How 3 world-class teams streamline creative production at scale
From billboard ads to social media posts, high-quality creative assets are essential to make your brand stand out. But the larger your company, the harder it is to coordinate all the moving parts of creative production.
That doesn’t mean it’s not possible. These three enterprise companies—Discovery Inc., Benefit Cosmetics, and Dr. Martens—have all cracked the code on large-scale creative production. Here’s an inside look at how they use Asana to make their creative workflows tick.
1. How Discovery Digital Studios produces thousands of videos every month
Discovery Inc. is the media giant behind big-name entertainment networks like TLC, Animal Planet, and Food Network. Their Digital Studios team creates thousands of videos every month for social media and consumer apps—no small task, given the amount of coordination that goes into every video. To get it all done, they organize creative production end-to-end in Asana.
Standardizing content production
The Digital Studios team often makes up to six versions of every video, each one perfectly formatted for their website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms. With so many deliverables to manage, having a clearly defined creative process is essential. Here’s how they make it work:
A central hub for each workstream: The team creates an Asana project for every video format, allowing them to organize all content production deliverables and stakeholders in one place.
Templatized production workflows: With standardized project templates, teams can kick off work instantly with a pre-set list of deliverables, so no tasks are forgotten.
Automatic handoffs: Automations instantly hand off tasks between different teams and departments, so every stakeholder knows when they’re unblocked and ready to start work.
Visibility into the status of work
When creating content at such a large scale, it can be difficult to see the full picture of what’s on deck, what’s in progress, and what’s been completed. With Asana, Discovery can see all of this in one overarching view—plus pull reports and search for specific videos. Here’s what that looks like:
A bird’s-eye view: The content team uses portfolios to track related video projects—like a group of cooking class videos for the Food Network Kitchen app. This lets them track work status, go-live dates, and more all in one overarching view.
One system of record: Organizing video production in one place means the team has a record of everything they’ve produced. For example, they can easily search Asana for all videos tagged with a certain keyword, like “summer,” and pull past examples to help inform future work.
Centralized communication: There’s nothing worse than tracking disjointed conversations across different apps. Discovery’s team avoids this by integrating Asana with tools like Outlook and Slack—turning email action items and Slack conversations directly into Asana tasks.
Discovery creative production template
Use Discovery’s custom Asana template to apply their proven systems to your own work. See how your team can capture all creative production in one place, streamline handoffs between teams, and ensure no requirements slip through the cracks.
2. How Benefit Cosmetics manages 75 creative projects at once
The US creative team at Benefit Cosmetics includes designers, copywriters, and video and photography specialists—all working on up to 75 projects at one time. There’s a lot to coordinate, including product launches, emails, paid media, and influencer marketing. The team uses Asana to efficiently manage their intake process, workloads, and campaign timelines in one tool.
Streamlining creative requests
The creative team at Benefit Cosmetics manages 50-60 work requests every month. At that scale, they had to turn their creative request process into a well-oiled machine, with a clear, pre-defined workflow for every task. Here’s what that looks like:
Standardized request forms: Every request comes through a standardized Asana form. This gives the creative team all the information they need from the start, eliminating back-and-forth communication and saving the team nearly six work weeks per year.
Actionable next steps: An Asana task documents each new request, all organized in one “Incoming Creative Requests” project. When requests are approved, the team can instantly assign deliverables and triage work to the right people—all using the same original task, so no context is lost.
Managing resources and timelines
With so many requests, Benefit Cosmetics needs to make the most of their team’s limited time. That means resource management and careful timeline planning are key to hit campaign goals and keep work on track. Here’s how the team stays on target:
Visibility into team workloads: The team uses Asana’s workload feature to automatically calculate team bandwidth and visualize it on a weekly timeline. This makes it easy to see when the team needs to hire new resources, like freelance designers or copywriters.
Timeline planning across campaigns: The team visualizes timelines for multiple campaigns in one calendar view—allowing them to spot gaps and proactively plan for overlaps. As needed, they can also filter the view to look at a single campaign timeline at once.
3. How Dr. Martens connects global design teams
The Creative Services team at Dr. Martens covers everything from store window displays and outdoor ads to social media posts and digital marketing—for the entire global retail company. They use Asana to keep each regional team connected and on track, organizing design initiatives and requests in one central hub where nothing can get lost.
Ensuring consistent designs
The Creative Services team has a critical job: communicating the season’s creative tone and direction and providing assets, artwork, and guidelines to help creative teams in other countries bring stories to life. Asana makes this process seamless, with:
One source of truth across regions: Designers in the UK and the rest of Europe use Asana to manage their work and communicate about creative assets. That means someone in Europe can ask the global team to quickly check whether a creative asset for France is consistent, and everyone has access to a repository of past creative briefs.
Accountability and visibility into projects: The team uses projects to organize major initiatives and brand stories. This gives stakeholders a holistic view of each project and its progress. Anyone can jump in and see who’s working on what, and there’s no need to chase one another for status updates.
Simplifying planning and prioritization
The Creative Services team fulfills creative requests from departments around the business and collaborates with external agencies. With such a large workload, they need to be able to predict when work will get busy—and make sure designers always prioritize the most high-impact work. Here’s how Asana helps them achieve that:
Reporting and trendspotting: Since all creative requests are captured in Asana throughout the year, the Creative Services team can use reporting dashboards to identify the year’s busiest months and anticipate resource needs in advance.
Faster prioritization: In Asana, stakeholders or managers can easily see what creative assets designers are working on and bump high-impact projects to the top of the list. Then, individual designers can use Asana’s my tasks view to prioritize and plan their own work on a daily basis.
How Asana uses work management for creative production
Learn how Asana's Head of Creative Operations streamlines workflows across her team to produce high-quality work, faster.
Speed up creative processes
Don’t start with a blank slate. Learn tried-and-true processes that can help your creative team streamline and automate workflows from start to finish. With the right tools, you can delight customers around the world with high-quality creative—no matter how complex your processes are.
Discovery creative production template
Use Discovery’s custom Asana template to apply their proven systems to your own work. See how your team can capture all creative production in one place, streamline handoffs between teams, and ensure no requirements slip through the cracks.
