Good clients value this. At a recent advertising event, leading brand executives called on agencies to challenge them and not just pitch conventional ideas that have a better chance of being approved.
But while you can accept certain aspects of creative collaboration having the potential for tension, other areas shouldn’t—especially creative reviews. If people are already stressed by the process of sharing visual work and collecting feedback and approvals, they won’t be in the right frame of mind to have a constructive creative conversation.
Hightail is about taking the pain out of creative collaboration. By making sure the process is smooth and efficient for everyone on the client and agency side, we help you get on with the real work—collaborating to create something great.
Here’s how Hightail helps agencies solve 10 typical creative review problems.
1. “I want to make it easy for my client to review our work.”
Upload your images, videos, PDFs and presentations to a Space then share the link with your clients. They can access your work instantly as high res previews and video streams without having to download the files first. They don’t even need to sign up for a free Hightail account to leave a comment—simply turn on Guest comments.
2. “I don’t want my client to see our internal discussions.”
Your team has used Hightail to collaborate on a winning idea and now it’s time to share it with your client. While you don’t want to share how the sausage was made, you still want them to leave inline comments. Simply Make a clean copy of your Space and we’ll create a new URL that only contains the latest versions of each file and removes all previous conversations.
3. “I need to get approvals from my client faster”
Approvals by email often turn into conversations about next steps, media buys and all the other minutiae of a campaign, leaving you wondering “was that actually a yes?” Because you want to get that simple “yes” quickly (and even faster if it’s a “no”), Hightail has approval requests that allow your client to give you the green light with one simple click.
You can also set up a chain that will send approval requests to your preset list of stakeholders in the sequence you choose.
4. “I want to be able to show we incorporated the client’s feedback”
The client might be the center of your agency’s world, but most clients have many other things occupying their mind. Feedback they provided three days ago might be forgotten by the time you’ve shared the next version. Follow-ups allow your client to set specific comments as tasks and you can then mark them as resolved to show that their feedback has been dealt with.
5. “We need to get files from people outside our agency”
Whenever a client says they’ll send you over their brand assets, you know you’re in for an inbox-busting batch of attachments or confusion about which consumer file-sharing services you’re allowed to use. Hightail’s Uplink service solves the problem for them. Send them your unique URL and when your client drops the files on that page, we’ll send them directly to you.
6. “I want to know when my client has reviewed our work”
Have they seen it? Do they like it? Why haven’t they been in touch? Maybe they haven’t seen it? Maybe they have but they hate it? Stop all the questions and find the answers. View activity to see all the latest information about your Space, including who has viewed and downloaded files. So now you know.
7. “We need to get the next round ready in three days”
Deadlines can be a great tool for focusing your team or a cold-sweat inducing countdown of doom. Ironically, the lack of a countdown can often be a problem. When someone is unaware that changes are required by a specific time, what could have been a few hours of simple work becomes a frenzied battle against the clock. With Hightail, it’s easy to add due dates to follow-ups and we’ll flag when the countdown is reaching its conclusion.
8. “I want our work to be seen in the best light”
In our global, digitally connected world, the days of face-to-face presentations with dramatic artwork reveals feel as distant as smoking in the office and bourbon for lunch. But you can still bring a touch of Don Draper to how you share your work with Hightail using custom branding, Space background images and context-providing descriptions that will make your client feel at home and present your work in its best light.
9. “The work we prepare for our clients is super confidential”
It’s exciting when you have to sign an NDA. You’re working on something important or exciting that other people would love to know about. But then the reality sets in that you need to be extra careful about what you discuss and how you share content. Hightail allows you to protect your work with an access code and set permissions around who can edit or download files in a Space. If you need to ensure no one accidentally forgets to protect, your account admin can make it a requirement that these controls are always used.
10. “I need to make sure my team will hit our client’s deadline”
There’s a fine balance between knowing exactly which stage everyone on your team is at and constantly interrupting their flow to answer your email or attend that time-wasting status meeting. Hightail’s Team View provides a snapshot of who’s doing what, which tasks are still outstanding and which files are waiting to be approved.While we can’t convince your client that Promixa is a bad type choice or rid them of their penchant for talking baby commercials, these 10 features will improve the creative review and approval process and enhance the relationship between your agency and client.
