The story behind the next generation of creative workflow

The most successful in-house creative teams recognize that today’s increasing demand for content requires a new approach to creative workflow management. Teams must deliver faster while adapting to changing priorities without impacting the quality of their work. In short, this boils down to the following:

Adaptable, error-free collaboration across marketing and creative will determine an organization’s speed to market — and the strength of the organization’s competitive advantage. 

For over a decade, inMotionNow has served creative teams by streamlining their workflows to help them be more efficient and keep up with demand. However, as creative teams play an increasingly important role in the business, they are under more pressure than ever, and the way they work is evolving. How are creative teams changing the way they work, and what do they need from a modern creative workflow management solution to support that work?

Answering this question was the focus of my past two years of research with the inMotionNow team. With two whip-smart, customer-driven product managers, I’ve been interviewing and surveying in-house marketing and creative professionals, as well as taking a deep dive into secondary research on best practices for creative workflow and collaboration. Our research ultimately informed and guided us in developing the next generation of creative workflow, inMotion ignite.

inMotion ignite is a complete reimagining of creative workflow, built on the latest in modern technology and rooted in the way creative teams work today. We’re taking our decade + years of experience and jumping ahead to build a solution that will redefine the landscape.

inMotion ignite will bring marketing and creative closer together, and allow their teams to strengthen collaboration and bridge the communication chasm that currently exists in most organizations.

This new application will have fewer walls, more collaboration, and smartly crafted integrations to ensure it can connect to the tools creative and marketing teams use most.

Since day one, our vision for this project has been “Elevating Creative Production through Simplicity” – we chose each word intentionally to guide our work and ensure we maintain the simple, easy to set-up, easy to use experience that we’ve established with inMotion Classic. Here are the five principles that guided our development of inMotion ignite.

1. Creative workflow supports a flexible, adaptable process, automating where possible

Modern creative teams need a process that enables them to deliver value as quickly as possible and to adapt to changing priorities along the way. Rigid workflows that involve many steps and multiple hand-offs are prone to delays and mistakes. As creative teams continue to fine-tune their processes they will need a creative workflow solution that adapts with them and limits repetitive tasks with automation.

2. Bringing down walls between creatives and their stakeholders

A key theme that emerged as I spoke to creative teams across the country was the challenges of building stronger relationships with their clients and stakeholders. Many creative teams feel that there is a wall between them and their clients. This metaphorical wall causes frustration for the creative team when key information is missing at project intake. Likewise, clients are frustrated by what they perceive as an opaque creative process.

3. Simplified communication and collaboration

If creative teams don’t have an easy way to collaborate or to gain feedback from clients or other team members, the quality of work and timelines begin to suffer. Alternatively, too many communication channels result in lost or missed details. Modern creative teams need a workflow platform that enables them to communicate in a consistent way in a central location where they can ask questions, share files, review deliverables, provide feedback and collaborate at every stage of the workflow.

4. Structure and accountability for growing teams

As more and more organizations are bringing their creative teams in-house, those teams need a way to create accountability, both within and outside their team.

Within the team, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined, and as the team refines their processes, they need to ensure everyone follows through.

Outside of the team, clients need to keep up their end of the bargain too by providing comprehensive information at the start of projects and getting their reviews in on time!

5. Quantify the value of creative work

In-house creative teams can often be treated as internal service organizations. Because they don’t bill the way an external agency does, it can be difficult for internal clients to understand the value of creative work and the impact it has on the business.

The next generation of creative workflow arms creative leadership with the data to help them track important KPIs that quantify the value of the creative team to the business. inMotion ignite tracks all activity in the system and comes with an integrated reporting suite that makes it easy to generate reports for key stakeholders.

Why inMotion ignite

Modern creative teams are dynamic and constantly evolving. As they continue to play an increasingly important role in their organizations, their creative workflow needs will also evolve. We set out to build inMotion ignite with these ever-changing needs in mind. inMotion ignite is the next generation of creative workflow, built to work the way creative teams work today and tomorrow.

About the Author

Brian Kessman is the Director of Product Management for inMotionNow. With 20 years in the creative services industry, he co-leads the product vision for inMotion ignite. Brian also consults directly with independent and in-house creative agencies, helping them to deliver impactful, quality work — faster, smarter, and with greater agility than traditional service models.