r/CreativeOperations

Im the marketing lead at a mid-size brand (we're a team of 5) where we work a lot with outside agencies and freelancers. Im trying to see if we're the only ones with a massive tech stack or if someone has a way to steamline it.
Our stack works, but tracking things down across five different platforms is a massive admin drain at the moment. We have Figma for the design team, Notion is rigged with all of our brand guidelines and branding docs, Canva so social and sales have locked templated to build whatever they need, Drive hosts all of out working files, and we host raw video on Dropbox. The most requested logos and one-pagers are basically eternal live pins in our Slack.

Im going back

I’d love to see others CO tech stack. Anyone wanna trade/share ?

Hey guys. Had some questions!

I'm trying to formally break into a Creative Operations role. My current role is a real blend of Creative Management (I manage a creative Team) and perform Creative Operations (Ive built and manage all the workflow, prioritisation, intake of our org), and operate as a designer as well building and contributing to production when I get time. . I basicly wear 3 hats as the org runs very lean.

I unfortunately don't have the flexibility and budget to really delve deeply into Creative or Marketing Operations even though we desperately need it. I've learned to build and manage it all with basicly no budget, and a very low headcount, and at a huge scale. Whilst sti

I run creative ops for a small inhouse team. Roughly a day of my work week gets spend fielding requests for files. We have a shared drive and everyone has access, but people still ask, because finding the right version can be tricky with a handful of designers plus other stakeholders working together (throw AI agents into the mix and you see what a designmordial soup we have going here).

Has anyone solved this with structure, a tool, a better request process? I'd rather not add another system but we might need some system redress.

Been wrapping my head around DAM options and didn't want to trust vendor pages blindly. Read up on the actual docs and came up with two questions to narrow my search:

1. Does the person on the other end get the rules along with the file, or just the file? (Brand guide PDFs never get read)
2. When you change something, does everyone downstream get it or are you re-sending links forever?

Brandfolder

Smart CDN makes sure when you update an asset every embed of it updates from the same URL. It breaks if you rename the file, though. Usage rules live separately from the assets.

Lingo

Brand kits hold the assets and usage notes in one pla

been thinking about this a lot lately because the gap between the hype and the, day-to-day reality still feels pretty wide, even now that the tools have matured a lot. on the good side, using image gen for early concepting has genuinely changed how fast we can get to a visual direction. showing 8 rough concepts in a first meeting instead of 2 is real, and clients respond well to it. there's research pointing to meaningful productivity gains for teams that adopt text-to-image tools, though the numbers vary a lot depending on the workflow, and who's using them, so I'd take any specific figure with a grain of salt rather than treating it as a universal benchmark. the tools themselves have gotte

been thinking about this a lot lately after seeing that Forbes stat where 78% of creatives feel AI is making their work less meaningful. we're at 94% adoption across the industry but a huge chunk of people feel worse about their work. that's a pretty rough tradeoff. our setup right now is basically: AI handles ideation volume, first draft copy, resizing, quick concept visuals. humans own the brief, the brand judgment, and anything that ships. it works okay but I notice the team defaulting to AI as step one more and more, which is what worries me. there's decent research out of Barcelona suggesting that when people lean on generative AI early in the process they end up producing more, generic

been doing this for a while now across a few different projects and the biggest thing I've noticed, is that the friction point isn't the AI tools themselves, it's figuring out where they actually fit vs. where they just add steps. the use case that clicked for me was using image gen early in the ideation, phase, like before anything is locked, just to get a rough visual direction sorted fast. client sees 8 concept directions in the first meeting instead of 2. that part works really well. where it gets messy is handoff. if you generate something in Midjourney or Firefly and then need to get it, into a deliverable, there's almost always a refinement pass that takes longer than people expect. t

I know this is a long shot....

I'm currently in Help Desk (early career), but would love to find my way into CreativeOps.

After some research, I learned that I can help creative teams improve workflows and processes. This is something I would love to do for creatives! In a previous career, I worked in the Arts in various creative and technical capacities and I deeply enjoyed it.

I plan on going back to school for a Bachelors in MIS (management Information Systems).

Is there any way for me back? Any learning resources I should consider? Since i'm early career, I can still pivot.

I work for a smallish agency that was recently acquired by a larger network. Today, I found myself on a multi-agency call with a Fortune 100 company to talk about file management. I felt out of my element and basically kept my mouth shut the whole time. I didn't really feel qualified to ask questions on the call.

The way they handle licensing is different than I am used to—the agencies just put in a ticket for an image, and the client-side art buyers handle all the negotiations and rights purchasing. Everything goes into their own system.

My other clients don't have that kind of scale, but I have two right now that are trying to build out their own Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems. I

Happy New Year.

I manage a small in-house creative team in a large company that owns many brands. It's super busy and we are usually pretty under resourced, but we make it work.

I've worked my way up from junior to senior graphic/digital designer (I have the skills to do mst areas of design... web design, video editing, classic graphic design etc). I'm also kind of a design manager as well, in the sense I manage a team, manage stakeholder relationships, set up processes, statistics, deadlines, delegate projects etc.

But I'm looking into specific Design Manager/Creative Ops roles in other companies, and considering moving into this field in a company with a larger, more mature creative de

Just found this community - let's make it active! Would love to use this subreddit to connect more.

I just became Dir. of Creative Ops for a quickly growing CPG brand. There are minimal tools / platforms in place so far.

I'm getting us set up in monday.com for PM - so far so good.

Our team has just kept all files in GDrive for the last year before I got here. I'm looking into a DAM. There are so many options...

Any strong recommendations for a small/midsize team?

• Air
• Bynder
• Frontify
• Brandfolder
• Shade
• Cloudify
• Syndigo MDM (we need Syndigo to work with a certain retailer)
• Plytix

Also, it looks like frame.io

Hello! Hopefully someone will read this not long after it's posted 🤞🏼

I've been a copywriter for over a decade, mostly in-house at tech companies with a brief stint at a tiny niche marketing agency. I've noticed that most places I've worked, I find myself very driven to solve workflow/process issues—sometimes it feels more exciting than my writing work. Because solving those problems isn't what I'm asked to do as a writer, and because I hate my current in-house job, it's made me think I should explore making a change into a role where that actually would be my job.

A few questions:

1. What options are even out there in creative ops? Only some of the places I've worked have even had proj