Collaboration at the speed of social

For social transformation company 1000heads, collaborating on the right message—in the right space—is essential to innovation and growth.

team of 3 collaborating in an office and ad campaign with skiers in mountains

By Nick Smith, IT and Digital Operations Director, 1000heads

As a global social transformation company, harnessing the collective power of our creative workforce is essential. The truly great work happens when we’re able to bring together a cognitively diverse, energized team, and empower them to ideate, collaborate and iterate at pace.

We’re tasked with transforming the way brands talk, and how they are talked about. Capitalizing on brief moments in time is essential to our business. Consumers are more switched on and engaged than ever before, so our job is to insert brands into conversations with the right creative and right message, at the right time and in the right spaces.

When I joined 1000heads as IT and Digital Operations Director, I found a diaspora of tools used in different locations around the world to interpret creative briefs. I immediately spotted an opportunity to help us work smarter.

person illustrates on tablet from reference photos

Centralizing innovation in the cloud

The fragmented technology stack the business was operating from added unnecessary complexity and slowed down innovation and creativity. It was the byproduct of growth into regional territories without a cohesive technology strategy—and a big challenge I was tasked with fixing.

The primary objective was to enhance our workflows to accelerate our creative output. With teams in London, New York and elsewhere using different tools and file structures, the biggest problem we had was the footprint of the network, optimized security and managing file versions.

five people working on 1000heads film set

To simplify this ecosystem, we migrated to the cloud with Dropbox. After a comprehensive audit of where our data was stored and the migration process, we were able to eliminate unnecessary tools and subsequent spending from our budget.

We now have a single location for teams to come together and collaborate, regardless of where they are in the world and what device they are working on. And what’s great for me is that we’ve enhanced our security through greater access controls, right down to an individual document level.

With teams working around the world, creating a single location for everything has been transformational.

Enhancing creative workflows

As a business, our clients and the creative we provide them with is a crucial element of our operation. Dropbox enables us to create shared environments where we can all come together, shortening feedback loops and accelerating the production of great creative output.

Shared folders connect our creative teams with our clients. Creative output can be commented upon directly, and feedback is collected on the file. Notifications automatically update teams on changes that need to be made—and it all happens in real time. It means we’re able to accelerate our creative workflows and deliver briefs more quickly to clients as a result.

woman working on a laptop in office and phone scanning a qr code on tshirt

We’ve practically eliminated lengthy email threads, and version control is a thing of the past. Trust between us and our clients has deepened. We can bring our core stakeholders and suppliers together, giving our teams unrivalled capabilities to execute on briefs with complete confidence.

As a business the creative we provide is the most important element of our operation. When we found out we had the capability to create shared environments in Dropbox, we jumped at the opportunity.

Empowering our teams with Dropbox

I never want to clamp down too hard on the tools our teams use; technology is meant to be an enabler rather than a blocker. When we discovered the versatility and integration capabilities of Dropbox, the business could immediately see the value.

Widely adopted right from the start, Dropbox integrates natively with the tools our creative teams use already.

Whether we’re creating a video, a new advert, or media campaign, using Adobe, Final Cut Pro or pretty much anything else, everything happens in Dropbox. There’s no more downloading, converting, saving, and re-uploading files. It all happens in a centralized, secure platform.

It all happens in Dropbox and our teams are empowered to get creative remotely, and bring our clients along for the ride, too!

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