The Modern Creative Hub: How Software Integrations Can Improve Your Creative Enterprise

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If you’re like many marketers, you spend time developing creative assets that are rarely used because the employees in your organization don’t know about them or can’t find them. It’s an unfortunate waste of your time — not to mention that of your coworkers. Your creative teams are undoubtedly looking for ways to streamline their processes. Fortunately, many organizations are working to transform their manual processes to improve productivity.

Technology is the logical way to perform that transformation, and marketers and creative teams are increasingly turning to creative asset management (CAM) systems. CAM is closely related to digital asset management (DAM), a vibrant market that is projected to grow at a combined annual rate of 14.2% between 2022 and 2028, a trend that promises to provide a wealth of opportunities for marketers and creative teams to automate.

CAM technology goes beyond DAM technology to understand and support the needs of creative teams. It offers integrated software suites that automate asset management and every part of the creative process. This removes unnecessary bottlenecks and restructures workflows for simpler task management and quicker production output.

To be successful in using the new technology, businesses must understand the key benefits of modernizing their creative workflows with CAM software suites that enable key integrations between different platforms.
The creative industry’s digital transformation

Traditionally, the creative process has been managed manually. The creative team and marketing professionals must manage the creative workflow, but when everything happens manually, that’s quite a challenge. The process includes:

  • Identifying and storing unretouched high-resolution assets
  • Assigning and sending assets to retouchers who may be internal or external
  • Communicating instructions to the retouchers
  • Tracking the status of the retouching work
  • Tracking versions of an asset to identify the latest version
  • Collaborating with others to compare versions and make final selections
  • Storing the completed assets
  • Sending completed assets to graphic designers

The list goes on. A busy creative team can very easily lose momentum in the face of all the requirements for tracking their work and collaborating with coworkers without a system that integrates different platforms. As a result, responding to requests for promotional material takes far longer than it should. That delay can affect your company’s ability to quickly respond to changes in the market and to get new products and services online.

A modern creative hub can change the way your creative team, marketers and other stakeholders participate in the creative process. The foundation of the modern creative hub is a fully integrated software platform that allows everyone involved in or dependent on the creative process to easily ideate and develop a product through seamless automation.

How creatives are building their own modern creative hub

Now that technology to support the creative process is available, creative teams are establishing modern creative hubs that give them the technology features that they need to improve their productivity. Today’s modern creative hub encompasses several concepts.

Core CAM Features

There is demand for a set of core CAM features that support the creative process. As a leader in the industry, globaledit offers the products that creative teams are looking for.

globaledit Sync: Upload assets to your secure workspace as they are created, avoiding delays. You can track sync activity and customize file extensions to make organizing the output from a shoot more effective.

Markup Editor: Your team can access assets in one place from anywhere, which is a tremendous timesaver. In addition, the Markup Editor allows team members to collaborate on visuals by adding markup layers to an asset. They can add comments and annotations right on the asset itself, saving time and avoiding confusion.

Collections: Teams want to be able to compile assets from different sources and control access with custom permissions. Collections allow them to create those compilations while using permissions to prevent outside users from making changes.

Versioning: Versioning can be time-consuming and if not organized properly, finding the latest version and its iterations can be difficult. With globaledit Versioning, it’s easy to mark the latest version. And since all the iterations are stored in one thumbnail, there’s no time wasted searching.

Metadata: You can use industry-standard or custom Metadata to organize millions of assets. You’ll also be able to search from any third-party software.

Watermarks: Watermarks help you protect your assets. With this feature, you can configure your watermarks, assign them to assets, and control whether you show or hide the watermark to a user based on predefined permissions.

Approvals: Rather than dealing with multiple systems, the Approvals process can be simplified when all stakeholders can comment on the asset in real time.

Projects: Creating Projects gives system administrators the control they need to protect your assets. The administrator can give and remove access to folders, workspaces, or assets while controlling which items are presented to a user.

Public-Links: You won’t need Dropbox or WeTransfer to share assets with third-party stakeholders. Public-Links let you share assets with one click, and your stakeholders won’t need to log in to a separate system.

Software integrations

The ability to integrate your software applications is a significant turning point in improving your creative enterprise. Streamlining workflows requires that your creative systems integrate with other systems you already use or want to start using. To address that need, globaledit provides out-of-the-box integrations with hundreds of the business world’s most popular software applications like those listed below:

  • Photo editing software: Adobe Photoshop
  • DAM software: Webdam, Box, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, OpenText
  • CMS software: Facebook Marketing, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, WordPress
  • Email management: Marketo, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Salesforce
  • PIM software: Salsify, Pimcore, Akeneo
  • Project Management: Trello, Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Asana, Airtable

These integrations give you one source of truth for all stakeholders. You can also improve collaboration and streamline workflows. If you have proprietary programs, you can use globaledit API Keys to create custom integrations. Your team can seamlessly work within multiple systems that all transfer data to each other without disrupting production.

Remove all obstacles from the creative process

A traditional creative workflow may get the job done, and creatives certainly don’t want to think about automating their work.

But the truth is that the modern creative hub is only automating the execution of the creative process. It doesn’t change the requirement for creative teams to exercise their creative muscles. In fact, it gives them much more time to be creative and think strategically while their automated tools handle the details. That’s why creatives are building their own modern creative hubs and enjoying the success they bring.