Digital Tools

Take Control of Jira

June 1, 2017 by Editorial Team

Summary: It sometimes happens that creative teams are given a digital tool that might not be best suited for their needs. Jira is a great example — it might be brought in by the IT department as a “safe” choice without understanding some of the core needs of its potential users. But all is not lost. Despite Jira’s reputation as sub-optimal for managing creative work, you can make the best of the situation if you know how to create a ticket type and develop workflows that are more friendly to your needs.

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Comedy Central Uses DAM to Find the Funny

August 2, 2016 by Author

Digital Asset Management was one of my early initiatives at Comedy Central, and it’s remained one of my all-time favorite projects there.

Comedy Central’s DAM system was originally created by — and for — the print design team. The initiative started small, but it grew to serve additional teams across the larger creative workgroup. Over the course of a decade its reach eventually expanded to serve a broad swath of users across Viacom’s corporate enterprise — users who have come to depend on it for ready access to a collection of more than 50,000 of Comedy Central’s branded digital assets.

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Comedy Central Dumps its Obsolete Optical Media Archive

February 3, 2016 by Author

Comedy Central migrated its entire Brand Creative archive to a modern system, and tossed 18 years worth of optical media into the dumpster.

Here’s how.

We had amassed 800+ CD’s and DVD’s in a comprehensive archive of all source files — for every single print project generated by the Brand Creative group since the team… well, pretty much since the team’s very beginnings.

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The Problem With Task Management for Creatives

December 8, 2015 by Author

Within the last year Comedy Central augmented its digital workspace with two new third-party systems, one for task management system and a sister system for project management. This filled a real need; our workflow tool already let users leave notes and comments about the media, and it retained the chain of conversation around a project or asset. But it just wasn’t enough.

So here we go again — creating two more silos of information and communication. Clearly, this went against my conviction that an integration solution should be our first resort. But, a void was filled… however poorly.

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Creative Ops: The Sweet Spot for a Digital Hub

December 2, 2015 by Author

When it comes to workflow solutions, my presentations at Henry Stewart have espoused a decidedly contrarian point of view, based on my experience and a sound business case at Comedy Central.

Our creative review and approval system is built in house using Ruby on Rails, hosted by Amazon Web Services. We chose not to outsource the creativity that is so vital to our process.

Comedy Central’s content marketing arm currently produces 3,000 to 4,000 graphics a month, across all media types. A 30-second spot could easily go through 20 revisions before it’s fit to release. The same holds true for everything else. And there’s a lot of conversation that surrounds this work. We needed a way to manage all this stuff that enhanced and supported our existing team structures and processes.

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Creative Ops: Digital Workspaces Can Get the Last 20%

December 2, 2015 by Author

It’s a big confusing world out there, with solutions offered for every possible workflow challenge. That’s why conferences like Henry Stewart that I recently attended are so important.

Operations professionals go to find answers and to learn from case studies like mine from Comedy Central to see how other enterprises are dealing with workflow issues. (Read my other blog post about how I helped Comedy Central find its Sweet Spot.)

Attendees are trying to understand the problem space, trying to find the right answers, and hoping to meet very smart and dedicated solution providers and vendors.

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