This is the second in a three-part blog series about how creative operations are measured, and how that measurement helps creative teams do their work more efficiently.
In Part I of this series, I shared how more and more creative operations, marketing and creative production team leaders are using metrics to shape and optimize their creative operations process. In this post, I’ll take a look at a specific creative operations metric being used by a ConceptShare customer. The customer, a major retailer, wanted to remain anonymous, but still share their story of success with creative operations metrics.
The Company:
Major North American Retailer# of Creative Projects:
300 – 500 at any one timeCreative Operations Metric & Goal:
Reduce change requests by 20% by Dec 31, 2013 (year-over-year improvement)How They Track Against The Metric & Goal:
For each creative project, this retailer uses metadata to classify the project by business unit (Men’s, Women’s, Kid’s, Shoes, Jewelry, etc.), by asset type (email, landing page, display, etc.) and by other variables, including campaign type and resource used (i.e. individual designer, external agency). Work is produced based on the creative brief and shared with reviewers. They provide feedback and ask for changes. Each change request is classified using metadata to indicate change type (i.e. copy change, product image change, offer change, etc.). Because of the classification described above, they can report on the number of change requests and see how that metric is changing over time. More importantly they can see if the number of change requests is increasing, decreasing and if they are trending towards achieving their goal of a 20% reduction by December 31, 2013.Analysis & Insight: Identify Where & How to Improve Performance
For this retailer, knowing how they’re performing against their goal is valuable. Beyond that, what they really need to do is figure out where there are opportunities to change how they work so that they can improve their performance. Since they’re capturing information on their projects and process in a structured, consistent way, they can now slice and dice the data (Analysis!) many different ways to discover where and how to improve performance (Insight!) This specific customer started analyzing the data and looking at it a number of different ways:- • Change Requests by Asset Type
- • Change Requests by Business Unit
- • Change Requests by Resource (a work-in-progress)
Based on some of different ways they were looking at the data, they discovered:
- • Marketing Projects for Business Unit A had 35% more change requests than the average of all other projects in other business units.
Then, they dug further and looked at change requests across different Business Unit A projects, and discovered:
- • Email marketing projects were responsible for 83% of the change requests.
So what did they do with this information? Just like a good detective, they worked backwards and came upon an insight:
- • The creative briefs submitted for Business Unit A email marketing projects were either incomplete, or what was requested in the brief was often different than the final output.
When they looked further, they discovered that the team submitting the original brief was changing their minds and asking for changes after the initial designs were produced. This insight gave the creative and traffic teams the data they needed to identify a bottleneck in their process. It also gave them the proof they needed to motivate change during the Creative Brief stage. Since this insight was discovered and changes were made, they have seen a significant decrease in the number of change requests for Business Unit A email marketing projects. It’s still not where it needs to be, but it’s trending much closer to the average, and it’s helping to improve performance of their primary metric, the number of change requests. Thanks to these improvements, their team is trending towards achieving their goal of a 20% year-over-year reduction.
This is just one example of how this retailer and other organizations are using creative operations metrics to drive performance improvement. It’s easy to implement, easy to track and has a substantial impact on productivity. In my next post, I’ll explore an example of how a financial services company is using metrics to enforce internal service level agreements to drive performance improvement. In the meantime, if you want to talk more about creative operations metrics, leave a comment or drop me a line at nish.patel@conceptshare.com.
Read the other posts in this blog series:
Post #1: Why should you measure Creative Operations?Post #3: Identify Bottlenecks with Creative Operations Metrics: A Case Study