About a year ago, we started talking about creative operations and creative operations management (COM). We came out and said that ConceptShare is a COM solution – and then we (or really, I) went silent on the topic. Well, silent on this blog, but our customers and partners have been hearing about it non-stop. We’ve shared with them, and learned from them, what we see as the existing and emerging challenges and opportunities for marketing and creative teams when it comes to creative operations.

If you hadn’t heard, what’s creative operations management?

Our short, often-used description is that creative operations is everything that happens in a marketing or creative team between “I need an asset” and “I have an asset.”

Looking for a more in-depth description? My last blog post on the topic gives a detailed look at what creative operations management is, isn’t and how we first realized it was a field poised to take off.

Now that we’ve got that covered, we want to share the ideas and challenges that we think are important this area with a broader audience. My goal is not to convert you – my goal is only to share what we believe, and to allow you to know and understand what shapes our product and everything we do as a company. Some companies get and are excited about our point of view, and how that translates into our product.

Maybe you’ll agree or maybe you’ll disagree with our opinions and beliefs. Whatever your position, I invite you to participate in the conversation and lend your voice to shaping the quickly emerging field of Creative Operations Management.

In today’s post, I want to set some context and plant the seeds for ideas and topics that I’ll be doing more in-depth posts on in the coming weeks.

Creative Operations Management: just an MBA Term?

I have to be honest and say that I’m not in love with the term. “Creative operations management,” or its shorthand, “COM” can sound like just the latest addition to the technology landscape buffet. But our intention in using this term isn’t just to add jargon to a field that already has more than enough of it. This is what we’re hearing more and more from our customers as the term (or job title) that defines the work they’re using ConceptShare for.

When we sit back to look at it, as well, it makes sense to us – it really is more than just another made-up term to differentiate a job or a field. Operations management is “overseeing, designing, and controlling the process of production and redesigning business operations in the production of goods or services.” Within creative teams, the “goods and services” part of that equation is assets and creative work in general, and given the nature of that work, the typical process of production is different enough that they need to adjust how they manage and optimize it.

That’s why creative operations management makes sense to them, and to us.

The Emergence of the Creative Operations Employee

I wrote this post about creative operations management a while ago that highlighted that if you search on LinkedIn, there are more and more people with the role or title of Creative Operations. It used to be rare for me to meet someone, let’s say a customer or prospect, who had that as their title. While it’s still not as common as say, “Marketing Operations,” it’s definitely becoming more common. Companies like Macys, Bath & Body Works, Starz Entertainment and many others have managers and executives with the role and title of “Creative Operations.”

Look around your own marketing and creative teams. Who’s managing the process of producing assets? What’s their title? Whether they realize it or not, they are responsible for creative operations.

What is Fuelling Creative Operations?

There are lots of factors fuelling the emergence of creative operations as a field, as a discipline, as a job and as a technology. Below are some of primary and secondary factors adding fuel to the creative operations fire. For now, I’m just going to stoke the fire with a bit of kindling. In the coming weeks, I’ll do a dedicated post on each of these topics.

It All Starts with, and Leads Back to, The Marketer’s Primary Job

Whether it was 25 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 5 years ago, or yesterday, the primary job of the marketer has always been the same. Send the right message, at the right time (or some variation of that). Collectively, the marketing community has called this objective terms like 1:1 marketing, or hyper-targeted marketing, or whatever the term of the day happens to be.

It’s the primary marketing equation that every marketer cares about, and everything that a marketer does is (or should be) in support of achieving the 1:1 communication objective. Why? Achieve it and every other metric that matters improves: conversion rates, click-through rates, average revenue per purchase, and all other metrics that are tied to the top and bottom lines.

Creative Operations is directly tied to a marketer’s ability to execute on the 1:1 objective.

Big Data: an Opportunity and a Challenge

While marketers have been talking about the 1:1 marketing objective for years, it’s only now within reach, and that’s all thanks to Big Data. As complicated as some people have made Big Data out to be, it’s pretty simple from a marketer’s point of view. Big Data means more information on individuals (demographics, purchasing, social, and more), which translates into more intelligent customer segmentation. That, in turn, translates into more targeted segments, which creates an opportunity to better execute against the 1:1 objective.

Big Data gives marketers the opportunity to better execute on sending the right message at the right time.

BUT …

Big Data is only an opportunity if marketers meet the challenge of producing all of the assets to fuel all of the campaigns made possible by more intelligent customer segmentation.

Creative Operations is directly tied to a marketer’s ability to produce all of the assets required to take advantage of the opportunity that Big Data gives marketers.

Real Time Marketing: an Opportunity and a Challenge

It used to be that a marketer would create a campaign, launch it and wait a few months for results to trickle in. Then, technology allowed marketers to capture results in weeks, and then days, and then hours. Now data about campaigns is instant, on-demand.

It presents a fantastic opportunity to react and right-size campaigns so that your marketing budget is better optimized. The data allows marketers to do a better job of sending the right offer, at the right time.

All of that real-time data only translates into an advantage if the marketer has a creative operations infrastructure that allows them to produce revised messaging and assets. They have to be able to produce those assets in time to take advantage of what the data is telling them is – and isn’t – working.

Creative Operations is directly tied to a marketer’s ability to accelerate the pace at which assets are routed, reviewed and approved through the creative production process.

Creative Operations Metrics and the 24/7 Creative Supply Chain

Each of those probably deserves its own short section, but in the interest of cutting down on the length of this post I’ll combine them, and then tackle them individually in follow up posts.

As marketers use Big Data (often in real-time) to better segment and target customers, they’ll need more campaign assets to fuel more campaigns. This has led to two big new trends in terms of creative work.

One is the growing use of creative operations metrics by marketing and creative services teams. As they have to produce more and more assets in tighter delivery windows, they can no longer rely on the old rule of “throw more bodies at it.” The volume and pace of the creative work (aka, asset creation) that needs to happen must be met with more efficient processes- and processes only become efficient if they can be measured.

Creative Operations is directly tied to a marketer’s ability to effectively structure, measure and continuously improve their processes and capacity (volume, speed) for producing assets.

Second is the emergence of the 24/7 creative supply chain, as companies seeking to produce more assets at a faster pace are turning to or creating their own 24/7 production networks. They’re following the same trends that the software development industry has lived through over the past 20 years. While still in its infancy, I’ve personally observed dozens of forward-thinking marketing and creative services teams move to this model.

Creative Operations is directly tied to a marketer’s ability to effectively manage a global network of creative production resources, and realize the benefits that it presents in terms of asset production capacity, time to market or campaign launch, and cost per asset.

There are other factors fueling the field of creative operations: marketers operating in more regulated and litigious environments, the complexity of assets being produced that require the participation and coordination of multiple skill sets, the commoditization of creative work, and many more. We’ll be taking a look at those and the ones that we highlighted in this post in more in-depth articles over the coming weeks.

I hope that this post helped you get a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities we see marketers and creative teams dealing with, and how it relates to creative operations. More importantly, I hope that it had your head nodding (up & down OR side-to-side). Whether you agree or disagree, I invite you to join the conversation and shape creative operations: the field, the job, and the technology.

In my next post, I’ll be writing about the link between Big Data and creative operations.