CRE8IVE’s catalyst for better collaboration

CRE8IVE is an Australian creative agency, specializing in branding, campaign development and digital design. We spoke with Creative Partner, Alberto Florez about working in print and digital and how Hightail became a catalyst for better collaboration. 

We are a creative agency based in Canberra

CRE8IVE is currently a team of 20, which includes client services, designers and a digital team. Canberra is the capital of Australia so some of our clients are government departments, but we also work with private companies across various industries.Branding is our primary offering

We can take that initial brand development and implement it all the way through an organization, especially on digital platforms. We also get involved in campaigns and even print work. For the past seven years we’ve put together the Canberra Convention Bureau’s Meeting Planners Guide. This guide contains conference, meeting and event venues and lists all the important information regarding these places to help event planners pick appropriate locations for their event.

Collecting assets from the advertisers was difficult

There was so many advertisers in the guide that something would always go wrong. The images they provided would be too low res or they’d want to make changes to the ads at the last minute. After the first year, which was a nightmare, we built our own asset management system. But that was so rigid it quickly became hard to manage. By this year it was simply untenable to keep maintaining this six-year old code.Hightail met our needs for this project

We investigated services, like Basecamp and Dropbox, but Hightail was the easiest to use. We built a process around it, setting up a Space for each advertiser and using that as a collaboration platform to show them the designs for their ad and have them mark-up their changes.

90% of the advertisers liked the process

The ability to comment on PDFs was popular though the approval process was the real winner. They could approve the ad with one click and we could see what was approved from the thumbnails. The advertisers who weren’t so keen were usually not very tech-savvy. They couldn’t see why the process was necessary but of course they had no idea how many other advertisers we were dealing with. We took the time to show them how it worked and it proved to be a really great solution.We saved ourselves a lot of time this year

One of our Client Services Managers, Alyson managed the whole process herself and it worked famously. We spent more than double the amount of time managing the project last year, so Hightail made us 150% more efficient.

This project was a catalyst for better collaboration

Hightail was so useful in putting together the Meeting Planners Guide that we’re now using it with our other clients. As a business, we’ve found that email is killing us so we’re trying to move away from collaborating there. Hightail provides a repository of any kind of asset, from text to images, and a place to talk about it as a team and collaborate with our clients.

To find out more about CRE8IVE, visit www.cre8ive.com.au, follow the company on Twitter and like their Facebook page.