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1. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
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© 2016 MetaCommunications. All rights reserved.
What You Need
To Know
To Supercharge
Your Creative
Workflow

2. Table of Contents
The State Of Enterprise
Creative And Marketing Teams
The Future Of Your
Workflow
Creative Workflow In 2016
And Beyond
1
section
2
section
3
section

3. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
1
Supercharge Your Creative Workflow | 1
The State Of Enterprise
Creative And
Marketing Teams
Whether you’re running a small agency or working at
a global brand, it’s both an exciting and challenging
time to be a member of a marketing or creative team.
The ground beneath your feet is shifting quickly.
Are you ready for the changes that are in store?

4. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
What it looks like to
be part of a successful
marketing or creative
team in 2016
3

5. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow | 5
WHO YOU ARE
You're running
the show.
Almost 30% of the global marketing executives
surveyed by the Society of Digital Agencies report
that they kept all projects in-house and didn’t
rely on any outside agencies for digital marketing
support in 2015.1

6. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
WHO YOU ARE
A 2013 survey of 450 leaders of in-house creative
teams found that 31% of teams had 11 or more
members.2
By 2015, that number had jumped
to 42%.3
Your team is expanding.
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7. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
WHO YOU ARE
You're working on
diverse projects.
According to a survey of marketers conducted by
the National Association of Advertisers, among the
most common responsibilities of marketing teams
are creating promotional materials for digital media
(91%), email marketing (77%), trade show and event
materials (73%) and direct mail (72%).4
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8. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow | 11
WHO YOU ARE
You're juggling
more than ever.
Research finds that approximately 50% of creative
teams with 11 or more people manage over 2000
projects annually.5
Only 56% of teams use a project
management system, but 83% claim to have at least
some process documentation in place.

9. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
What's changing?
What do those 56% of teams that rely on a work
management system know that colleagues who
are working ad-hoc don’t? They’ve recognized
the key challenges that the new working reality
for creative and marketing teams represents.
13

10. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
WHAT'S CHANGING?
Over 37% of American workers participate in some
degree of telecommuting as part of their jobs.6
As teams become more geographically distributed,
the complexity of managing collaborative projects
that span time zones or even countries continues
to grow.
Remote work is
on the rise.
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11. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
WHAT'S CHANGING?
Mobile technology means that project work can
happen anywhere at any time. The need to reduce
friction to facilitate this type of work approach while
managing and coordinating resources is an emerging
pressure teams are facing.
Work is no longer
restricted to 9-5/M-F.
17

12. WHAT'S CHANGING?
Client expectations
are growing.
Living in an always-on world means that internal
and external clients expect real-time project
updates and the ability to provide input when and
how they want.
Supercharge Your Creative Workflow | 19

13. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
WHAT'S CHANGING?
Data drives corporate
decision-making.
Being able to capture and analyze relevant project
data (time spent, costs, productivity metrics) in real
time in order to identify efficiencies and/or course
correct is top of mind for leading creative and
marketing teams.
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Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
The Future Of
Your Workflow
Creative and marketing teams are busy and getting
busier. Their diverse mix of projects and growing
team sizes coupled with the changing nature of their
work context calls for a simple, streamlined workflow
automation approach. As we’ve noted, however,
almost half of teams don’t have one in place.
We think that’s poised to change. Here’s why.
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15. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
FUTURE OF WORKFLOW
You're in control.
With increased marketing spending and reliance
on cloud computing and data-driven decision-
making becoming the new normal, teams are in the
driver’s seat when it comes to choosing the solution
that fits their needs. More than ever, vendors are
working hard to get their products in front of
potential customers and compete for their tech
investment.
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16. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
FUTURE OF WORKFLOW
Martech is a huge
market.
Almost two-thirds of in-house creative teams say
software tops their list of non-personnel expenses,
so it should come as no surprise that workflow
automation software is a big business.7
It’s currently
forecasted to be a $5B market by 2019 and forms
a significant chunk of the almost $32B marketing
technology market.8
That means more vendors,
more products and more information to sift through
in order to determine how to allocate your martech
investment.
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17. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
FUTURE OF WORKFLOW
500 US IT and business execs surveyed about their
use of workflow automation software identified
a few key pain points driving their investment.9
Topping the list was a desire to eliminate bottlenecks
that were slowing down work (48%), followed by a
need to reduce duplication of work (46%), improve
communications (39%) and manage documents and
assets more easily (33%).
What do teams want in
a workflow solution?
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18. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
FUTURE OF WORKFLOW
How do teams decide
what to invest in?
31
Industry research shows that peer recommendations
(66%) held the most influence over martech
purchase decisions, followed by online reviews
(44%) and analyst reports (33%).10
Word of mouth will
continue to grow in importance as a way to parse
the increasingly crowded market of workflow tools
available to creative and marketing teams.

19. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
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Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
Creative Workflow
In 2016 And Beyond
Given current realities for creative and marketing
teams and the drivers of investment in workflow
automation, what factors will shape how teams work
and the type of workflow solution they need in 2016
and beyond?
33

20. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
2016 AND BEYOND
The digital world is awash in shared content and the
rate of content production shows no signs of slowing.11
The Content Marketing Institute recently found that
76% of B2B marketers are planning to create more
content this year than they did in 2015.12
In other
research, the CMO Council found that while two-
thirds of the marketing leaders they surveyed in 2015
felt visual assets were vital to the content they create
and share, less than a third had a process in place
to manage these assets across their department or
between departments.13
As content production and
consumption grows, formal Digital Asset Management
will no longer be optional for teams that want to stoke
their content creation engine efficiently.
DAM(n)ed if you don't.
35

21. 2016 AND BEYOND
CMOs will outspend CIOs by 2017, with their
investment in tech rising to $120B over the next
decade according to Gartner and Foundation Capital.14
In addition to spending on inbound and outbound
marketing tech, marketing teams will also be turning
an eye to optimizing internal processes via strategic
investments in project management solutions to
consolidate and coordinate their workflows. The
decision about what tech to use has traditionally
resided with IT, but we’ll see a continued shift to
creative and marketing teams as the controllers of their
own destiny. With this newfound power will come the
responsibility to deeply understand their own workflow
needs and diligently vet potential workflow solutions.
Marketing teams will
have deeper pockets.
Supercharge Your Creative Workflow | 37

22. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
2016 AND BEYOND
According to Gartner research, companies will spend
almost $150B globally on enterprise applications this
year, with much of it going to cloud-based software.15
By 2020, Gartner predicts 60% of companies will rely
on cloud-based office systems to manage various
functions within their business.
In the shorter term, the growth of cloud-based
computing and the establishment of cloud-based
services such as Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud and
Slack as business must-haves means a robust list of
integrations will be high on the shopping list of teams
looking to invest in workflow automation solutions.
Integration is integral.
39

23. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
2016 AND BEYOND
41
The marketing technology marketplace has been
doubling year-over-year.16
With so many new
vendors entering the market, the value of peer
recommendations and word of mouth as a means
of identifying the best workflow automation
solution for your needs will become increasingly
important to cut through the noise. The caveat
being that before you can meet these needs, you
have to understand what they are. Savvy teams will
be judicious in their reliance on word of mouth.
Peer reviews help to narrow the field of vendor
options, but playing follow the leader isn’t the smart
way to make a definitive purchase decision.
Word of mouth matters
more than ever.

24. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
2016 AND BEYOND
Being present doesn’t mean being productive.
Atlassian reports that when pointless meetings,
meandering email threads and personal distractions
are taken out of the equation, 60% or less of the time
we spend at work is actually allocated to productive
tasks.17
As companies experiment with flexible work
arrangements, teleworking, unlimited vacation days
and other perks to spur productivity, they’ll also
increasingly be relying on data-driven insights to help
them do more with less. Look for forward-thinking
teams to start focusing intently on collecting,
analyzing and optimizing measurable metrics of
productivity and expecting their workflow solutions
to deliver this functionality.
Productivity goes under
the microscope.
43

25. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
2016 AND BEYOND
All of these trends have a common theme. They call
for or depend on the empowerment of marketing
and creative teams as drivers of investment, process
improvement and increased productivity. As these
teams gain prominence within organizations and see
their scope of work expand, their need for education
and critical analysis of their workflows increases.
Successful creative and marketing teams in 2016 and
beyond won’t necessarily be working harder, but
they’ll definitely be working much smarter.
Empowerment is the
name of the game.
45

26. 1. http://www.slideshare.net/sodaspeaks/the-soda-report-
volume-1-2015
2. http://www.creativeindustryreport.com/2014_InHouse_CS_
Ind_Report_final.pdf
3. http://www.creativeindustryreport.com/2015-IHCSIR-Report-
web.pdf
4. https://www.ana.net/content/show/id/26957
5. http://www.creativeindustryreport.com/2014_InHouse_CS_
Ind_Report_final.pdf
6. http://www.gallup.com/poll/184649/telecommuting-work-
climbs.aspx
7. http://www.creativeindustryreport.com/2015-IHCSIR-Report-
web.pdf
8. http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/
workflow-management-system.asp
9. http://www.slideshare.net/comptia/comp-tia-market-
research-on-business-process-automation
SOURCES
10. http://www.walkersands.com/images/files/file/Whitepaper-
PDFs/Walker%20Sands%27%20State%20of%20Marketing%20
Technology%202016%20Understanding%20the%20New%20
Martech%20Buyer%20Journey!5.pdf
11. https://www.domo.com/blog/2015/08/data-never-sleeps-3-0/
12. http://www.slideshare.net/CMI/b2b-content-marketing-2016-
benchmarks-budgets-and-trends-north-america?ref=http://
contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/09/b2b-content-marketing-
research/
13. http://www.cmocouncil.org/press-detail.php?id=5084
14. https://foundationcapital.com/assets/whitepapers/DotCMO_
whitepaper.pdf
15. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/08/27/enterprise-upgrades-
behind-software-spending-growth-gartner/
16. http://marketingland.com/infographic-2015-marketing-
technology-landscape-113956
17. https://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic

27. Supercharge Your Creative Workflow |
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