Prioritise creativity with creative management software

You didn’t sign up to be a photographer, filmmaker, artist or writer just to spend countless hours doing tedious admin. Yet modern workplaces, workflows and tools often seem designed to frustrate the very creative processes they’re meant to support. This means that managing and coordinating multiple creatives can quickly become all-consuming, often turning an elite team of ideas people into an overpaid and resentful admin department.

How bad can it get? It’s been suggested that the average UK employee spends up to two hours a day simply trying to find assets – not surprising when the typical asset library comprises some 164 terabytes of data!

So, it’s a serious problem with serious consequences for productivity. Creatives bogged down by laborious file management and endless report writing are quick to lose interest. Efficiency drops through the floor, ideas get lost, and results suffer. According to Imagen’s 2021 Marketing Tech Report:

● 29% of UK-based marketing professionals say that their biggest frustration is not having enough time to be creative.
● 19% of those surveyed said that most of their time is spent on admin tasks.
● 58% of marketing professionals in the UK spend more time outside of working hours to catch up on the non-admin parts of their role.

Costs can go up, too, with teams having to recruit more creatives to make up for the time they’re losing to admin. The irony is that these larger teams require even more management, creating yet more hassle and obstruction.

It isn’t meant to be this way. Creative teams work best with intuitive tools, organised into fluid, highly automated processes. Gruntwork should be someone else’s problem, leaving artists, writers, editors and other stakeholders free to exchange ideas, create and iterate, uninterrupted by boring, distracting or repetitive tasks.

Crucially, addressing the time lost to finding assets – and recreating lost ones – can produce vast savings. Did you know that the average company can save nearly $189,000 (£134,000) over five years by implementing digital asset management? In creative agencies and production houses – high salaries, fragile processes, time and quality-sensitive results – the savings can be greater still. All you need is a better workflow, supported by the right tools.

On the subject of assets, the creative process depends on a team’s ability to securely store and share the work they’re creating, and to grab any assets they need to get started. When assets go missing, creatives spend less time in the zone, and more in tracking down or recreating the collateral they need to do their job.

As an example, if a video editor needs to cut a 30-second trailer for a longer piece of content, they need to know where to find the relevant source material. In the absence of a centralised, coordinated library for assets, individuals often ad-lib their own solutions, for example getting a colleague to share source files via WeTransfer. Quite apart from the potential risks of sharing via an unencrypted platform, working out how to store and retrieve files is just another administrative task to get in the way.

The new normal

Even as offices and workspaces open up, the pandemic has caused permanent changes to the way we work. For creative teams, the new normal revolves around more distributed working patterns – less time in the office, and an increased reliance on freelancers or other external partners.

These changes add to the admin of managing and maintaining creative workflows. Particularly, there’s a greater need to focus on easy communication, and the smooth sharing of digital assets. In this permanently altered world, the temporary fixes of lockdown need upgrading to permanent solutions.

The struggle to find assets isn’t the only challenge for creatives trying to stay in the zone. In teams that rely on manual conventions for naming, incrementing and sharing files, mistakes are inevitable as assets go through several iterations. All too often, something will get overwritten, someone will base their work on the wrong source file, or someone else will share an asset that hasn’t been properly reviewed and approved.

These kinds of slip-ups are inevitable when your workflows rely on creatives to take on an administrative burden. Admin isn’t their chosen subject. Even if they’re good at it, it’s often seen as an imposition, and it always derails the creative process. This loss of efficiency is compounded by the extra time everyone spends fixing the mistakes – whether it’s tracking down lost files, or urgently recalling work that isn’t up to standard.

To understand the benefits of creative project management software, simply flip most of your administrative and organisational pain points on their head. Where you currently struggle with labour-intensive admin or the friction of clunky workflows, the right software will bring efficiency savings that liberate creative staff from pen pushing.

More specifically, by addressing the organisational headaches of a multi-agency, multi-skill workflow, creative workflow management software can radically simplify the coordination of your content creation process. With centralised visibility and control over creative tasks – including their prerequisites and outcomes – creatives face lower time overheads from managing their own work.

There’s less time lost to work performed out of sequence, or tasks that stall because the prerequisites haven’t been delivered. And crucially, creatives regain more time for undisturbed working, helping them spend longer in the zone.

Collaborative workspace software – or the collaborative features found in other platforms – is also important to increasing the time teams spend creating. This is particularly true when it comes to in-line commenting, discussion boards, and other features that support the free exchange of ideas and information. These may be best used asynchronously, leaving creatives to dip into discussions or refer to comments or directions during natural breaks in their content creation process.

“[Imagen] sets a new standard for global content management.”
Nick Moody, Head of Production, Premier League

However, perhaps the biggest boost to creativity comes from solving teams’ asset management headaches. Creative asset management ensures that assets are stored securely in a central repository, where they can be easily found by the person who needs to work on them next. Not only does the team no longer have to chase up resources, they get quick visibility of when those resources have been created, allowing them – or the project planner – to better schedule their work.

Creative asset management solutions support version control, helping prevent time lost to confusion over different drafts, or whether the final files have been approved. The best software includes comprehensive commenting, for example allowing filmmakers to add time-coded instructions or observations for their colleagues.