by Ollie Stewart
Recently while onboarding a new Opal customer, I was speaking with a cross-section of marketers from across the organization. To help understand their day to day workflow I asked, “What keeps you up at night?”
The team got rather emotional as they began to tell me how a common request from a senior leader quickly turns a 10 hour day into a 17 hour day. They often get a request to compile a “run of show” of all the content that is going to go out across the brand’s channels over the next few weeks.
A Painful Fire Drill
With different accounts across several global and regional media channels, the task of showing the content for a single day, let alone two weeks, was colossal. Before the team adopted Opal, all of their content was scattered across a galaxy of different spreadsheets. The status of content in various states of completion was hidden in various email strings. Each team had a slightly different process and a slightly different view of the world, so with no real way of knowing what’s the most up to date, what’s approved and what’s not approved, the team would get to work, pulling together the best report they could.
For that day, the team would find themselves missing crucial meetings, skipping the gym, and canceling dinner with the important people in their lives. Wait… What lives???
Making best guesses, they compile what they think the right pieces of content are into a keynote presentation, which takes hours unto itself. Next they mock up the content as it will look on the native channels. Now bleary eyed after a 17 hour day they send that presentation to their boss and get to bed… way past their bedtime. They awake four hours later only to find an email thanking them for compiling the information but learning that a change has been made to the strategy that leaves the information they pulled out of date and no longer accurate.
There is a Better Way
This was just one team’s account of their endless need to share and export a view of their content and what they are working on with others in the organization. I hear versions of this challenge pretty much every time I onboard a new customer. From management, “I need to generate a view of content across business units and geographies for a certain date range and send it to leadership asap.” From agencies, “we constantly need to generate presentations of final content to share with our client for approval.”
It never gets easier to hear the pains my customers share as we are getting started. But it always feels great to watch their pain shed away as they begin working together in Opal. In a way, I feel like I’m giving people their weekends back. By giving teams the ability to generate and share presentations effortlessly using the work they’ve already done, I feel like I’m saving my customers from their worst fears.
If any of this feels like a day in your life, know that there is a better way. Check out Opal and take back your nights and weekends. Spend your energy focused on the fun creative work that gets you out of bed in the morning. We’ll be happy to help show you the way.
