CreativeOps Podcast Nish Patel

In this episode, we'll take you behind the scenes with Roman Kuebler and Jeffrey Lash, the dynamic duo of creative ops at Under Armour. They share their secret sauce for building a well-oiled creative operations enabled content supply chain from the ground up, one template, one process at a time.

Key Takeaways:

1. Empathy as the Foundation for Effective Creative Operations: Understanding the pain points and needs of creative teammates is crucial for developing processes that stick.

2. Collaboratively Creating Guardrails for Creatives: Providing structure and templates that ensure brand consistency and quality while allowing for creative freedom.

3. Influencing Without Authority: Strategically building trust and credibility with partners and stakeholders through a grassroots approach.

4. The Power of Incremental Improvements: Continuously chipping away at problems and making small changes to transform the content supply chain over time.

5. Balancing Process and Creativity: Finding the right balance between left-brain (process-oriented) and right-brain (creative problem-solving) thinking in creative operations.

Questions or a different point of view than what you heard today? Drop me a line nish@creativeops.fm

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In this episode, Mike Rizzo, founder of Marketing Ops.com, joins us to explore the untapped opportunities in creative ops and marketing ops alignment. Discover how these two critical functions can partner to drive better outcomes across the entire organization.

Key Takeaways

1. Creative Ops and Marketing Ops: Natural Partners: Creative ops and marketing ops are natural partners that should be collaborating much more closely to drive efficiency and effectiveness.

2. Integrating Processes and Technologies for Speed: Integrating creative and marketing processes and technologies can enable marketing to move at the speed of ideas.

3. Efficiency Gains through Templatization and Automation: Templatizing and automating creative assets can lead to huge efficiency gains and empower teams across the organization.

4. Adopting Data-Driven, Results-Oriented KPIs: Creative ops should adopt more data-driven, results-oriented KPIs, and marketing ops can help guide this transition.

5. The Future: Horizontal Go-to-Market Ops: The future org structure could involve a horizontal "go-to-market ops" function that brings together marketing, sales, creative, and more.
Questions or a different point of view than what you heard today? Drop me a line nish@creativeops.fm

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Companion Newsletter: sign up at https://creativeops.fm/newsletterFollow Today's Guest: Mike Rizzo on LinkedInFollow Me, Your Host: Nish Patel on LinkedIn
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In this episode, we challenge the stereotype that legal teams hinder innovation by sitting down with Betty Louie, General Counsel and Partner at BrandTech Group. Betty shares how their legal team has been integral to catalyzing AI adoption through their simple yet effective "Green List" process, which creates a safe space for experimentation.

Key Takeaways

1. Legal Teams as Enablers of AI Adoption: Legal teams can play a crucial role in accelerating AI adoption by creating safe spaces for experimentation and providing clear guidelines.

"We assume it's here to stay. We know it's here to stay. This is something that is in use. And will it look different in a year? Most probably. Will it look different in probably six months? Most probably. But we're not approaching it from fear in terms of putting the brakes on. In fact, we're doing the opposite."

2. The "Green List" Process: Facilitating Safe AI Experimentation: BrandTech Group's "Green List" process involves proactively evaluating AI tools against various parameters, empowering teams to experiment with confidence.

"We created this list ….. so that it encouraged people to play with the ones that are on the green list. And therefore it encourages people to play around with it, invest more time in it, but also to come to us with additional tools that they thought were worthy of the group looking at and had really innovative features."

3. Collaborating with Clients on AI Adoption: Engaging in open, transparent conversations with clients about AI adoption helps identify opportunities for collaboration and address concerns.

"We are talking about our process of which tools we're using, what tools they're comfortable with. Oftentimes it starts with discussion …..  of its benefits and certain parameters where we have built into Pencil Pro that would ensure that it's well ahead of even the rest of the pack in the green list."

4. Addressing Ethical Concerns in AI-Generated Content: Proactively tackling issues like bias in AI-generated content is crucial for responsible AI adoption.

"It's definitely brought the discussion of inherent bias or unconscious bias to the forefront because when you see these images generated over and over again and it's hitting a certain theme, it's hard to deny it, right? Because the models themselves are just portraying what it was trained on, not other aspects of it."

5. Legal Teams as Strategic Partners in AI Adoption: By collaborating with IT, creative teams, and other stakeholders, legal teams can help develop comprehensive AI strategies that align with organizational goals.
 "It's incumbent upon us to stay abreast of how these tools are evolving. It's not a static green list. So, we do go back and we do have to change if necessary, if they get updated."

Questions or a different point of view than what you heard today? Drop me a line nish@creativeops.fm

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In this episode, I riff and rant on three topics
00:00 Heads Up03:09 Live from NYC ... want to watch 04:15  Meet Me at Henry Stewart Creative Operations Conference05:41 The Best Process of 100,000 Foot Creative Ops Leaders Tune in for actionable insights to level up your Creative Ops game!

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In this episode, I riff and rant on three topics
02:20 Creative Ops Vocabulary Follow Up: the power of language in shaping Creative Ops stories and (desired) behaviours10:50 WTF of Creative Ops: Are you observing and asking about the Fs in your process? 17:35 Creative Briefs: Simon Cowell x (annoying 5 year old) Socrates = Eliminating a whole bunch of Fs Tune in for actionable insights to level up your Creative Ops game!

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In this episode, Bethany Thornton, former head of Creative Operations at Atlassian, shares her secrets of a people-centric approach to Creative Ops. She discusses how fostering communication, collaboration, and a culture of curiosity allowed Atlassian's creative organization to thrive through a period of rapid global growth.

Key Takeaways & Sound Bites

1. Onboarding as a Foundation for Success

"That was like the biggest thing for me was making sure that we had a solid foundation for people coming in. And that really empowered not just those individuals coming in, but the whole team, because people were able to operate that much faster as this cohesive unit, because everybody knew where to go for things, how we work."

2. Fostering Collaboration Through Listening Tours

"The best way for me to do my job was to just get into the weeds, understand things because I was building operations from the ground up. And so nothing, very little was documented when I started in the role. And so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just creating things out of thin air and just saying, oh, well, this makes sense to me. I wanted to make sure that I really understood it and that I was doing right by the people that I was doing it for."

3. Adapting Intake Processes for Clarity and Efficiency

"Our intake process started with, hey, is this a new, is this a net new project? Is this a revision to something we've worked on with you before? Or is this just an idea that you want to chat about? And so they entered into our portal with those three options. And from there, it went into a form for them to fill in with as little information as was needed for us to get the conversation going."

4. Partnering with Other Operations Groups

"I think that one of the things that we really should be taking advantage of is working together with other operations groups; Marketing Operations, Design Operations, etc. Just the collaboration that can happen with this partnership, that's going to scale all of our teams so much in such a more efficient way and in a way that really energizes the teams. Because we're not just creating efficiencies within our team, making things a smoother process for our team, removing pain points within our team. We're doing it across teams, that is a game changer.

Questions or a different point of view than what you heard today? Drop me a line nish@creativeops.fm

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Companion Newsletter: sign up at https://creativeops.fm/newsletterFollow Today's Guest: Bethany Thornton on LinkedInFollow Me, Your Host: Nish Patel on LinkedIn
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