As I visit more and more enterprise marketing and creative services teams, I’ve started to see the emergence of something I’m calling the creative production supply chain. The creative production supply chain is something smart organizations are designing and continuously improving to create a competitive advantage.

It’s allowing them to produce more assets.

It’s allowing them to reduce the production time per asset.

It’s allowing them to reduce their cost per asset.

All of which translates into being able to produce more assets, and make them available for campaigns. The advantages are real, and the advantages are significant.

I know. When you think about supply chains you don’t think it applies to how marketing assets or creative work is produced. You probably think of something much more industrial, like auto manufacturing. Well guess what? The same supply chain discipline that is now at the heart of the automotive industry will soon be at the heart of how creative work is managed.

Supply chains are the future of how enterprises manage creative work.

In the automotive manufacturing world, the quality of Ford’s, Toyota’s (or any manufacturer’s) supply chain is as important as car design. They are coordinating dozens or hundreds of disparate parts to deliver their final product: your car. Take a look under the hood (pun intended) and I’ll bet that the manufacturers that are reporting the best financial results are the ones that not only have designed great cars, but that also have a supply chain that maximizes efficiency and minimizes costs.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What is the Creative Production Supply Chain?

It’s a bit of a mouthful, and it might seem overly complex, but it’s not. It’s really just the coordination of people, activities and information involved in producing the assets that fuel all marketing activities.

Why do we call it a supply chain?

Well, it’s the way that we hear a lot of marketing and creative services teams talking about it. They may not be using that exact term, but what they’re describing is a supply chain.

For example, Marketing at Company XYZ will hand off a creative brief to their agency, who will then assign the project to an account team that comes together on the fly (designers, copywriters) and they produce something that then needs to get reviewed by internal (product line owner, legal, other) and external (client, partner, other) stakeholders at Company XYZ.

When you step back and look at it, the creative production supply chain involves coordinating, communicating and collaborating across a lot of resources to make sure that what needs to be delivered (one asset or thousands of assets) is being delivered in time to plug into campaigns.

Without an efficient creative production supply chain, campaigns risk being left waiting for the required assets to show up, and opportunities are missed.

I mentioned agencies, but it’s worth noting that creative supply chains are incredibly varied, and can include almost any inputs you can imagine. From working with a few freelancers, all the way up to running an internal creative services bureau or outsourcing your creative production to another country, the creative supply chains I’ve seen are as varied as the companies who manage them.

What’s Fuelling the Need for all these Creative Production Supply Chains?

Not all of these trends will apply, but when I speak to the teams who are designing, developing and constantly optimizing their creative production supply chains, these are some of the reasons they gave for making the move.

Big Data & Hyper Segmentation: Need for More Assets

The amount of assets that brands need to produce is growing exponentially, thanks to big data and the hyper-segmentation it enables. Even one email campaign might have 25 potential variants based on customer data – and enterprises are launching dozens, if not hundreds, of those campaigns. They need so many assets that they need to find cost-effective, quick ways to produce them. This is driving them to make more use of options like freelancers and external (lower-cost) creative services bureaus, alongside their in-house team. All of these elements need to be efficiently coordinated and collaborating, otherwise the time-to-market and cost savings can quickly evaporate.

Real-time Data & Shortening Marketing Windows: Need for Quick Turnaround

Not only do more assets have to be produced, they need to be produced quickly. After launching campaigns, data comes in quickly and teams need to react just as fast. If they don’t, the investment and value that comes from having access to data isn’t driving the results it could be. Yes, that’s a nice way of saying it’s wasted. Companies can use their creative supply chain to take advantage of the opportunities data creates, by making sure they have creative resources ready and available when they need them.

One Asset, Multiple Creatives: Need for Coordinating Resources

The days of asking Brian at the desk in the corner to build a website are long gone. Today’s marketing assets are more sophisticated in terms of both design and functionality, and require the expertise and input of a whole range of creative team members in order to reach the standard they need to. However, the best – or most cost-effective – talent might not be local, or in-house for that matter. The creative supply chain is how teams manage and integrate different creative experts and resources to make sure collaboration happens – and to make sure assets get completed.

Budget Pressures

All of these trends coexist with the simple fact that budgets aren’t unlimited, and marketing teams are under more and more pressure to justify the ROI of their decisions and investments. As budgets are more closely monitored, efficiency becomes the only way marketing teams have a hope of meeting the other challenges they’re facing (more assets, less time, more collaboration.)

The days of solving a production problem by throwing more people at it are over for marketing.

Since the challenges facing marketing teams can’t be solved with more people (because it won’t scale) or more money (because it’s not always available) that’s where the creative production supply chain can be leveraged as a competitive advantage. It’s also why we’ll be seeing more (smart) big brands design, deploy and continuously optimize their creative production supply chain.

What does your creative production supply chain look like – and what challenges do you have with managing and optimizing it? Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter @nishpatel.