Next Generation In-House Creative Services

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Creative Operations Breakfast SeriesFor 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:

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Q&A with Brendon Derr, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Cella Consulting and the BOSS Group

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Brendon DerrAs 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?

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5 Easy Ways to Implement Modifications to Your Creative Production Workflow

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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.

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2. Staying Agile is Key

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Q&A with Mai Nozoe, VP of Creative Services for alice + olivia

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Mai NozoeMai 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?

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Centralize Your Digital Assets For Improved Productivity

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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.)

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Why You Should Map Your Creative Production Process

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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?

 

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Adding Crop Marks to Image Markups

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We’ve released a commonly requested globaledit feature — adding crop Crop Marks Tool Closeupmarks 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!

image crop marks added in globaledit software

Rectangular crop marks added to an image in globaledit

 

Scaling Creative Production at Refinery29

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Creative Operations Breakfast Series logoWith 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:

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Meet globaledit at Henry Stewart DAM NY

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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.

DAM or WIP?

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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.

The Creative Project Lifecycle

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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.

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Creative Operations and Beyond: Uniting Art, Technology & Commerce

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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.

 

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3 key principles for creating relevant visuals

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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.

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A guide to revisiting your creative production workflow [Part 1]

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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:

We’ve turned their thoughts and insights into a guide to help you initiate a workflow overhaul.

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How to easily manage your celebrity talent approval

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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. (more…)

The creative production toolkit

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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

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How to measure your creative operations

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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. (more…)

How to implement a new DAM system – A conversation with Lauren Philson

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Lauren PhilsonLauren 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:

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Creating visual assets that “bring to life your story the most”

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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.” (more…)

3 benefits of storing metadata in XMP files

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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. (more…)

Choosing the right channels for your brand

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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: (more…)

iOS November 2015 Release

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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
Share Lightbox from iOSYou 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.

Creative operations process makes perfect

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Brian Stuckey

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.

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November 2015 Software Update

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Globaledit iOS app for iPhone and iPad: Read the iOS November 2015 Release.

 

We released an update to the globaledit web platform and want to share some some of the changes. Among the most exciting new features are mobile-friendly lightboxes to make quickly sharing images faster and a new capability we’re calling ‘Workflows’.

  • NEW: Mobile Friendly Guest Lightboxes
  • NEW: Workflows
  • IMPROVED: Folder downloads
  • PLUS bug fixes

Mobile Friendly Guest Lightboxes (NEW)
Mobile lightbox You’ve always been able to share lightboxes with guests, but in the past those guests had to have our iOS app to view the lightboxes on iPhones or iPads. Now these users can simply click the emailed link and view the lightbox in their mobile browser. This enhancement makes getting approval or feedback from anyone lightening fast.

Note that when guests open links on the desktop they still get an optimized version of globaledit in their desktop browser. The new functionality change only impacts users when on mobile phones or tablets.

Workflows (NEW)
Workflows are simple “If ___ then do ____” style templates you can use to automate common tasks. For example, “If Tommy approves an image, then put it into this lightbox.” (more…)