Jesse Krinsky: Welcome to Creative Ops Compass, the podcast for in-house creative leaders who want to run tighter operations, improve stakeholder relationships, and position their teams as genuine strategic partners. I'm Jesse Krinsky, a Creative Operations consultant and the founder of Infocus Consulting.
Meredith Bailey: The final sign off that a stakeholder gives is truly uniquely human because, you know, if you're the steward of your brand, you need to ensure that whatever you put out into market aligned with that and is directionally correct.
Jesse Krinsky: Today I'm talking with Meredith Bailey. She's the founder and CEO of StreamWork, which is a proofing and approval platform built for creative and marketing teams. She launched StreamWork because everywhere she worked, she saw that the review and approval process was broken, and it was eating into time that should have gone to the actual creative work. AI keeps getting better at producing content. Volume is up, speed is up, and for some leaders, that raises questions about what a creative team actually contributes beyond execution. Meredith and I talked about Why the answer to that question isn't as complicated as it might seem. We also discussed why a human-centered approval process matters more than ever, and how being one of the first industries disrupted by AI gave creatives a first mover advantage. I recently led a webinar with StreamWork on making the business case for creative tools. Meredith references that in the conversation, so I wanted to give you that context up front. Thanks so much for joining me today. I I wanted to have you on the podcast because we've talked a number of times and in one conversation you you pointed out that creative teams were among the first industries that were really ⁓ genuinely disrupted by AI. And and the benefit of that is that a lot of them are ahead of other industries in kind of figuring out how how to respond. Obviously AI moves very, very quickly. So as the CEO of Streamwork, you you you work directly with a lot of in house creative teams every day. So you really have a front row seat, I I think, to how that disruption is is playing out. So why don't to get your perspectives on this?
Meredith Bailey: Well, first off, thank you for having me, Jesse. Really excited to be here and thrilled to be chatting about creative and AI. It's it's definitely top of mind at the moment. ⁓ top of mind for our industry, top of mind for us at StreamWork. It's a major theme. AI really is a it's a big opportunity, right? You could take any perspective on it, right? You could see it as a negative thing or a positive thing. ⁓ I choose to look at it as a positive thing because I think that what it really does is it unlocks the ability for teams to up level. what they're doing. And you know, just when we talk about creative in general, it's a novel idea. It's thinking outside the box. It's something that doesn't already exist. So when we're talking about teams and and their jobs and how, you know, the creative sector is is evolving and changing with AI, the f the real I think, opportunity here is that creatives can really step into that role where they have the time to think and the time to come up with great novel ideas and creative. And And AI can help eliminate all the process work that they today are spending so much of their time doing. Teams might be spending their time on on tons of versioning or status updates or spending tons of time in meetings. They can eliminate a lot of that with AI so that they can go back to really what the purpose of their job was, which is to create great creative. So I think it's a big opportunity.
Jesse Krinsky: I agree with all that, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate here a little bit about what creative is supposed to be is true, but it's also a bit of an ideal from the inside of creative, right? Because stakeholders who are not necessarily creative aren't always looking for what something that is new or novel. They're often looking for something that they can understand, wrap their heads around, which is something that they've already seen, right? I want something that looks like this, that feels like this. This worked last time, give me something like that. For non-creatives, especially stakeholders and company leadership, it seems so obvious to them that AI makes sense, that AI should be used more for creative design, because you can see what what already has worked, what is proven to work, as opposed to what will possibly work from the creative team's perspective. So with that in mind, how do you think? Creative teams should counter that mindset.
Meredith Bailey: So that's a great question. I think you're right that a lot of stakeholders they know what they know, right? They and what they're comfortable with. And they are the stewards of the brand, right? And as is the creative team. They're trying to protect the brand, protect the brand reputation, make sure that it's positioned correctly and appears correctly in in in market. That is a lot of a lot of the role. And so I think if we even take AI out of this and we just look at, you know. creative development in general, that that is always a factor that a stakeholder is trying to be the be the steward of the brand, right? And the creative team is helping to do that with them. ⁓ So AI doesn't necessarily at its core change that that conversation. But I think the big thing to to consider with AI is that it's like it's the speed and volume of creative that can be developed and If you have a really strong prompt, a very solid, clear idea, you could develop a concept extremely quickly that is aligned with the brand guidelines that you might already have uploaded to Cloud, et cetera, and put it in front of that stakeholder and get their feedback on it quickly in a way that you may not have been able to do previously. And that's one of the really awesome things about AI is that you can develop quicker and you can experiment quicker. And so if you have stakeholders who are pushing back on ⁓ new ideas, you could you could take an hour, take your idea, drop it into cloud, ⁓ your organization's cloud. I'm gonna mention I'm gonna specify that because you want to make sure that it has like the brand style guide. ⁓ but you could spin up something that shows your idea in a remarkable way and put it in front of a stakeholder quickly, get their fast feedback, and you might be able to change their mind. And that's something that previously was not really an option. If you had a great creative idea, it might get killed at the creative brief stage because it took so long to execute it and to show it to the stakeholder. And now you have the ability to actually take that, put it in front of the stakeholder and get their quick feedback on it. And if it works, you now move it into the to the arena of, okay, let's go take this and let's create a lot of volume around it and then let's go review, approve it, and get it to market.
Jesse Krinsky: I've heard you said before that that stakeholder approvals are also a a uniquely human thing. Why is that uniquely human? And what does that say about where human judgment still matters most?
Meredith Bailey: When it comes to developing creative, we've talked a little bit about how AI has changed the creative landscape in terms of lowering the barrier to to develop creative. Now creative teams can can develop creative, as well as other teams across organizations can quickly spin up develop creative. ⁓ when you lower the barrier like that of developing creative, the review and approval cycle only becomes more and more important. Because now we're talking about a lot of different types of creative being developed, potentially across, you know, teams that don't specialize in it. And we are also talking about just the sheer volume and increase in amount of creative. That's where review and approval again just becomes more and more important. Because at the end of the day, you do, regardless of anything that you're creating for your organization, you can automate most. Of the review approval process. And that's what we're focused on. That's what we spend our entire day thinking about how we can help teams do that. But the the final sign-off that a stakeholder gives is truly uniquely human because you know, if you're the steward of your brand, you need to ensure that whatever you you put out into market is aligned with that and ⁓ and is directionally correct. And AI can tell you a little bit of that. It can help you check off boxes, like, you know, does this align with the brand guidelines as an example? However, the there's the nuance within it and and just that institutional knowledge of what's going to resonate with the customer or not, what's going to land correctly or create, you know, a total PR nightmare. Like stakeholders know that. And so that's why they need to continue to have that final sign off on Creative.
Jesse Krinsky: I've made the case many times that creatives who just take a brief and execute it no matter how closely they execute it to what was requested, no matter how beautiful and impressive that creative is, they're effectively not much more valuable than an AI tool, right? Because what AI is great at doing is giving you what you have asked for, which is not necessarily what you need, by the way, but what you asked for. But creatives who who are able to push back, who can make connections across the organization and and can think more strategically, that is irreplaceable. How how have you seen that dynamic playing out ⁓ with the teams that you that you work with?
Meredith Bailey: Yeah, so it's interesting when we're talking about creative being developed today with AI. It's almost like the new creative brief is the power of the prompt, right? If you have extremely powerful prompt, you're gonna have a stronger creative brief and you're gonna have a stronger output. Anyone can go in and and drop in a a couple questions as a prompt and create a brief. And that is something that is becoming commoditized, right? But the difference is It's the next step up. It's this strategic brief, right? It's the strategy behind that. It's it's coming up with prompts that push the boundaries, that are compelling, that align with a very, again, like sort of clear idea that you're trying to develop. And if you get those prompts right, you're all of a sudden creating something much more strategic that that can be used. And so that's just my thought generally on creative briefs and prompts. And I think that the best creatives out there, they're gonna have these I they're gonna have prompts that you and I can't even imagine what they're what they're coming up with. And that AI is going to just 10X their abilities. I don't see AI as something in that can be just take over creative industry in isolation and just run with it. You need the people to really again guide where it's going and ⁓ Creatives are at the helm of that. It's just a really cool time for creatives. Like it can seem scary, right? All the different tools and everything that are available out there to create content so quickly. ⁓ there's also this change in perception where stakeholders might think that, ⁓ if if it's easy to create content, then they're assigning less value to it or that type of thing. But it's a creative team's job, it's all of our jobs to show that no, that's not actually the case. ⁓ it's extremely difficult to create actually. high value creative that works in service of of what you're trying to accomplish. And AI is is one of those things that can be a tool to really enable that versus, you know, detract from that.
Jesse Krinsky: So earlier on you had said that the creative industry was w was one of the first to be truly disrupted by AI. And because of that, creatives have something of a a leg up on some of their industries because they've been over the past few years have been working to try to figure out how to clarify what their value is, how to respond to to it, how to make use of it, but also how to explain to stakeholders, clients, and leadership what the limits of it are. Right.
Meredith Bailey: Yeah.
Jesse Krinsky: How have you seen how creatives are ahead of the game ⁓ in terms of responding to and utilizing AI?
Meredith Bailey: Yeah. I mean it's it's been in pretty incredible. What we've seen ⁓ at StreamWork is the volume of content has certainly increased because teams are able to leverage AI tools to create just more content. To give you an example, they might have, let's say, an an image that they've created and they need to cut it into different ⁓ sizes very quickly or ⁓ create different templates of that, upload it to Streamwork and then run it through reviews and approvals. So what we're seeing in our at least across ⁓ our our customers is just a massive increase in in amount of content. We're also seeing more cycles of reviews happening because that content needs to be reviewed, approved before it's it's pushed, you know, out the door. And so we're seeing an increase in versioning, we're seeing an increase in review cycles. And then everything needs that final stamp of approval by a human before it's before again it's deployed. And so one of the biggest differences is just sheer volume of of work created. ⁓ but when you have more content that's being creative, it's it you also need to continue to be really thoughtful about what is being created, right? You don't want it to to go off the guardrails in a way. Like you want to make sure, especially if you're creating it for for your brand, it needs to ⁓ be on brand and and so that's also an area where review and approval is becoming more and more important because you know especially if other teams within organizations beyond the creative or marketing teams are creating content only additional reasons that you need more review and approval in in that process. And so our goal is to reduce the process, take the admin out of creatives' lives so that they can focus on creating great creative versus focusing on the process. And what we're constantly thinking about is how can we make that process even easier, even more streamlined for teams so that they don't need to worry about that. It's all taken care of for them.
Jesse Krinsky: Basically, it sounds like you're saying that the review and approval process is because it's it's the the final step in creative production, it's essential because it's the last chance that creatives and their stakeholders have to make sure that what they're going to deliver is what is actually intended and what what is needed. Because during any sort of creative process, there are a million distractions. There's a million things that c can pull you in different directions. And it's so important. Have that last step to check to say, is this what we needed? Is this what we were expecting? Is this on brand? Of course. And I I I think you're right that to offload that to AI, for instance, would be so myopic, wrongheaded, detrimental. So I I can see how that is a part of the creative process where the human element and human judgment is essential. Yes.
Meredith Bailey: It's so important. I mean, we we are all familiar with brand faux pas, right? Like with like, you know, the Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner for a couple of a couple of years ago, or there's all sorts of campaigns that have that have gone live where there's been either a mistake in the campaign or maybe like maybe there just wasn't the proper approval process in place before it went live, and you know, all the considerations weren't there before it went live. And so that final approval. is so important. AI can help with elements of it, but when it comes down to what are we actually putting out in market in front of our customer and how will it be perceived? And will it help us reach our intended goal or KPI? That is something that you have to know the strategy of your organization. You need to have that that knowledge ⁓ and strategy in in order to make that final decision. And so Yes, I I really believe it's a uniquely human thing. And I don't think that's something that companies are going to willingly hand off to AI anytime soon.
Jesse Krinsky: I think if they did, I think plenty might consider it, but those are also the kind of companies that think in terms of AI first, right? There's a a lot of teams where they're under pressure to to allocate budget towards AI tools, which I think is wrong headed because it is putting the cart before the horse, right? Very often it's the idea of of this bright, shiny object, this this exciting, sexy thing is going to help us. Everyone's you talk about AI. Go find a way how can we use this? How can we use AI to do to do what whatever we need to do? I've heard from a number of companies where they have made very quick myopic decisions based on the perceived need to adopt AI tools without fully carefully thinking through the why, the how, and also how the work that comes out of that will be perceived by end users. Yep. And also when I call it myopic, I mean because it's focused on the the immediacy of the outputs, but not enough focus on what outcomes are associated with the outputs of of AI. What are your thoughts on that?
Meredith Bailey: So we're increasingly hearing from from teams and we're seeing it in just across software in general, there is a growing trend that a portion of the budget is going toward AI enabled tools or AI tools. That's something that in general, ⁓ as an industry we're seeing more and more of. I don't know if I agree that I I think it's a a bad idea for creatives. I think that there's a number of tools that can certainly help creative teams produce more faster and on brand. However, I think your point about the why is the really important piece here. So nothing should be done without asking why. To adopt a tool just for the sake of adopting it, it is not a a good strategic decision. There's so many other elements that go into adopting a tool for your organization. And it's really thinking through how is it going to benefit your org and what are what is the value that you can gain from it. And regardless of the tool, whether it has AI or not, that those considerations should be taken into account. When it comes to developing creative, creative will always be constrained by time and money, the development of creative. And so it's really thinking through tools that are going to help you alleviate that, help you save time, save money, and also reduce headache is a big part of it too. If you are adopting a tool, You should be thinking through, okay, how does this save our organization time? How does it save how can it save us money? And how can it reduce headache or improve morale across the creative team? And I think thinking about it in that way helps you get to the why. Part of this conversation, as I'm talking through this, it's making me think of the webinar that we just did with you, Jesse, where it's, you know, really proving out the value of of that investment. And so I loved in that webinar how you talked about That ⁓ if you're adopting a tool, if you go to your CFO and say, We need to spend fifty thousand dollars to purchase this tool, they they see it as a a a budget ask and it's and it's framed as a negative, right, in their mind. ⁓ yeah. Yeah, and it's a no. Whereas you were recommending, and I think it was so smart, that you you just need to reframe the conversation about the value that the tool brings to the organization. And so it's really thinking about.
Jesse Krinsky: The default is gonna be no
Meredith Bailey: You know, if we were to invest in XYZ tool, it would help us ⁓ reduce X amount of time spent on creative projects and help us save this cost. And so the tool might cost fifty grand, but we're actually going to save a million dollars over the course of a year as an example.
Jesse Krinsky: Meredith, it's been great talking to you about this. It's not something that I talk about very much, frankly. ⁓ it's not because I'm ⁓ bearish on it and I'm not a Luddite at all. I use it all the time. When it comes to creative production and strategy, the human element, I think, is not only is it not currently genuinely threatened by AI, not when you want to do it well, but I don't see that happening anytime in the near future. So it's great to hear your perspective on that and also to see how that plays into. approvals and reviews and to make that connection here. So it's great to hear your perspectives on that. Thanks so much.
Meredith Bailey: Yeah, thank you, Jesse. Thank you for having me.
Jesse Krinsky: Let's recap the key insights from today's conversation. First, as AI helps generate more content faster, the final approval matters more than ever. When the barrier to produce creative goes down, volume goes up, which means more assets in the pipeline and more chances for something to go wrong. The final human sign-off requires something that AI just can't replicate yet. Institutional knowledge of what'll land with your audience, what'll protect your brand, and what might become a crisis if it ships. Yeah, AI can check whether an asset is on brand. But I can't tell you whether your campaign is going to embarrass the company. That judgment still belongs to your team. Second, Creative was one of the first industries really disrupted by AI, and that's an advantage. It's forced creative leaders to clarify what they actually contribute, to make the case for their value, and to figure out how to work alongside AI or be eliminated by short-sighted leaders. The teams that started earlier are further along than they might realize. And third, creatives who just execute the brief are competing on AI's terms. The value that's hard to replace belongs to the creatives who push back on the brief, who ask the questions that weren't in it, and who make connections across the organization that nobody else is making. That's what makes a creative team irreplaceable. If you're wondering if your team is irreplaceable in the age of AI, you can find out with my free Creative Ops assessment. It takes three minutes and it'll show you exactly where you're reactive and where you're already operating strategically. You can find it at Infocusconsulting.net slash assessment. The link is also in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
Meredith Bailey: The final sign off that a stakeholder gives is truly uniquely human because, you know, if you're the steward of your brand, you need to ensure that whatever you put out into market aligned with that and is directionally correct.
Jesse Krinsky: Today I'm talking with Meredith Bailey. She's the founder and CEO of StreamWork, which is a proofing and approval platform built for creative and marketing teams. She launched StreamWork because everywhere she worked, she saw that the review and approval process was broken, and it was eating into time that should have gone to the actual creative work. AI keeps getting better at producing content. Volume is up, speed is up, and for some leaders, that raises questions about what a creative team actually contributes beyond execution. Meredith and I talked about Why the answer to that question isn't as complicated as it might seem. We also discussed why a human-centered approval process matters more than ever, and how being one of the first industries disrupted by AI gave creatives a first mover advantage. I recently led a webinar with StreamWork on making the business case for creative tools. Meredith references that in the conversation, so I wanted to give you that context up front. Thanks so much for joining me today. I I wanted to have you on the podcast because we've talked a number of times and in one conversation you you pointed out that creative teams were among the first industries that were really ⁓ genuinely disrupted by AI. And and the benefit of that is that a lot of them are ahead of other industries in kind of figuring out how how to respond. Obviously AI moves very, very quickly. So as the CEO of Streamwork, you you you work directly with a lot of in house creative teams every day. So you really have a front row seat, I I think, to how that disruption is is playing out. So why don't to get your perspectives on this?
Meredith Bailey: Well, first off, thank you for having me, Jesse. Really excited to be here and thrilled to be chatting about creative and AI. It's it's definitely top of mind at the moment. ⁓ top of mind for our industry, top of mind for us at StreamWork. It's a major theme. AI really is a it's a big opportunity, right? You could take any perspective on it, right? You could see it as a negative thing or a positive thing. ⁓ I choose to look at it as a positive thing because I think that what it really does is it unlocks the ability for teams to up level. what they're doing. And you know, just when we talk about creative in general, it's a novel idea. It's thinking outside the box. It's something that doesn't already exist. So when we're talking about teams and and their jobs and how, you know, the creative sector is is evolving and changing with AI, the f the real I think, opportunity here is that creatives can really step into that role where they have the time to think and the time to come up with great novel ideas and creative. And And AI can help eliminate all the process work that they today are spending so much of their time doing. Teams might be spending their time on on tons of versioning or status updates or spending tons of time in meetings. They can eliminate a lot of that with AI so that they can go back to really what the purpose of their job was, which is to create great creative. So I think it's a big opportunity.
Jesse Krinsky: I agree with all that, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate here a little bit about what creative is supposed to be is true, but it's also a bit of an ideal from the inside of creative, right? Because stakeholders who are not necessarily creative aren't always looking for what something that is new or novel. They're often looking for something that they can understand, wrap their heads around, which is something that they've already seen, right? I want something that looks like this, that feels like this. This worked last time, give me something like that. For non-creatives, especially stakeholders and company leadership, it seems so obvious to them that AI makes sense, that AI should be used more for creative design, because you can see what what already has worked, what is proven to work, as opposed to what will possibly work from the creative team's perspective. So with that in mind, how do you think? Creative teams should counter that mindset.
Meredith Bailey: So that's a great question. I think you're right that a lot of stakeholders they know what they know, right? They and what they're comfortable with. And they are the stewards of the brand, right? And as is the creative team. They're trying to protect the brand, protect the brand reputation, make sure that it's positioned correctly and appears correctly in in in market. That is a lot of a lot of the role. And so I think if we even take AI out of this and we just look at, you know. creative development in general, that that is always a factor that a stakeholder is trying to be the be the steward of the brand, right? And the creative team is helping to do that with them. ⁓ So AI doesn't necessarily at its core change that that conversation. But I think the big thing to to consider with AI is that it's like it's the speed and volume of creative that can be developed and If you have a really strong prompt, a very solid, clear idea, you could develop a concept extremely quickly that is aligned with the brand guidelines that you might already have uploaded to Cloud, et cetera, and put it in front of that stakeholder and get their feedback on it quickly in a way that you may not have been able to do previously. And that's one of the really awesome things about AI is that you can develop quicker and you can experiment quicker. And so if you have stakeholders who are pushing back on ⁓ new ideas, you could you could take an hour, take your idea, drop it into cloud, ⁓ your organization's cloud. I'm gonna mention I'm gonna specify that because you want to make sure that it has like the brand style guide. ⁓ but you could spin up something that shows your idea in a remarkable way and put it in front of a stakeholder quickly, get their fast feedback, and you might be able to change their mind. And that's something that previously was not really an option. If you had a great creative idea, it might get killed at the creative brief stage because it took so long to execute it and to show it to the stakeholder. And now you have the ability to actually take that, put it in front of the stakeholder and get their quick feedback on it. And if it works, you now move it into the to the arena of, okay, let's go take this and let's create a lot of volume around it and then let's go review, approve it, and get it to market.
Jesse Krinsky: I've heard you said before that that stakeholder approvals are also a a uniquely human thing. Why is that uniquely human? And what does that say about where human judgment still matters most?
Meredith Bailey: When it comes to developing creative, we've talked a little bit about how AI has changed the creative landscape in terms of lowering the barrier to to develop creative. Now creative teams can can develop creative, as well as other teams across organizations can quickly spin up develop creative. ⁓ when you lower the barrier like that of developing creative, the review and approval cycle only becomes more and more important. Because now we're talking about a lot of different types of creative being developed, potentially across, you know, teams that don't specialize in it. And we are also talking about just the sheer volume and increase in amount of creative. That's where review and approval again just becomes more and more important. Because at the end of the day, you do, regardless of anything that you're creating for your organization, you can automate most. Of the review approval process. And that's what we're focused on. That's what we spend our entire day thinking about how we can help teams do that. But the the final sign-off that a stakeholder gives is truly uniquely human because you know, if you're the steward of your brand, you need to ensure that whatever you you put out into market is aligned with that and ⁓ and is directionally correct. And AI can tell you a little bit of that. It can help you check off boxes, like, you know, does this align with the brand guidelines as an example? However, the there's the nuance within it and and just that institutional knowledge of what's going to resonate with the customer or not, what's going to land correctly or create, you know, a total PR nightmare. Like stakeholders know that. And so that's why they need to continue to have that final sign off on Creative.
Jesse Krinsky: I've made the case many times that creatives who just take a brief and execute it no matter how closely they execute it to what was requested, no matter how beautiful and impressive that creative is, they're effectively not much more valuable than an AI tool, right? Because what AI is great at doing is giving you what you have asked for, which is not necessarily what you need, by the way, but what you asked for. But creatives who who are able to push back, who can make connections across the organization and and can think more strategically, that is irreplaceable. How how have you seen that dynamic playing out ⁓ with the teams that you that you work with?
Meredith Bailey: Yeah, so it's interesting when we're talking about creative being developed today with AI. It's almost like the new creative brief is the power of the prompt, right? If you have extremely powerful prompt, you're gonna have a stronger creative brief and you're gonna have a stronger output. Anyone can go in and and drop in a a couple questions as a prompt and create a brief. And that is something that is becoming commoditized, right? But the difference is It's the next step up. It's this strategic brief, right? It's the strategy behind that. It's it's coming up with prompts that push the boundaries, that are compelling, that align with a very, again, like sort of clear idea that you're trying to develop. And if you get those prompts right, you're all of a sudden creating something much more strategic that that can be used. And so that's just my thought generally on creative briefs and prompts. And I think that the best creatives out there, they're gonna have these I they're gonna have prompts that you and I can't even imagine what they're what they're coming up with. And that AI is going to just 10X their abilities. I don't see AI as something in that can be just take over creative industry in isolation and just run with it. You need the people to really again guide where it's going and ⁓ Creatives are at the helm of that. It's just a really cool time for creatives. Like it can seem scary, right? All the different tools and everything that are available out there to create content so quickly. ⁓ there's also this change in perception where stakeholders might think that, ⁓ if if it's easy to create content, then they're assigning less value to it or that type of thing. But it's a creative team's job, it's all of our jobs to show that no, that's not actually the case. ⁓ it's extremely difficult to create actually. high value creative that works in service of of what you're trying to accomplish. And AI is is one of those things that can be a tool to really enable that versus, you know, detract from that.
Jesse Krinsky: So earlier on you had said that the creative industry was w was one of the first to be truly disrupted by AI. And because of that, creatives have something of a a leg up on some of their industries because they've been over the past few years have been working to try to figure out how to clarify what their value is, how to respond to to it, how to make use of it, but also how to explain to stakeholders, clients, and leadership what the limits of it are. Right.
Meredith Bailey: Yeah.
Jesse Krinsky: How have you seen how creatives are ahead of the game ⁓ in terms of responding to and utilizing AI?
Meredith Bailey: Yeah. I mean it's it's been in pretty incredible. What we've seen ⁓ at StreamWork is the volume of content has certainly increased because teams are able to leverage AI tools to create just more content. To give you an example, they might have, let's say, an an image that they've created and they need to cut it into different ⁓ sizes very quickly or ⁓ create different templates of that, upload it to Streamwork and then run it through reviews and approvals. So what we're seeing in our at least across ⁓ our our customers is just a massive increase in in amount of content. We're also seeing more cycles of reviews happening because that content needs to be reviewed, approved before it's it's pushed, you know, out the door. And so we're seeing an increase in versioning, we're seeing an increase in review cycles. And then everything needs that final stamp of approval by a human before it's before again it's deployed. And so one of the biggest differences is just sheer volume of of work created. ⁓ but when you have more content that's being creative, it's it you also need to continue to be really thoughtful about what is being created, right? You don't want it to to go off the guardrails in a way. Like you want to make sure, especially if you're creating it for for your brand, it needs to ⁓ be on brand and and so that's also an area where review and approval is becoming more and more important because you know especially if other teams within organizations beyond the creative or marketing teams are creating content only additional reasons that you need more review and approval in in that process. And so our goal is to reduce the process, take the admin out of creatives' lives so that they can focus on creating great creative versus focusing on the process. And what we're constantly thinking about is how can we make that process even easier, even more streamlined for teams so that they don't need to worry about that. It's all taken care of for them.
Jesse Krinsky: Basically, it sounds like you're saying that the review and approval process is because it's it's the the final step in creative production, it's essential because it's the last chance that creatives and their stakeholders have to make sure that what they're going to deliver is what is actually intended and what what is needed. Because during any sort of creative process, there are a million distractions. There's a million things that c can pull you in different directions. And it's so important. Have that last step to check to say, is this what we needed? Is this what we were expecting? Is this on brand? Of course. And I I I think you're right that to offload that to AI, for instance, would be so myopic, wrongheaded, detrimental. So I I can see how that is a part of the creative process where the human element and human judgment is essential. Yes.
Meredith Bailey: It's so important. I mean, we we are all familiar with brand faux pas, right? Like with like, you know, the Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner for a couple of a couple of years ago, or there's all sorts of campaigns that have that have gone live where there's been either a mistake in the campaign or maybe like maybe there just wasn't the proper approval process in place before it went live, and you know, all the considerations weren't there before it went live. And so that final approval. is so important. AI can help with elements of it, but when it comes down to what are we actually putting out in market in front of our customer and how will it be perceived? And will it help us reach our intended goal or KPI? That is something that you have to know the strategy of your organization. You need to have that that knowledge ⁓ and strategy in in order to make that final decision. And so Yes, I I really believe it's a uniquely human thing. And I don't think that's something that companies are going to willingly hand off to AI anytime soon.
Jesse Krinsky: I think if they did, I think plenty might consider it, but those are also the kind of companies that think in terms of AI first, right? There's a a lot of teams where they're under pressure to to allocate budget towards AI tools, which I think is wrong headed because it is putting the cart before the horse, right? Very often it's the idea of of this bright, shiny object, this this exciting, sexy thing is going to help us. Everyone's you talk about AI. Go find a way how can we use this? How can we use AI to do to do what whatever we need to do? I've heard from a number of companies where they have made very quick myopic decisions based on the perceived need to adopt AI tools without fully carefully thinking through the why, the how, and also how the work that comes out of that will be perceived by end users. Yep. And also when I call it myopic, I mean because it's focused on the the immediacy of the outputs, but not enough focus on what outcomes are associated with the outputs of of AI. What are your thoughts on that?
Meredith Bailey: So we're increasingly hearing from from teams and we're seeing it in just across software in general, there is a growing trend that a portion of the budget is going toward AI enabled tools or AI tools. That's something that in general, ⁓ as an industry we're seeing more and more of. I don't know if I agree that I I think it's a a bad idea for creatives. I think that there's a number of tools that can certainly help creative teams produce more faster and on brand. However, I think your point about the why is the really important piece here. So nothing should be done without asking why. To adopt a tool just for the sake of adopting it, it is not a a good strategic decision. There's so many other elements that go into adopting a tool for your organization. And it's really thinking through how is it going to benefit your org and what are what is the value that you can gain from it. And regardless of the tool, whether it has AI or not, that those considerations should be taken into account. When it comes to developing creative, creative will always be constrained by time and money, the development of creative. And so it's really thinking through tools that are going to help you alleviate that, help you save time, save money, and also reduce headache is a big part of it too. If you are adopting a tool, You should be thinking through, okay, how does this save our organization time? How does it save how can it save us money? And how can it reduce headache or improve morale across the creative team? And I think thinking about it in that way helps you get to the why. Part of this conversation, as I'm talking through this, it's making me think of the webinar that we just did with you, Jesse, where it's, you know, really proving out the value of of that investment. And so I loved in that webinar how you talked about That ⁓ if you're adopting a tool, if you go to your CFO and say, We need to spend fifty thousand dollars to purchase this tool, they they see it as a a a budget ask and it's and it's framed as a negative, right, in their mind. ⁓ yeah. Yeah, and it's a no. Whereas you were recommending, and I think it was so smart, that you you just need to reframe the conversation about the value that the tool brings to the organization. And so it's really thinking about.
Jesse Krinsky: The default is gonna be no
Meredith Bailey: You know, if we were to invest in XYZ tool, it would help us ⁓ reduce X amount of time spent on creative projects and help us save this cost. And so the tool might cost fifty grand, but we're actually going to save a million dollars over the course of a year as an example.
Jesse Krinsky: Meredith, it's been great talking to you about this. It's not something that I talk about very much, frankly. ⁓ it's not because I'm ⁓ bearish on it and I'm not a Luddite at all. I use it all the time. When it comes to creative production and strategy, the human element, I think, is not only is it not currently genuinely threatened by AI, not when you want to do it well, but I don't see that happening anytime in the near future. So it's great to hear your perspective on that and also to see how that plays into. approvals and reviews and to make that connection here. So it's great to hear your perspectives on that. Thanks so much.
Meredith Bailey: Yeah, thank you, Jesse. Thank you for having me.
Jesse Krinsky: Let's recap the key insights from today's conversation. First, as AI helps generate more content faster, the final approval matters more than ever. When the barrier to produce creative goes down, volume goes up, which means more assets in the pipeline and more chances for something to go wrong. The final human sign-off requires something that AI just can't replicate yet. Institutional knowledge of what'll land with your audience, what'll protect your brand, and what might become a crisis if it ships. Yeah, AI can check whether an asset is on brand. But I can't tell you whether your campaign is going to embarrass the company. That judgment still belongs to your team. Second, Creative was one of the first industries really disrupted by AI, and that's an advantage. It's forced creative leaders to clarify what they actually contribute, to make the case for their value, and to figure out how to work alongside AI or be eliminated by short-sighted leaders. The teams that started earlier are further along than they might realize. And third, creatives who just execute the brief are competing on AI's terms. The value that's hard to replace belongs to the creatives who push back on the brief, who ask the questions that weren't in it, and who make connections across the organization that nobody else is making. That's what makes a creative team irreplaceable. If you're wondering if your team is irreplaceable in the age of AI, you can find out with my free Creative Ops assessment. It takes three minutes and it'll show you exactly where you're reactive and where you're already operating strategically. You can find it at Infocusconsulting.net slash assessment. The link is also in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
