Here’s something many creative teams believe: The planning and execution of a great concept and solid first draft for a client gets your project pretty close to the finish line.
Here’s the reality for most agencies and brands: The delivery of that first draft kicks off a review-and-approval process that can be plagued by bottlenecks that wreak havoc with deadlines, send projects over budget, create unnecessary levels of stress and debilitate your ongoing productivity.
Sound familiar?
It’s not surprising that mistakes, delays and indecisions occur during creative reviews. Creativity is really more iterative than linear and, certainly, many ideas don’t work out the way they were intended. But there’s also the issue of how projects get managed—or better yet, produced. This is often where problems arise, especially when it comes to communications between creative teams and clients that move the project forward in effective and meaningful ways to get from concept to completion.
The solution requires a mix of process and technology. You may need a shift in practices, behavior and platforms to manage and execute those methods. So let’s take a quick look at four of the most common ways your creative process may be broken and how you can fix it:
1. You’re still using email
Email has its place in the business world. But it is not really set up for great creative collaboration. Reviewers are frequently stymied trying to communicate their opinions on a file, switching back and forth between the visual work they’re examining and the comments they’re trying to write. And creative teams can get bewildered when multiple reviewers are sending redundant feedback, or they’re wasting time sifting and collating all the comments.
Step one is to get reviews out of email and into a dedicated, cloud-based creative review-and-approval platform (like OpenText Hightail). This allows clients to focus on reviews in a distraction-free environment. They’ll be able to add comments directly to images or timestamp them onto videos, so feedback can be more precise. And since reviews happen in one shared space, feedback is automatically collated, cutting down on repetitive comments from reviewers.
2. You’re holding too many meetings
The process of “getting the team together for a face-to-face” is much less productive than you think it is. While scheduling a meeting might seem like the fastest way to get clear feedback from your clients, it can really slow things down. Just think of what it takes to get everyone to just agree on a time, much less all the recapping that needs to be done, or the status updates that need to get shared. That’s make-work, not productive work.
By using digital tools to drive creative reviews, reviewers can access content on their own time so feedback can be provided asynchronously. Each reviewer can deliver comments more efficiently while contributing to a single system. This provides greater transparency into the creative process, cutting down on the need to do things like time-and-energy-sucking status update meetings.
3. Approvers can’t say “yes”
If you want to see how the review-and-approval process can create anxiety, just look at what it takes to get to final sign off. When your client says “I like it,” does that mean it’s approved? What happens when the client suddenly has to “loop someone in” who hasn’t been part of the process at any other step along the way? Truthfully, there’s often far too much ambiguity in a process that requires a binary go/no-go decision.
Approvals should be treated separately from feedback. Giving the green light needs to be clear and explicit. Again, when you’re using a platform that makes all conversations and context around a creative program openly accessible, oversight can occur throughout the project, not just at the end. Simply put, if you need someone to say “yes,” then processes and technology need to make it convenient and easy.
4. The version vortex
Every creative program goes through multiple rounds and revisions. But when you fail to track them effectively, serious problems arise. How can you know whether everyone involved in a project—internal creative groups, external contractors, client reviewers and final approvers—always has the correct version? Working on a wrong version can be a waste of time. Sending the wrong version into production? That can cost you a client.
Version control needs to be an automated process, where the agency team and the client always have access to the latest version with one unchanging link. Previous iterations should be archived and accessible so reviewers and final-decision-makers can look back on the evolution of the project. Approvals should be applied to a specific version of the file, so there’s clear accountability if a mistake is made.
The bottom line: Review and approval is critical to your creative project’s success. Getting feedback and sign-off doesn’t have to be onerous or stressful. You just need to have the tools and procedures to get it done so that your team can start saving time and spare the creative frustration.
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Liana Tallarico leads marketing for OpenText Hightail, a cloud-based collaboration and file sharing software designed for creative content reviews and approvals. Before joining the Hightail team over 3 years ago, Liana started her career working for a number of advertising agencies prior to going client-side.
