Inside Skai’s Creative Manager – Part 1


VP Corporate Development @ Skai

Last week we provided an overview of our latest marketing capability, the Skai Creative Manager.

This week we begin to explore the different design points that went into its development, and how you can benefit from improved workflows to get your media-rich advertising deployed faster than ever.

The Heartbreak of Creative Bottlenecks
Rapidly increasing needs for fresh creative have crept up on many marketing organizations. Product imagery for inventory feeds, audience-specific creative updates, refreshed media for social messaging, promotional imagery deployed for retargeting…NEVER in the history of advertising has SO MUCH creative content been deployed at scale, across an increasing number of destinations, for impressions delivered across our diverse devices and ad formats.

And like our aging roadways and bridges, this increase in creative traffic is exposing marketing infrastructure that has failed, is under strain, or may even be non-existent. Our current team communications and asset sharing protocols are bending under the weight of new demands and higher frequencies…especially with the IIRY processes we use to access and traffic new assets.

The Pain of Is-It-Ready-Yet
When we reviewed marketing processes with our clients, we saw a well-established Is-It-Ready-Yet (IIRY) pipeline between the creative and marketing teams for accessing new media assets:

  1. The marketer messages the creative team wondering when the new assets will be ready
  2. The creative team responds with a “don’t worry, we’re still on schedule” message
  3. Later, the creative team sends a web link for the new assets to the marketer
  4. The marketer downloads the asset to a local folder on the marketer’s computer
  5. The marketer uploads the asset into the campaign system and starts preparing the ad for deployment
  6. The rest of the marketing team wonders if the campaign preparation is on schedule, and they crowd around the marketer’s computer to look at the local copy of the creative that had been downloaded from the creative’s weblink

We wanted to eliminate the IIRY flow and help our marketing teams increase agility, work faster, and develop more common insight into the messaging impact of their advertising. And we realized that the silos between the creative and marketing teams were a root problem, slowing down the asset and information flow.

The Creative Team Asset Advantage
Work products of the creative team have been organized for some time with the adoption of Digital Asset Management systems (DAMs). These media-tuned databases ease data sharing, simplify versioning, and create a shared view for the creatives to work from.

If only marketers had a similar technology that they could use to build a shared view across their team and to manage the creative storage….

But marketers never had DAMs of their own…until Skai’s Creative Manager.

DAMed If You Do…And That’s a Good Thing
By providing a DAM to marketing teams, their IIRY processes disappear, replaced instead with They See It (TSI) experiences:

  1. Marketers never have to query the creative team to find if an asset is ready…now THEY SEE IT
    All new assets flow from the creative DAM to the Skai Creative Library with automatic syncing. Markets can find all new assets that have been loaded visually or with a one click query on the “Recent” assets button.
  2. Marketers never have to waste time uploading assets for campaigning…if THEY SEE IT, it attaches with no delay
    The Creative Library’s cloud storage links media to campaigns and ad sets immediately.
  3. Marketers never have to look for assets stored across computers, folders, and reports…now THEY SEE IT with a common media store
    The Creative Library provides a single shared view for the entire marketing team.
  4. Marketers never have to navigate foreign hierarchies or naming structures…now THEY SEE IT with their own custom collections
    The Creative Library supports shared collection tags and asset renaming so all creative is easy to find by campaign, product category, or through other tagging protocols that are useful to the team.

But Creative Library is Just the Start…
Next week we’ll explore another key component for speeding up ad trafficking workflows…we’ll super-charge the Creative Library with our Smart Template overview!

To learn more about Creative Manager, click here or contact your Skai account rep.