Creativity too often gets bottlenecked: Here are the ways to fix this

Lately as I talk to my marketing peers across every industry, they are all facing the same challenge of being asked to do more with less. Even as resources dwindle, content demands and workloads are increasing. It’s a question of bandwidth, and it’s impacting brands from sports, entertainment and technology to CPG, retail and every other sector. According to a new Canva-Ad Age survey of marketing, creative and communications professionals, 75% say the volume and complexity of creative assets have increased, while the expected turnaround time for creative and design work has shrunk in the same timeframe. The demand for tremendous scale and speed will inevitably impose bottlenecks that can show up in every phase of production—from planning and resource sharing to approval processes and unexpected revisions. Indeed, creatives’ workflows are becoming congested, as the cost of content creation has gone up. Adding to their woes, 69% say their budgets have either decreased or remained the same post-pandemic. What’s more, 80% worry that they spend undue time on mundane or repetitive creative tasks, and 86% complain of ineffective collaborative techniques across their organization. When the content objective is to increase scalability, all those hours spent on superfluous technical matters can feel like a real waste of time and resources for all departments involved. Business leaders agree. Canva’s just-released Visual Economy report notes that the majority of leaders are looking to provide low-cost visual platforms that prioritize design literacy for all employees, not just designers. Overwhelmingly, these executives are prioritizing more efficient workflows when evaluating visual-design software. Eliminating inefficient collaborative processes Inefficient collaborative workflows are a top creative pain point. Tasks that should be simple—like providing temporary access to a freelance contributor, quickly swapping in newly updated colors or photography, or converting files from incompatible software—often cause headaches and lead to unpredictability, inconsistency and accessibility issues surrounding brand image. According to the Canva-Ad Age study, a dismal 25% of creatives say they’re “very satisfied” with other teams in their organization maintaining and following brand guidelines in the assets and materials they create. So it’s clear that current processes aren’t doing it, and there’s a need for simple-to-use, collaborative creativity tools. Key benefits of design collaboration tools include: This type of democratic design approach frees up creatives to spend more time generating new ideas, rather than creating multiple variations of themes, images and content. It gives the team the bandwidth for brainstorming sessions and devising richer and more original campaigns. The essentials of a brand toolkit It’s imperative that creatives configure their brand identities in one centralized place, managing what ingredients people access when they’re creating materials. Erica Sorrels, partner solutions manager for the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, sees on a daily basis how important it is for all of the team’s brand guidelines for graphics and other imagery be housed in one easily accessible location, which is one of the main reasons the team uses Canva’s platform. “One of my favorite features within Canva’s Brand Hub is the Brand Kit,” Sorrels said. “This allows us to easily share our brand assets and guidelines, logos, fonts and colors. Our brand is an important part of who we are as a team, but it also helps us connect with our fans, partners and the community, so it is important that it's represented accurately.” Canva’s Brand Hub offers tools and features that help teams and organizations create with efficiency and stay on message. No one knows this better than Brandon Realmonte, the global brand creative manager for Zoom. The video-conferencing software company saw massive pandemic-related growth, and its creative and marketing teams needed to scale their work just as quickly as their engineers and developers. Once they implemented Canva, Zoom’s creatives saved more than 230 hours of design time in the last quarter of 2022. Based on that success, Zoom is now using Canva to support multiple teams across the company, including social, marketing, sales, digital and comms. “We had a lot of people who were not designers but who needed to create things fast,” Realmonte recalled. “I said, ‘My team can handle either 500 designs and that's going to take us five hours, or we can do five designs with Canva and let the rest of the company scale their work from there.’” The reason why 92% of global business leaders, per Canva’s Visual Economy Report, are prioritizing more efficient workflows when evaluating visual design software is because the demands on marketers and creatives are intense. But with some fine-tuning of the technology and processes that teams need in today’s challenging times, they can turn these creative pain points into strong points. About Canva Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Canva features a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates, including presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel and videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage and audio clips. This allows anyone to take an idea and create something beautiful. Since its launch, Canva has grown to over 135 million users each month in more than 190 countries, with more than 15 billion designs created.

Creativity too often gets bottlenecked: Here are the ways to fix this

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