less time searching for your assets. Globaledit’s creative asset management tool lets you focus on the right content by automating tasks from cataloging assets to transformations for specific applications allowing for increased productivity.  With image identification and metadata you can search for an asset at each stage of the life cycle.  Advanced Search: Enhanced asset information and asset history provides the capability of quickly searching and finding your most desired asset. To shorten the creation process, you can add a new collection based on your searches and needs.  Asset Rights: The most important feature of Globaledit’s creative asset management system is unparalleled security. Giving asset access to the wrong person through an unreliable medium is harmful to your business. Globaledit’s asset rights ensure the asset goes to the right person. You can set expiration dates, grant or deny access requests, track usage, add watermarks, and more. 

At globaledit, we understand creatives. We understand the process of a creative workflow. Most importantly, we want to empower your workflow with the ability to build smart collections and automated tagging to slash your production timelines. Globaledit is a tool built by creatives, for creatives. How does globaledit make your creative workflow better? Your Assets When You Need ThemWe know you need to produce quality content on tight deadlines. That’s why we centralize all your assets in one organized platform. No longer waste time consulting multiple systems. Your Assets Where You Want ThemQuickly find the right assets among thousands of assets with globaledit’s advanced metadata & automated tagging. Locate the correct creative and produce quickly, without compromising quality. Be in the Know of What is ImportantAchieve unparalleled transparency to all assets. Access all versions of the asset and account for all the stages of the asset’s life cycle. Obtain Key InsightsEmpower and align teams with a single platform. One source of communication—from capture to delivery of production—allows everyone to gain the insights they need. What do our creative workflow features look like? DashboardGlobaledit’s dashboard helps you keep your curated content sets organized. Project phase and user selection plays a role in organizing your content how you want it. AutomationGlobaledit’s collections allow your assets to live in a virtual folder where you can sort assets based on rules such as ratings, retouching, dates, metadata, comments, and more. CollaborationShare content with targeted custom permissions quickly and securely. With globaledit, every member can comment directly on the asset. Collaborate on each layer of the asset with status updates and give granular feedback for a faster turnaround. Globaledit allows multiple members to approve the creative simultaneously. Metadata Using metadata you can easily structure your creative workflow with Product Information Management systems, ERP. Metadata makes your assets discoverable quickly and makes working with these assets seamless. Controlled vocabulary and autocorrect reduces mistakes with tagging; catching errors before they happen. You can also update metadata and tags in bulk (up to 1,000 images at a time) cutting your creative workflow in half. Learn more about our products here: Creative Workflow Management Predictions for 2021

Having a markup editor is essential for creatives. Without it, a photo editor, retoucher, or another creative on your team doesn’t have the ability to collaborate with their colleagues seamlessly. A markup editor takes a task that’s often tedious and time consuming and creates an opportunity for a simple, easy workflow. Why is the markup editor important? A markup editor allows you to add annotation, comments, and call-out text annotations. With globaledit, the markup editor can be easily used on both web and mobile including  iOS & Android platforms. This way, you can be in sync with your creative team at the touch of a button. How to use the markup editor: If you’re working with globaledit, the interface provides you with an incredibly easy way to use the markup editor. While in the interface, you simply press the pen icon to enter the markup editor. Once activated, you can swipe through your team’s imported images and see current markups. You can then make your own markups in the editor by using the brush tool, comment section, or text. Once you’re finished with your work, or approved the work of others on your team, you’re done. Yes, the markup editor really is that simple to use. How to use a markup editor as part of a team: Whether you’re in marketing, advertising, e-commerce, or any other creative field, one thing rings true: creative work is collaborative work. Being able to access visuals from anywhere, all in one place, is something that is invaluable to a team. Within a tool like a markup editor, your team members will see your work instantly and vice versa. You can collaborate on visual projects so seamlessly that it will tremendously improve your time and efficiency. The functionality of a markup editor: If you’re utilizing globaledit to markup visuals, all of your markup layers can consist of multiple comments and annotations. A Text Box appears when an initial mark is made to instantly apply a comment. That comment will then apply to all marks on that layer allowing a single instruction to be delegated to multiple annotations. Comments can be changed in the text box on the image. To change a comment on a different layer, tap the layer from the markup layers pop-up window. Once a layer is chosen, a comment can be changed in the text box on the image. The pen tool allows you to freehand your marks, while shapes (circles and squares) provide increased marking precision. For example, use a square to define a desired crop or an ellipse to quickly highlight blemishes.

Early data suggests some verticals are thriving in the time of social distancing and an increasing reliance on eCommerce.  See the full report here.

Macy’s is set to reopen 68 stores next week in advance of a full reopen in six weeks’ time. Read about their plan here.

Philip Lim is keeping busy during his work-from-home time. Check out how he merged his passion for fashion with charity via his new cookbook here.

Glossier is making waves with its new hand cream release.  While hand sanitizer might be a hotter product right now, Glossier is doing a social good by donating its first 10,000 units to healthcare workers whose hands are likely pretty dry due to constant washing.  Read about it here.

Read Maria Luisa Frisa’s predictions about our marketplace, trends, and possible future in her insightful and wide-ranging Vogue interview here.

As we’re all getting up to speed and getting efficient in our remote setup, it’s good to breathe for a moment and reflect. Check out this article to see different strategies to make sure your e-commerce empire keeps expanding with the turbulent times.

Incumbent cloud asset management solutions have a mixed reputation–slow upload speeds, sluggish searches, volume limitations. Globaledit, however, scales out and scales up as you need. Early this year we processed an average of nine million assets per month. Since the majority of our clients went remote, our downloads have tripled with no outages or slowdowns. Want to learn about how Globaledit can manage your assets at any volume? Click our new asset management page here.

The weekend beckons!  Want to fill the time and simultaneously enrich your soul? These fashionable books might inspire your next look.  Check out the list here.

By now most companies have transitioned to remote work, but some lack a platform to access and deliver creative assets quickly. Over the last month, Globaledit has seen a 300% increase in downloads.  Our clients have been able to access their assets, whether works-in-progress or finalized projects, without interruption and with all the efficiencies of the cloud. Want to hear more about how Globaledit can centralize and distribute your creative assets during the remote revolution?  Click here.

We’ve all been there: you do five or six revisions of an asset, upload the wrong one, and don’t notice until it’s too late. That’s the inspiration for Globaledit’s newest feature: Versioning. Versioning lets you track an asset through each iteration and makes sure your team knows exactly which one to use. Want to see how Versioning works? Request a Demo  

Trying to streamline your creative content collaboration and production while remote? Globaledit’s online platform has you covered from-sharing creative content securely to making approvals, ratings, and markups anywhere, at any time.  We will help you achieve remote creative collaboration and efficient creative production, for the next 3 months free of charge. Access a 90-Day Free Trial  

Just after one year, Instagram’s in-app Checkout feature has skyrocketed, with many new brands joining every week. Brands are testing the waters of the new feature, which is still in closed beta and open to any select brands at this point. The new Instagram functionality empowers customers to buy products directly through the app itself. Since customers can quickly buy products without having to leave the platform friction is reduced. Read more about this new feature here.    

Individuals confined to their homes are turning to the digital world to get a glimpse of what’s happening outside. Their 9-5 jobs, shopping, entertainment, social life, and exercise have all been transported to the digital realm. Since their customers’ lives are all happening online luxury brands must thrive in digitization in order to survive. An article “How Luxury Brands Can Win During a Crisis” claims that accelerating digitization is key. The article states, “Many brands brag about their digital capabilities, but now is the time to be honest and take measures where your brand is lacking. Only the strongest digital brands will emerge during this crisis.” Daniel Langer, the author of the article, clarifies that digitization “means sophisticated tools that measure digital marketing ROI, real-time insights, content validation and creation via Artificial Intelligence-powered tools, and highly-personalized and automated digital marketing journeys.” Globaledit’s online creative collaboration platform for leading luxury brands is a tool that can help push out content quickly for highly-personalized and automated digital marketing journeys. Contact us to create strong creative content for the digital sphere while under pressure.  

Returns make up more than $351 billion dollars in lost sales. Among the culprits for this insane dollar figure is a lack of uniformity in sizing standards across brands. This leaves people guessing as to whether they should be buying that fabulous new shoe they saw online in a size 9 or size 10. To provide greater consumer reference, brands like Good American are giving website visitors the ability to “change fit model” to see varying body dimensions and how they’re aligned to sizes. This approach has great potential to result in reduced online returns, but what’s the cost of executing this strategy? Creatives will need to shoot more variations (‘looks’) of a SKU. Learn more about how creatives can shoot more looks and manage the demand for content creation.  

A Business of Fashion article reveals that Highsnobiety, a German-based streetwear blog, media brand, and production agency launched in 2005, is turning to print magazines to engage their Generation Z audience. Employing print to attract new-age consumers, who stereotypically inhabit the digital-only realm, might seem counterintuitive. Although, recent research shows that Gen-Z consumers are a growing market for the print industry. Research shows that a Generation Z audience spends 1 hour each week reading magazines and prefer reading printed books. More brands will try to tap into print as another means to attract the Generation Z customer. With creating content for both the print and digital spaces, brands will be drowning in creative production. Learn more about how you can create an efficient creative production process today.  

The creative process and workflow do not have to be tied to a server. In the 21st century, having your creative process and workflow on the Cloud should be a priority. What if your creative team needs to access content remotely? They should not be dependent upon an office or server in order to execute time-sensitive deadlines. Take your creative workflow to the Cloud and let your team work on-the-go with Globaledit.  With our creative collaboration platform, all key team members can collaborate on content from anywhere, at any time. Our platform drives communication between all stakeholders and teams. You can now comment on all your content with key stakeholders anywhere, at any time. Notify all team members involved in the creative process throughout the asset lifecycle. Status updates are provided to the right team members to push content out quickly.  Learn more about how your creative workflow can happen anywhere, at any time.    

According to a 2020 In-House Creative Report, 72% of creatives struggle to keep up with the high volume content. The main reason for this struggle is inefficient creative production processes and the use of disparate systems. Achieve efficiency in the creative process by providing visibility, quick access, and voting ability to all stakeholders.  When all key creative team members can give thorough input and vote on the creative asset together it creates efficient, inclusive creative collaboration.  With Globaledit’s creative voting system, multiple members can vote on all layers of the creative process simultaneously for a faster turnaround.  Learn More   

A Glossy Podcast interviews jewelry brand Switch on how they drew inspiration from the fashion brand Rent the Runway for their new rental model. Switch is now renting out jewelry for $29 a month. Their rental model is also subscription-based allowing them to generate a higher engagement and retention rate from their customers. While renting out jewelry for $29 might seem to negatively impact the company’s revenue, this is not the case. According to the podcast, “In two years, to have an endless rotation of jewelry instead of just purchasing one piece — that, probably, after two years you’d be sick of — is a really good value for our customers.” The subscription and rental-based models are becoming more popular, and, thus, more competitive. A Glossy article notes the increases in the number of players in the rental fashion world and reveals that “Rent the Runway is tinkering with its available subscription plans by adding a third option in between the lavish Unlimited subscription and the more bare-bones Update or 1 Swap, subscription.” The article further highlights that Rent the Runway launched “the new 2 Swap plan” on Tuesday. This plan “will let customers swap out their four rented items twice per month for a monthly fee of $135, instead of once as the $89 1 Swap plan allows.” The article closes with the 2 Swap plan “is one way that Rent the Runway, the largest but certainly not the only major player in the rental space, is standing out from competitors.” While subscription and rent models may be attractive for fashion brands, they must come up with a unique strategy for the models to be lucrative.

The digital space has re-envisioned traditional storytelling. A report “Digital Storytelling for Luxury Brands: 5 Trends To Succeed” discusses the core measures of storytelling have stayed the same, yet the digital realm is transforming the manner in which these stories are delivered. The report unpacks how digital is re-defining storytelling and offers 5 key tactics that top luxury brands are using to engage affluent consumers digitally. The top 5 successful trends for digital storytelling are the following: 1.) Content snacking: storytelling in micro-moments 2.) Mobile videos: go vertical and go live 3.) Ephemeral stories: 24 hours then gone 4.) Social media and UGC: The audience as storytellers 5.) Big data helps craft more personalized stories and understands which stories will resonate Read more here.

Renown luxury magazines that have been around for years must undergo a transformation to the digital space. Print luxury magazines still hold a certain appeal with a particular audience and have an intimate, tangible experience that a website cannot emulate. Yet, a digital presence is a must. Luxury magazines are being coerced to gain digital real estate in order to survive. An article “Transforming Luxury Magazines for Digital with Michael von Schlippe” unpacks how Michael von Schlippe is “rewriting the story of luxury publishing” to fit the digital space.” Michael von Schlippe is the founder and co-owner of Indochine Media Ventures (IMV). IMV’s portfolio of brands includes Robb Report, Esquire, Luxury Guide, and Buro 24/7. Michael von Schlippe explained, “Luxury advertising budgets were being cut across TV, print, cinema, and outdoor for all industries. The only area that was seeing an increase was digital. The increase in digital luxury advertising budget did not equal the reduction in print, but it was the only media buying growth that we saw.” The transition from print to digital calls for more content creation designed for the digital realm. Unlike stagnant visuals created for print, digital assets must be refreshed constantly under a tight timeframe. Globaledit’s web-based creative platform streamlines the production process of digital assets. With Globaledit, leading luxury brands push out high-quality content to their digital site and channels, while slashing production time. To request a demo of globaledit, click here.    

Brands are continually trying to understanding how to stand out from the enormous, ever-growing crowd of “cool” brands. Generation Z customers are captivated by brands offering a fresh new look and embodying a strong, authentic identity. Customers are now seeing beyond the facade of brands’ that deploy marketing campaigns for a quick sell. Instead, individuals are demanding more from brands and want to see a transparent and consistent brand message. Arriving at an empowering brand image and identity is not a simple task. It may take multiple attempts and various approaches. There is not a single model or a one-size-fits-all formula. An exclusive BOF article provides 6 steps to make your brand “cool” and to find your true identity. These steps are open-ended and high-level. BOF advises brands to: 1.) Figure Out Your Purpose 2.) Be Open to Moving Fast and Experimenting 3.) Use Your Budget to Work With New Creatives 4.) Give Your Collaborators Creative Freedom 5.) Empower Experimental Projects Within the Organisation 6.) Remember that the Product Has to Live Up to the Hype To read the entire article, click here.      

Luxe Digital released its 2020 report on luxury industry trends. Among the top trends for luxury was personalization at scale and new social media platforms. The report stated, “luxury brands will dive deeper into unstructured data coming from various digital and social platforms to deliver personalization at a larger scale.” In addition to producing personalized content, luxury brands must venture out into the uncharted territories of niche social media platforms. Brands must create content “that fosters meaningful, life-enhancing connections with like-minded peers and brands.” They will benefit from harnessing “the power of alternative social platforms to answer consumers’ desire for a more authentic, unfiltered look behind the scenes.” With the growing trends of personalization, additional social platforms, and the need for more creative content, the importance and structure of creative operations continue to grow. Creative operations must be able to produce more visual assets for custom campaigns and multiple social channels seamlessly and deliver them in a timely manner. The need to improve workflows for efficiency and acceleration is vital to generating vast amounts of creative content showcasing personalization. Learn more about how your brand can stay competitive with personalization and the efficient production of visual assets.    

The recent trend of personalization at scale has retail brands deploying this strategy across all marketing campaigns. However, the rise of personalization in marketing, as well as sales and customer service, is not without challenges. Personalization requires gleaning more private information from prospects and consumers. Digital gains of extracting key data on targets and customers must come with a clear approach on how to keep personal data secure and private. A McKinsey & Company article “Consumer-data privacy and personalization at scale” states, “As the enterprise risk of collecting, holding, and using consumer data to personalize offerings grows, so do the business-impairing consequences for those who fail to get it right.” Based upon a McKinsey & Company survey, senior marketing leaders are not concern about compliance with privacy in personalization campaigns. If marketing leaders considered consumers’ fears their perspective towards personalization and privacy would change. Recent surveys reveal that more than”90 percent of consumers are concern about their online privacy, and nearly 50 percent have limited their online activity because of privacy concerns. Ignoring security and privacy of personalization can come with dire consequences including slower time-to-market, constraints on remarketing and consumer-data collection along with devasting fines and injury to a brand’s reputation. If companies abide by security and privacy measures in their personalization campaigns, they can witness boosts in customer-satisfaction, reduced time-to-market, and slimmer chances of regulatory fines. McKinsey & Company advocate the below six steps to embrace security and privacy: establishing and enforcing standards on security and privacy for creative agencies using best practices for data protection in their day-to-day work tokenizing consumer data ensuring consent compliance sanitizing data before using them in outbound communications and remarketing being accountable for incidents when they occur You can read the full McKinsey & Company article here.

According to a Smartly.io study, more than half of retailers plan to increase their social media advertising budget across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Additionally, 50% of retailers will spend more than half of their total advertising budget through these three channels as platforms offer more e-commerce integration directly on the apps. While ad spending is increasing significantly, 48% of retail CEOs said their performance marketing and creative departments don’t collaborate effectively through the creative production and ad delivery process, resulting in time-consuming inefficient manual labor. As a result, brands can benefit from investing in tools to better align their creative and marketing teams, ensuring that content for all channels is effectively produced, communicated, and delivered. Contact us to learn more about how Globaledit can help bring your teams together while producing more content faster than ever.

TikTok is making a splash into the fashion industry, and brands are using the new social platform to drive sales. Glossy article “How Gen Z-brand Adika is Using TikTok influencers to drive sales” takes a close look at how Adika successfully increased purchases with the power of the new social media platform. Dedy Schwartzberg, the founder of Adika, realized that “after seeing the flood of sales from one TikTok post” the company soon started to shape a marketing strategy and a healthy budget for the platform. Schwartzberg commented while though still heavily interested and invested in Instagram that TikTok provides a fresh new marketing tool to their arsenal. In comparison to Instagram, TikTok is known for being more organic, raw, and up-close. The focus is less on the background and more on the clothes and dancing. The brand has partnered with 30 to 50 Gen-Z influencers for TikTok alone. The introduction of yet another platform into fashion brands’ already large repertoire of social media platforms means more creative content for more channels. Deploying the right creative content to the correct social channel calls for an intuitive creative workflow platform. A workflow platform, such as globaledit, utilizes robust metadata and quickly locate the right visual assets created for specific social media channels. Learn more about how globaledit can help you prepare for succeeding in adopting next-gen social platform of TikTok.

Meeting the demands of Gen Z consumers might be difficult for fashion brands embracing sustainability practices. NYTimes article “What do Gen Z Shoppers Want? A Cute, Cheap Outfit that Looks Great on Instagram” postulates that Generation Z prefers to buy inexpensive clothing from ultra-fast-fashion brands. The article surmises that Gen Z consumers gain instant gratification from a seamless transaction of a cheap outfit on their smartphone. The purchase on an outfit is not a one-time occurrence, rather for the typical Gen Z shopper, this is a daily practice. Fast production and consumption of inexpensive, single-use clothing are dramatically at odds with sustainable practices. Meanwhile, many fashion and beauty brands are allocating funds to enact sustainable measures. A Glossy article notes, “As the fashion industry begins to reconcile its impact on the global climate crisis, some brands are putting their money where their mouth is.” According to the article, Allbirds, a leading shoe brand, is undergoing a self-imposed carbon tax. The carbon tax would mean that “if the average shoe produces 10 kilograms of carbon and it would require $0.10 per product to offset that amount.” Fashion and beauty brands that want to have a social impact may have to increase their spend on production and subsequently increase their product prices. A more expensive, yet ethical piece of clothing might not prove favorable with the Gen Z consumer.        

The 2020 “In-House Creative Management Report” pinpoints that creative teams are weighed down by operational challenges. The main challenges of 2020 all revolve around operational processes and antiquated practices. According to the report, the top challenges for creative teams in 2020 are: 72% of creatives struggle to keep up with the high volume of content.  73% of in-house creative teams report being challenged by the speed at which they are expected to complete work.  63% of creative teams are not able to focus on being a strategic contributor to the business because they are busy keeping up with demands for volume and speed of work.  47% of creatives spend a full day each week on admin tasks  Globaledit’s cloud-based platform can shave days off of the time-to-market for creative production. Globaledit is a leading creative workflow solution that streamlines your creative process for faster, easier production, and gives organizations worldwide control over content from capture to distribution. Contact us today about how you can improve the production process of creative visual assets.  

A Glossy article reports that Beautycounter, a leading cosmetics brand in clean beauty, has implemented a new set of manufacturing standards called Blueprint for Clean. According to the article, the “Blueprint for Clean includes 12 for transparency, including requiring manufacturing partners to be cruelty-free through Leaping Bunny certification and increasing its forbidden-ingredient list from 1,500 to 1,800 ingredients.” Corresponding with Beautycounter’s debut of the Blueprint for Clean is a 12-minute documentary showcased on their website about mica mining. The short video has a powerful call-to-action of asking “viewers to share the video, to purchase from brands that do not exploit child labor and to ask government leaders to act.” Beautycounter has a large following and a high engagement rate with an average of 336 postings about the brand and its strides in clean beauty. The #betterbeauty hashtag often used by the brand has become ubiquitous within the industry. Beautycounter’s marketing strategy is focused more on advocacy and values of clean beauty rather than its products. Beautycounter’s salient presence in clean beauty and its urging for clean practices in the industry places pressure on cosmetic brands. Consumers will start demanding #betterbeauty from all beauty brands.

Omnichannel personalization is reputably the largest 2020 marketing win. Securing this win calls for more creative content and accelerated marketing collaboration. McKinsey & Company’s article “The end of shopping boundaries: Omnichannel personalization” notes that “Personalization across physical and digital channels is the next big marketing opportunity.” Personalized content should not be secluded to the digital realm. Instead, brands must expand customized content to their brick & mortar stores. Brands that can source and deploy curated content for both the digital and physical realms will be leaders of personalization. The article recognizes “companies that are able to personalize the customer experience across physical and digital channels-omnichannel personalization-can achieve a 5 to 15 percent revenue increase across the full customer base.” To drive revenue through customized content, brands must create a dialog between the physical and digital worlds. Companies must have their digital marketing campaigns and storefront displays work in tandem. The article advises, “Companies should focus on five touchpoints where this convergence happens: mobile app, digital displays, interactive screens, tech-enabled associates, and point of sale.” Marketing teams will need to work collaboratively to push out creative content for each of these diverse touchpoints. While these distinct channels call for specific creative, the channels must produce creative that creates a consistent conversation. Globaledit’s creative asset management platform helps creatives deploy high-quality content for specific channels quickly. With globaledit, marketing teams can achieve enhanced collaboration. Our platform provides visibility into all versions of the creative—from the original to the retouched—creating one source of truth. Learn More 

Creative operations teams are still bogged down by manual tasks in the 21st century. Reports show creative operations teams are consumed with manual, mundane jobs throughout their day. While the speed of final approval on creative content has improved, time spent on manual work has remained stagnant from 2019. In the age of AI, creatives should not be living an age of antiquated manual practices. There are larger business implications when a creative must devote his or her entire day to administrative work. A faster approval process does not necessarily mean a quicker production time when creatives are stuck with manual tasks. To truly accelerate the production of creative content, companies must automate all manual processes. Globaledit, the leader in asset management, reduces time spent on manual tasks with robust metadata. Transform manual jobs into a seamless process and shorten the entire production process with globaledit. Learn More.      

Fashion brands know they have to take environmental responsibility seriously. Yet, consumers and reports are noticing that brands tend to opt for eco-consciousness campaigns, instead of employing action in production. BOF’s The State of Fashion 2020 reports, “Despite some modest progress, fashion hasn’t yet taken its environmental responsibilities seriously enough.” Next year, fashion players need to swap platitudes and promotional noise for meaningful action and regulatory compliance while facing up to consumer demand for transformational change.” The reputable fashion news source of BOF is not alone in recognizing and calling out fashion brands’ inability to create a wave in sustainability.  A recent article from Glossy points out, “Sustainability has become a trend to sell clothes, and that is not what it should be about.” Instead of exploiting sustainability as a buzz word to attract customers, brands need to make real strides in creating a positive impact on the environment. Taking real, quantifiable action will, in the end, allow brands to win over high priority key accounts. Although, securing consumer trust through successfully creating sustainable measures is not easy. DespiSurvey respondents stated sustainability will be one of fashion’s largest challenges in 2020. The article “Is Your Fashion Brand Ethical” offers three ostensibly easy steps to achieving sustainability: “explore new business models”, “respect your business partners”, “pay fair”. A new business model inevitably calls for transformation and upheaval of a tried and true model of the past. There is a forewarning in the article that “Brands that want to have a positive social impact may have to sacrifice some sales and profit.” Although, sacrifices, changes, and risk will not outweigh the reward of gaining consumers’ trust and having a true environmental impact.        

Fashion brands are aware they must embrace sustainability in their 2020 marketing and production strategies, but they are struggling with how to conceptualize and execute. The proliferation of articles, reports, and blogs on sustainability pressures brands into incorporating sustainability as a buzz word in their brand message. However, many fashion companies are lacking knowledge of how to become a sustainable brand or create an impactful sustainable campaign. There is no doubt the topic is prevalent within the industry and growing in power, placing even more demand on brands to embody sustainability. Forbes article “Sustainable Fashion Reigned Supreme at the Oscars, Led by Rivals Louis Vuitton and Gucci” glorifies designers who created pieces from re-purposed or sustainably sourced material. Designers who failed to opt for eco-friendly material or go vintage did not make the list. Reputable news sources, such as Forbes, are continually praising fashion brands who strive to make sustainable efforts. Brands who fail to incorporate sustainability will remain unmentioned and unnoticed by consumers. Our next micro-blog will unpack strategies on how to succeed with sustainability.  

The latest news on BOF highlights news on how AI is not only a means of innovation for luxury brands but also is a means of survival. The article points out, “A.I.-driven cyber- luxury” is the game-changer for luxury brands. Why? For one luxury car brand, 80-90 percent of its digital communications had no relevance at all to its consumers.”  The piece dives into how luxury brands have been notorious for not adopting advanced AI social listening tools in the past. However, luxury brands must now harness adequate machine-learning technology to truly understand their digital audience. The article forwarns, “A decade from now, brands that can’t adapt to using sophisticated digital analytics tools while connecting them to actionable insights won’t survive.” Luxury brands must think of innovative technology throughout the entire creative content production process from the pre-production to post-production analysis. Globaledit, an automated creative workflow platform, uses robust AI and metadata to slash creative production timelines. Learn more about how your team can push creative out to market quickly with globaledit’s AI capabilities.  

A recent NYTimes post shows how Another Tomorrow harnesses AI and technology to provide consumer transparency on their clothing line. The article notes, “Affixed to the label of every Another Tomorrow garment is a scannable QR code that, if a shopper holds their phone camera over it, will direct them to a website explaining where the piece was made and where its materials came from, down to the exact roll of fabric used. ” The deep learning of metadata, an automated search functionality that provides data which gives information about other data, helps consumers understand what the product is made of. Metadata, in particular, product metadata, is crucial in propelling fashion companies’ AI strategies. In fact, AI strategies would not be possible without product metadata, and it is the creative teams that are the ones best suited to capture and drive the influence of this information during production and post-production. There is a ton of first-hand knowledge that only creatives have access to that,  if applied, can empower consumers with highly relevant and accurate product to provide transparency. Globaledit supports all standard metadata formats and can build custom schemas to fit your business needs. Learn more about Globaledit’s capabilities.  

A BOF article “Want to See the Future of Social Media? Look to Asia” points out brands are perplexed by the vast amount of next-generation social media platforms growing at an unfathomable rate. The article states, “Beyond the sheer number of “next-gen” social media platforms cropping up across the continent, it is the speed at which they evolve that stuns the average marketing executive.” Companies are questioning which platforms they should invest in and how to manage all the creative content needed for the new platforms. The need to jump on board the train of next-gen social platforms will have brands scrambling for content specific to each channel.  Deploying the right creative content to the correct social channel calls for an intuitive creative workflow platform. A workflow platform, such as globaledit, utilizes robust metadata and AI to quickly locate the right visual assets created for specific social media channels. Learn more about how globaledit can help you prepare for succeeding in adopting next-gen social platforms.

Loyalty programs are a great way to keep customers coming back and have been effectively building brand loyalty for decades, but research by the Harvard Business Review shows that marketing content that works for your already-loyal customer base doesn’t resonate with new prospective customers. Using social media analytics, it is possible to study which posts resonate best with which audiences so brands can cover their advertising bases, but this means brands must be producing more content to cut through the digital noise that we have become accustomed to. Globaledit can help keep photography production organized and on target so brands can produce the content they need in less time. Contact us to learn more about how we can help with your next production.  

The State of Fashion 2020: Navigating Uncertainty produced by Mckinsey & Company in partnership with Business of Fashion reports that fashion companies may face dire and difficult situations in a precarious market.  The report urges fashion brands to plan for resilience to survive slow economic growth and outlast the competition.  One of the key 2020 trends the report urges fashion brands to embrace is innovation and digitization, specifically digital recalibration and re-thinking traditional engagement models on prevalent social media platforms. The report states, “It is getting harder to stand out in established social media. Fashion players need to understand how to gain traction on newer platforms.” Not only must brands venture into the uncharted terrains of new social media platforms, but they also must develop vast volumes of high-quality content tailored to particular channels.  The report highlights, “Attention-grabbing content will be key, deployed on the right platform for each market.” Deploying the right creative content to the correct channel calls for an intuitive creative workflow platform. A workflow platform, such as globaledit, utilizes robust metadata and AI to quickly locate the right visual assets created for specific social media channels. Learn more about how globaledit can help you prepare for navigating the uncertainties in 2020.  

By Luke Schneider, Business Development at Globaledit Few imagined a decade ago that a large percentage of our transactions would take place through the phones in our pockets. As the last decade has invited opportunity for a long list of start-ups, it has fundamentally changed the way brands effectively reach customers.  Combined with ever-increasing manufacturing quality, it’s easier than ever before to purchase a high-quality product at a fair price.  It isn’t enough today simply to have a great product. The rise of direct-to-consumer brands like Glossier, Warby Parker, and Harry’s Razors have shown how important it is to create a brand voice to reach customers through more than direct advertising alone. This need for a diversified marketing plan challenges creative production to produce higher-quality content for more channels in less time. Modern Effective Advertising – A Coffee Subscription Story Think about the last time you discovered a product you didn’t know existed. Do you remember where you were first exposed to the brand? Did you see one ad and buy it immediately?  Or did you take more time, require multiple touches, and do some of your own research? If you’re like me, chances are you take more convincing; my most recent ad-driven purchase was a Trade Coffee subscription (This is not a sponsored post, but I wouldn’t turn down free coffee beans).  When I look back and study what brought me through their marketing/sales funnel, I see multiple touch-points combined with interesting and eye-catching content that made me thirsty for more.  I was first exposed to Trade Coffee through an Instagram sponsored post, likely spurred by my consistent views of high-end coffee machine pages like La Marzocco. I thought it was interesting and they certainly had beautiful content, but I had tried direct-roaster subscriptions before and wasn’t crazy about it due to the price and, frankly, getting bored of the same product over and over again, I quickly moved on.  Over the next few weeks I saw multiple ads through online search and video streaming. I then saw a Facebook ad with some more details and a call-to-action that spurred my interest. This ad got me to click-through to the brand’s website. I was now solidly within the “discovery/evaluation” stage of their pipeline. After thoroughly researching the company, I found their product offered a solution to an issue I was facing—not having consistent access to fresh, high-quality, interesting coffee beans at a reasonable price. To put the cherry on top, I was presented with a promotional offer of 30% off and free shipping for the duration of my subscription, which led me to my first Trade purchase a few weeks after the first touch.  For many brands, this would be the end of the story, but their content and customer service didn’t stop there. I received further information about the product I had ordered through beautiful visual and written content, as well as suggestions for my next coffee selection through information about their other partner roasters. Trade Coffee’s full-cycle marketing had brought me from an unaware consumer with a desire to a loyal customer who happily refers all of his coffee-loving friends to their service. Getting Competitive Keeping up in our modern direct-to-consumer, omni-channel, social- and brand-voice guided consumer marketplace requires breaking through the status quo and looking at your overall marketing plan with the future in mind. Customer stories like mine continue to show how important a cohesive brand voice is to bring in new customers and increase brand loyalty, in turn increasing the reach of your products beyond your direct marketing efforts.  In the perpetual race for market share, new and established brands alike utilize social media more than ever, but, in an unexpected turn, brands are once again tapping direct mail, billboards, and out-of-home advertising to stay at the forefront of consumers’ minds. Staying competitive requires an expanded marketing reach, necessitating more content than ever before. This has put stress on the old way of doing things when it comes to creative and marketing operations, with significant backlog build-up during the editing, retouching, design, and approval processes.  The Right Tech At the same time, it can be hard to parse the increasingly crowded marketing-technology landscape. From CMS to MRM, CRM to DAM, it’s easy to lose sight of the original goals of your solution search, often resulting in running in place.  When we look at creative operations through the past few decades, not much has changed when it comes to overall workflow. Instead of editing and passing around film, we now work from hard drives or a local server, as full-res files are still too large to send back and forth quickly without physically moving a hard drive. The current process tends to require teams to be in the same location when production wants to be decentralized. New technology can help both small in-house teams and the biggest global marketing departments stay organized and on-schedule while producing more great content. Companies leverage traditional Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms to organize and distribute their digital files, including marketing materials. While these tools are effective long-term repositories, they quickly find their limits when confronted with the access demand required during marketing production. Here at Globaledit, though our solution has the capabilities of a DAM, we refer to our software as a “Creative Asset Management” (CAM) platform, built specifically with the work-in-progress (WIP) workflows of creative photography and visual production in mind. The Benefits of a Specialized Creative Asset Management Platform A powerful CAM platform can unlock collaboration in ways only previously possible through in-person interaction. Photographers, creative directors, art directors, clients, retouchers, graphic designers, marketing directors, producers, and project managers can all log on to the Globaledit platform from anywhere in the world through our browser- and iOS-based platform.  Globaledit can be used by creative directors to build cohesive pre-production decks to communicate the vision and direction that they have in mind. Clients and other stakeholders can easily view, comment, and annotate materials to further develop concepts into the focused direction. You can upload and store PDF decks alongside the raw assets, ensuring that teams are on the same page from pre-production through post-production.  Our platform makes it simple to keep your content secure by determining which users can move, add, delete, rate, and annotate which assets. The same user control allows you to assign groups of users to a project to ensure everyone is kept in the loop, or you can control what users access which assets, ensuring that unfinished content isn’t accidentally published.  Our rating tools leverage industry standards: 1-5 stars, color tags, and select/approve/alt/kill to narrow down your edit and designate final selections. Not to worry if you make a first-pass on set—ratings within CaptureOne, Bridge, and Lightroom will automatically transfer to Globaledit, allowing you to pick up where you left off to make your final edit simple.  Once final selects are made, use our visual markup tool to draw the changes you want retouchers and graphic designers to make.  This streamlined process eliminates the need for vague or complicated text-based descriptions of retouching call-outs. Once the edit is finalized and markups have been made, you can easily transfer large files by building a Collection within Globaledit to quickly share with your in-house or freelance creatives. Our easy approvals tool ensures that even the busiest stakeholders have a quick and simple way to sign off on finalized content. Our clients shave days off the production timeline by breaking their dependency on hard drives and printed contact sheets. Digital Asset Managers utilize our organization capabilities, tapping industry-standard metadata schemas, as well as the power to build their own custom schemas for their unique business applications. Metadata best practices ensure that organizations are able to find assets that fulfill their marketing needs instead of unnecessarily repeating the production process. With unlimited folder levels, Producers and Digital Techs can utilize the same folder hierarchy they would use on a local server to keep assets organized by project and stage within the post-production process.  Because our platform brings people to content instead of the other way around, it’s easy for marketing departments to know where to find creative content that they can shape into their next campaign. Whether it’s locating eCommerce imagery, developing seasonal lookbooks, or finding social-ready content, Globaledit makes it simple to find what you need, when you need it.  While Globaledit can be utilized as a DAM for long-term archival storage, it can also integrate with a variety of other production management, studio management, and existing DAM platforms. Globaledit was built by and for the creative department; our solution can scale-with even the largest creative departments. Contact us to learn how we can fit into and increase the yield of your creative stack today.  

As Rent The Runway has proven over the last decade that clothing-as-a-service subscriptions can help expand a brand’s reach without cannibalizing sales, more brands are working to offer rental closets of their own. Vince, Urban Outfitters, Express, Trunk Club, Le Tote, and more have jumped in the game. Clothing rental introduces logistical challenges, but yields valuable consumer data at a level never before seen. Through analyzing which items users add to their virtual closet, brands can understand more about current and future trends, and ensure that their inventories are well stocked. Globaledit utilizes robust metadata, ensuring that visual assets are tagged with descriptors that help ensure that visual content is ready for future data analysis. Learn more.

With its rapid expansion underway, the digitally native brand, Morphe, is leveraging the use of in-store studios to drive foot traffic. Currently, the 12 studios in operation are offering free services. From masterclasses and 20-minute tutorials to reserving a studio to film YouTube videos, the brand is focused on differentiating itself through these studio services. Morphe continues to expand globally while prioritizing a public space for a community to create and share content. Optimizing on the experiential marketing trend, Morphe is providing key resources to generate more digital assets while keeping the community engaged. The demand for more digital assets calls for sophisticated management of assets and workflow. Without a creative asset management system, a seamless workflow of visual assets to push out to production is almost impossible to achieve. Learn more about Globaledit, the creative asset management that allows you to employ an intensive creative content strategy.

By Luke Schneider, Business Development at Globaledit Welcome back to After The Shoot, the blog series about the modern creative post-production workflow. Last week we discussed the challenges of editing thousands of images down to a handful of final options. This week we will cover the retouching process, including markups, global outsourcing, and rounds of approval. Retouching is a vital part of the post-production process. Whether applying light color grading, background clean-up, or beauty-level skin work, every image presented through an advertising channel has been retouched in some way. This process ensures that creative assets are in-line with a brand’s image. Many studios have in-house retouchers to facilitate the back-and-forth that this process often requires, but it’s becoming more common to outsource retouching around the world.  Text-Based Notes on Visual Assets The outsourcing trend for retouching has made communication challenging. How can you describe which sections of a visual asset should be changed and to what degree through text alone? “Clean the hairline on the left shoulder.” “Clean the background foliage.” “Smooth skin.”  These are all vague descriptions that cannot properly communicate the desired level of retouching. If multiple team members have to make retouching notes, things become increasingly difficult. For post-production managers, time spent organizing email, text, Slack, Hangouts, and face-to-face conversations means less time actively working on content. This “omni-channel communication” also creates risk as notes can easily be lost, forgotten, or separated from the assets that they refer to. Many production houses create a PDF copy of the assets as a workaround. This PDF can then be opened in Preview, Acrobat, or Photoshop to add layers of drawings and text notes to communicate what needs to be done. This method is a decent fix, but is difficult to scale as multiple team members may have to make notes on hundreds of images a week. Additionally, this introduces multiple new versions and files to track. Multiple Retouching Rounds Multiple rounds of retouching for campaign, editorial, and commercial production magnify these challenges. It is important to have access to the raw files, as well as all rounds of retouching to keep a close eye on the retouching process. Oftentimes this is achieved through a name-change denoting which stage the file is in (e.g. name-V1, name-V2, etc.). Unfortunately Dropbox, Drive, and Wetransfer do not support two-up diptych viewing, making it difficult to see the changes side-by-side without downloading and opening the files on each local machine.  After one round of retouching, all stakeholders should view the assets and either approve the version, or repeat the same visual markup process to communicate further work that needs to be done to finalize the asset.  How does Globaledit help? Let’s back up to the end of After The Shoot – Part 2.  We’ve just made our final selects in Globaledit and have uploaded derivative files so the final selects all have a .PSD file attached. Through the creation of a Lightbox – a playlist of assets that can be sent to certain users – we can automatically notify our Art Director, Creative Director, and Client that final selects have been made and that they have images that need retouching markups. Let’s say that we have a tight deadline for final assets, so we set an expiration date to put some pressure on the review team.  From here, those three users can log into Globaledit and use the retouching markup tool to draw on the assets and make text-based comments. These actions are name and time-stamped to ensure there’s a central record that can be referred to later when needed. Globaledit supports the upload and markup of high-res video formats so users can add frame-accurate comments and notes to those as well.  Going one step further, let’s say you have already created a “Workflow” rule within Globaledit to move all assets that have been marked up by the client into a “Ready for Retouching” Lightbox. This second Lightbox will be assigned to a retoucher who has preset permission to download the .PSD to start work immediately. The retoucher may also view markups within Globaledit or generate a PDF in the form of a to-do list that lists the markups one-by-one. At the end of the first round of retouching, the producer sends a Globaledit Uplink to the retoucher that allows the retoucher to securely upload the assets into a pre-built “Retouching Round 1” folder and appends any necessary metadata to the assets. We have decided to color-code round 1 images with a blue color tag upon upload. The same team members who added markups will then be notified that the retouching work is complete and ready for review. Using the Round 1 folder as an Approval Gallery, any images that the team “approves” will be ready for finalization. Any additional images that receive retouching markups can automatically be added to a Round 2 retouching lightbox that is sent to the same retoucher and the process repeats again. This time an Uplink moves new assets into a “Retouching Round 2” folder and a yellow color tag is added to show that this is a 2nd round asset.  Unlike Finder, Dropbox, and other file viewers, when selecting a root folder, Globaledit makes it possible to see all content within subfolders. In English – if you have a retouching master folder, containing three different folders, “Unretouched,” “Retouching Round 1,” and “Retouching Round 2,” all assets within the subfolders can be viewed at once. This means that the same image in different stages, denoted with a blue color tag and yellow color tag, can be viewed using a two-up view to compare round 1 and round 2 side-by-side. This makes it easy to ensure the proper changes were made and that everyone is happy with the asset before moving forward.  Increased outsourcing and adoption of technology have opened a new world of high-end and time-friendly retouching services. Post-production workflows that have worked in the past are now being put to the test and are causing significant delays that lengthen the time-to-market of creative assets. This happens at a time when social media, eCommerce, and advertising require brands to produce content as quickly as possible.  Globaledit was built as an internal tool to streamline this process for the leading production house in New York City and is now offered as an enterprise-level SaaS platform to enable brands and studios around the world to do the same. If you’d like to learn more about Globaledit and how it can help your creative workflow, contact us by clicking here. Stay tuned next week for After The Shoot Part 4, where we discuss finalization, distribution, metadata enrichment, and finally Archival and DAM storage.  

The beauty and cosmetics industry has a lot to learn from streetwear brand success. Through building hype and limiting supply, lines down the street outside of Kith and Supreme are commonplace here in New York City. As the retail industry turns towards experiential shopping, exclusivity and being “in the know” are big revenue drivers for the “drop” model we see regularly in the footwear and streetwear industry. Estee Lauder and Malin + Goetz have produced limited release packages for Kith, testing the waters for the limited release model. Creative photography and videos are vital to building hype around a limited drop through all media channels available, but this model means more creative materials are needed faster than before. Globaledit’s cloud-based platform can shave days off of the time-to-market for creative production, allowing brands to shift towards a more aggressive “drop” model easily. Contact us today about how you can improve the production process of creative visual assets.  

Fast-fashion giant H&M opens up about its plans for the future in the quickly changing retail landscape. Citing further investment into eCommerce and quicker time-to-market online, as well as more experience-oriented brick-and-mortar stores. As fashion seasons have become shorter, the need for quick and efficient photo and video production has never been greater. Globaledit helps by connecting global teams through a cloud-based, work-in-progress platform, ensuring that edits, retouching, approvals, and distribution can take place as quickly as possible, decreasing the time-to-market of all creative assets. Contact us today about how you can speed up the production of creative visual assets for a competitive go-to-market strategy.    

By Luke Schneider, Business Development at Globaledit   Welcome back to After The Shoot, the blog-series about creative post-production workflow. Last week we discussed the challenges associated with securely handling hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes of files created during photo and video shoots. This week I will discuss the editing process and how challenging it can be to get the necessary input and feedback from all stakeholders. Editing and culling images can be a slow process, especially on campaign and editorial projects where an on-set art director, agency creative director, and client team may all need to give their two-cents. Aesthetic is often a matter of personal preference which makes it challenging to keep everyone on the same page. On the eCommerce side, brands may have stakeholders determining brand image, all of whom may want to give final approval before product pages go live. Sending multiple options to everyone can be an organizational nightmare, let’s take a look at a few ways to handle this process. On-Set or After the Shoot Most productions will have an on-set art director, ensuring that images are on brand and aesthetically pleasing. Depending on the shot list and schedule there may be time to make a rough edit after each shot or during lunch and at the end of the day. For on-figure productions, this edit tends to narrow down roughly 50-400 images per shot to 5-20 final options. Let’s say there are 15 shots for the day, this is still 75-300 final options even before taking into account second options that should be accessible in case someone wants to see more versions.  If the shotlist is more packed – a common occurrence now that social and online channels require more content than ever before – there may not be time to make a rough edit on set. In this case, the AD is responsible for making those selects after the shoot and likely will have to take a physical drive or pull all of the images from an on-site server adding further transfer time as the files are moved to their machine for editing.   Client Feedback and Input Before images can be sent to retouching, the final options often need to be approved by the client or creative director so time and money aren’t wasted finalizing images that will never be seen. This can be done a number of ways, including physical/PDF contact sheets with thumbnails, Dropbox/Google Drive/WeTransfer/FTP links, or through shipping a physical hard-drive carrying the files.  The good news here is the sent files can be low-res and transfer quickly.  However, all of these methods rely on other forms of communication to give feedback based on file name, or sometimes the vague “I like the 8th one, let’s go with that,” that then requires the producer to match file-names to files on the server. Adding another step to the mix, the producer then has to ensure that they’re sending high-res TIFF, PSD, or EIP files to the retouchers, and not the low-res copies sent for approval. This is also assuming that all necessary parties send feedback through the same channels. More likely the producer will be inundated with feedback received through Slack, Hangouts, email, text, or conversation, increasing the chance of miscommunication and mistakes during the post-production process.  Media & Entertainment Talent Approvals  When working with celebrities there may be contractual “Approve/Kill” requirements. Actor A may have the right to kill 50% of the final options for show and movie promos, while Actor B may only get to approve 25%. This imagery is often leak worthy or containing spoilers which requires increased security that traditional methods cannot maintain.  Meeting these contractual and security requirements is a significant challenge for M&E productions. Finding platforms that can allow actors to make their approvals/kills while in transit or working on other jobs is challenging but vital for timely production.  How does Globaledit Help? Globaledit allows production teams to go to the files instead of the other way around. After an initial upload into the platform, users and teams can be assigned to specific jobs. Final-options can then be separated and shared with the necessary stake-holders. Because Globaledit renders a low-res JPEG proxy, anyone can quickly view and edit assets on any device with an internet or cellular connection and the Globaledit app. Users can comment directly on individual assets or whole collections and can even use @-mentions to notify specific users. These comments are saved and time-stamped so there is a cohesive record of who-said-what and when they said it.  With our “derivatives” feature, PSD, EIP, and JPEG files can be paperclipped together, allowing seamless file delivery without searching through file-specific folders. Furthermore, custom workflows can be built so that images are moved into a “Ready for Retouching” folder as soon as the necessary approval has been made, so retouchers can start working right away without back-and-forth communication.  For Media & Entertainment, approval galleries through Globaledit allow each talent-user to be assigned a Kill/Approve percentage. Further security options allow automatic watermarking with company name, or for increased security, with an individual’s user name to discourage leaks. Because Globaledit is cloud-based, talent can complete approvals/kills while in transit with nothing more than their phones.  The modern editing process has many bottlenecks. Globaledit works with our clients through dedicated account managers and a digital-experience solutions team to remove technological hurdles. We help our clients focus on finding the best assets and avoid spending hours on file management. That’ll do it for this week’s edition of After The Shoot, stay tuned next week when we discuss the challenges associated with the retouching markup process. To learn more about how Globaledit can accelerate your creative production message us here.  

    By Luke Schneider, Business Development at Globaledit You did it, you’ve just finished that big production you’ve been working on for weeks! The talent, the crew, the gear, everything went according to plan and you’re about to start the post-production process. How do you take terabytes of raw assets, likely thousands of images or hundreds of video files, and get them culled down, organized, cropped, retouched, approved, and distributed across all channels?  Before joining the team here at Globaledit, I worked as a photographer, retoucher, photo editor, and digital tech with some of the most successful global apparel and home brands. Working in high-end, high-volume production has given me a unique look into this process at scale and over the next four weeks I’ll lead you through industry standards and best-practices to help you streamline post-production for your next photo or video production. Files, Files, and More Files Let’s start with the basics. At the end of most productions, you’ll likely have hundreds of gigabytes of files, if not multiple terabytes. Digital Imaging Technicians (DTs) will be backing up the raw files and the CaptureOne sessions containing image ratings and notes made on set throughout the day, and, if you covered your bases, you now have two identical hard drives containing everything, from lighting tests, to silly gray-card frames, to actual content.  Depending on your workflow, DTs may have processed out low-res JPEGs for contact sheets and other file types such as PSDs or TIFFs from a rough-edit made on set so retouchers can get working as soon as the finals are approved. Additionally, for location jobs or companies not headquartered in New York City or Los Angeles but shooting content through production houses in these cities, shipping physical hard drives may be necessary.  This introduces a significant security risk should the drives be lost or damaged. After all, the contents of those drives cost five, six, or sometimes more than seven-figures to create.  Next, these files need to be moved to a secure location where they can be accessed by the producer, art director, retouchers, creative director, and other stakeholders higher up in the marketing department. Depending on how fast your on-set hard drives are (pretty slow if they’re the standard rugged USB spinning hard drives) it could take hours to get all of the assets onto a server and downloaded to each local machine, which leads to your first liability – duplicate images. To further complicate things, different people need different types of files, Art Directors can make selects and notes using low-res JPEGs, but retouchers will need either RAW, EIP, TIFF, or PSD files depending on your workflow. This could mean additional manual processing time on another machine, which means additional places to copy everything.  If you think this is starting to get complicated, you’re right. Keeping track of what files are on which drives and who possesses those drives is a difficult and time-intensive part of managing a studio. In today’s global world, it’s likely that photographers, art directors, and retouchers may not all be in the same studio, city, or even country while working on a project. We will touch on the difficulties this presents in our next article covering the Editing Process, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s not a huge time-suck to get all the files onto everyone’s computers, and that sharing final-selects is quick and easy (which I can assure you, it often is not).    How does Creative Production keep up in the age of Cloud Storage? With faster internet connections and the development of 4G and 5G wireless, more tools are being developed that allow users to bring themselves to their content, rather than the other way around. Services like WeTransfer, Dropbox, and Google Photos allow relatively quick consumer solutions, but while these may suffice for sharing JPEG files from small freelance jobs or managing personal storage, they cannot keep up with the volume, speed, data, and security requirements of large-scale production.  If you’ve ever tried to move and store thousands of RAW files on these platforms, you likely found that you had to wait multiple days for the files to upload and be accessible from another machine. What’s worse: these files aren’t even viewable. Because of this, you’ll need to have a separate folder with JPEGs to utilize the cloud-based viewing features of these platforms, or you will need to download the files locally to review using Bridge, CaptureOne, or similar RAW capable software.  Additionally, shared folders may have significant security risks. These links can be forwarded to anyone, opening the project up to leaks. On some platforms, non-users may even have the capability of deleting the source files themselves (a terrifying thought considering the time and money that goes into creating content). These transfers may also have hidden expiration dates, potentially causing dead-links towards the end of the post-production process. These potential risks are sometimes found with internal on-premises corporate servers as well.    Where does Globaledit fit in all this? Globaledit was developed for creatives, by creatives. Industrial Color, a photography, video, CGI, retouching, and all around digital creative production house, originally developed Globaledit in 2002 as an internal solution to address the headaches associated with post-capture production. Globaledit provides cloud-based active storage, editing, visual retouching markups, client and talent approvals, metadata enrichment, distribution of projects, and archival storage.  Let’s jump back to the end of the last shoot day we talked about above. In addition to copying a hard drive on-set, that digital tech could set the Globaledit desktop app to watch the CaptureOne output folder. This creates a hot-folder that will automatically upload to our platform. Globaledit supports the upload of folder structures rather than simply uploading archives or buckets of files one folder at a time.  This saves time organizing your assets during the production process. Additionally, Globaledit’s “Uplink” feature allows producers to send a web-link to an upload portal within the platform. Uplink’s allow the rest of the assets on the platform to stay secure, and offers a quick way to receive files from location and freelance teams around the world. Upon upload, Globaledit renders out a low-res JPEG of the source file for quick and easy viewing over the internet.  You can also append or “paperclip” derivative files (high res JPEG, PSD, or RAW files of the same image, see all supported file types here) to prevent clutter. This means that users with access to the project on Globaledit can use their mobile phones or tablets without the need for strong WiFi connections to view, comment, select, approve, and markup the files. Admin users can determine which users can view, move, download, upload, and delete which assets, and can even apply watermarks for certain users (think freelancers that need access to leak-worthy assets) to keep the files far more secure than most servers and cloud-storage solutions. Globaledit also has a dedicated solutions architecture and implementation team to assess, train, and set up best practices, along with dedicated Account Managers who are available to help our clients far past technical troubleshooting and FAQs. Wrapping a creative production should be a great feeling, however, like with many things in the production industry, there is no standard for how to handle what takes place after the lights and cameras have been put away. We’ve discussed the difficulty of moving terabytes of files to ensure that they’re accessible by the necessary parties, organized so time isn’t wasted, and safe so the company doesn’t face unnecessary risk. Over the next few weeks I will discuss the editing and approval process, retouching markups, and distribution, security, and metadata and how Globaledit can help alleviate some of the common hang-ups and headaches that all creative producers face. To learn more about how Globaledit can accelerate your creative production message us here.  

A recent Glossy article with the headline “Fashion Brands Are Using Customization” points to the industry’s growing trend of personalized products and, subsequently, the need for the production of more creative content. Fashion brands are shaping their identity around designing pieces tailored to fit their customer’s personal style and image. Glossy article “Fashion Brands Are Using Customization” notes, “More fashion brands are following the beauty market’s lead by introducing product customization options that make each purchase feel tailor-made.” For instance, Bite Beauty’s philosophy is based on the concept of bespoke beauty. The Bite Lip Lab allows customers to discover “their own signature, unique lipstick.” At the Bite Lip Lab, customers are able to find their perfect shade on the spot by selecting their shade, texture, finish, and flavor. Bite Beauty is one of many cosmetic brands to harness the power of the customization. The burgeoning fad for customization in the fashion and cosmetics industry is driven in part by a consumer-first marketing strategy, technology, and consumer behavior data. While personalized products and a customized consumer experience seems contemporary, these marketing and production strategies are not rooted in the digital age of the 21st Century. Forbes article “The New Size is Custom: How Retailers are Using Personalization to Win Consumer Loyalty” explains that customization isn’t unprecedented; Shamil Hargovan, CEO custom-fit footwear company Wiivv, says “Clothing and shoes used to be individually made for their users, by cobblers or tailors and dressmakers. When mass production hit, that’s when customization was lost.” Ironically, the hype for personalization of garments can be traced back to design approaches founded by the House of Worth in the 19th Century. The ability to meet the demand for personalized products is not simple in a world of fast fashion and mass production. “People expect their favorite brands, products and apps to be smart and on-demand, so they can live better, easier lives. This is what custom-fit products are all about,” says Shamil Hargovan. Whereas bespoke tailoring in past centuries had the luxury of time, the modern trend of custom-fit products must meet the requirements of mass production and on-demand delivery. Moore in her recent Glossy article expounds on the challenges: “Fashion brands offering custom orders have to find a way to integrate one-off orders into their supply chain management and logistics workflows, all while considering its impact on production time and delivery as it relates to the overall customer experience.” The option for customized orders also generates the need for the production of more creative content across the brands’ website and social media platforms. All birds, a company designing environmentally friendly footwear, offers the same style of shoe in multiple colors to fit their customer’s personal style. The look in multiple colors requires more visual assets to be created for the customer to visualize how the shoe looks in that particular color. Louis Vuitton’s launch of the “Personalization Collection for Women” and “Mon Monogram Collection for Women” calls for more creative content, with additional visuals of how the purse would appear in 34-plus colors for both exterior and interior lining along with the placement of the monogram. With the growing trend of customization and the need for more creative content, the importance and structure of creative operations continues to grow. Creative operations must be able to produce more visual assets for custom products seamlessly and deliver them in a timely manner. The need to improve workflows for efficiency and acceleration is vital to generate vast amounts of creative content showcasing personalization. Learn more about how your brand can stay competitive with customization and the efficient production of visual assets.

Blackrock purchases 30% stake in Authentic Brands Group, highlighting the importance of diversification within the consumer retail & fashion space. Authentic Brands owns a wide range of Fashion, Sportswear, Shoes, Media, and Celebrity brands including our client Misook. Read more about our customer success stories here or chat with us now.

Direct-to-Consumer brands are using Instagram, Facebook, and similar online platforms to determine which content resonates with their customers Through small digital campaigns, they’re able to determine which fits, colors and photo styles convert best without having to commit to huge print campaigns. This data then allows them to tailor their bigger advertising campaigns, as they already know what their customers like to see. Metadata plays a significant role in gleaning consumers’ insight, demand, and trends. Globaledit equips brands like Uniqlo and Showtime with robust metadata and search functionality for creative visuals assets. Click here to get in touch with us today.

Online fashion giants are beefing up their tech, using AI and deep learning to help consumers quickly find what they’re looking for. The deep learning of metadata, an automated search functionality that provides data which gives information about other data, helps consumers in their search to stumble upon an item they did not even know existed, but that is highly relevant to their needs and wants. Metadata, in particular, product metadata, is crucial in propelling fashion companies’ AI strategies. In fact, AI strategies would not be possible without product metadata, and it is the creative teams that are the ones best suited to capture and drive the influence of this information during production and post-production. There is a ton of first-hand knowledge that only creatives have access to that,  if applied, can empower marketers to showcasing highly relevant and accurate product suggestions to the right customers. Globaledit supports all standard metadata formats and can build custom schemas to fit your business needs. Feel free to message us to hear more about Globaledit’s capabilities.    

Steve Madden adds to its direct-to-consumer portfolio with recent acquisitions of GREATS and BB Dakota, Inc. The acquisitions extend Steve Madden’s focus on athleisure, in turn widening its men’s footwear reach. Steven Madden’s broadening of their horizon with athleisure grants access to capital and infrastructure to advance their growth. With Steve Madden’s move into athleisure, they will need to generate more photo and video content to deploy across a variety of marketing channels. Acquisitions and growth into new areas, such as athleisure, urge brands to create more creative visual assets for marketing purposes. Globaledit’s robust metadata capabilities allow brands to easily organize and enrich legacy photo and video content. All visual assets are stored in a cloud-based centralized location in order to glean the most marketing value out of all content. Contact us today about how you can speed up the production of creative visual assets for a solid go-to-market gameplan.    

A McKinsey article “The Need for Speed: Capturing Today’s Fashion Consumer” shows that high-volume retailers are searching for products to execute the insights they derive from data. Long lead times to-market are being optimized to keep up with the evolving “see it-buy it” consumer behavior. Becoming agile for these express cycles require the streamlining of the creative workflow. Globaledit allows for a quicker to-market funnel by connecting teams in their upload, edit, retouch & distribute processes. Contact us about you can speed-up your creative workflow today.

Globaledit is now empowering users to have more control over the lightbox sharing functionality with guest users. The new update tightly implements enterprise-level control.  With this recent update to globaledit, you now have the ability to password protect lightboxes shared with guest users. With recent updates to the lightbox-sharing feature, an account administrator will have the choice and power to enable or disable Guest User Login passwords. View the below screenshots to learn more about how to leverage password protected lightboxes:  Invitation to Shared Lightbox:  Registered to View Lightbox: Confirmation Email Sent: Creation of Guest User Account:     Set Up Your Password:  Login to View Lightbox:

A recent Glossy article with the headline “Fashion Brands Are Using Customization” points to the industry’s growing trend of personalized products and, subsequently, the need for the production of more creative content. Fashion brands are shaping their identity around designing pieces tailored to fit their customer’s personal style and image. Glossy article “Fashion Brands Are Using Customization” notes, “More fashion brands are following the beauty market’s lead by introducing product customization options that make each purchase feel tailor-made.” For instance, Bite Beauty’s philosophy is based on the concept of bespoke beauty. The Bite Lip Lab allows customers to discover “their own signature, unique lipstick.”  At the Bite Lip Lab, customers are able to find their perfect shade on the spot by selecting their shade, texture, finish, and flavor. Bite Beauty is one of many cosmetic brands to harness the power of the customization. The burgeoning fad for customization in the fashion and cosmetics industry is driven in part by a consumer-first marketing strategy, technology, and consumer behavior data. While personalized products and a customized consumer experience seems contemporary, these marketing and production strategies are not rooted in the digital age of the 21st Century. Forbes article “The New Size is Custom: How Retailers are Using Personalization to Win Consumer Loyalty”  explains that customization isn’t unprecedented; Shamil Hargovan, CEO custom-fit footwear company Wiivv, says “Clothing and shoes used to be individually made for their users, by cobblers or tailors and dressmakers. When mass production hit, that’s when customization was lost.” Ironically, the hype for personalization of garments can be traced back to design approaches founded by the House of Worth in the 19th Century.   The ability to meet the demand for personalized products is not simple in a world of fast fashion and mass production. “People expect their favorite brands, products and apps to be smart and on-demand, so they can live better, easier lives. This is what custom-fit products are all about,” says Shamil Hargovan. Whereas bespoke tailoring in past centuries had the luxury of time, the modern trend of custom-fit products must meet the requirements of mass production and on-demand delivery. Moore in her recent Glossy article expounds on the challenges: “Fashion brands offering custom orders have to find a way to integrate one-off orders into their supply chain management and logistics workflows, all while considering its impact on production time and delivery as it relates to the overall customer experience.” The option for customized orders also generates the need for the production of more creative content across the brands’ website and social media platforms. All birds, a company designing environmentally friendly footwear, offers the same style of shoe in multiple colors to fit their customer’s personal style. The look in multiple colors requires more visual assets to be created for the customer to visualize how the shoe looks in that particular color. Louis Vuitton’s launch of the “Personalization Collection for Women” and “Mon Monogram Collection for Women” calls for more creative content, with additional visuals of how the purse would appear in 34-plus colors for both exterior and interior lining along with the placement of the monogram. With the growing trend of customization and the need for more creative content, the importance and structure of creative operations continues to grow. Creative operations must be able to produce more visual assets for custom products seamlessly and deliver them in a timely manner. The need to improve workflows for efficiency and acceleration is vital to generate vast amounts of creative content showcasing personalization. Learn more about how your brand can stay competitive with customization and the efficient production of visual assets.  

Many brands are attempting to publish more creative content to meet marketing demands through in-house agencies. An ANA study finds, “Nearly 80 percent of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) members have some form of in-house agency.” ANA CEO Bob Liodice has noted, “Traditional agencies are becoming increasingly challenged as marketers move more work in-house while encouraging their external agencies to provide differentiated services and increased value.” While there is a dramatic shift away from traditional agencies, in-house agencies are facing challenges, particularly within the context of the fast-paced, complex marketing strategies of today. McAteer points out, “The biggest challenges for in-house agencies are related to managing growth. Specifically, the two top challenges are managing workflow (increased projects) and efficiently managing resources.” Traditional agencies should take note of the in-house agencies’ weaknesses and play them to their advantage. Forbes article “As In-House Agencies Become the Norm, The Opportunities For Outside Agencies Evolve” recognizes the new possibilities for traditional agencies, in spite of the recent growth of in-house departments. The article notes that “talent pool, staying abreast of trends, the informality of client relationships, and strategic acumen” are issues in-house agencies face on a daily basis and adds “every one of those are opportunities for individual outside agencies.” Traditional agencies should transform their competitor’s weaknesses into their strengths. If traditional agencies can provide differentiated services and increased value and enhance their efficiency and productivity, they can win the battle against in-house agencies. A creative asset management such as gloabledit can help in-house and traditional agencies manage workflow, increased projects, and efficiently manage resources. Learn more about how your agency can overcome the creative content demands of today and beat the competition, whether you are an in-house or traditional agency.

Meet Today’s Creative Content Challenge Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, the leaders of original content production, intend to maximize their growth of original content production in 2019. Past success with original content only calls for more original content creation.  According to a recent Variety article, Netflix’s CFO David Wells commented, “Let’s continue to add content–it’s working, it’s driving growth.”Growth for these leaders is measured outside of revenue; unique viewership is key. To support attracting more unique viewers across a growing original content collection these studios need to invest heavily in marketing. If media and entertainment leaders want to win the battle for viewers they need to pump out promotional content faster than their competitors and aggressively promote it across all marketing channels. The recent success of Netflix’s Bird Box is proof of the power of early and heavy advertising for new releases. To successfully execute advertisements, leaders must remove obstacles that slow them down when managing unit and gallery photography for key art. Obstacle 1: Inefficient Talent Approvals One of the most crucial parts to releasing key art for marketing and promotional purposes is the talent approval process. It is important for the talent to have their images sent to them in a secure and timely manner. Additionally, it is crucial to have technology that can easily track the amount of killed or approved images made by any given talent. A platform that can create a unique image gallery with precise ratios of approvals and kills efficiently moves the correct visual assets into the next step in the asset lifecycle, in turn slashing the production time of promotional content. Obstacle 2: Ineffective Searches for Creative Assets The key to producing promotional content quickly is finding the correct images you need, with specific actors, scenes, movies, etc, and ensuring you have the right to use them for that particular media. Locating the right visual asset for a certain channel and campaign in a mounting pile of images can be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. If metadata is applied to each photo, with technology, searching and finding the right image is a seamless experience. We are just at the beginning of all studios truly reaping the benefit of leveraging metadata to improve processes and enhance the security of visual assets. Obstacle 3: Disconnected Collaboration Creating high-quality primary artwork used across all ads and promotions for a motion picture can be a tedious process when lacking a creative workflow process. Many details from the font of the title to the portrayal of the actors must be determined and approved by various key players. Without a creative collaboration management system, conflicting opinions on visual designs, fonts, scenes, actors, etc. can lengthen production time, or cause an entire advertising campaign to be canceled because timely release deadlines cannot be met. Bring a Technology Focus to Drive Growth With an effective creative workflow management system in place, media and entertainment studios can outshine their competitors and win over viewers. Learn more about how a creative asset management system can enhance efficiency and drive growth for media and entertainment brands.  

A Creative Asset Management platform (CAM) accelerates and enhances visual assets that will be leveraged downstream in marketing efforts. The markup and review functionality allows for markups and comments to be made on the individual images for the retouchers. Approved assets can then be sent to the retoucher securely with specific asset rights, controlling the ability to download the content and how long it is available.  Without a CAM, such as globaledit, retouching the wrong assets or having unapproved images released to market might become an all-too-familiar scenario. Enhanced efficiency upstream in the creative process greatly impacts the asset value downstream when used by marketing teams. Product metadata is critical to marketing teams executing high-level marketing strategies such as omnichannel marketing, multi-channel, or AI customer experience strategies. In fact, the real driver behind successful AI strategy is the creative team capturing and driving the influence of product metadata during production and post-production. Likewise, for an omnichannel approach, product metadata captured during the production phase is vital to searching and locating specific visual asset for the appropriate channel in an efficient manner.   Metadata historically has been considered a time-consuming, tedious process that is the domain of an administrative librarian. With a CAM, metadata is ingested from other systems, reducing the risk of manual error and enhancing efficiency. A CAM allows for asset ingestion and metadata extraction and enrichment to be an unobtrusive part of the creative workflow. Automation of tasks such as cataloging assets and transformations for specific applications allow for increased productivity.   If you do not have a Creative Asset Management System in place, you run the risk of having poor product metadata or no metadata, making advanced marketing strategies such as omnichannel marketing, multi-channel marketing, or AI near impossible. Additionally, without a CAM, retouching the wrong assets or having unapproved images leak into the market may become a commonplace issue. When disregarding the importance of accuracy and efficiency downstream in the creative process, the visual assets upstream when used by marketing teams are greatly at risk. Remember C comes before D. To avoid inaccuracy and inefficiency throughout the lifestyle of visual assets, see how creatives like yourself, are getting to know CAM. Discover  CAM   SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave

Meet Today’s Creative Content Challenge The demand for visual content across all industries is putting a spotlight on creative teams to bear the brunt of supply and demand. Creative content production is increasing as CMOs realize the importance of investing in strategies such as omnichannel and multichannel marketing, visual commerce/shoppable social, and AI customer experience. These strategies call for a vast amount of highly optimized creative content to be produced under a tight turnaround. Technology is key to successfully executing visual content strategies. When it comes to searching for product photo production technology a DAM or Digital Asset Management software may populate in your search results. Although, a Digital Asset Management is about the final approved assets along with usage rights amongst other permissions it should never be confused or substituted with a Creative Asset Management (CAM). A CAM is a creative management workflow platform designed for the processes and workflows of creative and production teams. It’s simple, C comes before D; CAM is necessary at the beginning of a creative asset lifecycle when there is a massive volume of content. In addition to being critical at the start of creative production, a Creative Asset Management can also be used throughout the entire processes and workflows for creative and production teams. The volume of content at the start of an asset lifecycle is vastly different from the amount of content that ends up in a Digital Asset Management. Digital Asset Management technology companies report that their customers store around 39,000 assets in their Digital Asset Management platform. With a Creative Asset Management platform (CAM), the average customer can upload 1M+ visual assets; 39% of the assets stored in a Digital Asset Management on average. It is necessary to have technology specifically designed to manage the volume and processes related to photo and video production at the beginning of the creative process to arrive at your end goal of finalizing creative content faster. Efficiency and effectiveness at the start of the asset lifestyle are critical to deploying highly optimized content across multiple channels and marketing strategies. A CAM will create the efficiency and effectiveness you need.  Get Started with a  CAM. P.S. Stay in tune for our next post to learn exactly how a CAM creates efficiency and accuracy throughout the photo production process.  Learn more about our products here: globaledit Launches New Digital Asset Management Platform to Help Creative & Marketing Teams Accelerate Creative Production or DAM or WIP?

  A Key Metric In Today’s Photo Production ‘Time-to-site’ is becoming an increasingly throttled target within eComm photo and video production. Brands need content to be produced and published faster and faster, without compromise of quality in order to stay ahead of the buying patterns of a fickle consumer base. In a recent Glossy article, Fabletics Co-CEO Adam Goldenberg emphasized, “Speed is key to the next phase of growth as Fabletics looks to minimize its production window from a nine- to 12-week cycle down to a six- to eight-week cycle by early next year. A lot relies on newness, since customers come back each month and decide if they want to buy something or not.”   As reducing time-to-site becomes cemented in a top-down corporate strategy, creative teams must find ways to accelerate their visual production, hunting efficiencies and effective processes along the way. Here are two recommended strategies. Efficiency: Remove manual, time-consuming tasks in favor of automation whenever possible We’ve been there…production days on-set can feel like they stretch on forever – all you want to do is go home, but you still have to format, backup, and distribute all of the photos from the day’s shoot so that your team members can see the progress made that day. This distribution is sometimes the most focus-intensive as it represents the presentation of content to stakeholders (including clients and/or upper management). “Did we get everything we needed? Have I sent every required asset?” Fatigue at this stage can increase the potential of human errors which is unacceptable and, most importantly, can be avoided. Get away from manual uploads and file reconciliation. Creative asset management platforms, like globaledit, can tether to capture stations and automatically upload content for access to other stakeholders in synch with your capture process. If you capture products by SKU or ‘look’, make sure your distribution platform is cloud-based, can mirror the folder structure into which you capture, and transfer any ratings or metadata captured on set.  As a result, you don’t have to worry about uploading, sharing, and communicating progress. The moment you capture or process, it gets to the people who need to get their eyes on it, wherever they are. You can now use that time to complete other creative tasks. Effectiveness: Improve collaboration strategies to the language of the medium Disconnected, non-standardized communication through production slows things down and increases liability. Comment-based email or text messaging is probably one of the worst means of providing input to retouchers, yet it is still heavily utilized.  You may have heard the phrase “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture”. The point is to use the nuances of the medium and stay in its space for true effectiveness. In the case of visual imagery, communicate notes visually. Text comments require subjective interpretation and lead to additional rounds of revisions that eat up valuable post-production timelines. Find a creative asset management platform which provides a means of consolidating comments and callouts visually and records all user input over the history of the asset’s lifecyle, so when you look at an image you know exactly what needs to be done, who offered what feedback and when. Visual markups provide crystal clear direction and social media methodology such as ‘@mentions’ allow you to bring user attention to the asset, not the asset to the user. CAM: Creative Asset Management Platforms Hyper-sensitivity of ‘time-to-site’ has incentivized brands’ use and prioritization of  CAM platforms, such as globaledit, to track and accelerate their photo and video production. There are a number of ways through which globaledit removes the manual, disconnected obstacles commonly found in creative production. If time-to-site matters to your brand, we can help. Fill out our contact us form and we’ll be in touch in less than an hour.

Homeless World Cup organizes tournaments for the homeless all around the world. The nonprofit has over 450 locations, reaching 100,000 homeless people every year. Each year, their network of street football partners picks more than 500 players to compete in the annual Homeless World Cup tournament.  In addition to inspiring marginalized people around the world, the Homeless World Cup aims to challenge public’s perceptions of homelessness. Images of the players play a large role in subverting pernicious stereotypes surrounding homelessness.  Volunteer photographers from all around the world work to capture empowering photos of the players. With the many photos streaming in from around the world, the Homeless World Cup realized they needed a platform for organization and an improved workflow. Globaledit’s online photo management software allows photographers from all over the world to upload their photos to one central location from anywhere, anytime. The nonprofit can then access and view all the images quickly after international photographers have uploaded them. For an enhanced organization, each photographer creates and maintains their own folder in globaledit. The advanced folder structure in globaledit permits the nonprofit to have a solid understanding of which images are uploaded by which photographer. Globaledit’s metadata schema further provides the nonprofit with valuable asset information such as the date, players, game, background story etc. The ability to search and find photos related to a specific event, such as a game is now simple. This data gold allows the needle in the haystack to be quickly spotted. With gloabledit, the Homeless World Cup can find the precise images they need to push out on their social channels efficiently. Another feature of globaledit that has impacted the organization’s creative production is the star ratings and approval functionality. Globaledit’s star ratings assists the nonprofit in selecting the best images that convey compelling stories and portray the players in a heroic manner. The nonprofit is then able to send their favorite selects securely via a lightbox to the photographers and players, enhancing the production process. With globaledit’s accelerated photo workflow, the nonprofit is then able to share these compelling images of the players via social media shortly after the game.   If you’re also working with internationally-based or dispersed teams or simply interested in creating efficiencies in your photo production, then let’s talk. Photo Credits: Daniel Lipinski

Nike recently announced that they plan to release new features in their app that will allow consumers to shop the look of mannequins in their stores. Nike’s App at Retail will let shoppers instantly access and shop a “head-to-toe look,” after scanning a QR code at the base of in-store mannequins. For this enriched consumer experience, detailed product information must be associated with photos, so the app can search, retrieve and deliver the right products. It is product information or metadata that informs these recommendation engines to search and find the correct assets. So much of this data gold can be captured during the photo production process. Creative Asset Management (CAM) platforms, such as globaledit, ingest, append, and embed rich product information into the image itself. The entire process of capturing metadata is automated, eliminating manual time-consuming tasks. Those in creative production need to adapt, update workflows, and adopt such technology. Without this technology, countless hours are lost to manually organizing or re-keying that product information in retroactively. This not only creates inefficiency but also makes room for manual error. If brands, like Nike, want to truly deliver unparalleled in-app experiences they need to recognize the value that is being generated in the early stages of an asset’s life-cycle. They must empower their creative teams, via technology, to effectively capture and pass product metadata. If you’re ready to adapt and adopt technology, we should talk.

  A proliferation of research and articles show that the demand for creative content has significantly increased over the years. As a result, traditional approaches to creative content production have shifted. Previously, companies allocated hefty sums of money to taking a few high-quality shots for a single consumer touch point. Now modern-day consumption models call for a vast amount of content production across various digital platforms.    An article in Glossy “How fashion creative is keeping space with production” highlights the demand vs. capacity issue present in the creative production process. It makes evident that brands now face the struggle of depending on a single photoshoot to generate all of the content to cover multiple digital platforms. With this new approach comes new creative challenges. There are more people on set, and each has their own content creation needs based on the channels they support. Photographers and producers, more now than ever, need the proper tools and technology to fuel effective communication and collaboration during production and post-production. Which photos are for what channels? With the increased demand for photography the sheer volume of assets coming out of production has dramatically increased. Searching and finding specific visual assets for specific channels can be a nightmare. But with the proper technology and processes, metadata captured during production empowers you to find that needle in the haystack. Creative asset management platforms, like globaledit, allow you to ingest and append metadata to images, so you can easily filter and find the content you need. For example, you could create a rich metadata schema that includes channel. The ability to locate the precise image for its respective channel slashes time within the production process. Who said that? Online creative workflow management software also meets the challenge of having multiple key players involved in the creative production process. Globaledit’s online collaboration tools accelerate creative teams’ productivity. Powerful tools allow for comments, markups, and ratings to be made on individual assets in real-time. All activity is tracked, ensuring a historical record of team members’ changes and edits. Collaboration also is enhanced with globaledit’s secure, centralized cloud-based library, accessible from anywhere, at any time. One central location of all visual assets allows teams to optimize their workflow speed and efficiency. Investing in creative production platforms that aggregate and optimize metadata at multiple steps in the production process is invaluable to brand managers, producers, and creative directors, who are stuck in the trenches of creating content. Discover how globaledit can streamline your production workflow and overcome the production challenges of today.

By David Iscove, Manager of Solution Architecture and Implementation at globaledit AI isn’t a buzzword anymore, it is a powerful marketing tool that brands like TUMI are implementing to drive personalization and increase online conversions. Deep machine learning and analysis of consumer trends allow brands to process customer data across channels in order to refine targeting, tailor messaging, and offer product recommendations with greater personalization. AI-driven analytics are impacting the customer experience dramatically, but what is the glue that connects a person’s shopping interest or ‘likes’ to the appropriate product or product range? The answer lies within our favorite topic…metadata! For every aspect of consumer trends that AI interprets, it needs organized product data to make the perfect recommendation. In this way, brands actively drive customers to ‘discover’ products instead of passively delivering only the results of a specific customer search. If a brand is not putting effort into optimizing their product metadata, they limit their ability to offer relevant, alternate recommendations and their programs ultimately fall flat based on only servicing a ‘passive’ search. By passive, I mean the results of a direct query by the user. In this way, a search for ‘SKU123’ only returns the result of ‘SKU123’. With relevant product metadata actively fueling consumer algorithms on the backend, a search for ‘SKU123’ can return ‘SKU123’, ‘SKU123a’, ‘SKU123b’, even ‘SKU124’ (if appropriate). More product metadata = more SKUs availability to consumers = more conversions It saddens us that product metadata doesn’t get the same visibility as “cool” new consumer engagement toys labeled under the AI banner. This is partly due to the fact that metadata has historically been considered the domain of the stuffy administrative librarian. The bottom line is that these headline-grabbing AI strategies wouldn’t be possible without product metadata and it is the creative teams that are the ones best suited to capture and drive the influence of this information during production and post production. There is a ton of first-hand knowledge that only creatives have access to that, if applied, can empower marketers to do a lot more than just search and find assets. The creative team is the real driver behind successful AI strategy. In our last masterclass, we dove deep into specific techniques creatives can use to capture rich product-driven metadata for use downstream. The most forward-thinking brands are leveraging this data to analyze how specific creative operations decisions directly drive conversions. In doing so, they learn how to optimize future eCommerce production towards greater efficiency and effectiveness, turning what seemed like a disconnected workflow into valuable data. This is what we call eComm gold. If you’re a creative professional wanting to harness this power, I highly recommend you watch our last masterclass. I dive into some of the specific techniques that you can perform to capture and enrich your workflow with product-driven metadata. It’s time to make the header of the file just as important as the visual payload. I’ll explain that in greater depth in an upcoming blog.

Hey creative community! What will you be doing on May 3rd – 4th? Globaledit will be attending the Henry Stewart DAM event in NYC: the world’s largest conference dedicated to Digital Asset Management and Creative Operations. We think you should join us and here is why… DAM NY 2018 will feature 100+ speakers and 60+ sessions covering topics like Metadata, Integration, AI, Automation, Creative Operations, Corporate Archives, Video Workflow, Rights Management, Semantics, Governance. Want another reason? Co-located at the DAM NY event, on May 3rd, is the Creative Operations. It is a great opportunity to network with your creative community and share best practices. Our very own creative operations guru, David Iscove, is participating in a very exciting panel “What’s in your Creative Ops Toolbox?” If you’re serious about Creative Operations, this is an event that can’t be missed. You will also have a chance to check out a live demo of globaledit, the essential creative collaboration platform, at our booth! See for yourself why brands like Asics, Rent the Runway, boohoo and Warby Parker have made investments in tech to create efficiencies in their photo production processes. Finally, don’t forget to use the code GLOBALEDIT100 to save $100 on your registration! SESSIONS NOT TO MISS: MAY 3rd, 9:40 AM – 10:10 AM – David Iscove’s TechLab   How to sync capture software to embed and deliver custom metadata into your DAM In this TechLab, David Iscove, Solution Architect for globaledit, will show you strategies to collect custom metadata prior to the point of capture in order to embed and deliver valuable product data to downstream users of a DAM. MAY 3rd, 11:20 AM – 12:20 PM – Panel with David Iscove What’s in your Creative Ops Toolbox? A Scenario-Based Approach Co-panelist: Lauren Luscombe, Creative Resource Director, Netspend Moderator: Kevin Brucato, VP, Creative Operations, Prudential The panel will use a scenario-based format to go behind the curtain and explore which tools the panelists identified as must haves for their Creative Ops Toolbox.

By David Iscove, Manager of Solution Architecture and Implementation at globaledit The fast-fashion brand first jumped into AI-driven image recognition to make alternative recommendations to customers who were searching for items which were out of stock. Boohoo.com has since gone through seven months of refinement and have advanced their search technology to allow consumers the ability to upload a picture themselves which identifies similar items in Boohoo’s catalog. The backend of this consumer-facing AI tool depends on deep metadata tagging of each product within their inventory to “match” the images uploaded by consumers. As we can see in this and other B2C models, metadata, now more than ever, is playing an invaluable role in the consumer experience. Product information which is associated with eComm photography makes assets smart and identifiable, fueling innovations like AI-driven visual search, image recognition, machine learning, and online recommendations, such as market trends like “shop the look”. The unfortunate truth is that brands are overlooking opportunities to add this valuable metadata during the production process. This is because the process of capturing this data-gold has traditionally been extremely manual and time consuming. However, with the right tools and technology, metadata enrichment can be automated, seamlessly transferring metadata from capture software to work-in-progress creative tools to asset management platforms, and ultimately into your consumer-facing ecommerce platform. Innovative creative professionals are using globaledit in their photography production process to manage the ingest and enrichment of metadata from capture software platforms like Capture One and Lightroom. Globaledit’s automated enrichment process streamlines productivity, providing creatives the ability to scale to meet the increasing demand for content which is optimized for today’s consumption models. When it comes to creating efficiencies in the creative production process, this is just the tip of the iceberg. See for yourself how globaledit is changing the way modern creative professionals collaborate.

It seems all we hear about today is how Amazon is doing everything in retail perfectly. We’re all trying to find ways to be more like Amazon. But what is it that they’re doing so well? The answer: They have created an exceptional customer experience. But it goes beyond Prime and free returns. Amazon is continually investing in new ways to enhance a customer’s interaction with their brand. As reported in the New York Times, Amazon plans to “(…) pour money into photography to give internet shoppers a better representation of garments (…)”. They know that providing more photos will give people more buying information, improving the customer experience, and as a result increase purchases. To this point, brands spend millions on strategies that are aimed at improving the experience one has with their brand. They test websites, optimize purchase paths and deliver personalized experiences across all channels, but rarely think about how to enhance the process that delivers them the valuable assets that empower these strategies: Photo and video content. Think about this like a supply chain. E-comm teams are requesting more shots per SKU, social teams continually need new and fresh content and email teams require unique images for different customer segments. The demand for photos has never been greater, and creatives are running at capacity. They can incrementally increase production by focusing on people and processes, but without technology, they are at a disadvantage. It has become critical for brands to invest in technology that makes production more efficient, allowing creative teams to deliver more assets while also accelerating the process. The ability to create more, faster, in a scalable and repeatable fashion is a competitive advantage that gets a brand to market more quickly. And with more retail brands going bankrupt, or worse out of business, it has become a business imperative to move faster and improve the customer experience. Brands must invest in technology, for their creatives, to remove the obstacles that slow production down. There are unique roadblocks at each stage of the creative process (upload & ingest, review & approve, distribute & share, search & retrieve) so having a comprehensive work-in-progress solution is essential to making production more effective. This technology automates manual, repetitive and time-consuming tasks that creatives are wasting time on when they could be creating. It provides visibility for all stakeholders into where projects are in the process. Collaboration and communication are optimized by consolidating interactions, notes, comments, and markups. Asset histories deliver valuable information into the who, when and why behind a photo. This level of efficiency keeps visual assets moving through the supply chain, getting them to the internal customer (marketing, e-comm, social, brand, store teams) faster. In turn, the external customer has an improved experience with the brand impacting purchases, loyalty, and LTV. Leading brands, like Theory, Lucky Brand, and Smashbox Cosmetics have invested in such platforms, but not all solutions are created equally. To learn why globaledit is the clear choice to accelerate creative production read our blog, “Built for creatives, by creatives”.

Does your brand’s demand for visual content exceed your production team’s capacity? Does the combination of volume and speed have you looking for better ways to manage post-production workflows? If you are a creative on a daily hunt for answers to these pressing questions, join globaledit at the Digital Assets & Content Leadership Exchange presented by Insight Exchange Network on January 22 – 24, 2018 in New York City as we explore the solutions and challenges faced by the creative ops community today. The event will explore two parts of the creative process: strategy & monetization and implementation & stewardship. Network with us, share experiences and hear stories from industry experts at brands like Revlon Cosmetics, NBCUniversal, Hasbro, Facebook, World Wildlife Fund and many more. Additionally, don’t miss out on two presentations from our thought leaders: January 22, 2018 – 9:10 AM   Mathieu Champigny, CEO at globaledit Today’s digital commerce requires creative production to move faster, and for digital assets to be made smarter. Creative production leaders are now tasked with designing and implementing digital content management solutions with the future in mind, from smart digital assets to the breakthrough of Artificial Intelligence. Mathieu will explore the topics of digital creative asset production challenges, review industry-leading practices and future technologies. January 23, 2018 – 9:35 AM David Iscove, Creative Production Solution Architect at globaledit In today’s fast-paced creative production environments, metadata has more value than ever before, enabling automation to accelerate your time to market and analytics to inform future creative ROI. But unlike the traditional approach to administrative and descriptive metadata where enrichment occurred post asset creation, new sources of relevant data, such as product and sample information, can be captured upstream prior to the creation of an asset to then feed downstream value. David will show you how to identify and capture both this valuable upstream product information and downstream creative feedback to provide more value and automation to your creative assets as they move to market. To learn more about the event, visit the Insight Exchange Network website. Use the discount code GE200 for $200 off this event until 1/22/18  

Top brands, leading organizations, and fast-growing startups are investing in creative operations to scale and fuel growth. That’s why the Henry Stewart Events is hosting their Creative Operations event in Los Angeles, co-located at the Henry Stewart DAM LA 2017. This gathering is a great opportunity for the creative ops community to network with their peers, share experiences and learn best practices from industry experts with frontline experience. Brands like HBO, The Coca-Cola Company, Farfetch, Nickelodeon, and Beachbody will be in attendance. In 2003 globaledit release the very first cloud-based collaboration platform offering essential work-in-progress features to create efficiencies in creative production workflows and processes. We are pioneers on creative operations and this is why we are honored to be participating in several sessions during the Creative Operations Conference in LA on November 14, 2017. We look forward to seeing you at one or all of our sessions. Segmenting hi-res and low-res workflows to accelerate creative production What is in your creative ops toolbox Securing buy-in for investments in creative ops technology For more details visit the Henry Stewart DAM conference website. Use the discount code GLOBALEDIT100 to save $100. REGISTER NOW. Here are the details of our panels: Tuesday, November 14, 10:20-10:50 am PDT   Accelerate Creative Operations: Segmenting Hi-Res and Lo-Res Workflows Segmenting your hi-res and lo-res workflows can accelerate your review and approval, post-production processes, and creative asset delivery. Join David Iscove, Creative Production Solution Architecture & Implementation Manager, to learn real-world techniques and dive deeper into the specifics of creative production. David Iscove is a seasoned professional with 10+ years experiences as a digital archivist, workflow solutions architect and asset manager at companies such as Activision Blizzard, EMI, and Universal Music Group. ************************************ Tuesday, November 14, 2:20-3:40 pm PDT What’s in your Creative Ops Toolbox? An Interactive Session In today’s creative environment, where the stakes are high and the challenges are real, each of us needs our Creative Ops Toolbox to get the work done. Every successful marketing and creative leader has their own key “tools” which help them sort through the complexity that modern-day creative execution demands. Many think of these as their “Swiss army knife for success”. Automated Workflow, Data Analysis, Agile Methodology, and Business Acumen are a few examples of the “tools” that these leaders depend on to be successful. In this interactive panel discussion, we will go behind the curtain and explore which tools these industry professionals have identified as must-haves for their Creative Ops Toolbox. These tools include: Technology for identifying and overcoming pitfalls in your creative process Creative harmony through a balance of technology, process, and business acumen Meaningful reports and dashboards drawn from a set of data A standardized intake process to drive efficiencies in your workflow Agile project management which keeps your processes nimble Real-time content production. What you need in order to keep up. Augmented and Virtual Reality, what’s next on the horizon? Change Management: Embrace the change Moderator: Kevin Brucato, VP, Creative Operations, Prudential Panelists include: Clair Carter-Ginn, Partner, Forecast Carin Forman, Director, Digital Photo Services, Home Box Office, Inc. David Iscove, Manager, Solution Architecture & Implementation, globaledit

Today’s creative production team must produce more photos, faster, with fewer resources. Rising to this challenge entails transforming the creative production process. In this second session of our online masterclass series, we address a radical new vision for photo production, based on the concept of ‘smarter assets’ produced through automated metadata tagging. This masterclass covers: Automating metadata to enable ‘smarter assets’ through multiple platforms in the creative production process How to use ‘smarter assets’ to accelerate creative production Implementation guidelines for a ‘smarter asset’ workflow for high volume photo production WATCH MASTERCLASS > Past & upcoming classes: Segmenting hi-res and low-res workflows Building a best-in-breed creative production tech stack: Understanding the nuance differences between systems The metadata holy grail: Designing a metadata schema for immediate communication and long-term access

When creative professionals are evaluating technology, such as a work-in-progress platform (often also referred to as a collaboration platform), one of the questions they need to ask is, “who developed the product?” Was it someone who had a “great” idea one day, a product manager who did a handful of prospect interviews, or was it someone who would actually use the product himself? Was it someone who was feeling actual pain, and found a way to solve it? While each approach can provide value, there are varying degrees of value that tech can provide. Understanding the history behind who developed your solution, and why, can reveal the differences between a tool that just ‘does the job’ versus a tool that you feel was designed for your exact needs. Globaledit’s creative collaboration platform was developed by creatives for creatives. Our history as the pioneers in creative production explains why we’re the right choice for driving efficiencies that accelerate the creative process. We continually strive to provide acceleration tools to increase the capacity of creative teams, ensuring you never miss a deadline. Our History 1991: Impact Digital founded Founder Steve Kalalian and Janet Mayfield start the company under Impact Digital, a two-person graphic design team. 1996: Impact Digital Retouching and Pre-Press launched Impact Digital specializes in retouching and pre-press for high-end photography and fashion. 2001: Industrial Color founded Industrial Color is established to offer the first digital capture packages in the industry, setting the new standard for digital production. 2002: Acquisition of Fast Ashley Studios Industrial Color expands to operate Fast Ashleys Studios, Brooklyn’s premier full-service photo studio and equipment rental center. 2003: globaledit® launched Industrial Color launches globaledit®, a web-based production workflow platform for creative teams. The SaaS platform provides a simple, powerful tool to streamline the creative process from capture to distribution. 2003: Los Angeles offices Industrial Color opens offices in Los Angeles. 2004: Miami offices Industrial Color expands, opening offices in Miami. 2006: globaledit® development brought in-house Globaledit launches its in-house software development and data center to push workflow innovation and hosted services. 2007: CG Division launched Industrial Color and Impact Digital launch a CG division to offer new creative technology for print and video clients. 2008: Motion capture and post-production Industrial Color launches video capture and post-production services. 2010: globaledit® iOS app As Apple launches the first iPad, globaledit® simultaneously releases its globaledit App for iOS, ushering in the first mobile production workflow platform. 2012: Industrial Color Brands created The brand portfolio is consolidated into a new entity: Industrial Color Brands, a family of integrated creative production services. 2015: Smashbox Studios relaunched Industrial Color Brands partners with Smashbox Cosmetics to renovate and operate the legendary Smashbox Studios in LA. 2016: Acquisition of eBay Studios Industrial Color Brands acquired eBay studios in order to expand services for eCommerce clients. The Tribeca office added two new studios to its footprint and with the acquisition, Industrial Color Brands gained studios in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. So as you can see we’re not simply a technology provider, we are your peer. We’ve been first to market across several areas of creative production and have earned our reputation as pioneers. But while we are creatives, we don’t think we know it all. Our customers, over 4,000 users, have been providing us with feedback about their pain points and challenges which have been the drivers of ongoing innovation. That is the value of globaledit®. Technology for creatives designed and built by creatives.

This year globaledit attended fantastic creative operations conference both on the West and East Coast. One of the main feedback we received is that creative production professionals were yearning for the chance to dive deeper into many topics discussed. As a result, our Masterclass Series was born. We will be putting on a series of online masterclasses led by experts in the field of creative operations. The first session will be: Segmenting hi-res and low-res workflows to accelerate review and approval, post-production processes, and delivery. REGISTER NOW > Upcoming classes: Leveraging metadata to enable ‘smart assets’ through multiple platforms in the creative production process. Building a best-in-breed creative production tech stack: Understanding the nuance differences between systems. The metadata holy grail: Designing a metadata schema for immediate communication and long-term access.  

Creative Operations is in demand. An increasing number of brands and organizations across all sectors are recognizing the importance of “creative operations” – the tools, systems, and methods that maximize the productivity of “creative staff”. That’s why the Henry Stewart Events launched a conference dedicated to Creative Operations, co-located at Digital Asset Management New York. This is a great opportunity for every member of the Creative Operations Community to meet with their peers, share experiences and hear from a leading team of experts with hands-on, frontline experience of the latest thinking, best practices and best-in-class solutions necessary for ensuring end-to-end solutions. We’re creative ops veterans: Since 2003, we’ve been constantly innovating to help our customers – some of the top brands, retailers, media and entertainment companies, and advertising agencies, accelerate creative production. This is why we chose to sponsor the Creative Operations Conference co-located at Henry Stewart DAM Event. This year, we are thrilled to announce that our CEO Steve Kalalian will deliver an insightful talk entitled “Darwinism in Creative Operations” (Thursday, May 11 at 12:35 pm EST). Also, Sandie Roberts, VP of Content & Technology Operations at Rodale, will join us for our TechLab session to discuss how she uses technology to streamline ingestion and optimize content for downstream delivery and usage (Thursday, May 11 at 9:40 am EST). We hope to see you there! Use the discount code GLOBALEDIT100 to save $100. Register now. Here are the details of our panels: Thursday, May 11, 9:40-10:10 am EST Accelerate Creative Operations: Capturing Assets and Metadata Upstream Large-scale creative operations must effectively manage incoming content from multiple sources, teams, and partners. To do this right, brands are leveraging technology: Platforms that are flexible enough to provide multiple options for ingest, yet powerful enough to enforce an organization’s delivery requirements, often in the form of metadata enrichment/validation or file name convention rules. In this session, Sandie Roberts, VP of Content & Technology Operations at Rodale, will discuss how she uses technology to streamline ingestion and optimize content for downstream delivery and usage. Sandie Roberts, VP of Content & Technology Operations, Rodale David Iscove, Creative Operations Specialist, globaledit ************************************ Thursday, May 11, 12:35-12:50 pm EST Darwinism in Creative Operations Creative Operations has changed tremendously over the past 20 years. Those who do not evolve, by inheriting superior traits, will inevitably become extinct. Those who do will prosper from the process of natural selection. Join Steve Kalalian, CEO of Industrial Color Brands, to learn about the single most important evolutionary trait of successful creative groups: acceleration.

By David Iscove, Creative Operations Specialist at globaledit Eric Fulmer of ShotFlow One (Capture Integration) is one of the sharpest minds within the fashion photography industry. I recently read an article he wrote that referenced the massive shift that the fashion industry has undergone in recent years, known as the “Zara Effect”. For those not familiar, Zara has set the benchmark in reducing time to market in that they “can design, produce, and deliver a new garment and put it on display in its stores worldwide in a mere 15 days”. This represents a massive acceleration of previous development cycles which once spanned seasons, then months, weeks, and now days. This is the new race that modern brands must run in order to compete and, ultimately, survive. To compete, brands must transform their overall approach to creative production and identify any gaps that have the potential to force delays. And, as Fulmer states, “(…) there really are only three levers available to pull.” People Process Technology The culture must be willing to analyze their processes and systems objectively.  To be blunt, learn to accelerate your creative production, and, in so doing, reduce your time to market, or die. But proper acceleration has two benchmarks – efficiency and effectiveness. People often confuse them, but they are very different. Efficiency is about speed, while effectiveness is about quality. If you accelerate, yet produce low quality visual assets you have not improved your creative production process. How To Create Efficiency And Effectiveness With Technology At present, moving to a cloud-based creative production collaboration platform is the most impactful way to drive both efficiency and effectiveness. It creates an accessible “single source of truth”, for all of your visual assets. But cloud access and redundancy is just the starting point. In-app collaboration tools such as markups, commenting, or @mentions to other stakeholders are essential in reducing  friction by allowing all communication to occur  directly within the same interface used for file access and sharing. And this collaboration strategy must be mobile to respond to the world we live in so that collaboration can happen from anywhere and on any device. Each connected system must inherit any input previously made on an asset, picking up and displaying metadata or ratings made on other systems. This ‘linking’ of asset inheritance provides full business continuity and, picking up on another concept from Fulmer, makes those assets “smart”, whereby they can inform their own process in the creative production process. And during the review process a platform should drive efficiency with fast previews, regardless of the file size or format. This is a key differentiator in the effectiveness between a visual asset management platform and simple online storage.  You should be able to view those images in whatever visually appealing layout you require – one at a time with deep zoom, full screen, contact sheet, list or side-by-side comparison. And as you add markups, annotations and comments the history of that asset becomes compiled, searchable, and forever accessible, providing visibility into the production lifecycle of each image. Technology that provides these guidelines will not only improve a team’s overall efficiency, but ensure the organization’s effectiveness in going from concept to market. Let’s Dive Even Deeper Creative production and operations have forever changed due to the “Zara Effect”. That is why I am very excited to attend the first Creative Operations Exchange in San Francisco on April 10-11, 2017. I will be monitoring a panel discussion “Workflow solutions – Find the tool to boost your team’s creative process!” I hope you’ll register so we can meet face to face to dive even deeper into how technology can accelerate your creative production.

The first West Coast conference dedicated to Creative Operations is happening in San Francisco on April 10-11. This is a great opportunity for you and 200 of your peers to convene, learn, and share experiences with each other. You will learn from seasoned experts at leading brands, including Calvin Klein, Google, Amazon, Lonely Planet, Michael Kors, Oakley, Wieden & Kennedy, and many more. Since 2003, we’ve been accelerating studio production for our customers, some of the top retailers and media and entertainment companies, and we saw this event as a great opportunity to connect with the growing creative operations community. This is why we chose to sponsor it and participate in two panel discussions. Here are the details of our panels: Tuesday, April 11, 1:15-2:00PM Workflow solution – Find the tool to boost your team’s creative process!   Moderator: David Iscove, Creative Operations Specialist at globaledit Panelists: Molly Gallagher, Creative Services, Creative Operations, Consultant Yasaman Golban, Creative Operations Manager, Firewood Marketing – Google Inc. Jennifer Pentes, Senior Director, Client and Creative Services at Lonely Planet —————- Tuesday, April 11, 2:00-3:00PM Online Proofing, Review and Approval Tools Panelists: Dickson Bueno, Director of Creative Operations – Americas, HH Global Patti Fox, Creative Project Manager, Scout Steve Kalalian, CEO of Globaledit Shannon Leighton, Senior Project Manager, Global Prairie We hope to see you there! For more information on The Creative Operations Exchange 2017, visit: http://www.insightxnetwork.com/creative-operations-exchange-2017.html

On Thursday, January 26th, globaledit and Industrial Color Brands teamed up for the first 2017 Creative Operations Breakfast with Communication Arts to highlight new trends in Photography & Advertising. We were delighted to welcome Patrick Coyne, editor and designer of Communication Arts magazine. Communication Arts (CA) magazine has been the benchmark for creative excellence for nearly six decades, even as so many competitors have fallen by the wayside. One vital component of that excellence has been the magazine’s long-running annual competitions, which are judged by some of the industry’s top creative professionals. Coyne outlined the philosophy and mission guiding CA, and presented examples of the latest trends in advertising and photography, along with anecdotes and insights on how the jurors are chosen for their famed annual competitions. Coyne described the jury selection process at CA and how they select the winners. “It’s a fun and fascinating process, just to see what [the jurors] pick and how they narrow it down…” He also illustrated the types of trends they see when reviewing submissions. “Something [we see] especially in photography but also in illustration is how quickly visual trends show up.” Watched the video recording: The Creative Operations Breakfast series brings together creative leaders to address key issues and challenges faced by creative production and operations professionals today.

More, More, More In today’s eComm world, it’s not just about the brand’s own site anymore. With the rapid rise of alternative online channels for content (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.), retailers face increasing pressure to engage with both customers and prospects in new ways.   For consumers, following brands on social media is a great way to stay current with the latest trends, sales and news.  For retailers, the challenge is to craft a presence that draws those consumers in. Of course, there has to be content to support it, and with that comes the need for more from these brands: More channels to support, more content to produce, and more efficient processes. The question is: How can they achieve this without blowing up their budget, derailing their current system and watering down their brand? Fashion is Getting Faster The idea of Fast Fashion is also something that the eComm industry has been abuzz about for some time now. With the rise in opportunistic product buys to keep up with ever-changing fashion trends, retailers are finding that the production timeframe is getting shorter and shorter. What used to be a 6- to 9-month lifecycle several years ago has now turned into 12 to 8 weeks. Brands are now feeling the pressure to produce more content in a shorter period of time to remain relevant. So what does this all mean for retailers and their content creators? Well, for one thing, lots of last-minute, “squeezed-in” campaigns and shoots to promote various trends across various channels. This leads to quicker turnaround times, which inevitably calls for a workflow process that’s as streamlined as possible to ensure that clients are getting exactly what they need, right when they need it. How to Succeed in eCommerce Creative Production Here’s the thing: Trends will come and go faster than you can say “I have to have that new [insert latest style here],” but as long as your workflow process can handle it, you should have no problem navigating the ever-changing eComm landscape. Studios and content providers are constantly partnering up with production solutions to organize their photo and video assets and decrease turnaround time. Globaledit even has a mobile app that lets you review and approve content during that train ride home, making the most of your over-scheduled day. Combining strengths helps you serve your clients better, providing solid results and a positive outcome in the long run. It’s important to take a disciplined approach and map out your workflow from start to finish. This allows you to find ways to standardize key aspects of the process, such as naming conventions. Are your conventions flexible enough to be able to accommodate projects of various scopes and scales? Are you prepared to handle a last-minute request without having to resort to a manual approach? In short, can you keep up? Asking questions like this and planning out your methods in advance makes it much easier to take on pretty much anything thrown your way, avoiding a never-ending series of fire drills that waste time and suck the life out of your staff. This allows you to offer clients and/or other departments an end-to-end, automated solution to help organize their content in a usable way, which, in turn, lets them utilize said content across all different types of channels faster and more efficiently.   When it comes down to it, the better prepared you are before the requests come in, the higher the chances of seamless production, minimal disruption to your workflow and — of course — satisfied, happy clients. Check out our Ramping Up Your eCommerce Production Workflow webinar with Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Studio Services at Industrial Color Studios.

Building the Case for a New Workflow Solution Drive Transformation in your Organization Featuring Molly Gallagher, Consultant, Former VP of Marketing, Creative Services and Operations at Kenneth Cole Productions. WATCH THE WEBINAR Congratulations! You’ve identified new workflow solutions to make your creative services team more productive and deliver more content more economically. Now what? How do you convey the message that with the right tools the cost center can be transformed into a revenue engine? How do you get the resources? How do you get C-level sign off? And once the budget is in place, how do you roll it out and get broad-scale adoption? In this webinar, Molly Gallagher, Consultant, Former VP of Marketing, Creative Services and Operations at Kenneth Cole Productions, will offer strategies, tactics and tips to build the business case for a new workflow solution. That’s the best way to drive innovation and transformation, and reap the benefits accordingly. Watch this FREE webinar and learn how to: Identify the right timeframe to implement a new technology solution Communicate the need–and the enhancements possible–to decision makers Understand the potential disconnect between system users and C-level executives Develop successful strategies for rollout / adoption FEATURED SPEAKER Molly Gallagher is an accomplished executive-level creative marketer with over 15 years of industry related experience. Molly has an outstanding record of achievement in creating efficiencies and a proven track record of establishing and developing fully integrated processes, teams, systems, and calendars in order to deliver a cohesive 360 brand experience. As VP, Marketing Creative Services and Operations for Kenneth Cole Productions, she was responsible for implementing an effective department workflow. At David Yurman luxury jewelry, Molly helped to establish a creative infrastructure as well as processes and calendars upon the company’s split from its longtime creative agency. She began her career in magazine publishing at Conde Nast as a photo shoot producer for celebrity and fashion photo shoots spanning the globe. Globaledit is a cloud-based platform that empowers creative professionals to manage visual production at scale. Globaledit is part of Industrial Color Brands.  

Globaledit released a new webinar in partnership with Industrial Color Studios. Ramping Up Your eCommerce Production Workflow: How to Better Manage High-Volume Imagery As retail transactions migrate increasingly to the internet, eCommerce image production workflows have become intensely demanding and essential to the profitability of today’s merchants. In this webinar, Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Studio Services at Industrial Color Studios, illuminates the best practices for achieving the ideal high-volume image production workflow at your company. Whether your’e at an eCommerce brand, a traditional retailer, or any company wanting to improve its creative production workflow, don’t miss this special webinar! In this session you will learn: Current State: More is More Workflow Strategies Repurposing Assets Who should register: Creative Directors, Art Directors Directors of eCommerce Studio Managers Anyone interested in improving their eCommerce image production workflow ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER: Jim Zdancewicz (aka “Jim Z”) is Head of Studio Services at Industrial Color Studios, and works out of the Pennsylvania office. Jim brings over 25 years of content production expertise, operational management and creative producing to the to the Industrial Color team. In his previous role at QVC, he led the broadcast graphics, post-production and digital imaging teams. In 2010, eBay Enterprise recruited Jim to help grow their e-commerce studio presence in the fashion industry. Jim assumed responsibility for all creative projects including creative production for eBay Enterprise’s marketing, display, e-mail and affiliate clients. Globaledit is a cloud-based platform that empowers creative professionals to manage visual production at scale. Globaledit is part of Industrial Color Brands. Industrial Color Studios is the latest addition to the Industrial Color Brands family, offering a variety of high-end services that can deliver efficiency and value for your brand’s digital and eCommerce content needs. Learn more about our products here: PIM: The Advantages of Using a Product Information Management System

For six consecutive years, The Boss Group, Cella Consulting & In-Source have teamed up to benchmark the in-house creative community. The 2016 In-house Creative Services Industry Report is full of insights, as always. How are in-house creative services teams becoming more strategic and handling their increased responsibility? What role are existing and emerging technologies playing in this transformation? And how can they be used more effectively? Mai Nozoe from alice + olivia and Brendon Derr from The Boss Group joined us Thursday, September 22 and share their insights and the implications of these for your companies and creative teams. Watch the video recording: The Creative Operations Breakfast series brings together leaders in the creative production and operations community for a casual breakfast. ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS Brendon Derr – VP, Enterprise Solutions, Cella Consulting and The BOSS Group As the VP, Enterprise Solutions, Brendon Derr and his teammates have helped hundreds of Fortune 1000 organizations to optimize their investments in marketing and creative resources. He has helped companies like American Express, Staples, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Chevron, and many others to build, optimize and evolve their in-house agency capabilities. Brendon has been working within the corporate creative environment for more than 15 years. Mai Nozoe – VP, Creative Services, alice + olivia Mai Nozoe joined alice + olivia in 2013 to develop their first in-house creative department. In her role, she oversees all creative branding and global image direction of brand collateral and website. Prior to her current role, Mai served as the first VP of Creative Operations for Moda Operandi where she was responsible for developing their first branding print campaign and global photo studio operations. From 2005-2012, Mai was responsible for developing the first in-house creative department at Michael Kors. Mai holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and International Business from the Stern School of Business at NYU. She is also certified in Digital and Graphic Design from the Parsons School of Design. Globaledit is a cloud-based platform that empowers creative professionals to manage visual production at scale. Globaledit launched the Creative Operations Breakfast in 2015 to address key issues and challenges faced by creative production and operations professionals today.  

As Vice President Enterprise Solutions for BLR Holdings, Brendon Derr and his team have helped hundreds of Fortune 1000 organizations build, optimize and evolve their “in-house creative agency” operations over the past 15 years. In this interview, Brendon shares some industry insights from the sixth and latest survey benchmark for the in-house creative community from Cella/BOSS and In-Source, along with advice on how to best optimize creative resources. You can see Brendon Derr live at our next Creative Ops Breakfast, on September 22nd in New York City. Q. What common and recurring challenges are your clients facing when it comes to creative services? Operational excellence. Justifying the need for, and orchestrating the necessary people, processes and technology/tools needed in today’s creative production environment poses a huge challenge while most creative leaders are already consumed with producing great creative work. The result is many companies struggle to find the time and resources needed to organize their operations so that creative teams can produce their best work in an organized and timely manner, while maintaining the level of efficiency and cost effectiveness that they are counted upon to deliver. Specifically, the sheer variety of work being produced, along with the need to coordinate creative across many channels, has been a great challenge across the industry, particularly in the larger and more complex companies. Q. What one piece of advice do you have for companies that are looking to optimize their investments in marketing and creative resources? Don’t be a creative kingdom builder, be a value creator. The biggest and most common mistake that I’ve seen in-house creative leaders make over the years, often to the point of them losing their jobs, is to go down the road of building an ever-expanding team and pursuing an ever more sexy body of creative work for the company. To be clear, sometimes this truly is the best thing for the company and the creative team. Often though, it may not be the time for this approach, and is instead rooted in the personal aspirations of the creative team. Focus on creating value for the company first, and the kingdom will come. Focus on the kingdom first, and it may be hard for your company to see the value. Q. What do you think is the “Next Big Thing” for creative services? Near term, I see many companies beginning to nail down their big data management and technological capabilities to a level that starts to enable creative teams to develop strategies more targeted to specific segments of their customer base. Longer-term, virtual and augmented reality has the potential to be huge. It may take a few years yet to really take hold, but when these technologies gain traction with the mainstream consumer, look out! Use cases for design and content, and the associated creative skill sets required for production, will cause a talent and technological shift that may prove to be even more transformational than the advent of the web and Mobile. Brendon Derr was a guest speaker at our monthly Creative Ops Breakfast “Next Generation In-House Creative Services: Living up to the Challenge”, on September 22nd, 2016, in New York City. Watch the recording now.

We’ve all been there before. Your company’s creative production workflow process isn’t functioning quite as well as you’d like, but you’re not sure how to fix it without derailing the whole thing. Do you scrap everything and start from scratch? Do you make modifications to each step? Do you just leave it alone and hope for the best? First, don’t panic. The most important thing is to embrace the idea of change. Here are five easy tips to remember as you move toward a smoother and more efficient creative production workflow.  1. Take a Look at Your Creative Team as a Whole In order to make effective changes, it’s important to look at the big picture first, rather than focusing on just one person in (or one part of) the process. To do this, you have to make sure to map out the entire creative production process, step by step, and look for bottlenecks that may cause a domino effect and impact the final outcome. Find out the purpose of each step, who does it, how long it takes, how data is passed between steps and what tools are used. Talk to everyone on the team and make no assumptions! Once you find the bottlenecks, you can zero in on them and begin to figure out ways to make improvements. 2. Staying Agile is Key Agility is crucial when it comes to modifying your workflow. You have to remember that one change isn’t going to be the be-all end-all. Your workflow process is fluid, so be prepared to revisit changes and keep thinking of ways to improve. Implementing retrospectives with your team can also be helpful. This allows you to take a step back after making a change (or several changes) and talk about what worked well and what still needs improvement. Make it a social process and get as much team input as you can. 3. Divide and Conquer Once you have a solid idea of how your workflow, well, flows and where the bottlenecks are, look for ways that you can split large chunks of work into smaller pieces in order to keep things moving swiftly. For example, if you’re dealing with image processing, breaking up groups of 50 images into smaller batches allows your team members to work through them faster, thus getting them down the line at a quicker pace. Or, put one group of team members in charge of fixing one bottleneck while another focuses on improving something else. 4. Keep Your Changes Small You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a positive impact on your workflow. Making smaller, reasonable changes that you can easily accomplish, then evaluating their effectiveness, can create more of an improvement than completely turning the process on its head. For example, fixing one asset transfer step (like the more time-consuming process of burning images to a hard drive that has to be delivered by bicycle courier) could noticeably shorten the total production cycle and create an appetite for more improvements. 5. Make a To-Do List Keeping a running list of potential changes makes it so simple to stay organized. Anytime someone on your team has an idea for a modification, add it to the list so you can prioritize and determine what would help the most when it comes time to revisit your workflow. Organization is vital to ensuring that you’re attacking the right change at the right time. No matter what, remember that your workflow will probably never be 100% perfect, and you should never get to a point where you stop making changes. Tasks and responsibilities are constantly advancing, which means that there’s always going to be room for improvement. Using these tips can make the process as painless as possible for your entire team…which, in turn, leads to less headaches for everyone involved! To learn more about mapping your creative production workflow, watch the webinar recording “Fine-tuning Your Creative Production Workflow” with Senior Product Manager Brian Stuckey.

  Mai Nozoe is the Vice President of Creative Services for alice + olivia, a contemporary women’s lifestyle brand founded by Stacey Bendet in 2002. Mai joined the company in 2013 to develop their first in-house creative team. Her 8-people team handles all creative branding and global image direction including photography, video, art direction, casting, styling, advertising, design, and production of brand collateral and website. Prior to her current role, Mai served as the first Vice President of Creative Operations for Moda Operandi, and developed the first in house creative department at Michael Kors. In this interview, Mai shares her past experience, some of the insights and best practices she learned along the way. You can see her live at our next Creative Ops Breakfast on Thursday, September 22, in our TriBeCa office. Q. You’ve developed the first in-house creative department at Michael Kors and currently at alice + olivia. What recurring challenges have you faced in both jobs? Developing the first in-house teams requires being nimble and adaptable to business needs. Being able to change direction is key, while simultaneously developing a consistent aesthetic that represents the brand so the customer becomes familiar with and identifies with the brand over time. In addition, I have also experienced:   Adapting brands to overseas markets especially in the Middle East and Asia, which have been a consistent challenge and opportunity. The ever-evolving online world, which requires that we adapt and speak to the customer in new ways through different channels but with an omni strategy. The constant need for content in social media, which challenges traditional methods and processes for developing creative.   Q. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for creative teams today? The greatest challenge is the constant need for more content with restricted resources. Creative services and its tie to social media as one of the greatest communication tools will continue to grow, and companies must focus on keeping up with developing the content by providing as many resources as possible in this area. What’s exciting is that there is now a greater need for in-house creative departments than ever. Q. Any tools or applications that are “must-have” or “can’t live without”? With the volume of content that is needed today, it becomes critical to have an organized workflow. In every company I have worked in, I require a creative brief for all projects. Asset management systems and archival systems should be implemented as quickly as possible. Q. What one piece of advice do you have for those just getting started in a creative leader role? It’s important to have thick skin and endurance. The glamour of the job fades quickly. Never get attached to one creative campaign and be ready to tackle the next project with consistent drive and passion. The most successful people put in hard work and are committed to developing a beautiful product. Mai Nozoe was a guest speaker at our monthly Creative Ops Breakfast “Next Generation In-House Creative Services: Living up to the Challenge”, on September 22nd, 2016, in New York City. Watch the recording now.

If you’re looking to transform your company’s creative operations, the single largest impact you can have on your organization’s creative operations productivity is the establishment of a single, centralized (ideally cloud-based) digital asset repository. This one change completely alters the way your team stores, manipulates, collaborates, searches, retrieves, tracks, secures, and shares photos, videos, PDFs and other files.  (Note: many of globaledit’s customers have already taken this step and have made globaledit that digital asset repository.) When you move to a central repository, the first impact your entire organization will notice is the sense of clarity that will emerge. The constant questions and uncertainty about “where the latest version is” and “where those files are” will be gone. A simple browse or search becomes the path to find any and all files – from anywhere and at any time. In this new world everything anyone needs to access is always just a search or a click away. It will make things easier when someone needs to grab the approved final version of an image, when someone needs to quickly browse through every shot taken on an old shoot, or when you need to check the metadata on a certain photo or video. The largest benefit may be in time saved. It will no longer take hours or even days to figure out where a file is, or on what hard drive it was stored. Projects finally move along and deadlines get hit rather than missed. Another potential win is mobility. You can now access years of archives right from your phone or tablet, and send it along to anyone with just a click. This kind of always-at-your-fingertips access to your library transforms the value of your entire photo and video library. Many companies find that the number of mistakes throughout the creative production process drops when a central archive is created. First because it is much easier to find the exact right version of any image when it’s needed. Secondly because many of these platforms offer some form of digital rights management — to enforce important rules or contractual obligations. There are other benefits too: Avoid mistakes, gain universal access, save time, and simplify the life of everyone touching your creative operations. It’s easy to understand why establishing a centralized digital asset repository should be considered your first step towards better productivity.

We get it. Creative production, as fun as it sounds, is inherently granular and complex. It’s not just shooting photos and videos, and bang, you’re done. In reality, someone has to take a picture, some else has to select images on set, along a chain of people who enhance or approve the content. So when our clients come to us for help, we usually recommend that they map their team’s workflow. Without some encouragement, few companies dedicate the time and resources to do this preliminary work. But it could improve their team’s productivity and well-being and the quality of the final deliverables. What are the key benefits of mapping your creative production workflow? Visualize a complex process and spot inefficiencies Depending on the size of your team and on the type and number of deliverables that you’re producing, the end-to-end process can be more or less complex. Taking a snapshot of your creative ops process at an instant, ideally from capture to finish, will help better understand the inefficiencies and spot bottlenecks or patterns in usage. With this map in front of you, inefficiencies, problems, and sometimes solutions suddenly become obvious. It’s a great start to figure out where you want to make changes. Clearly communicate the creative production process to all team members There is a lot to keep in mind: What are the deliverables, who is involved, what are the tools used, setting this shoot up and getting all the assets moving through the pipeline… Mapping helps to document all the relevant facts and communicate with other team members. A documented process is also extremely helpful toward smoothly on boarding new employees or freelancers. Ensure understanding of the creative production process Mapping is a collaborative process. It forces you and everyone on the team to go step-by-step, verbalize what they do, and eventually spot inefficiencies or current miscommunications. By having every team member review the final map, you ensure that everyone is on the same page. Note that a map may be in constant flux and evolution – as you will soon spot the inefficiencies and want to address them. If the process is working and performing well, why not use it as a template for other teams or divisions? Watch the webinar recording “Fine-tuning Your Creative Production Workflow” with Senior Product Manager Brian Stuckey to learn more about mapping your creative production workflow.

We’ve released a commonly requested globaledit feature — adding crop marks to images. The markup tool now allows you to draw constrained rectangles to clearly specify a set aspect ratio. To use the new feature, click on the shape icon in the Markup Editor. Select the shape you want and begin drawing. More tips to: Switch between portrait or landscape drawing: Simply use the mouse to draw a shape that is either taller or wider and the system will draw the appropriate shape. Move a crop mark: Select the pointer tool, click on the rectangle, and drag the shape around to move it. Delete a crop mark: Simply select it and hit the delete key or delete the layer it is on. Enjoy! Rectangular crop marks added to an image in globaledit  

With over 25 million visitors per month and over 175 million users across all platforms, Refinery29 has become the fastest growing media company and today’s go-to place for millennial women looking for daily lifestyle & fashion inspiration. How does Refinery29 creative production team keep up with the increasing needs? For the 6th edition of the globaledit Creative Operations Breakfast, we asked Refinery29 team members Anne Cassard and Michael Ciancio to discuss the unique evolution of the creative production workflow at R29 over the past three high-growth years. Learn more about the behind-the-scenes of Refinery29’s creative production: Globaledit presents the Creative Operations Breakfast Series, a monthly event that addresses key issues and challenges faced by creative production and operations professionals today. ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS Anne Cassard – Senior Project Manager, Refinery29 Anne Cassard’s work at Refinery29 centers on establishment, enactment, and constant improvement of workflow and inter/intra-departmental processes for the Design and larger Creative teams. She also oversees the growth and development of the Design and Creative staff in response to the shifting pursuits and demands of the business. Anne has refined her interest in creative management through her work with R29 over the past three years, having previously gained experience in the businesses of fashion and finance. Michael Ciancio – Creative Director, Refinery29 Michael Ciancio heads up the Design team at Refinery29, overseeing all aspects of design across editorial, events and branded content. He brings diverse experience to the R29 team, joining from Wolff Olins, a leading international brand consultancy, where he helped major clients strategically and creatively change the way they do business. Michael was previously a grant-holder at FABRICA, the Benetton design research center based in Treviso Italy, where he worked alongside a wealth of international creatives, practicing product design and advertising.

Are you attending Henry Stewart DAM NY May 5-6 and its Creative Operations track on May 5? As the largest event focused on Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Creative Operations, it’s your best chance to meet DAM and Creative Ops experts and professionals, and globaledit will be a sponsor of the Creative Operations track. We’ll be on stage and at the exhibition to share insights and best practices to help brands and organizations better manage their creative production workflow and the digital assets that come with them. Plus use our discount code GE100 to save $100. Where can you find us?    1. At the panel discussion at the Creative Operations 2016 track Steve Kalalian, CEO of Globaledit and Industrial Color Brands, will be on stage to share his insights on today’s use of technology for Creative Operations management. Don’t miss his panel discussion! Theme: Creative Ops Technology: Same Destination, Multiple Paths When: Thursday, May 5, 2016, from 11:50AM to 12:50PM Where: New York Hilton Midtown Hotel, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, New York.   2. Exhibition Stop by our booth #12 on the exhibition floor to get a private session with our Creative Ops experts, get a workflow diagnostic, and see how we can help you take control of your creative production. When: May 5-6, 2016, from 9AM to 6PM Where: New York Hilton Midtown Hotel, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, New York. See the full agenda of the Creative Operations 2016 track here. Unable to attend the Henry Stewart DAM event? No worries, you can contact us here with any questions you have.

The digital asset management and creative production industry commonly mistake Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Work In Progress (WIP). People often believe they need a digital asset management (DAM) system when in reality, they’re looking for a Work In Progress system. There is overlap between the two, but also some distinct differences. Below are the key differences that will help make sense of it all and where globaledit fits in among enterprise solution providers. What Is Digital Asset Management (DAM)? Digital Asset Management is the practice of storing, cataloging and handling digital files to make them more findable, reusable and available for distribution and monetization. The term “DAM” is used industry-wide to refer to not only this concept, but also the software system used to manage files. A DAM system provides a centralized asset library for ingesting digital files. These files can be catalogued, searched, retrieved, distributed and archived. The DAM system stores these digital files in a database or on a file system. Metadata attached to each asset is entered at the time of ingest to categorize and make files easier to find and secure. The metadata is typically stored in a database alongside the files. The combination of the digital file and its associated metadata is referred to as a “digital asset”. Users can browse and search the DAM to retrieve the assets they need, as well as download, share or deliver the assets. Benefits of a DAM: Maximize asset reuse and minimize duplicate content production efforts by making your existing assets easily findable Enable teams to share and collaborate on content production Enable distribution and monetization of digital assets Learn the value of your media assets by gathering metrics about usage patterns Globaledit focuses on Work In Progress. But what Is Work In Progress exactly? Work In Progress usually represents the first step of the creative production workflow, right after the photo shoot or the digital asset creation. Work In Progress is the practice of sharing, collaborating and distributing media files including photo, video, audio and collateral documents (pdf, doc, etc.) prior to final delivery. Various groups within an organization generally co-managed WIP systems. They’re typically accessible to internally or external stakeholders in various geographical locations. This phase of the overall creative production process is the most chaotic and requires multiple collaborators to take action simultaneously in order to move that perfect asset along. A WIP system is similar to a DAM in that it can provide a central repository of digital assets. However, unlike typical DAM systems, WIP systems include additional functionality that is specific to team collaboration; such as rating systems, contact sheet generators, communication tools, and fast upload, download and ingest methods for large media files (photos, videos). They also provide vehicles to easily share assets with various stakeholders while managing user permissions. These tools enable an organization to collaborate on assets and manage their creative workflow process in a more streamlined, efficient way.  The results are shorter production times and work that gets to market faster, at less cost. A DAM system doesn’t care so much about getting the asset to market faster, but rather provides a organized repository for your employees to find approved assets later. Benefits of a WIP: Manage visual assets at scale, right after they are created Streamline the review and approval process Centralize all the assets into a single repository Enable teams to easily share and collaborate on assets in real-time and from any device (web, tablet, mobile) Workflow unification across departments, divisions and brands High Speed Distribution to teams, stakeholders and vendors – saves time and money vs. manual distribution methods Cloud-based WIP platform like globaledit appeals to enterprise creative teams because it needs little to no IT intervention. Implementation ramp up time is minimal. The ability to work anywhere, anytime and remain in sync is even more appealing. Globaledit provides easy-to-use and beautiful interface (along with enterprise-level security) to encourage adoption. Of course each company, process and team structure is different. It is important to find the right partners that understand your specific creative production workflow to recommend the best solution. The first step to improving your creative operations process is not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Speak to the “workflow wizards” within your company, as well as your vendors. Globaledit may just be the best egg. Happy hunting! To learn more about the difference between WIP and DAM or the globaledit platform contact us today. Lear more about or products here: Top Reasons to Consider Digital Asset Management and CAM

  Scot Safon, brand consultant and media executive, and former CMO of The Weather Channel, CNN, and TNT, was our Creative Ops Breakfast guest speaker in February 2016. In this short interview, Scot talks about why brands need to be storytellers, and the impact of storytelling on company culture.  

  At our fifth edition of the Creative Ops Breakfast at globaledit HQ on March 24th, 2016, Carrie Roberts, Director of Creative Operations at The Body Shop, and Dan Cohen, VP of Marketing at Republic Records, shared their strategies, tools, and techniques for leading successful creative projects from ideation to delivery. Check out what they had to say: Globaledit presents the Creative Ops Breakfast Series, a monthly event that addresses key issues and challenges faced by creative production and operations professionals today. ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS Carrie Roberts has over 15 years experience leading and executing creative projects for various companies and clients. Before leading the U.S. creative operations team at The Body Shop, Carrie was Director of Creative Services and Head of Production at Exposure America, where she was developing brand campaigns, events and content such as Nike, Converse, Dr. Martens, and Coca Cola. Dan Cohen has over 20 years experience in the music industry, working at various record companies, an independent marketing company and independent distribution company. He recently joined Republic Records (home to Ariana Grande, Lorde, Pearl Jam, The Weeknd, and more) as the Vice President, Marketing. Over the course of his career, he has worked with a wide array of artists including LCD Soundsystem, Gorillaz, Daft Punk, 50 Cent, and Chrissie Hynde, as well as chart topping campaigns for Alabama Shakes, The Decemberists, Five Finger Death Punch, All Time Low and Tyrese.

For our fourth installation of the Creative Ops Breakfast at globaledit HQ on February 25th, 2016, Scot Safon (former EVP/CMO of The Weather Channel, CNN, and TNT) and Christopher Grakal (former VP of Image Management & Technology Strategy at Turner Broadcasting) shared their perspectives on how to maximize the combined power of creative, tech and business teams. > Check out what they had to say: Globaledit presents the Creative Ops Breakfast Series, a monthly event that addresses key issues and challenges faces by creative production and operations professionals today. ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS Scot Safon is a brand consultant and media executive who has served as the Chief Marketing Officer of CNN Worldwide, The Weather Channel, and TNT. He also ran the cable network HLN. He started at NY ad agencies, after getting his MBA from Cornell and his BA from the University of Virginia. Christopher Grakal is the former VP of Image Management & Technology Strategy at Turner Broadcasting. He has strong track record of creating strategy and building technology-forward systems and organizations that maximize the value of content, marketing, PR and sales assets. He’s also a thought leader on how technology is driving consumer experience, advertiser value and creative workflow potential.

What should brands focus on when creating visual content? Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Creative & Content Production for eBay Enterprise, identifies three key principles for creating efficient and relevant visual content for your brand: 1. Define a clear brand message. 2. Determine your key objectives – and measure the results to optimize your creative assets. 3. Pick the channels that expose your brand in the right way, optimize for these channels – and expand from there. Watch Jim Zdancewicz’s full answer:

When getting creative assets out the door becomes too painful, and complaints and frustrations start to pile up, now might be a good time to review your organization’s processes and inefficiencies. Revisiting a workflow is an arduous task that requires months of planning and adjustment. But doing so can bring tremendous value to your organization and business: It increases predictability and reduces variance, it expands your creative team’s capacity and productivity, and ultimately, saves your team frustrations and your company money. Where to start and how to convince the top management of the ultimate return on investment? During our monthly Creative Ops Breakfast on October 22, 2015, three creative operations professionals join us to share their experience and advice on how to (re)build an efficient creative production workflow: Stephen Hunking, Director of Studio Services and Asset Management at Showtime Wiesia Mancewicz, Principal at High Touch Studio Lauren Philson, Digital Assets Manager at The Rockefeller Foundation We’ve turned their thoughts and insights into a guide to help you initiate a workflow overhaul. Step 1: Identify the problems “If you had no complains, then you probably have a very amazing system. I’ve never had zero complaints.” – Stephen Hunking, Director of Studio Services and Asset Management at Showtime. Clearly your team’s feedback should already provide you with great insights on what’s working or not. Start your petition by listing the main pain points and recurring complaints that people raise. Down the road you should measure quantitatively or qualitatively how these bottlenecks impact your team’s productivity, and ultimately your business. Step 2: Build a task force Time to involve your team /organization. On the one hand you need to convince your top management that investing in a creative production workflow overhaul will bring value to the organization. On the other hand, you need to empower your teammates so that they implement, drive, and embrace the change. Your task force will be composed of two groups: C-level and decision-makers: The initial group that you bring together will most likely be a mix of executive, senior manager, or director levels. They come to the table and bring the business purpose and the business use cases for each department/teams that would be affected by the project. This core group go through your petition, prioritize, help inform the phasing of the actual project, and most importantly, assign a budget and internal resources to it. Ambassadors & end-users: The second group that you will bring together is what Lauren Philson, Digital Assets Manager at The Rockefeller Foundation, calls the “ambassadors”: “These are going to be your power users, the folks that are embedded within each of the departments“. In the long run, the ambassadors will inform you when there are issues with the system itself, or with adoption. Once everybody has adopted the system, you make them the trainers. Involving different part of the business, different teams, and end users early in the process is key to succeed. As Hunking reminded: “It is very easy to lose sight of the end-user. If you don’t involve them earlier and throughout the process, you might end up overwhelming them with features that they don’t really need, while neglecting features that they really do need”. Also, you don’t want to be the person that dictates how the process is going to work and what they are going to do – without consulting the team actually implementing it. Practice an open door policy: Allow your team to come back to you with questions. They should have ownership over their workflow, you’re just here to empower them to use the system for themselves and make it their own. Stay tuned to our blog for Part II: How to Document Your Workflow

Written by Brian Stuckey, Senior Product Manager at globaledit. Talent Approval is an essential component of the media and entertainment industry. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, let me give you some background. If you’re producing a TV show, movie, or even YouTube show, you probably want recognizable people to appear in your production. One of the common bargaining chips used when negotiating a contract for a celebrity is the right for the talent to approve or kill images they like or dislike respectively. This celebrity sign-off typically takes one of two forms: Talent Approvals – Talent has the right to approve any image of theirs used (within some boundaries.) Talent ‘Kills’ – This is the right for a celebrity to reject some percentage of the images of them. For simplicity, I’m going to focus on ‘Kill’ rights but the exact same logic applies to approval galleries. By giving your talent the right to reject images, you’re adding a significant speed bump to your creative process. You are effectively allowing someone to put a pause button in your creative process.  Before you invest in marking up and retouching images, you need to first get their approval and this is harder than it sounds. If you don’t get the approval, your work might be wasted or even worse – it could lead to contract compliance problems. Second, how do you enforce your contract terms? For example, talent might have the right to kill 60% of their images. What if they email you and tell you they are ALL rejected? There is also a latent third problem. How do you prove that a talent approved a photo? If they come back in 6 months when the publicity photos are released don’t like an image, how do you defend your operation? Now, imagine that you have multiple celebrities in your project, all with different terms, and several different sets of publicity photos. All of the sudden, getting talent approval doesn’t seem as easy as it first did. How we tackle the problem Talent Approval is a common use of our platform (watch this short video to learn how we do it). I’ve had the luxury of seeing how multiple production companies, development labs, and agencies tackle this problem. This has helped us for our best-in-class approval workflow. To simplify this discussion, I’ve broken down the process of creating an efficient Talent Approval machine. Enforcing the contract Let’s say that Jean-Claude Van Damme has a contract that allows him to kill 50% of the images we present to him. His agent and your company have agreed to the terms and now you have the first round of unretouched publicity photos for him to review. To easily enforce the agreement, I setup a ‘Kill’ Gallery in globaledit. A ‘Kill’ Gallery is like a specialized lightbox. It allows you to take a group of images and set an approve/kill ratio. Once the kill ratio has been set (at say 50%), the recipient is only allowed to kill UP TO 50% of the images. They cannot select more than half of the images in the gallery. This makes the decision clear and forces the correct number of assets to be selected in the process. Getting images in their hands Tracking down Jean-Claude and getting a contact sheet in his hand with a red pen is challenging. You could always FedEx images and hope they get to the right place and are sent back in a timely fashion. Alternatively, you could email him the images but then you have a problem if he responds ambiguously like “Kill the first and third one” instead of “Kill photo2345.JPG and photo2315.JPG”. The better way to do this is to send the gallery to Mr. Van Damme or his publicist. By sending them the approval gallery – all they need is a computer or a smartphone to get to work. When the gallery is sent to a mobile phone, a thumbnail list of images is displayed. He can then tap on images to kill them and a running counter shows how many images are remaining before he reaches his quota. When Jean-Claude is done looking with the gallery, his decisions are recorded and the process is complete. You know unambiguously which photos were rejected, you know you are compliant with your contract, and you have the list of ‘killed’ images instantly. Centralize decision list Since we used a gallery to get the list of images to ‘kill’, we always know which images were rejected. These ‘kill’ (or approve) decisions live with the metadata in globaledit. This means that your retouchers, if they are using the globaledit platform, will never accidentally work on the wrong image. Audit Lastly, all of these ‘kill’ or approve decisions are stored in our database. Among many other things, we keep track of: 1) who sent the ‘kill’ gallery 2) which images were ‘killed’ 3) who ‘killed’ them and when This provides you a traceable record of a photograph from the time it was taken to the finished image. Each step of the process generates notes in our asset notes log. Hopefully you never have a dispute with talent but if it happens, you have a strong record of the approval. Pulling It All Together By using the globaledit platform, we simplify and clarify the process with talent representatives, ensure talent approval rights compliance, and give you the tools to audit the entire process. While doing all of this, we speed up the creative flow by both instantly sending approval requests and giving you instant feedback. For your talent, we make it as simple as using Facebook. The key to the process is our Approval Galleries. They are a purpose-built mechanism to capture approvals or ‘kill’ decisions. All of the talent input is recorded in the database and lives with the asset alongside the previews, markups, and high res images.

For the third installation of our Creative Ops Breakfast Series, David Plavin, Creative Applications Service Manager at Resources IT, and Irene Yoo, Photo Manager at Food Network & Cooking Channel, discussed the specific tools and technologies that make professional creative production kick. From Capture One to DAM to Dropbox and Photoshop, panelists shared the indispensable tools that their teams use to get work done. What key solutions for creative production toolkit today How to evaluate your current tools and technology What upcoming technology to look into/for to improve your workflow Watch the full panel: The Creative Ops Breakfast Series is the breakfast lecture series for creative production and operations professionals to network and learn as well have a delicious breakfast. ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS David Plavin Creative Applications Service Manager Resources IT, a Publicis Groupe company David has been at the Publicis Groupe for over 20 years and currently serves as the Service Manager for Creative Solutions. He works with the Groupe’s North American creative agencies helping them become more productive by supporting a suite of applications. David has a strong background in production and creative development, which enables him to better understand the need of his clients. He migrated from publication design to technical support in a period of 35 years. Irene Yoo Photo Manager Food Network and Cooking Channel Irene is responsible for still photography production and asset management for Food Network and Cooking Channel shows and related entities. She has 7+ years of experience in the Digital Asset Management (DAM) field working with different brands and industries to streamline creative workflows. Matt Glueckert Host – Product Manager globaledit Matt uses his lifelong passion for creative technology to lead a development team define and design the creative production application of the future. Before joining globaledit, he was a creative technologist at Showtime where he managed the photo department, photographed boxing events, and developed DAM tools for non-geeks.

Written by Brian Stuckey, Senior Product Manager at globaledit. One of the books that has really shaped my thinking about creative operations is Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal. The basic plot is about a manufacturing plant manager faced with a failing organization and tasked with turning the operation around or the plant will close. The book is commonly used to teach introduction to operations classes and provides intuitive and practical examples on both how to measure and how to improve assembly line style work. Not everything in the book has an analog in a creative operations world but most of the basic concepts apply. Creative operations isn’t an assembly line in the manufacturing sense but there are clear parallels. You have raw goods (camera files), you have to do something to them (retouch them), you have to QA them (approvals), and you have to ship the product (the final images). The process of creating a creative asset is just that – it is a process with a series of distinct steps. Through that lens you can start to identify ways to create a high performance Creative Operations team. Your goal is to ship more assets. The first step (and the focus of the rest of this post) is to answer the question: “How is my team performing?” Quantifying Success I want to be explicit here: the intent of this measurement is not to create some sort of employee review metric. The intent is to help you understand where your team is and if your changes are having a positive or negative impact. We want to analyze the team as a whole, not the individual participants. I’ve bucketed a few different metrics into two different categories: those which measure the whole team and those which measure individual steps. 1. Team Metrics: Asset turnaround time Your team is charged with producing something. Therefore, one of the most basic measure is: How long, on average, does it take from the time an order is placed to the time that it is completed? This measure is an easy-to-understand metric that should drastically change with an improved process. If an average time drops from 7 days to 5, you’re made a huge improvement. Who doesn’t want to get their results faster? It is an intuitive measure for tracking success. To calculate this: Look at all of your jobs for the last week. List each job in Excel, one per row. Now, in new column, add the date you received that job. Lastly, add the date the job was completed in a third column. For simplicity, I calculated this to the nearest day. You may want to do hours or weeks. The right level of resolution is highly dependent on the nature of your work. A B C D 1 Job Name Start Stop Duration 2 Job 1 1/1/2015 1/2/2015 1 3 Job 2 1/3/2015 1/7/2015 4 4 Job 3 1/3/2015 1/4/2015 1 Average (μ): 2 Days . Now, calculate how many days each job took and take the arithmetic mean (=AVERAGE(D2:D4) )  of the them.  Repeat this week after week and plot your weekly values for turnaround time. Standard Deviation in Turnaround Time This is a super useful metric that takes a just little bit more effort to compute. It shows you that the average turnaround time is 7 days (+/- 2) days. This metric is important because it directly measures those times when you’re overworked and the times you have a light workload. The more you fluctuate between those two states, the higher your standard deviation is. You want to move towards (+/- 1) day instead of (+/- 3) days. A high deviation from the average means that your team is having very busy days and very light days. This game is about endurance; you want your team to work consistently for a long time, not in short bursts. Constant bursts wear out your team and reduce predictability in deadlines. To minimize the deviation, you need a well-defined process, clear responsibilities, and mechanisms to identify who is overworked. This means that there should never be a question about “who needs to work on this?” or “what do we do next?” A simple diagram showing how the asset moves from start to finish and who is responsible for what will go a long way. To calculate this: Good news! If you did the above work, you’re 99% done. In addition to average, in a new cell calculate the Standard Deviation of a Population (=STDEV.P(D2:D4) ). Don’t try to do this one by hand, it will be tedious. This should give you the average deviation from the average for that week. Remember: lower numbers are good. One note on the above function – I am assuming you included every job in your calculations. If you did a sample of them (say every other one) then you should use the Standard Deviation of a Sample (=STDEV.S() ). A B C D 1 Job Name Start Stop Duration 2 Job 1 1/1/2015 1/2/2015 1 3 Job 2 1/3/2015 1/7/2015 4 4 Job 3 1/3/2015 1/4/2015 1 Average (μ): 2 Days StDev (σ): 1.4 Days . In the above example, the average job will finish in 2 days. About 80% of all jobs will finish between 0.6 days and 3.4 days. (70% comes from a Normal Distribution table) Throughput This is slightly different than the turnaround time. This answers the questions “How many jobs did we complete this month?” This helps you better understand how much work you can take on. Of course, you want this metric to grow over time. There will be a natural limit to how much work people and your team can do. What is important is that it grows following your new process. This metric is also useful for capacity planning. If you can constantly handle 50 jobs per month, and you project things to grow to 100 per month a year, then you need to think about hiring or outsourcing some of your steps. To calculate this: This is the easiest to calculate. Just count how many jobs you did in a week and you’re done. Write this number down somewhere and plot it week after week. 2. Individual Step Metrics Utilization If you use the mental model of an assembly line, then all of the above metrics track the system as a whole. One last data point worth tracking is the utilization of each step of the process. If everything happens in order, then the most overworked step of the process is your bottleneck. As any fan of Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal can tell you, the bottleneck is what limits the entire system. By tracking WHERE this is (and there will likely be one next time) you know where to add support. (Hint: The bottleneck will be the team with the large inbox and the light outbox). One note on this metric: it isn’t a critique of any step. There will ALWAYS be a bottleneck and it may move. Not every person or step takes the same time to do something. The value is knowing where this is so you can add employees to help where it matters most. To calculate this: This is actually best solved by walking around the office instead of using Excel. You need to figure out who is slowing down the process. Who has the most work to do and who are other people waiting on to finish? p.s. As good of a message as The Goal has, the plot is pretty abysmal. The updated version only exacerbates this. If you buy a copy, make sure you don’t buy the updated version. p.p.s. This isn’t just creative operations. This concept has been applied to Software Engineering for a long time too.

Lauren Philson, Digital Assets Manager at The Rockefeller Foundation, specializes in enterprise system deployments in both the private and public sectors. Lauren views Digital Asset Management (DAM) as a dynamic keystone in any organization’s technology suite and has driven strategic integration projects with PIM and ECM platforms. Championing efficiency and overall effectiveness, she emphasizes process and change management alongside technical considerations in order to craft the best possible user experience. Lauren is currently rolling out a new DAM for The Rockefeller Foundation as part of a larger digital enhancement to evolve the esteemed philanthropy’s message through storytelling and compelling media. Previously, she implemented DAM and a suite of creative tools for e-commerce leader Gilt.com. Lauren recently shared with us tips and advices on how to seamlessly implement a new digital asset management system in an organization. Watch the full interview:

What are the key visual assets that your brand should focus on?  Vanessa Holden, independent consultant and former SVP, Creative Director at West Elm, shared with us the main creative assets that every brand should always have available. First and foremost, before even thinking about producing visual content, brands need to know and understand who they are, with Holden reminding us that “The core of communicating any brand is being very clear on what the heart of your brand is.” This clarity in the message you want to deliver to the public and to consumers will guide you first set of brand visuals: Create visual assets that are directly related to your brand’s core and that showcase your brand’s key differentiator on the market. These assets will seek to “bring to life your story the most”. Only then can you turn your attention (and budget) to more experimental visuals and content pieces. Burberry is a great example of this creative production strategy, according to Holden: “They identify their heritage, as an inclusive and exclusive brand, then boldly step forward to a very different media landscape”. Watch Vanessa Holden’s full answer:

Written by Brian Stuckey, Senior Product Manager at globaledit. Most people don’t find metadata or file formats sexy. It’s all of the data around the image without any of the nice visual appeal of a photograph. So, launching into the realm of the esoteric, I wanted to take a moment to talk about XMP files. XMP files are awesome. XMP files allow you to transfer your image metadata, ratings, tags, keywords, geolocation, and other attributes about the image outside of the actual JPG, CR2, or other file. The XMP format is a standard way of recording these data so that other programs can carry all of the additional data you added to your images. This is super useful in practice. Most creative work doesn’t live in a single piece of software. You might start by capturing images in Capture One. There you might do your quick selects, add job information, and other relevant data. Next, you might organize the files using Adobe Bridge. From there, you might pass the RAWs off to a retoucher and get back a finished TIFF file. When you to import this into your DAM – the TIFF file may no longer contain the job information, photographer, talent, or the other metadata you meticulously added earlier. This is where XMP files save the day — when you import them into your DAM, your software can read the metadata and append all of the missing information to the asset. (One technical note: XMP content is frequently embedded in images such as TIFFs, JPEGs, and a few other formats. For the sake of this document, I’m focusing on sidecar file format. This is the kind where you have a file named SOMETHING.XMP in the same folder as SOMETHING.CR2.) How XMP files work in practice A single photograph might have several different associated files. For example: image_2345.CR2  (The camera raw) image_2345.JPG  (JPEG preview) image_2345.TIFF  (High resolution retouched photo) image_2345.XMP  (Sidecar file that contains all of the shoot information) XMP files typically have the same name as the photograph and live in the same folder as all of the other assets. Most software (Bridge, Lightroom, Capture One, Media Pro, etc.) are smart enough to understand the relationship and automatically recognize the data contained in them. Example One: My vacation Earlier this year, I went to several countries in Europe. I took nearly 7,000 photographs across three devices and was faced with a challenge: How do I tag my photographs, select the good ones, and come up with the Facebook album version? The big problem is that Lightroom is meant for a single user. Two people can’t work on a library simultaneously.   I started by uploading all of my JPEG preview images to globaledit. JPEGs are smaller and the transfer time was short. This allowed my wife and I to see all of the images and to collaborate on them. I culled the 7,000 photos down to 500 and she picked out the final ~50. At the same time, we bulk-edited photos to add the city information and for a few key photographs, we added additional information (the name of a landmark, who was in the photo, etc.) This distributed approach allowed us to quickly comb through thousands of images at the same time and be always in sync. I worked on my desktop and she worked on her iPad. When we were done, I downloaded the XMP files which only took a few seconds and added them to my Lightroom collection. Now, Adobe Lightroom had all of my keywords, subject information, location, ratings and selects. I appended this to the RAW files and I processed the final 50 images in Lightroom. Because I was able to quickly transport metadata in the XMP files, I could distribute my workflow without fear of losing valuable information about the images. I didn’t have to transfer tens of gigabytes of information to just make a few decisions. Example Two: Backing Up Adobe Lightroom is my go-to package for my personal photographs. I’ve spent thousands of hours adding information about people, places, geotagging, and categorizing my images. What if I want to switch to, say, Capture One? What if my library becomes completely corrupted? Adobe Lightroom allows you to actually write all metadata to XMP files in addition to their library. It slows the software down a little bit but this gives you a new level of security. As long as you back up the XMP files with your images, you’ll never lose any of your metadata. Example Three: Migrating content between applications Most of my RAW processing for casual images is done in Lightroom. However, I prefer the look and options that Capture One affords me and so my workflow is split primarily between these two applications. I really like the organization tools that Lightroom provides. The face identification, geo-tagging, and keyword management tools are second to none for a home user. I use Lightroom to tag ALL of my images, regardless of whether I process them in another application. To enable this mixed-environment approach to handling images, I use XMP sidecars to transfer the metadata I’ve curated in Adobe in to Capture One. Capture One reads the XMP sidecar files and all of my people tags are instantly recognized. I can process my images like I prefer and rest assured that I can always find my images by metadata regardless of the software I used to render the final image. Everything Else: The XMP format was created by Adobe to standardize how metadata is stored and transferred. It is now managed as an ISO standard and free for anyone to use. For more information about XMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp.html

Many brands have spent the past few years rushing to every new channel that pops up, without a clear purpose or goals. Today, brands are refocusing on their core message and looking at the channels strategically in terms of the audience and message they want to get across. Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Creative & Content Production for eBay Enterprise, recommends that brands “pick the channels they feel have the best chance of exposing their brand in the right way and expand that from there”. For Zdancewicz, there is a risk in thinking that every single channel is relevant. “Don’t go too broad too early, you risk watering down your message or losing control of your message”. Watch Zdancewicz explains the importance of choosing the right channel(s) for your brand:

Globaledit web platform: Read about the November 2015 Software Update. We released a new update to our iOS app this morning and users on iOS 9 with iPads and devices with 3D touch will appreciate the new touches. Additionally, we’ve made it easy to share lightboxes right from within the application to make collaborating easier. New: Share lightboxes from within the iOS app New: Support for 3D Touch New: Support for split screen Enhanced: Intercom integration NEW: Share Lightboxes You can now share lightboxes right from your iPhone and skip the main application. To share a lightbox, tap on a lightbox and click “share lightbox.” Enter in your recipients, select your permissions, and click share. We support the most common sharing permissions: download restrictions, rating restrictions, and collaboration restrictions. NEW: 3D Touch Next- we’ve added support for Apple’s 3D Touch. If you have a new iOS device, you can hard-press on an image and see the full resolution version without having to navigate into a lightbox. This allows you to quickly look through images and improves the overall browsing experience. NEW: Split screen In addition to 3D Touch, we now support the split screen view on iOS. This intelligently lays out the interface to support globaledit side-by-side with other applications. ENHANCED: Intercom Integration Lastly, we have enhanced our Intercom integration. Intercom is a messaging service we use to publish notices and to communicate directly with users. Now, you can use the service to chat with our support. To message us, click on Settings > More. There is a new option to “Contact globaledit” that will message our support department.

Written by Brian Stuckey, Senior Product Manager at globaledit. One of the perks of my job is that I get a deep view into the creative operations process for our clients. We are intimately woven into the fabric of some of the largest fashion brands in the world and are granted access to their inner workings. Likewise, we work with potential clients and prospects to understand how we can fit in their process. Because of this access, we can learn, study, and define best-practices across verticals and improve our client’s processes. Creative production headaches are not unique and their causes are more common than not. This puts us in as much as a consulting role as it puts us in the software support role. So what have we learned? Well, it turns out that the most successful clients have a documented process. There are clearly defined roles, artifacts, deliverables, and handoffs between participants. A well-structured process forces your teams to operate predictably and efficiently. I’ve spent a lot of time reading client notes, talking to clients, and trying to synthesize best-practice templates for our core industries. The one I want to talk about is an eCommerce creative operations workflow. eCommerce creative operations process is about scale Creative operations is more about operations than it is about creative. eCommerce typifies this by the sheer size of their needs. Let’s talk about what it takes to get a photo of a new dress for Stuckey Co’s website. There are 5 colors of this dress, and 5 different sizes per dress. Most clients want photos of: Front, back, and sides 3 on-model photos 2 close-ups Now, to get the final image, let’s assume that there are 15 shots of each. That means that the client will need to manage: (4 angles x 15 shots) = 60 images (3 on-model x 15 shots) = 45 images (2 close-ups x 15 shots) = 30 images = 135 images * 5 colors = 675 images (or >1,300 if JPEG + RAW) 675 images – assuming that they are only shooting one size. If this is going into a PLM (product lifecycle management) system, they may do this for EACH unique SKU. This means nearly 7,000 photos could be created FOR ONE DRESS. What happens when they sell a dozen different variations? What if they want distinct photos of each size? It should be apparent by now that this is a scale problem that quickly becomes intimidating. But wait, there is more. Retailers will typically add SKU, season, color, and style information to each image’s metadata; they have to simply keep track of everything. And the images have to be sorted, rated, and culled down to the few approved images. Then they get to be retouched, have the retouching work approved, added to the DAM, PLM, and sent to Scene7 or their CMS. And how are you shipping these around? If you’re using a hard drive, how do you know you have the latest versions? That’s a lot to manage for a single dress Here is a diagram that I’ve been working on to abstract the typical eCommerce creative production workflow. We find that many of the clients in the most pain have some sort of an ad-hoc process that has grown organically and uses consumer tools. This certainly works to a degree but it has a distinct pain: Output is unpredictable, highly variable, and the team members are stressed. The solution is straightforward – but it requires some effort There are two parts: The process and the tools. Part 1: When we engage clients, we like to start with a diagram like the one above. We customize it based on client feedback and try to name who is responsible for what, how they get their work done, and who is next in line. Many clients haven’t done this exercise and we find that just getting people to spell out how they work has value. Inefficiencies stand out. People disagree. Sub-optimal choices become apparent. Part 2: Our software is the other half of the solution. We found that a huge amount of time is wasted when people have to track down decisions. For example: Was an image approved? By whom? We address this head on by keeping a running log and filtering tools so a team member can see “all of the new approved images that have been marked up” and need to be retouched. Second, we keep all of the assets in a single location. We can intelligently manage JPEG, CR2, XMP stacks of images so that all of your assets are intelligently consolidated on one platform. This means that if you have an iPhone, you have access to the version of the image that was updated 5 minutes ago in a different state. Lastly, we manage all of the metadata. We can compile photographers to upload key information during their work (SKU, Style, etc.), then give you the tools to bulk-edit these. This metadata lives with the assets and is exportable when you want to ship the finished assets to your DAM or PLM system. So, what’s in it for me? I’m biased, I’d love everyone to use our platform. The platform is only part of the solution. Just the act of documenting your workflow, asking WHY you operate like you do, and being open to refining the process is a huge win for most teams. If you’re starting a new season and looking at the prospect of producing tens-of-thousands of new assets, taking a little bit of time to reset and reflect on your process could save your sanity. Check out the webinar “Ramping Up your eCommerce Production Workflow” with Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Studio Services at Industrial Color Studios. Learn more about our products here: PIM: The Advantages of Using a Product Information Management System

Omnichannel marketing is reshaping creative operations teams, noticed Vanessa Holden, Independent Consultant and former SVP, Creative Director at West Elm. Vanessa was part of a panel discussion titled “The impact of omnichannel on creative operations” presented by globaledit, on September 22nd, 2015. She shared with us her thoughts and insights on the evolving role of creative and production teams on set. 1. Integrated production: the new normal Today, creative teams are becoming more integrated to produce and serve every channel of the marketing mix. The multiplicity of channels forces production teams to leverage every photo shoot to produce a large variety of visual content (photos, behind-the-scene photos and videos, etc.) in a minimum amount of time and budget. Typically, the main photo shoot with models for print and catalog becomes an opportunity for brands and organizations to create low-budget visual content, such as behind-the-scenes photos and videos, which can be leveraged on a multitude of channels. 2. Building hybrid creative and operations teams This new integrated approach requires creative production teams to develop a new skill set: “An art director mindset in a creative ops space”. Creative teams become hybrid as they need to understand all the moving and visual parts involved in the campaign creation, the connection, continuity, and complementarity of each piece. 3. Mastering the visual vocabulary of a brand “The fluency and confidence in the visual vocabulary of a brand throughout the [creative production] team is going to be more of a differentiator”, said Vanessa Holden. With reduced teams on set and shrinking budgets, everybody on set needs to know the brand’s values and objectives, and identify in real-time the perfect moment, image, video, format that will best convey the brand’s story. A successful brand will be able to get the right tuning of the visuals it needs and it creates on set, especially with distributed creative teams. Watch what Vanessa has to say about the new creative production team in an omnichannel world:

Building and maintaining brand consistency across every single marketing channel is incredibly challenging. How do you provide the best brand experience everywhere your customer is? During a recent Creative Ops Breakfast at globaledit, Vanessa Holden, Independent Consultant and former SVP, Creative Director at West Elm, and Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Creative & Content Production for eBay Enterprise, shared their insights into building a successful brand platform in today’s complicated omnichannel world. 1. Define a clear brand identity & message Marketing 101: At the foundation of any successful company is a clear brand identity and message, attached to a compelling story. “The core of communicating any brand is being very clear on what the heart of your brand is”, says Vanessa Holden. Identify your key differentiator and what makes your brand unique and relevant in today’s competitive marketplace. 2. Let the creative follow from there The brand message should always come first, then creative assets can follow the brand’s story. What visuals should a brand generate? For Vanessa, the key is to create “A balance of content”. First and foremost, brands should create a visual storytelling that relates directly to their core message and values. As Jim Zdancewicz reminds us: “The most important thing is to be on message and on brand, and make sure you stay true to that”. For Jim, the message dictates how you produce these assets – an iPhone to shoot a behind-the-scenes video, a drone, etc. A brand should experiment in new formats or new emerging media only once mastering the core visuals. For Vanessa Holden, that means being “super flexible and responsive in surprising ways”. Burberry is a typical example of successful brand that have been able to identify its heritage, and then boldly step forward to a very different media landscape. 3. Stay true to your brand Be honest: Not every single channel will be relevant for your brand. Pick carefully those channels that bring your brand story to life and resonate the most with your audience. “The most successful brands are the ones that have figured out their core values, and their core channels”, explains Vanessa Holden. After selecting those core channels, make sure you optimize them constantly to be “relevant and vibrant”. Once you’ve learned the best practices, you can start propagating them to new channels. As Jim Zdancewicz advises: “Don’t go too broad too early, you risk watering down your message or losing control of your message”. 4. Know what success looks like before you start Everyone on your creative production team should be very clear about the business objectives and calls to action: Should customers watch, share, or buy? Agreeing on the goals and then measuring the results will help you tune your message and get the best results out of your creative efforts. 5. Master your brand’s visual fluency Whether on set or in the office, your creative production team needs to understand the brand’s message, objectives, and master the brand’s visual vocabulary. Why? Vanessa Holden explains: “while the brand is in motion, [they can] identify those great moments that are going to become parts of a bigger brand ecosystem”. On set, behind-the-scenes, literally anywhere, anyone on the creative team should be able to spot the photo, video, GIF, etc., that should be created for a channel, while reinforcing the brand’s story. “An art director mindset in a creative ops space” could make all the difference between creating just another visual and creating a compelling piece of content that successfully reaches your audience. Watch the full recording of our breakfast on “The Impact of Omnichannel on Creative Operations”:

Companies are being asked to get higher quality results out of creative efforts, while at the same time having fewer resources and time as they had in the past. Those challenges, coupled with the inherently chaotic nature of creative production, have forced creative professionals to try to bring order to disorder so that they can achieve those goals in an ever-competitive marketplace. What is the progression of the ideal workflow? How do we move from an ad hoc, chaotic environment, to an efficient creative production machine? Who are the right people to manage each phase of the workflow? What is the best allocation of roles and responsibilities for maximizing results? In the second edition of the Creative Ops Breakfast Series (Oct. 22, 2015), Stephen Hunking, Director of Studio Services and Asset Management at Showtime, Wiesia Mancewicz, Principal at High Touch Studio, and Lauren Philson, Digital Assets Manager for The Rockefeller Foundation, joined us in our TriBeCa headquarters to share their experience in building creative operations processes and workflows, taking them to the next level, and discussing the challenges they faced, from internal obstacles to managing external and internal technologies. Watch the full panel to learn more about how to build the perfect creative production workflow: The Creative Ops Breakfast Series is the breakfast lecture series for creative production and operations professionals to network and learn as well have a delicious breakfast (the last event featured Crepes By-Suzette!) ABOUT THE GUEST SPEAKERS:   Stephen Hunking Director of Studio Services & Asset Management, Showtime Stephen has been working in the media industry for over two decades. He oversees the Studio Production and the Digital Asset Teams at Showtime Networks. These departments are responsible for everything from print to in-house photography, mobile apps, and the entire digital asset catalog for the company. Wiesia Mancewicz Principal, High Touch Studio Wiesia is a seasoned executive with over 15 years experience in eCommerce and web technology. She currently runs her own retouching company, High Touch Studio, specializing in image post-production for retailers and photographers. Wiesia previously worked as Director of Imaging at macys.com where she supervised operations and image post-production for one of the most successful web retailers in the U.S. Lauren Philson Digital Assets Manager, The Rockefeller Foundation Several years in creative production and operations led Lauren into DAM, where she now specializes in enterprise system deployments in both the private and public sectors. Lauren is currently rolling out a new DAM for The Rockefeller Foundation as part of a larger digital enhancement to evolve the esteemed philanthropy’s message through storytelling and compelling media. Previously, she implemented DAM and a suite of creative tools for e-commerce leader Gilt.com.

Vanessa Holden is a creative leader with an established track record of creating, launching, extending, and growing global brands. As the former SVP, Creative Director of American lifestyle brand West Elm, Vanessa oversaw the creation of a completely integrated omnichannel brand experience, leading the teams who created all facets of the customers’ brand experience. Vanessa has focused on the art of storytelling through images and words throughout her diverse career in publishing and design. As Senior Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Martha Stewart Living, Vanessa oversaw the creative and editorial direction of the award-winning magazine and married its visual style with the brand’s media and retail segments. Vanessa recently sat down with us to discuss content consumption, successful and impactful visual storytelling, and changes that affect today’s creative operations teams. Watch the full interview.

Jim Zdancewicz is the Head of Creative & Content Production for eBay Enterprise, and contributes his over 25 years of content production expertise, operational management, and creative producing to the eBay Enterprise team. Jim has grown the eBay Enterprise studio business with an ever-expanding roster of top fashion and eCommerce clients. His passion for creative imagery, video, and technology is a key driver in eBay Enterprise’s delivery of multichannel content across all customer touch points. Jim recently sat with us to discuss content creation strategy, omnichannel marketing, and measuring success. Watch the full interview:

As brands and retailers are embracing new omnichannel strategies, the demand for product photography and visual content is exponentially growing. How do omnichannel strategies affect brands and their creative operations? What challenges are they facing? How do they (plan to) adapt to this new environment? In the first edition of the Creative Operations Breakfast Series (Sept. 22, 2015), Vanessa Holden, Independent Consultant and Former VP Creative Director at West Elm, and Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Creative & Content Production at eBay Enterprise, joined us in our TriBeCa headquarters to discuss how the multiplicity of marketing channels have impacted brands and organizations’ creative operations. As new channels and devices are constantly emerging, companies and creative production teams are trying to produce the best content that fits their brand identity and messaging. After years of rushing for new pop-up channels, Vanessa and Jim have noticed a change in companies’ marketing and creative production approach: Brands are now putting more strategic thought into their creative assets, focusing on producing core assets, while constantly innovating by experimenting with a multitude of asset types, formats, and channels in order to test and learn. This reality-check is mostly due to stagnant or shrinking creative production budgets, especially for experimental assets. Creative teams themselves have also evolved: Because creative teams and operations are more condensed, they also need to be more versatile. On set, every single link of the creative operations chain needs to be clear about the company’s identity, objectives, and key messages to be able to shoot, pick the right edit, and properly edit the appropriate assets for each channel. They need to understand the nuances of each channel to make better creative decisions on-the-go. Watch the full panel to learn more about the impact of omnichannel marketing on creative operations: The Creative Operations Breakfast series brings together leaders in the creative production and operations community for a casual breakfast.   Globaledit is a cloud-based platform that empowers creative professionals to manage visual production at scale. Globaledit launched the Creative Operations Breakfast in 2015 to address key issues and challenges faced by creative production and operations professionals today.  

Reviewing assets while on-the-go is about to get easier. The latest update to our iOS app makes it easy to filter and sort images so you can very quickly find and review exactly the images you need to see from your iPhone or iPad. To get to the new feature, enter a job and load the grid view. Next to the grid view icon, click on the funnel icon to load the Filter and Sort options. Filtering suppresses all images that do not match your criteria. The numbers on the right side-show you how many assets in view are approved, selects, starred, etc. Click on the filters you want to apply and the grid view will update automatically. Sorting is similar. But instead of hiding assets you rearrange them based on name, ratings, and other common metadata. Clicking on the arrow allows you to swap between ascending and descending order. Retina Support Also new in this release is support for full Retina quality on all images if you have a retina display iPhone or iPad. This allows you to have pixel-perfect images and should improve the overall image quality in the app. We’ve also made a few other tweaks to the UI to better support the iPhone 6S and Plus. The result is a better looking application with improve usability. Mobile Uploads One last huge improvement – you can now upload images directly from your iCloud account. If you’ve moved lots of images into iCloud to save space, or want to upload a photo from year ago – you can now do so seamlessly as if they were an image stored right on your phone. Simply select the thumbnail you want imported into globaledit. For more details about any of these improvements, check out the full release note. If you have any question about these features or want to schedule a demo, contact us.

As brands and retailers are shortening their supply chains and embracing omnichannel retailing and marketing, the demand for product photography and visual content is exponentially growing. Today creative production and marketing teams are constantly facing the challenges of producing more visual content (e.g. product photography, editorial), for a larger number of on- and offline channels, and in a shorter period of time. Finding technological solutions to these growing pressures has become critical for creative production professionals and their companies in a highly visually competitive market. Scale & agility are key in this new creative production environment. During a DAM Meetup about “Product Photography & DAM”, Deanna Bedoya (Lafayette 148 NY), Sara Mitzner (swimsuitsforall), Nikki Schiwal (J.Crew), and Jim Zdancewicz (eBay Enterprise) shared their creative production volume and process, as well as the solutions they are using or considering to produce more content better, cheaper, and faster.  More visual content than ever before Top brands and retailers like J. Crew, Lafayette 148 NY, swimsuitsforall, and eBay Enterprise capture more products and lifestyle photography than ever before: J.Crew shoots around 10-15 different looks a day, 50 to 300 images for each look; Lafayette 148 NY shoots 1,500 images per month; swimsuitsforall produces approximately 2,500 images month per month; and eBay Enterprise shoots from 3 to 4,000 images for their clients from different sets all across different locations. That’s just the beginning. Once photographed, in-house creative production teams have to review each individual shot and make their selects for eCommerce websites, catalogs, social media, and a myriad of other channels. As Jim Zdancewicz from eBay Enterprise put it: “I don’t envy being an art director these days when you’re looking at three or four times the images they used to, a couple of years ago, because the content channels are so immense (…)”. At Lafayette 148 New York, Deanna Bedoya mentioned shooting “about 1,500 images per month… we make 150 selects per web shoot (that’s 50 SKUs 3-ways), for catalog shoots it’s usually 120”. Sounds like a lot? It is. Some creative production professionals estimate that 10 times more visual content is being produced today when compared to five years ago. Why visual content is crucial to brands and retailers There are more products to sell. Sara Mitzner, Content Director at swimsuitsforall, mentioned: “the biggest change for us has been volume because we’ve grown so much as a business. When the company started out, they only had about 10 styles. Now we have close to 1,100 styles per season”. Customers are requesting more details about those products. For Deanna Bedoya from Lafayette 148 NY, “the expectations for eCommerce are only getting larger, not smaller”. As eCommerce is maturing and eCommerce customers are becoming more sophisticated, they tend to have higher expectations when it comes to the products featured online. In the past, companies used to shoot front and back of the product featured online, and that was it. Today, customers are looking for detailed photography for each individual item (zipper, buttons etc.), videos for each product, and more. To appeal to their online customers, more and more brands and eCommerce websites are now shooting each product from every angle, and zoom in on small details. The rapid growth of consumer channels. The proliferation of social media has encouraged brands to create dedicated imagery and campaigns for these platforms. According to Nikki Schiwal, J. Crew now does about 25 shoots per month for social media only – that cover everything from J.Crew, Madewell, and Factory. Deanna Bedoya from Lafayette 148 NY mentioned creating dedicated images for each social channel, such as original imagery for Facebook ”because it is not as cut and dry as eCommerce”. Technology solutions to produce more, faster, cheaper To increase their efficiency and productivity, brands and retailers are looking to leverage technology solutions to scale their creative production. A digital asset management software or a workflow platform is typically the first step to keeping media assets organized and the process flowing. Teams can store and distribute files quickly, track and control access and usages of each of their assets. Swimsuitsforall currently uses globaledit as their DAM system: “[We] have the image database on globaledit. That’s where all the final imagery lives (…). We actually have two offices as well, so using globaledit really helps in that regard”. Outside of digital asset management systems, brands are increasingly looking for cost-efficiency. At Lafayette 148 NY, Deanna Bedoya mentioned eying technology solutions to cut the production load and lower its costs. This leads brands to explore platforms like Looklet, for example, where you can “shoot all of your clothing on mannequins and have the company clone it on to models”. While these solutions are not quite there yet, brands are keeping an eye out for the latest and greatest technology to improve their processes in a very competitive world. These quotes were taken out of the NY DAM Meetup about Product Photography & DAM that was hosted by globaledit on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. Watch the full recording to learn more about product photography & DAM.

At globaledit, we’re constantly leveraging today’s tools and technology to make your creative production process seamless. This month, we’ve released a bunch of great features and new upgrades. You can now enjoy: now live! upload images directly from your iPhone/ipad You requested it, we did it! You can now upload images directly from your iPhone/iPad camera roll to your globaledit account. Found a great inspiration or a template on-the-go? Send it directly to your globaledit library using the iPhone or iPad app. Your images can then be rated, commented on, marked up, and shared just like any other asset. Read the support article.   How can I upload images from your iPhone/iPad to my globaledit library? 1. Navigate to a job 2. Click on the globaledit logo in the middle of the menu strip 3. Click upload and select your images from the camera roll 4. Et voilà! Your image is automatically added to your globaledit library   make your talent happy with mobile-friendly Approval Galleries Approval galleries are now in a mobile-friendly format so that your talent can easily & securely review them from any mobile device – no need to download an app, no extra steps. This keeps your process moving and your talent happy. Read the support article.   ALLOW Guests to upload to globaledit Invite guest users to upload files to your globaledit library without setting up an account for them. Your photographers, vendors, or other collaborators can now very easily share files with you using Uplink. No more WeTransfer, Hightail, or Dropbox nightmares. Simply invite them via email and they can begin securely uploading to globaledit right away. Read the support article. Find our more about our latest upgrades and improvements in the full release note. If you have any question about these features or want to schedule a demo, contact us!

You’ve got your creative production under control – if not, here are three ways to get your creative operations on track, now time to take a creative break! Here are 6 inspiring exhibits to check out this month: 1. “The Rise of Sneaker Culture” (NYC) The first exhibition that includes approximately 150 pairs of sneakers, looks at the evolution of the sneaker from its beginnings to its current role as status symbol and urban icon. Brooklyn Museum July 10 – October 4, 2015 Hours: Thu: 11a.m.-10p.m. Wed & Fri-Sun: 11a.m.-6p.m. Entrance: $16 suggested contribution 2. “Emerging” (LA) All about new, upcoming artists who are bringing “a fresh perspective and creative techniques to professional photography.” Get ready for some unfamiliar names and jaw-dropping images. Annenberg Space for Photography Jun 6, 2015 – September 20, 2015 Hours: Wed-Sun: 11am-6pm Free Admission 3. “Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography” (LA) Center stage at the Getty Center’s latest exhibition. Rather than focusing on the final image, this retrospective will spotlight the canvas on which the photo was printed and how that affects the end-result. J. Paul Getty Museum April 14 – September 6, 2015 Hours: Wed–Mon 10a.m.-5p.m. Free Admission 4. “Zoe Leonard: Analogue” (NYC) This ambitious project made up of both color and black-and-white photos was created over a ten-year period, and takes its cues from Eugène Atget’s iconic documentation of ancient Parisian neighborhoods disappearing under the onslaught of modernization. MOMA – Museum Of Modern Art June 25 – August 30, 2015 Hours: Thu-Fri: 10:30a.m.-8p.m. Sat-Wed: 10:30a.m.-5:30p.m. Entrance: $25 5. “Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld” (NYC) Charlesworth, photographer and pioneer of the “Pictures” aesthetics, used newspapers, magazines and other sources as her palette, isolating image fragments against lush monochromatic backgrounds to deconstruct how we are manipulated by mass media. The New Museum June 24 – September 20, 2015 Hours: Thu: 11a.m.–9p.m. Wed & Fri–Sun: 11a.m.–6p.m. Entrance: $16   6. “Folk Art and American Modernism” (NYC) Stylistic borrowings from outsider art have become something of a vogue among contemporary painters. Self-taught artists have long exerted a pull on Modern Art, especially in the United States, where folk traditions have played a large role in the nation’s cultural life. American Folk Art Museum July 18–September 27, 2015 Hours: Tue–Thu: 11:30a.m–7:00p.m. Fri: 12p.m.–7:30p.m. Sat: 11:30a.m.-7p.m. Sun: 12p.m.–6pm. Free Admission

We’ve all been there: Trying to make the most of our time by using production shortcuts that can save our schedule. But when your company or client starts producing high volume of creative assets for their multi-channel retailing and marketing strategy, the ‘quick & dirty’ fixes that worked for small scale teams or creative production no longer work. Inefficient habits can have a long-term impact on your team’s productivity, their morale, and your business. When your team needs to deliver a high volume of assets in a short period of time – production cycle times are constantly shrinking – you need to bring your A game. Centralize The worst thing that could happen to a creative production team is to be physically and virtually disconnected from their assets. The two most common mistakes are: On set: Uploading all the files to a hard drive and shipping it to the in-house creative team or advertising agency. In this case, teams can sometimes wait for days before they can start working on the assets. On set or at the office: Uploading files to the FTP server or using consumer tools like Dropbox, WeTransfer, Google Drive or HighTail to share the assets with the rest of the team. Here’s the truth: These tools are not powerful enough to quickly upload and share terabytes of files in no time. The moment you start using these tools, your creative production is already delayed – by a few hours or a few days. Since creative teams are more and more distributed, centralizing your assets on a cloud-based platform is key to get your creative production on the right track. It also provides one single source of truth accessible anytime, anywhere. It removes all doubts and frustrations right from the beginning. Simplify Scattered communication is the evil of our time. Teams email each other for everything and anything: Share files, chase approvals, provide feedback, etc. Mistakes or errors are common – if not the rule. From retouching the wrong file to missing a key information in an email spread, sometimes teams spend more time correcting their mistakes than actually getting the production moving. Review & approval should take minutes, not hours. Giving and receiving feedback should be a matter of seconds. You shouldn’t have to frown every time your client or Creative Director emails you their feedback. Marketing and sales departments know it, and you know it more than anyone: An image is worth a thousands words. Emails interrupt the creative production workflow. To control and simplify it, start by connecting your feedback to your creative files: Ratings, selects, approvals, notes, and markups need to be attached to the asset your team is working on, in one centralized place accessible from anywhere. Don’t let emailing slow down your creative production. Automate Creative operations, especially when producing huge libraries of product photography or lifestyle images, come with repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Some of them are unavoidable, but many of them aren’t. Remember that contact sheet that took you so much time to put together and shared with your team? It can now be automated. That email recapping all the markups you’ve made on a photo or a video? Automated. Finding all the assets that have been approved by your talent? Automated search. Use technology to your advantage by automating all this time-consuming tasks, and focus on what you do best. Creative production platforms like globaledit offer a simple and easy way to centralize your library, simplify your communication to avoid mistakes, and automate your most tedious tasks to save time. All in one platform – not three or five different tools or platforms. Selecting the right platform will give your team the freedom to focus on what they are really good at: their creative input and expertise.

Globaledit had the pleasure of hosting a DAM Meetup NY about “Product Photography & DAM” featuring a great panel of experts and professionals who joined us to share their experience and best practices: Deanna Bedoya, Director of Creative Services, Lafayette 148 New York Sara Mitzner, Content Director, swimsuitsforall Nikki Schiwal, Senior Digital Archivist, J. Crew Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Global Content and Creative Production, eBay Enterprise With the rise of multi-channel retailing and marketing, product photography is booming. Today’s organizations are documenting, photographing, and videotaping every single item and SKU for various purposes. This results in extremely high volumes of assets generated, and creates growing challenges for companies when it comes to storing, tracking, reviewing, retouching, and sharing all those assets while managing time restrictions. Learn more about the challenges big retailers like eBay Enterprise, J. Crew, Lafayette 148 New York, swimsuitsforall are facing everyday when it comes to product photography, and the best practices they’ve put into place to solve them. Watch the full video:

Once a month, we meet with one of our software developers to get to know the team behind the technology. Meet our Aussie Software Engineer, Matt Callahan, who ensures the scalability of the globaledit platform for future developments. What do you do at globaledit? I am currently a software engineer at globaledit. I build out some of the core features and ensure the system architecture translates into code properly for successful scalability. So every time a new feature comes out, I oversee it to make sure the code structure is clean, secure, stable, and scalable in the long run. Also, because the application is available for iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Desktops, I focus on building out our API, which globaledit platform is utilizing more and more. What is your role in the feature development process? When the team comes up with a feature request, we’ll do a proof of concept to come up with possible solutions and technical recommendations – keeping in mind the existing code structure and future developments. For every new feature, we think about: What the customer wants, how the changes are going to affect the customer and the existing features, and how we can build on the system architecture without affecting future releases. It’s a trade-off: Sometimes the best technical approach might not solve customers’ needs, or a great new feature might have a huge impact on the system. What’s your professional background? My previous role was a Software Consultant in Melbourne (Australia). This involved working with different clients both remotely and on-site, and sometimes with multiple ones at a time. My clients would range from SMB to huge enterprises in finance and banking. I liked the team aspect, the negotiation and discussion. Eventually I moved to New York, and I was working remotely for the same consulting company. It was a great experience, in the aspects of freedom and setting your own schedule. After some time, communication became very challenging with the different time zones, and I missed working with people and building things. That’s when I decided to join the globaledit team. How did you get into engineering? I grew up on a dairy farm in Australia. Most of my siblings have an engineering mindset, but more hands-on. I guess that’s why it comes naturally to me. By the age of 10-12, my parents got a computer with Windows 3.1, and my father bought revolutionary farming software to manage the farm. I helped him setting it up and digging into it, that’s how I started understanding the file system. Eventually one day I was tinkering the computer and accidentally deleted everything. That’s how I learned the importance of backups! Later on, I moved to Melbourne to get a Computer Science degree, which opened so many doors. What do you like best about working here? What I like about my job is that we can be involved and have a direct impact on the product by incrementally improving it. A lot of little things allow us to be strategic and acquire big clients and it is very satisfying. In my previous job as a consultant, I had to deal with lots of variety (bank, plumbing, trading), which I really enjoyed. But there was no continuity of seeing the product evolve. I have been at globaledit for two years now, and I can definitely see how the usage has improved today vs. back then because we acknowledge product feedback from our customers. What are your favorite sources of inspiration? I listen to a lot of ‘nerdy’ podcasts for developers and engineers, especially on my commute: Full Stack Radio, Javascript Jabber, .NET Rocks!, The HanselMinutes Podcast, and the Software Engineering Radio. It helps keep up with the technology, consider different approaches to a problem, or give tricks and tips, etc. Also, I like building experimental websites and systems on the side. Technology is constantly changing, so you have to challenge yourself to stay on top of it. Working with new systems is a great way for me to keep my mind open to new approaches. For example, I developed a platform that could predict results of sporting events. By analyzing the different betting markets, the system would try to find a combination for a guarantee win. It didn’t really work, but I still learned a lot from building it. Do you have any hobbies? In Australia I loved watching Australian Rules football and cricket – I still watch it but the time difference can make it complicated. Since I moved to the States I’ve started following the American Football League, which means I have now 12 months of non-stop sport to watch! Also, my wife and I love to travel. I have been traveling since I was 18. I went to Japan for 3 months, got the travel bug, and went backpacking all over Asia. I love New York City, but I try to travel at least once a year overseas.

Time to take a break and feed your creative mind with these inspirational TED Talks: 4 lessons in creativity – Julie Burstein Radio host Julie Burstein talks with creative people for a living — and shares four lessons about how to create in the face of challenge, self-doubt and loss. Hear insights from filmmaker Mira Nair, writer Richard Ford, sculptor Richard Serra and photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Watch now. Fashion and creativity – Isaac Mizrahi Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi spins through a dizzying array of inspirations — from ’50s pinups to a fleeting glimpse of a woman on the street who makes him shout “Stop the cab!”. Watch now. Capturing memories in video art – Gabriel Barcia-Colombo Using video mapping and projection, artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo captures and shares his memories and friendships. At TED Fellow Talks, he shows his charming, thoughtful work — which appears to preserve the people in his life in jars, suitcases, blenders, etc. Watch now.  Taking imagination seriously – Janet Echelman Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing — which forced her to look to an unorthodox new art material. Now she makes billowing, flowing, building-sized sculpture with a surprisingly geeky edge. Watch now. Your Elusive Creative Genius – Elizabeth Gilbert Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk. Watch now.

June was a busy month for the development team at globaledit. We’ve improved performance, increased security, squashed bugs, and added a few powerful functionalities to help you gain more control over your creative production. We’re excited to introduce our latest features and newest improvements! Markup Editor now supports PDFs – You could already mark and annotate your photo and video files in globaledit to easily collaborate with your creative team. Now, you can also markup layouts or any multi-page PDF! Just upload your file, switch to our Markup Editor, and go. Discover what you can do with our Markup Editor.   ‘Smart Search’ now has additional fields – A few months ago, we introduced two new ‘Smart Search’ fields: In advanced search, you could search your ‘rated’ assets by user(s) and/or date range, a great way to simplify your review & approval process. We’ve gone one step further: Now ‘Smart Search’ fields also apply to markups and uploads! Look for all the assets that were marked-up or uploaded by a certain user and/or during a specific time frame. Read the support article.   Image load time improved – We’re all about embracing mobility and removing all physical barriers for creative teams. That’s why we’ve reduced image load time for galleries and lightboxes throughout the world, for a better user experience. Read the support article.   Share your photo or video markups directly from the globaledit iPhone or iPad app – If you already use our powerful Markup Editor on the iPad and iPhone app, you’re going to love this: Now you can also email to your team a PDF attachment containing all marks and annotations – directly from your iPhone and iPad! Update or download the globaledit app. Idle time session expiration – We know you’re sometimes dealing with highly sensitive assets and campaigns, so we’ve added an extra layer of security to our system. Admins can determine the time that will log users out of their globaledit account after a period of inactivity. Read the support article. If you have any questions about these new features, please contact our client services team!

For eCommerce, advertising campaigns, or editorial features, retouching is an essential part of every creative production process. Both photography and retouching go hand-in-hand to create the most beautiful and compelling imagery to a reflect a product, a brand, and a creative vision. We’ve met with Katie Ryan, Account Director at retouching and CG super-boutique, Impact Digital*, to learn more about their workflow—and how they integrate globaledit into the retouching process. At Impact Digital, we’re constantly against the clock producing hundreds upon thousands of images for clients. And when you’re retouching for top international brands and photographers, you have to ensure every photo is of the highest caliber. This is why we have a refined, tried and tested process to produce excellent images. 1. Creative kick-off Before we even touch the photos, it’s important that we sit down with the client and explore his or her vision of the shoot. What ‘story’ do they want to tell? Do they have any reference pictures? We ask these questions to get the images right from the start—saving the client time and reducing the amount of retouching rounds down the line. 2. Processing and organizing  Organizing hundreds of reference images, RAWs, JPEGs, and metadata can be very tricky at times. We use globaledit to centralize all our assets right at intake. This simple step can be a life-saver when a client wants to shift conceptual directions or when we’re creating composite shots. Rather than digging through folders or hard drives for the right images, our retouchers can pull them from the cloud into Photoshop straight away. 3. Initial retouching Prior to presenting to the client, we actually prefer to have several internal rounds of retouching in-house. During the rounds, the account manager, production manager, and the retouchers get together to assess if the image correctly matches the client’s vision. In the visual world of retouching, it’s all about first impression! 4. Client presentation This is where we present first round of retouched images to the client and receive constructive feedback. Whenever possible, we also like to have in-person meetings to facilitate healthy discussion about the photos. Sometimes a client might say “make this element pop more,” but this might actually mean “up the saturation” in Photoshop lingo. Having our account and production managers present really helps when translating the feedback to our retouchers. 5. External rounds After our initial meeting, we then enter a cycle of external retouching rounds. We retouch the image again, send them through a lightbox, a virtual folder that we create and share via globaledit, and then eventually receive new feedback from the client directly in globaledit. Clients can review, leave notes and comments, and mark images with the Markup Editor. This phase can take some time depending on the number of images we are retouching or possible changes in the client’s vision, but using the right digital collaborative tools make it so much faster! It considerably reduces the number of emails you have to track in your inbox and eliminates miscommunication. 6. Q&A and proofing Once the final image is approved, our whole team thoroughly inspects for errors and hard lines for maximum visual integrity. For photos that need to be printed, our prepress department processes the images and creates proofs for the client. This ensures that colors remain accurate across web and print ads. We share the finalized files with the client via a secure lightbox, to prevent any leaks from happening. If they themselves have a globaledit account, they can decide where to store it in their library, and how to share the final files with their team (asset and user permissions, watermark, etc.). 7. Release At this point, our images have finally reached the end of their little journey, and the client is happy. We begin to see our work in magazines, posters, or on the web—a moment that’s always amazing. *Impact Digital and globaledit are sister divisions and part of Industrial Color Brands, a family of integrated creative production companies.

Happy 4th of July! We know you’re constantly looking to feed your creative work. If you’re staying or visiting New York City this weekend, here are 5 must-see exhibits and activities that will boost your creative thinking: Aperture: Photographs ‘Aperture: Photograph’s is an exhibition that tells the story of Aperture, through a display of photographs from its print and fundraising programs, from over fifty years. A retrospective of all the great photographers that shaped the industry. Aperture Foundation June 29 – September 18, 2015 Hours: Mon–Fri: 8:00a.m.–6:00p.m. Entrance: Free Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks The first major exhibition of the Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s notebooks, ‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks’ features 160 pages of these rarely seen documents, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings. Brooklyn Museum April 3 – August 23, 2015 Hours: Wed: 11a.m.–6p.m. Thur: 11a.m.–10p.m. Fri–Sun: 11a.m.–6p.m. Entrance: $16 suggested contribution American Folk Art Museum: ‘When the Curtain Never Comes Down’ A sprawling cacophony of objects, audiotapes, photographs and films is here orchestrated into a curatorial marvel. Strange and wonderful in numerous ways, the show sheds new light on the performance aspects of much outsider art. American Folk Art Museum March 26 – July 5, 2015 Hours: Tue–Thu: 11:30a.m–7:00p.m. Fri: 12:00p.m.–7:30p.m. Sat: 11:30a.m.–7:00p.m. Sun: 12:00p.m.–6:00 pm. Mon: Closed. Please note the museum will be closed on Sat., July 4. Entrance: Free Whitney Museum of American Art Whitney’s new building increases the Museum’s exhibition and programming space, offering the most expansive display ever of its unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary American art. Hours: Mon, Wed, Sun 10:30 am–6 pm, Thu–Sat 10:30 am–10 pm, Tue Closed Entrance: $22 14th New York Asian Film Festival Back with 54 feature films, 18 international filmmakers and celebrity guests traveling from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. will attend the festival. Walter Reade Theater at Film Society Lincoln Center and SVA Theatre June 26 – July 8 and July 9 – July 11, 2015 Entrance:  $14 or $17 (depending on event)

Today, online creative collaboration looks like this: “Where is his/her email?”: One project or one asset (image, PDF, video) can generate thousands of back-and-forth emails. “In which email did I read this?”: When you scan emails all day long, it can be difficult to search for the exact comment or note, especially on iPhone or iPad. “Who said it?”: With several stakeholders involved, you vaguely remember someone sending a comment about a specific asset, but who and when? “Did he/she give his/her feedback?”: It’s hard to track who did or did not review the assets in time. “What changes need to be made?”: Collecting all the feedback is time-consuming, and mistakes are common. “What is he/she talking about?”: You’ve got the message but you’re still trying to figure out how to read between the lines. Using digital markup tools is an easy way to communicate clear directions to your team. By directly drawing and commenting on the image, PDF, or video file, your team saves time, avoids mistakes, and eliminates endless rounds of review. Here are 3 reasons why you should start using digital markups and annotations to communicate with your creative team: 1. Move the conversation… …from your inbox to your assets. Gathering all your assets in one single ‘place of truth’ is the first step to better collaboration. If you add the possibility for people to provide their feedback and comment directly on the asset (image, PDF, video) they are reviewing, you’ve already cut down ⅔ of your emails and the time spent searching for them. 2. Track your creative team’s feedback Each time your teammates leave a comment or a markup, know exactly who requested the changes, reviewed the images, PDF document, or videos. 3. Show don’t tell By using digital markup tools (shapes, colors, notes), feedback are more accurate and the work gets done faster. Decide on a color-code with your team to quickly estimate the amount of work or the team involved in the changes. Globaledit has an integrated digital Markup Editor that enables creative production teams to quickly communicate and share their feedback and comments on photos, PDFs, and videos. By using the Markup Editor on their desktop, iPhone or iPad, our clients noticeably reduce their retouching, editing, and rounds of review with their team (video, eCommerce, marketing, etc.). Watch how the Markup Editor for images & PDF works and how you can accelerate your video review with video commenting at time frame.

Save the date! Globaledit will be hosting the next DAM Meetup about Product Photography & DAM on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. Many organizations photograph their products to market them online (eCommerce platforms, affiliated websites, social media) and/or in stores. The high volume of items photographed and, as a result, of photos taken makes it very challenging for brands to keep track of their assets. Using a DAM system enables them to keep the best photographs and helps with multi-channel distribution. A talented panel of experts and professionals will be sharing their experience and best practices in product photography & DAM system: Deanna Bedoya, Director of Creative Services, Lafayette 148 New York Sara Mitzner, Content Director, swimsuitsforall Nikki Schiwal, Senior Digital Archivist, J. Crew Jim Zdancewicz, Head of Global Content and Creative Production, eBay Enterprise When: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 from 6.30PM to 9PM Where: Industrial Color Brands / Globaledit, 32 Ave. of the Americas, 22nd Fl., New York, NY

Stay on top of industry news & trends with our top 5 must-read stories of the week! Here’s what you should read this week: JPEG Compression Test: Google Photos vs. JPEGmini (via PetaPixel) How to reduce the size of photo files without changing the perceptual quality of the images? PetaPixel ran a series of tests to compare the photo compression performance of the newly released Google Photo vs. JPEGmini. Get Ready for Social Media’s Big Event Trends (via Freeman XP) From Twitter’s Project Lightening to Snapchat’s Our Stories to Instagram’s Search & Explore, social media platforms are capitalizing on customer- and brand-generated content shared during live events. Adobe Has Entered the Stock Photo Market, Competes with Getty and Shutterstock (via Resource Magazine) The market for stock images is massive, coming in at over $3 billion. That’s why Adobe just launched Adobe Stock, which lets consumers buy and sell creative content (images and graphics) directly through the Creative Cloud interface. Twitter Gets More Shoppable With Product Pages And Collections (via Techcrunch) Slowly but surely Twitter moves into eCommerce, releasing two new products this week: Product and Place Pages and Collections. This means more eCommerce channels to manage, and new opportunities for brands. Comedy Central in the Post-TV Era (via The New York Times) The network is in the middle of a creative renaissance and a business-model crisis. What does a television network do when its bread-and-butter demographic, young, piracy-fluent, glued to phones, stops watching television? Do you have an article to share with us? Reach out on Twitter, we love hearing from you: @globaledit.

After being rewarded “2015 Best Redevelopment Project” by the Los Angeles Business Journal, our sister company, Smashbox Studios has received LABC’s Los Angeles Architectural Award of Excellence in Interiors. Congratulations to the whole team at Industrial Color Brands, Gensler and Howard Building Corporation for making this incredible project possible! When the renovation project started a year ago, it was a huge undertaking with very tight deadlines. The team was split between the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States, making it harder to communicate and work together. Find out how design and architecture firm Gensler and all the stakeholders leveraged globaledit to remove barriers of time and location, and avoid expensive mistakes. Read the article.

In this edition of Tech Talk we sat down with Nick Balsamo, one of our talented software developers who’s dedicated to making sure our platform runs smoothly. Read more below! What is your role at globaledit? I’m currently a software engineer with focuses on our backend development and on crafting our automation frameworks. What this means is that I work with our QA team to build the tools they use to write tests that check if globaledit is healthy and working optimally. These tests will  run each night and perform a variety of scenarios. This also means I work on building out our APIs and services for the iOS app and website. In many ways, my position requires me to straddle between QA and development; I’m pretty much a “liaison” between the two. Whenever the QA team needs tools, I build them! What is the most challenging part of your position? When I was hired about a year ago, I actually didn’t have any experience building testing frameworks. As a result, I had to do a lot of research. We were just starting to automate our tests, so I looked extensively into QA tools—what would work for us and what was most cost effective. Since then I’ve worked with the QA team to build up our automation framework from scratch. What’s your approach to solving a problem? Start out by defining the problem and its variables. What can and can’t you control? From there, it’s all about taking incremental steps. You never want to just dive in and attempt to tackle a problem in its entirety. Modularize it: Divide it into digestible segments, start with the first part, and work your way on to the next one. What do you enjoy most about globaledit? I used to work for an investment bank in developing software that tracks the performance of a client’s investments. After a few years there, I decided it wasn’t for me. Now that I’ve joined globaledit, my work environment is much more uplifting. Everyone takes ownership of their work and we all take pride in building together a product that is constantly improving. One of the most enjoyable aspects is the atmosphere and work vibe around the office. Having a relatively small team in comparison to a huge company means that you get to work one-on-one most of the time, and there’s an individual touch to everything. Everyone has their hands in the pot, whether it’s database work, API building, or front-end development. We’re not limited to just one role, which leaves a lot of room for growth. What are your favorite apps? I’m actually a big runner so I really enjoy Nike Plus. It tracks how fast you’re going and your mileage. I find it pretty interesting since I get to visibly see what affects my running. If I went out the night before, I’ll obviously be running slower than normal. If I ate something pretty energizing in the morning, I’ll see how effective it is. As far as work apps go, I created a tool that captures the state of the website as the system runs through our automated tests. It’s incredibly useful because you get to see exactly what’s happening when something goes wrong. Not to mention, it feeds into a dashboard that summarizes the results and progress of a running test. Definitely a time-saver. What do you enjoy to do outside work? I really enjoy traveling around the country going to the “big games” and visiting different stadiums. In the last few years I’ve been to the Super Bowl, the College Football Championship, a few Stanley Cup Finals games, and 15 different MLB stadiums. The best part has to be the tailgating and how each city has their own culture and their own traditions. These trips aren’t the most traditional types of vacations, but they’re a great way to see the country!

Q&A with Marketing Producer, Julia Foresman of Industrial color brands We’ve been talking a lot about the gallery exhibit going on at our headquarters in TriBeCa over the past month.  As Jean Jullien’s installation comes to a close at the end of May, the Industrial Color Brands team shared with us how they’ve leveraged globaledit to manage content creation for its four divisions: Industrial Color, Fast Ashleys Studios, Impact Digital, and (of course) globaledit. How do you leverage events for marketing purposes? As a brand we’re entrenched in creative production on all levels, so being able to curate a creative endeavor ourselves is essential.  An exhibit like our recent collaboration with Jean Jullien offers huge opportunity to engage with the community about something aside from the services we offer.  Practically, this also means creating a lot of promotional content about the exhibit, the artist, and putting on an event for the opening. What is your role in the process? I’m responsible for curating all of the raw content and distributing it on our websites through blog articles and social media. Because I work for all of the Industrial Color Brands divisions that means managing four websites and 16+ social media outlets, each with original content that aligns with their specific  ‘voice’. How did you manage all of the assets produced in promoting an event like this? Part of what has made my job easier in promoting globaledit as a platform is that I legitimately use it every day to manage all of our photo and video assets. With four divisions under the Industrial Color Brands umbrella, we’re producing a wide variety of content every day that isn’t specific to one division.  Events are unique in that we’re promoting across all divisions simultaneously, so we have four times the amount of distribution all at once. What is the biggest challenge with managing event photography? Event photography like a photo booth can be a monster of a task. Time is of the essence when it comes to leveraging the post-show buzz and all of the photography captured during it. By the next day people want to see the photo booth collection and share the photos themselves, and of course we want them to as well. Thanks to the team at Industrial Color we have a custom photo booth set-up that people get super engaged with at our events.  In fours we’re talking upwards of three thousand photos.  The challenge here is being able to quickly pare down 3,000 some images into multiple galleries to share by the next afternoon.  How do You get from 3,000 photos to the few you want to use? Once in globaledit I use a star rating method to quickly pare selects down to a few hundred and then separate out 25-50 unique photos for each division. I put each division’s photos into a separate Lightbox, download them and get to work on distributing.  By the afternoon I’ll have created four Facebook albums, four blog articles and who knows how many additional social posts cross promoting and linking them all together. Usually, I’d start this process by getting a drive from our photo booth Tech and uploading all the assets first thing the next day.  However, this event was our first time using the new ‘globaledit desktop’ feature for the booth, which was hugely beneficial. How was globaledit desktop used in this case? The globaledit team set up a ‘hot folder’ at the capture station so that every single photo taken in the booth automatically uploaded into a folder in globaledit right on the spot.  No drive to upload the next morning. And both RAW and jpgs were accessible immediately.  I was able to start making selects that night, cutting down the turn-around time to distribution even further. This was also great for the Industrial Color Tech who handled the photo booth set up.  He didn’t have to manage handing over files the next day or creating a backup because it was all done for them automatically. What is the biggest benefit from your experience incorporating globaledit desktop at the event? Definitely how much time it saved, especially being under the pressure of a hard deadline.  Between cutting out the back and forth to get my hands on a drive and the time of doing a mass upload, I saved three hours before even walking in the door the next day. That time makes a huge difference when you still have your general day-to-day tasks to get done. Any advice for people managing event photography? It’s really important to come up with an efficient rating & filtering system that makes sense to you.  For the first pass you really can’t be too precious with each photo.  I’ll scroll through everything one time quickly and uniformly give a 3 stars to all ‘usable’ photos.  Then I filter out anything that isn’t 3 stars so immediately the photos are pared down to a more manageable selection.  With a more limited collection, I can then go through and use color labels to indicate which division or outlet it should be used for. So I know that green is Industrial Color and red is Fast Ashleys Studios, etc… Once that’s done, again I quickly filter by ratings and add to individual Lightboxes.  I download those and have four perfectly organized (& unique) collections to draw from. For more behind-the-scenes from Jean Jullien’s exhibit at the Industrial Color Brands gallery, you can watch an interview with the artist and check out (all four) of the photo booth galleries here, here, here and here.  Learn more about globaledit desktop in the short video below! Automate your uploads with globaledit desktop from globaledit on Vimeo.

Stop searching for a needle in a haystack with globaledit advanced search! We’ve just released two new search criteria that will improve your review & approval process for good: You can now search your ‘Ratings’ by user(s) and/or date range. Here are 3 use cases to take advantage of these new features and boost your productivity: Talent approval: How do I look for all the photos ‘killed’ by my talent? I want globaledit to show me all the killed photos by talent A. Expand  advanced search, select ‘Ratings’, then ‘Kill’, and click on the user icon.  Once that modal expands, begin typing the talent’s name. Now when you run your search you will see the list of assets  killed by talent A. How do I look for all the assets rated by a collaborator during a specific period of time? Your Creative Director (or another collaborator) emailed you on May 20th to let you know that she’s selected the photos for your next Fall campaign. You don’t know the file names. To avoid having to go through all the selected assets (other team members may have selected some of them too), you can now add your Creative Director’s name, and even a date range, to your search: ‘Ratings > Select > Creative Director > Between May 10 and May 20’. You went from 500 photos to only 20 in just a matter of seconds. Date range is also great to find all the assets that have been rated, killed or approved over a specific period of time, on one single project, or your entire library – perfect for those monthly reports. I keep searching the same assets over and over. How can I automate my search? If you are used to running the same search over and over, why not save it? With the new search criteria, it means you can now easily find it one single click: All the assets killed by your talent; Your weekly report of approved photos; Or anything that helps you keep your creative production track. Save your time. Have a question, another use case in mind, or just want to share your workflow? Contact us and we’ll be happy to help or publish your use case on our blog.

Video review & approval is a tedious process that often means endless emails, confusing feedback, and unpredictable outcomes. To avoid confusion and simplify your communication, we just rolled-out a powerful new video feature that will bring your video review to the next level: Frame accurate video commenting. In this session, Product Manager Matt Glueckert will show you: How to instantly review your video from any device (web, iPhone, iPad) How to generate an exportable pdf including all of your feedback Best practices for reviewing your videos in globaledit Have a question or want a free demo? Contact us!

How do you deliver all your video content and keep all your projects on track when you are constantly on-the-go, in-between shoots, and working on multiple projects? Here are 4 tricks to make the most of globaledit’s video commenting on your iPhone and iPad—and review all your videos from the tip of your fingers. 1. PINPOINT AN EXACT FRAME TO COMMENT  Tapping on the left/right of the video frame will move back/forward one frame. Perfect for navigating to the exact frame you want before making a comment.     2. REVIEW COMMENTS AS VIDEO PLAYS While watching the video, comments will automatically be highlighted when the video reaches its specific frame. Turn off this functionality by tapping the gear in the bottom right hand corner then switching off ‘Comment Auto-Tracking’. Quickly review all video comments as you play your video.     3. WATCH YOUR VIDEO FULL-SCREEN  View your video fullscreen in landscape mode to enjoy the full video experience and better spot the changes you want to make. Get edge-to-edge video viewing by turning your phone to landscape mode. You can still access frame controls and add comments. Then turn it back to portrait to review your comments.     4. SWIPE TO REVIEW YOUR NEXT VIDEO! You can also swipe left or right on the video frame to move between videos. Great if you need to review multiple videos at once and get your projects moving.

  Video review & approval is a tedious process that often means endless emails, confusing feedback, and unpredictable outcomes. Video teams all around the world are constantly facing this problem, so we at globaledit came up with a solution: Frame accurate video commenting. You can now provide or get precise feedback to or from your collaborators by adding comments on video at a specific timecode, selecting a frame, or manually entering the timecode. With video commenting in globaledit, your team can: Instantly review your video from any devices (web, iOS) Provide or receive frame-by-frame comments on a video Centralize all feedback on a video into one exportable pdf To get started, open your video using the globaledit Markup Editor mode. Now, you’re all set to review & comment your video! Visit our dedicated support article for a full review of video commenting in globaledit, or contact our dedicated team of User Champions.

We’re back for another round of our ‘Tech Talk’ series with Sam Sandoval, QA Engineer at globaledit. Find out how we sniff and snuff out bugs in our platform, Sam’s exciting career as a professional gamer, and his new found interest in salsa dancing. What is your role at globaledit? As a QA Engineer at globaledit, it’s my job to run the application through various tests to ensure that each new update and feature that we release is as bug-free as possible and that they have been implemented correctly. This includes more manual front-end testing of the UI, automation of said testing, and API level testing on the back-end. As QA, we’re the last line of defense between a new update to the app and our clients, so we do absolutely everything we can to ensure that globaledit is in a polished and workable state before it reaches their hands. What’s your approach to building and improving globaledit? When you have a product that’s as complex as globaledit, testing for all of the possible scenarios can sometimes be a challenge. There are a seemingly countless of interconnected features that affect each other in ways that aren’t always obvious. It’s pretty easy at times to forget how even a small change in one feature can impact another one. This is why we do our best to create detailed test plans before each new feature released, so that nothing is overlooked. Fully identifying what needs to be tested beforehand helps immensely when targeting and testing certain aspects of the platform. We then go in, execute the test cases, validated the features, smoketest the release, and give it our thumbs up if all goes well. What is the most challenging aspect of your position? Probably keeping up with the rapid release cycles. When we push out a new update to globaledit, the expectation is that the product should be very stable and bug-free. Finding that balance between working quickly and being more calculated and methodical is what allows us to put out these quick releases while meeting the quality standards. Luckily, we have a great QA team to divvy up the testing and reach our goal. 🙂 Why did you choose globaledit? When I was initially looking for a new QA job, I wanted a challenging position with lots of room for personal growth. I wasn’t disappointed when I decided to join globaledit. So far I have added multiple new tools to my QA repertoire, many of which have helped in testing globaledit. Not to mention, the team is full of really smart people – I feel like I can learn a lot from pretty much everyone that I work with. Your favorite globaledit ‘Hackathon’ project? I actually use our monthly Hackathons as a time to learn new tools more than anything else. I pick a new tool, run at least one test with that tool, and add it to my skillset. Not only does it help with my own personal portfolio, but it has directly benefited my testing of globaledit as well. One of the coolest tools I’ve learned was Sikuli, a QA tool centered around GUI components. Because globaledit is flash-based, it can be difficult sometimes to automate some of the tests that we want to perform. Sikuli recognizes the pixels on the screen based on a screenshot you take of the UI element you’re trying to find, finds it on the screen, then moves the cursor to that location and clicks the button. It definitely became a huge time-saver in testing the application. How did you get started in QA-ing? I actually started out with game design in college and was determined to make it in the game industry at the time. I created a company with some colleagues/friends of mine and worked on some iPhone games. They were pretty solid apps—nothing too complicated or fancy, but it was a lot of fun. Somewhere along the way, in-between jobs, I picked up a QA gig. I enjoyed it and discovered that I was pretty good at it, and so I just kind of ran with it. Fast forward a few years and now I’m a QA engineer at globaledit! But you still enjoy video games, right? Do you have other hobbies? Yeah, of course! For a couple of years, I was a pro-gamer for the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft. It was like being a sports athlete… except for a computer game. I practiced with my team, got flown out to tournaments, and was even sponsored. It was an amazing experience and gave me a pretty solid excuse to visit new countries and experience different cultures. Nowadays, I’m not competing professionally, but I still enjoy gaming as a daily part of my life. Aside from that, I picked up salsa dancing last year, and it’s been a pretty positive change so far. I practice several times a week and have performed at several salsa dance events. I also have a salsa dance iOS app in the works right now.

Thanks to everyone who came out for last night’s Industrial Color Brands gallery opening!  We celebrated artist Jean Jullien‘s installation ‘In Case of Ubiquity’, illustrations overlooking New York City from 22 stories up in air.  The French artist concluded his 6 month residency in New York by creating a visual diary with the city skyline as his canvas. The finished work is a clever, insightful narrative on the nuances of life in the Big Apple. Check out a few choice pieces below and the full gallery from the event’s photo booth here. The exhibition runs through May 1st at the Industrial Color Brands gallery in TriBeCa. Email gallery@industrialcolor.com to come by!

Smashbox Cosmetics partnered with House Leopard Productions to renovate and operate their legendary Culver City studio. The NYC based executive team worked remotely with the LA based design and construction teams to bring the project’s vision to life under an extremely tight deadline of 9 months. Remote collaboration From concept to construction the project deadline was half of the industry standard for an undertaking of its scope – with major infrastructure upgrades, complete gut renovations of two adjacent buildings and numerous high-tech and AV innovations. The ambitious project required constant, detailed collaboration among many stakeholders across multiple geographic locations to review and approve the design and daily construction progress. The team involved top suppliers, including the Newport Beach Gensler team, Gardiner & Theobald project management, ARC Engineering, Howard Building Corporation and the Smashbox Studios teams in NYC and LA. A project of this scope and deadline required a new way to work and communicate. By implementing globaledit, the teams were able to upload and share photos and drawings in real-time from anywhere 24/7. This removed barriers of time and location and gave immediate access to the project and removed guesswork. From design concepts, mood boards and renderings, to original site photos and landscaping references, globaledit was the primary communication platform between the client and Gensler. Its use was also paramount during construction, allowing the teams to communicate instantaneously and make constant real-time decisions. “Referencing actual in-progress photos was a huge benefit to the project. Conference calls, drawings and meetings are one thing, but photos are real – they clarify and align the team. Smashbox Studios uploaded around 50 site photos per day. Because of their diligence prior to and during construction we were able to see every detail, prevent mistakes and make approvals instantly. It was an amazing resource that I’ve never had before.” – Gareth Jones, Associate Director, Gardiner & Theobald. Real-time feedback In addition to major infrastructure upgrades that included electrical, seismic, fire sprinklers, plumbing and HVAC, the team was also tasked with designing custom features including state-of-the-art color controllable LED hair/makeup stations, world class café and commercial kitchen, modern AV systems and premium VIP lounges and mezzanines to create their vision of the “studio of the future.” “Globaledit was critical to ensuring every custom feature and detail was executed perfectly. The cloud-based application allowed team members to visualize and identify any issues instantly and work together to find quick resolutions to stay on track with our fast-paced schedule.“ – Ashley Brewer, Designer, Gensler A simple workflow was quickly established to streamline the team’s review and approval process. Photos were uploaded to globaledit at the end of each construction day. The NYC team was then able to review the photos in the late afternoon and make comments, markups and approvals. The vital feedback was reviewed and integrated into the next day’s construction updates. globaledit was also critical in both discovering construction conflicts ahead of time and establishing immediate solutions that avoided costly delays – the team never missed a beat. “With globaledit we all referenced the same images during construction. I might notice one detail, while our project manager would catch something else. In one instance we caught an issue with the sprinkler install that would have cost well over $100,000 in abortive work.  Catching all of the details adds up to huge cost and time savings. More importantly, it’s about building an amazing studio. With globaledit we achieved our vision and mission. The team and project exceeded our expectations, which is rare in construction.” – Steve Kalalian, CEO, Smashbox Studios “In the end, it only took 9 months from concept to construction for Smashbox Studios to re-open its doors. Usually a project like this takes around 15 months, but we were working on an extremely tight timeframe. We did a load of things in parallel that are usually done one after the other, so we condensed everything schedule-wise.  We simply couldn’t have done that without globaledit.” -Gareth Jones, Associate Director of Gardiner & Theobald. Smashbox Studios re-opened its doors on schedule and immediately welcomed high-profile photographers and celebrity clientele. The Gensler and Howard Building Corporation team was able to create an exceptional space that delivered on the client’s mission of creating a modern, user-friendly facility. The team is proud to have earned Los Angeles Business Journal’s 2015 Best Redevelopment Project award, and an upcoming feature article in Interior Design Magazine’s April 2015 issue. Be sure to check out Smashbox Studios’ website for a closer look at the results. Construction Credits Architect: Gensler, Newport Beach – James Young, Ashley Brewer, Anne Bretana, Eric James & Michael Robins Construction: Howard Building Corporation – Steve Segel, Mike Thompson Project and Cost Management:  Gardiner & Theobald – Gareth Jones MEP: ARC Engineering – TK Wong AV & Cabling: Tekworks – Joshua Montana and Dave Novak Security: Enterprise Security – Keith Trainer Landscape Architect: Place – Victoria Pakshong and Anne Buttyan Read & print the full story. *globaledit is a division of Industrial Color Brands, operator of Smashbox Studios.

Looking for innovative ways to optimize your creative production? We are too! This is why we brought you globaledit desktop, a tool to upload your assets to the cloud faster than ever. Join Product Manager, Tommy Lionelli, for a quick 20-minute training session that will automate your uploads for lightning-fast transfer and real-time collaboration. In this session, you will learn how to: Get started with globaledit desktop at the office or on set Automatically upload photos and videos to shared lightboxes Best practices to use globaledit desktop in your worfklow

Renowned illustrator and graphic designer, Jean Jullien, will be bringing his signature style and humor to the the Industrial Color Brands gallery in TriBeCa. He’ll be creating a one-of-a-kind painting on the gallery windows that interacts with the New York City skyline from 22 stories above ground. Schedule an appointment to stop by!

When your photographer is on location in LA, your retouchers are in Hong Kong and your marketing team is in NYC, working together on the same creative project can be extremely challenging. Join Product Manager, Matt Glueckert, to discover how globaledit can tie your whole creative production workflow together, and boost your remote collaboration efficiency. In this session, you will learn how globaledit helps you to: – Centralize communication by keeping your ratings, comments, markups, and files together – Control access to your assets with powerful and easy sharing tools – Accelerate large files upload and transfer  

This week, we chatted with Senior Software Developer, Christian Saide. Join us as we take a closer look at the code crazy, ocean-loving programmer who’s keeping our cloud afloat.  What is your role at globaledit? I’m currently a software developer at globaledit with a focus on running and optimizing our servers. What this normally entails is working with our systems team to build the server and application code and of course, test it over and over again. This can range from low-level tweaks and changes, to big projects spanning hundreds of virtual machines. In the end, it’s all about getting more people on our cloud and transferring data faster than ever. I work to build a nimble, seamless user-experience ‘behind the curtains’ or in the other words, the back-end side of things. It’s a job that has a lot of little nuances and challenges, but it’s definitely rewarding. What’s your biggest accomplishment so far here?  As I mentioned before, our work sometimes involves a vast array of virtual machines. When people think about storing large amounts of digital data, they usually think about physical storage—like terabytes upon terabytes of hard drives or server rooms. Eventually, we decided to move our infrastructure to virtual emulations of PCs. This gave us an edge when developing and testing new features. There was no need to replace physical hardware, provided more environments to test iterations of features on, and ultimately, just made our team more agile and flexible. It was a great change that speed up our development cycle tenfold. What’s your approach to building and improving globaledit? globaledit is clean and simple, yet powerful and deceptively really, really big. Users are constantly pulling large amounts of data from our servers, uploading high-resolution pictures and videos to our cloud, and editing these huge files. It’s a really intricate process that focuses on one point: speed. With that in mind, we look at routing calls from the user interface, reducing latency, and moving caches into the cloud. I aim for a robust globaledit that’s incredibly responsive and always reliable. Why globaledit? I’m not going to lie, the view was amazing when I first visited the office. Aside from that, it was really the nature of the work and the team that drew me in. When you’re faced with the sheer size and breadth of a cloud-based platform, it’s a difficult job. Right now, we keep 9 separate environments functioning, well-oiled, and working perfectly. It’s great to constantly learn from and evolve with a product, especially one that’s complex. As for the software development team, we’re a pretty tight-knit group. Though we’re always working on different things, the end goal is to make all the pieces fit neatly into each other. It’s in the same vein of start-ups: a healthy mix of autonomy and teamwork. It’s exactly what I enjoy in a working environment. What are your favorite apps and tools? For work, it’s all about Sublime Text, literally the best text editor in my life. The rest relates to server back-end helpers like Bash and Visual Shell. On my phone, I’m actually not a big app user. I only have Tetris, and I currently can’t beat the 16th level. How do you approach problem-solving? It’s sometimes impossible to solve a complex problem just in one shot. You have to think deeply about it, explore the possibilities and angles, and then attack it. But the most important part is, don’t get stuck. Move on to something else and then come back later—with lots of coffee. How did you start programming? I had a computer ever since I can remember and during my childhood, I was always the IT guy. Funny thing is, I actually majored in Mechanical Engineering in college. However, after I graduated, I started working in a nanotech lab, ran simulations, and eventually started developing the simulation software. At that point, I fell in love with coding and started creating my own video game hacks. I did that for a long time and even got paid to play video games. I eventually shifted my focus to web applications, what I think is the future of software development. What keeps you busy aside from work?  I love keeping my skills sharp by making apps and contributing to GitHub every now and then. I dabble in whatever interests me, like genetic programming (code that rewrites itself as it runs), 1080p screen-capturing, and FTP replacement servers. For me, it’s all about making every iteration better than the last and constantly improving. Outside of coding, I’m actually a really big longboarder and surfer. I love the ocean. As for why I don’t live in California—trust me, I’ve thought about it, but college just put me on the East Coast for now.

Looking for innovative ways to optimize your creative production? We are too! This is why we’re bringing you globaledit desktop, a new tool to upload your assets to the globaledit cloud faster than ever. globaledit desktop automatically uploads your assets from your computer to your globaledit account. Watch Tommy Lionelli, Product Manager at globaledit, introduce this new workflow tool: Start using globaledit desktop now! Visit our dedicated section or our Support website to get started today.

  Handling talent approvals can be a huge headache. For over 10 years, globaledit has been providing the industry standard talent approval system. This streamlined tool is used every day by top media companies and advertising agencies, making sharing assets a breeze and approving them even easier. Join Product Manager, Matt Glueckert, to explore how TV networks and movie studios use globaledit to manage and speed up talent approvals for some of the biggest names in Hollywood. In this session you will learn: – How to share Approval Galleries in just a few clicks – How to use Approvals on-the-go with your iPad or iPhone – How to keep track of Approvals with our Asset Status feature Check out the recording below! https://vimeo.com/121185498  

In this week’s ‘Tech Talk’, we chatted with Vice-President of Engineering, Ameet Doshi. Join us as we discover his approach to building globaledit, love of start-ups, and brief stint as a NYC bar owner. What is your role at globaledit? As the Vice-President of Engineering, I’m responsible for overseeing the progression of globaledit. Contrary to the title, I don’t do much programming anymore, but rather, I guide the product and development teams on the ever-lasting quest to improve our platform. We brainstorm, test, and implement ground-breaking features or the littlest of UI changes to create a better product. It’s a complex process that requires us to be mindful of security, our client’s needs, the market, and our goal to stay above our competition. In a nutshell, I bring together the vision of globaledit and its execution to bring a concrete, working platform that’s always evolving. What’s your approach to building and improving globaledit? When creating a product like globaledit, a solid grasp of analytics is absolutely key. We choose to align our vision with internal data because it reveals important insight into our user base. For example, we may think our clients want XYZ, but data collected may show they want an upgrade of an already existing feature. In the end, it’s all about harmonizing your endeavors with analytics—striking a good balance between direction and data. What is the most challenging aspect of your position? When you’re evolving the overall product, the challenges change and shift according to your daily focus. In a sense, it’s fun because it breaks up the monotony and constantly keeps things moving forward. It’s also productive because we like to carve out time to reimagine our platform from different focal points, eventually combining each iteration into a new feature or upcoming concept. But as far as an actual challenge? It’s always time! There’s never enough hours in the day. Did you always know that you wanted to work in the tech industry? Nope! I actually started off with biomedical engineering to reconcile my love of math and my dad’s desire for his children to become doctors. At first, I loved it—I met wonderful professors, was genuinely interested, and even secured a job after graduating. It was a research and development position that had me in charge of my own project: take raw collagen, purify it, strengthen it, and make a natural ACL replacement. From just a raw concept, I designed about a thousand prototypes before eventually submitting the idea for studies and testing. At that point, though, I was 22—very young and restless—and I couldn’t wait around for 2 years for the findings to be released. I resigned and started looking into technology. (My idea eventually got patented!) How was the transition? It was actually nothing too new to me. At school, I took core classes in programming and around the dot-com bubble, all the companies were hiring like crazy. With a biomedical engineering degree, it was a bit difficult to convince interviewers at first, but once I got my first position—they never regretted it. I held the most amount of raises and promotions in my company and even the longest awake session in development (42 hours straight)! From there, I went into digital marketing, the product world, rebuilt a webmail platform, and even started my own consulting firm. What is it about the “startup culture” or process that you enjoy? A lot of the companies that I joined, like 360i, were reasonably small but definitely growing by leaps and bounds. And it’s something about the passion and heart that go into a budding business, that’s absolutely inspiring. In companies similar to Google and Facebook, there’s a lot of slow, methodical action. You never really get to test your wings at fast-paced speeds. At globaledit, we have a team that’s nimble and ready to make a big splash. There might be growing pains here and there, but it helps a lot with making the day-to-day grind more dynamic and lively. How do you maintain a healthy work-life balance? As a consultant for start-up companies, some of my work-life balance actually begins in work! Having had two great mentors in life, I see my legacy as not ‘what I did’ but ‘how I helped others grow’. I love mentoring when I can, and I make it a point in my life to encourage and push others to realize their potential. In the end, it’s all about creating a family with the people you work with and fostering a healthy environment with plenty of room to grow. As far as outside of work, I’ve got my wife and two daughters who I never want to miss out on. I always try to be home before their bedtime and create precious time for them on the weekends. Though my professional career is important, I like to stay rooted with my family. It’s rewarding and the balance keeps me more energized in my daily life. We hear that you once owned a bar? How did that happen? During my days as a young programmer in my mid-20s, I decided to do something completely different and buy a bar. I managed people, made connections, and fostered my communication skills—something not easily done in front of a computer and keyboard. It was overall an experience that prepared me for consulting and managing a team of thinkers and developers. When you’re directing or working with large groups of different people, you’re also collaborating with their personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. It takes a certain finesse to pull them all together and create something great.

Last year IBM reported 1.5 million monitored cyber attacks in the United States. Passwords, credit card numbers, and other valuable information totaling billions of dollars were exposed on the web. Now is the time to safeguard your precious photos and videos. Start out with these 5 ways to protect digital assets and keep your company work secure. 1. Manage what your users can and cannot do Not everyone should have universal rights to access, create, edit and delete digital assets. Ensure that your users only have the tools required to complete their jobs. There’s nothing worse than losing assets to human error. 2. Balance safeguarding your digital assets and user experience Requiring your team to change their passwords periodically  can be a pain, but it is necessary from a security standpoint. Communicate with your collaborators to create a healthy harmony between security protocols and workflow. Setting expiration dates and company watermarks are easy ways to protect your assets without sacrificing time. 3. Know your most valuable assets Cyber crime costs businesses up to 575 billion dollars annually. Avoid the risk by knowing your security architecture is secure. If your work involves sharing pre-retouched photos or unedited videos, consider using tools with transport layer security and data encryption for safe sending. 4. Layer your security One common misconception is that attacks solely originate from outside sources. However, around 35% of breaches occur from within or third-party vendors. Protecting your files and data from unauthorized outside access is crucial, but you also want to safeguard servers, networks and digital assets from internal mishandling. 5. Test your tools In a post-Sony hack world—It’s not if you’ll get hacked, it’s when you’ll get hacked. Only use tools that are audited by renowned third-party security organizations to minimize your risk. You can find a list of certified Qualified Security Assessors evaluated by the PCI Security Council here. For more about protecting digital assets, take a look at our ‘Implementing Enterprise Application Security’ Snackinar with Ted Harrington from Independent Security Evaluators. We explored some of the concepts here, as well as the relationship between security and the creative realm.

We hosted the Advertising Production Club’s ‘Integrated Media’ panel last night to learn what makes a good integrated campaign work and why. The outstanding panel discussed what drives a brand, how media is distributed and how the creative process travels from concept to consumer.  Check out the some photos below and the full album on our facebook page.

Collaborating and sharing content has never been easier, and the demand to do so quickly, never greater. In this Snackinar, we continued our new series focusing on the craft of digital photo and video production. We interviewed top talent from across the creative industry to learn how they use their skills to create top-notch visuals for their audiences. For our second edition, join us as we take a closer look at the creative workflow behind the making of iconic images. Our guest Katie Ryan, Account Director at retouching & CGI super-boutique Impact Digital, joined us to share: The evolution of digital photo retouching The challenges faced by retouching teams Tips and tricks for a smooth retouching workflow Katie has over 8 years of fashion industry experience in retouching, both on the client side and the agency side. Impact Digital is a high-end retouching & CGI super-boutique based in New York City, embracing all types of projects ranging from editorial work to global advertising, in-store and e-commerce campaigns. Find out more about the Art of Retouching in a new series: “Anatomy of a Super Boutique”. Check out the recording below!  

We had a great time at LeBook’s Connections Los Angeles event yesterday.  Hosted by our friends at Smashbox Studios, we got to rub elbows with the best in creative production at an incredible facility. We joined sister divisions Industrial Color, Fast Ashleys Studios and Impact Digital to present Industrial Color Brands and cheers at the after-party. Check out the gallery for a peek into one of the highest caliber industry events in the biz.

Collaborating and sharing content has never been easier, and the demand to do so quickly, never greater. But with great flexibility and speed can come poor security. So how do you keep creative workflow moving while maintaining a secure environment? Security Expert Ted Harrington from Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) joined Product Manager Matt Glueckert to discuss today’s at-risk situations and best practices to protect your assets from external attacks – and internal mistakes. In this session you will learn: Secure design principles: How you should think about security. Know thy enemy. Where they are, what they want, and what you can do. Performing security evaluations for products, platforms, and services. Ted Harrington drives thought leadership initiatives for ISE, the elite American organization of security researchers and consultants. He is a sought-after speaker and a contributing author on security topics across a wide range of industries. Check out the recording below!  

We’re excited to announce our latest release: @mentions. In the Asset Notes panel, just type the @ symbol followed by the first letters of your contact’s name, then select his/her name, and voilà! Your contact(s) will automatically get notified in their inbox and see a notification in globaledit. By using @mentions, you can easily: Save time by drawing your teammate’s attention to a note or a comment you’ve made on an asset. Assign tasks, clarify responsibilities, and ensure your teammates are on the same page. Keep you project on track by cutting down the response time and increase productivity. To find out more about @mentions in globaledit, visit our support website or contact us for a free demo.

Join us at LeBook Connections Los Angeles next Thursday, January 29th! We’re excited to present at the show hosted by our partner, Smashbox Studios, in Culver City.  We’ll be sharing a booth with sister divisions Industrial Color, Fast Ashleys Studios & Impact Digital.  Hope to see you there! LE BOOK Connections January 29th 11:30am – 7:30pm Smashbox Studios 8549 Higuera St. Culver City, CA 90232

We’re ringing in the New Year with a brand-new ‘Tech Talk’! Join us as we chat with Andrew Cho, an iOS developer at globaledit, and learn about the nuances of iOS programming and his humble beginnings as a kid coder. What is your role at globaledit? In a nutshell, I’m responsible for globaledit’s ever-improving iOS platform. Optimizing user experience is a key tenet of our product team so my job is to create a seamless transition from our web client to on-the-go production with an iPad or iPhone. We make sure globaledit is optimized across all platforms—from markups to approvals and selects to sharing. What recent project have you worked on? Was it challenging? We recently pushed a new and improved markup editor to both the web and iOS platforms. With new colors, different shapes, and stroke sizes, globaledit more accurately mimics the markup process in real life, in only half the time. As far as what was challenging, probably all of it! Creating a mobile application requires lots attention to little nuances, like connectivity, crash logging, and beta testing. We have to watch out for scenarios like losing service or accidentally closing the app. Ultimately, iOS development is a tricky field that requires a lot of testing and QA. How do you brainstorm new ideas and features for globaledit? From our everyday conversations to discussions with the product team, we’re constantly throwing new ideas around and trying to innovate. Sometimes it’s just a sudden flash of inspiration, and other times it’s the result of hours and hours of coding at our monthly ‘Hackathons’ (24-hour sessions of taking concepts to working prototypes). And it’s honestly a never-ending process. Once you have your assets in the cloud, the possibilities are limitless in terms of collaboration and sharing! What are some of your favorite tools or apps to use? A lot of the apps that I love are related to my job. (I would say that I’m definitely a workaholic.) Xcode: I use this software to design and build the globaledit app! Definitely my bread and butter of developing for iOS. Crashlytics: A beta testing platform and crash reporting tool tidily wrapped up in one app—it saves a lot of time and headaches. Network Link Conditioner: It’s a great tool that simulates various connectivity scenarios. Overall, it helps a lot in testing apps’ performances in real life situations. How did you start programming? It actually all began in elementary school when I first flipped through a programming magazine. It showed me all the amazing things you could do with code, like make web apps or create your own video games. To an 8-year-old like me at the time, it was absolutely mind-blowing. From that point onward, I spent lots of long nights hovering over my computer creating my own games. However, at the time, I didn’t think of it as a potential career path. It was more of a hobby than anything else. It wasn’t until college and during internships that I realized that programming presented a lot of opportunities for me, in terms of making people’s visions and dreams a reality. What kind of apps have you created, and which one is your current favorite?  I’ve actually been all over the place in terms of creating apps. I’ve developed apps for the financial services, education, and health industries. My favorite out of all of them? It might be cheesy to say, but globaledit is my favorite because it’s my best work so far. What hobbies or interests do you have? For someone who has stuck to a computer for most of my life, nature has actually been one of my favorite topics to explore. When I’m home, I try to tune to nature documentaries and play with my cat, Coco. And when I get to travel, hiking through amazing places is my passion. I’ve managed to trek through the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Kauai, and every moment was breathtaking!

We kicked-off the New Year with an upgraded photo markup editor in globaledit. We rebuilt our cutting-edge markup tools to bring you finer control and easier commenting – anywhere, anytime. Enjoy sharper annotations, faster turnaround, and easier team-wide collaboration with our easy-to-use markup interface. Join Product Manager, Matt Glueckert, for a 20-minute tutorial that will take your markup skills to the next level! In this session you will learn: New shapes and new commenting Switching between markups on web and iPhone/iPad Keyboard shortcuts to mark your photos in a breeze How to become a markup pro! Check out the recording below!

We’re very excited to kick off 2015 with our latest release: A new and improved photo markup editor.  We’ve rebuilt this popular feature to bring you finer control and easier commenting in an easy-to-use interface. You can now enjoy a brand new markup experience in globaledit markup editor: New look, improved performance, and expanded functionalities on both Web and iOS platforms. What’s new: REVAMPED MARKUP EXPERIENCE: New shapes, crisp drawing, and easy commenting in a user-friendly interface. SIMPLIFIED MARKUP LAYERS: Marks and comments together at last. SPEEDY SHORTCUTS: Swap shapes, adjust brush sizes, and create new layers with handy keyboard shortcuts. AUTO-SAVE & UNDO: Everything auto-saved and un-doable. CTR Z to the rescue. UPDATED iOS APP: Make markups on the go with the updated globaledit app for iPhone and iPad. Don’t forget to update your app! Check out the complete list of new markup tools for Web and iOS on our support website. And feel free to contact us for a demo or a quick training session. We hope you’ll enjoy the upgrade!

We’re back with another exciting round of ‘Tech Talks’ with the newest addition to the globaledit team, Account Manager Christiana Rifaat. Join us as we explore her unique position, as well as her love of food and travel. Welcome to the globaledit team! How do you like it so far? I love it! Everyone is hard-working and dedicated, and the atmosphere is really inspiring. Not to mention, it’s been incredibly easy to adjust because we’re such a tight-knit, welcoming community. And we work with a ton of amazing clients, so it’s very rewarding to be part of this team. Describe your role as an Account Manager. I’d like to say that we’re “User Champions” or in other words, the crucial link between clients and globaledit. Workflow consultation, customer support, or training: You name it, we do it. And we always provide a “tailor-made” experience to our clients. We talk to users and create customized manuals for their unique workflows or keep them posted on new features that are relevant to them. We’re also the proud messengers between our clients’ needs and the development team. We work together with both sides to constantly enhance globaledit. What have you learned since becoming a globaledit team member? It may not seem that big, but working in an open-office layout was an eye-opening experience. I actually used to do freelance work before, and it was a very private and isolated work experience—a “my work is my work” sort of thing. At globaledit, it’s great to be able to walk over to a coworker’s desk and brainstorm ideas. I can literally head over to the marketing department, the developers, or the CFO for open collaboration. What did you do before joining globaledit? I was (and still am) a photographer! I have a special connection to art, and I love a photo that’s engaging. It’s like listening to a good song and having it speak to you. It’s for this reason that I tend to photograph my family a lot. I started by taking pictures of my younger brother, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Not to mention—my inspirations, Larry Sultan and Harry Callahan, also started out by photographing their families. What do you like to do when you’re not working?  Traveling. And if I had any life advice to give, I would say: Go out there and travel if you can! I took a two-month long backpacking trip with my sister in Southeast Asia last year, and it was absolutely mindblowing. I had never done extensive traveling before this trip so it was my first time exploring other ways of life outside of the U.S. It’s one thing to see culture, but it’s a completely different thing to experience it. What was a highlight of your trip? I took a cooking class in Thailand, right in the middle of the jungle outside of Chiang Mai. Actually, it was more of an adventure than a “class.” They took us to a farm, and we pulled vegetables straight from the ground. Afterwards, we went to a bustling market where we navigated the shops to pick out fish and other ingredients, like ginger and coconut. We ended up making five different Thai courses throughout the day, and they even gave us a cookbook of what we made to take home! So is cooking another one of your hobbies? I cook a little bit, but I’m actually just the kind of person that likes to watch people cook (I love Mind of a Chef!) or go out to eat. You know those rebels that never follow a recipe? I’m one of them, and sometimes it turns out great… and other times, it’s inedible. It’s a bit of a gamble. There’s this place in Brooklyn called Chuko’s. It’s a ramen bar, and their food is amazing. Scratch that, it’s the best. View Christiana’s photography here. And stay tuned for our next ‘Tech Talk’!

Content creation is speeding up. The pressure is on for brands to produce more and more visual content in less time. Creative decision makers are often overseeing multiple photo shoots at a time, and their ability to be on set is limited.  How can you keep up? Corrie Zaccaria, globaledit Account Manager, recommends uploading directly to the cloud from your photo shoot . Here are 4 key benefits of uploading to globaledit on set, and get ahead of your competition. 1. Speed up your time to market A cloud-based system enables your team to quickly access images and start making selects, ratings and markups in real-time – wherever they are. So all those folks who couldn’t make it out to shoot on location in Fiji…still have an eye on production. Learn more about:  Uplink, Aspera 2. Collaborate in real-time Get immediate feedback and direction from your creative team off set.  Potential errors can be caught and fixed during the shoot, avoiding costly re-shoots or retouching. This allows your team on set to make quick changes and ensure they get the right shot. Learn more about:  collaborative markups, notes, comments, notifications 3. Save TIME & money Moving to the cloud means eliminating the redundant hard drives in your life. You can finally stop throwing away money on purchasing extra hard drives and shipping them around the world. Here’s another big saver: No more overtime charges from the studio or your crew for additional file processing time. You also cut down duplication of effort in the production process since reviewing assets and making selects is centralized. Avoid the time sink of making selects on a hard drive or server and having to transfer onto other platforms. Learn more about:  Lightboxes 4. Organize at ingest Applying detailed metadata directly from the shoot ensures your photos are properly tagged and easily searchable. It is particularly important when dealing with multiple products or talent. And with Adobe & Capture One ratings support, the team on the ground can rate while they shoot, and their work is preserved at ingest saving you time down the road. Learn more about:  Metadata, XMP, Capture One/Adobe Bridge

In this week’s Snackinar, we begin a new series focused on the craft of digital photo and video production. We’ll be interviewing top talent from across the creative industry to learn how they use their skills to create top-notch visuals for their audience. Our first guest is Todd Schweikert, VP of Capture Operations at Industrial Color Productions, who joined us to share: The history and evolution of digital photo capture The challenges faced by creative photo teams on set and on location Tips and tricks for smooth digital production Todd Schweikert has over 15 years of digital capture experience and is known for his workflow architecture expertise in both digital still and video production. Industrial Color Productions is recognized as the premier digital capture company in both NY and LA, always at the forefront of digital capture technology. Check out the recording below!

There’s a fine line between open collaboration and a free for all. Managing a media library of thousands of assets is hard. Managing access to all of those assets is even harder. How do we separate access for internal vs. external users? Who can view what? And what can be distributed when? globaledit puts the power in your hands to determine all permissions for viewing, downloading, and editing assets and their related data. Whether you need watermarked, date-based restrictions or full rights within specific folders, globaledit has the user rights combination for your workflow. In this session you will learn: Setting up basic user rights and permissions in globaledit How to enable the powerful asset rights system Creating user groups to bulk assign job permissions How to check existing permissions and update on the fly Best practices to secure and deliver large assets to external vendors, international teams, and partners Join Product Manager, Matt Glueckert, for a crash course on user roles, permissions and rights management in globaledit.

We’re back for another round of ‘Tech Talks’ to learn more about Director of Engineering, Alessandro Catter-Martinez. The fearless leader of our development team constantly strives to turn great ideas into reality. Join us as we go from past to present, exploring his unique childhood and early aspirations to be a cartoonist to his experiences at globaledit today. We hear you have quite the international background. Can you tell us about that? My parents were both born and raised in Peru but eventually met and married in Florida. By the time I was born, they relocated to Burbank, California, where I lived until I was 7. At that point, my parents decided to move back to Peru to live a simpler lifestyle on a family-owned chicken farm. The best school in area happened to be a Japanese international school, so I ended up going there. My childhood was certainly a colorful experience! So are you tri-lingual? I used to be trilingual, I’ve lost the ability to speak Japanese. Lack of practice. But at the time I could speak it, read it, and knew two out three alphabets. Did you see yourself ending up as a techie in TriBeCa? Actually, no! On the contrary, I used to be quite artistic as a little kid so I wanted to become a cartoon artist. In Burbank, we lived near the Warner Bros. studio so all of the giant movie and TV-show posters made quite the impression on me. With a creative career in mind, I gravitated to computers and CGI. The turning point was when I took a programming class in high school with some friends on a whim. Everything managed to come so naturally, and I easily aced the class. Then and there, I found my calling. What brought you to New York City?  It was really a mix of the cooler weather and the amazing energy of the city. Despite having lived in places like Peru and Florida, I never got used to 80 degree days, sand getting everywhere, and the humidity. I visited New York City a few times and instantly knew I wanted to live here. Describe your role as Director of Engineering at globaledit. Put simply, my role is to lead our team of engineers and ensure that we create software that is user friendly, secure, and top quality. This involves collaborating with the product team to continually brainstorm new features and improvements, from bugfixes to user experience. In many ways, my job is all about turning great ideas into reality. How long have you been at globaledit, and how has it changed since you’ve been part of the team?  I started in the summer of 2012, a little over two years ago.  When I started, the application and team was a lot smaller. Since then, we’ve internally rebuilt globaledit from the ground up, reshaping it into the industry-leader it is today. The team has shifted a lot as well. We’re constantly growing so there have been quite a few talented additions. At the same time, we still have our fundamental core of developers—the “tent poles” of our team—who have stuck with globaledit since the very beginning. It’s a great mix that creates a truly collaborative culture. There’s not a lot of weight behind hierarchy or titles, so from testers to engineers we openly share ideas, do monthly hackathons, and go out for drinks after work. It’s a fun environment full of creativity and teamwork that I’m proud to be a part of. What has been the most challenging aspect of your position thus far? As I said before, globaledit started out small so we’ve gone through some growing pains. The demand of globaledit surged so we had to focus on improving the hardware that ran the software. It was a big challenge to keep everything running seamlessly while making big infrastructure changes. People depended on globaledit for their day-to-day needs so we couldn’t have any downtime. It was tricky, but we managed to do it in the end. What keeps you motivated in your day-to-day? It’s really mix between the guys I work with and my growing family. It’s really inspiring working with team and bouncing ideas off of each other. Discussing the merits and shortcomings of our ideas leaves a lot of room for growth and development. At home, I have a 1 year old daughter going on two in February and a new baby coming in January. They’re huge motivators for me, and I want to be a good inspiration for them. Who has been the biggest influence on your life? What lessons did they teach you? I would without a doubt say my parents. One way or the other, they both showed love and endless perseverance—especially by uprooting themselves and moving from one place to another several times. It’s not the easiest thing to do, and it showed a lot of courage on their part. One of my biggest life goals is to be like them and teach my children the same lessons they taught me. Being the best husband and father I can be is my ultimate goal, everything else is tangential.

  Good news! In globaledit you can now select multiple folders within a job or multiple Lightboxes to move them to a different location. How to do that? Just the way you’re used to doing on your desktop: Hold Shift/Control while selecting all of your folders or Lightboxes Drag/drop them in the job or folder where you want them to be saved And that’s it! Now you can manage and rearrange your large collections of assets in no time.  

You have the metadata basics down. Now your workflow and library need to take the next step. With a more demanding workflow and a growing library comes a greater need to harness the power of metadata, drive advanced automation, and optimize search-ability. Special guest, David Riecks, joined us again to show you how to take advantage of both standard and custom metadata types and elevate your creative production. Named as a “Pioneer of Digital Preservation” by the Library of Congress in 2009, David has been involved in many recent digital image standards and is founder of ControlledVocabulary.com. In this session you will learn: Effective metadata field types How to apply metadata templates and use keyword sets How to create and use custom panels How to create and use custom schemas Best practices for .XMP sidecars Listen to Product Manager, Matt Glueckert, and Metadata Guru, David Riecks, in this advanced metadata Snackinar and take your metadata skills to the next level. Additional Resources: Working with metadata in globaledit IPTC Core mapped fields (.pdf): chart which maps the IPTC Core Schema to the various field names used in popular photo editing applications Tutorials on how to use Metadata Templates with: Adobe Photoshop Adobe Bridge Photo Mechanic Expression Media/Media Pro Metadata 101 for a detailed explanation of the the various Photo Metadata Schemas Metadata “Field Guide”, which lists and defines the most common used fields in key metadata schema and popular software (IPTC Core and Extension schemas)

Tired of going back-and-forth from your globaledit account to your inbox? We heard you. And we’re stepping up YOUR game, so you can now directly reply to globaledit emails to create comments within globaledit. How does it work? Respond directly from your inbox to a Lightbox share notification or a Lightbox comment email, and your new comment is automatically created in the Lightbox. Respond directly from your inbox to a shared markup pdf email, and your comment is automatically created in your Asset Notes. Communication with your team is even more seamless. And way faster. Check out the support site for more info.

Resource Magazine included a piece on our parent company Industrial Color Brands in their Fall Issue. We’re proud to be featured alongside our sister divisions Industrial Color, Impact Digital, and Fast Ashleys Studios. The article covers the full range of services offered by the four companies and the evolution of the Industrial Color Brands family. “What’s remarkable about the Industrial Color Brands’ story is that each division arose organically out of the need for new solutions in creative production’s shift to digital… Today all the divisions work together and independently to continually innovate and provide solutions for creatives.” – Billy Murray, Resource Magazine Check out the article below. You can also pick up a free copy at Fast Ashleys Studios or our TriBeCa headquarters.  The digital version of the issue can be downloaded from the iTunes store here. Resource Magazine included a piece on our parent company Industrial Color Brands in their Fall Issue. We’re proud to be featured alongside our sister divisions Industrial Color, Impact Digital, and Fast Ashleys Studios. The article covers the full range of services offered by the four companies and the evolution of the Industrial Color Brands family. “What’s remarkable about the Industrial Color Brands’ story is that each division arose organically out of the need for new solutions in creative production’s shift to digital… Today all the divisions work together and independently to continually innovate and provide solutions for creatives.” – Billy Murray, Resource Magazine Check out the article below. You can also pick up a free copy at Fast Ashleys Studios or our TriBeCa headquarters.  The digital version of the issue can be downloaded from the iTunes store here.

On October 16, 2014, the Advertising Production Club of New York hosted a panel discussion on ‘Mobile Mayhem’ at Parsons The New School for Design. Product Manager Matt Glueckert joined representatives from Google, Adobe, Drawbridge, and AKQA to present the globaledit iPhone app to the crowd of creatives. https://vimeo.com/109867396

During creative production your team is constantly moving and sharing a massive amount of assets in order to collaborate. With so many cooks in the kitchen, maintaining access control, search-ability, and asset history is critical to a creative teams’ workflow efficiency. Learn how successful creative teams structure their cloud-based media libraries, and the new features in globaledit that can help you clean up a messy library in a jiffy. In this session you will learn: Effective library templates for different creative industries (agencies, fashion brands, production companies and more) How to setup a media library in globaledit How to control access to your media Power tips for cleaning up a messy library Check out our latest Snackinar for 20 minutes that could save you 20 hours and get your library together!

As creatives we want everything to look good. We accomplish this through thoughtful design. Managing your production process should be no different.  Before jumping into building out your cloud-based asset library there are a few key questions you need to ask yourself to make sure it’s “designed thoughtfully” as well.  We asked globaledit Account Manager, Corrie Zaccaria, for best practices when setting up an asset library to ensure that it’s organized, secure, and fits your workflow. Here are a few questions to consider when building the blueprints of a new asset library: 1. What does your current server look like? What works and what doesn’t about the folder structure? This is the first opportunity to learn from your mistakes and fix organizational problems in your production workflow. Identifying the key issues that don’t work is the start of creating a foundation for a new asset library.  For example, are too many people accessing a folder on your server so files get moved and misplaced? Are you able to share the right files with the right people on your team?  Can you currently manage confidential or restricted files? 2. Who needs to access particular files, jobs or folders?  And who should be restricted? This is where we evaluate the dynamic of how people work together in their current workflow.  Some teams are small and open with access to everything, whereas other teams are extremely secure with permissions due to legal or confidentiality reasons.  Aski