An AI Rescue: Busting Creative Director Bottlenecks and Boosting Efficiency
A marketing agency approached us with a common problem: the Creative Director was overwhelmed with reviewing, guiding, and approving each asset delivered by the creative team. This bottleneck led to project delays, rushed work, and burnout. Our team developed a GPT-based AI assistant to help designers in their process, streamline the creative workflow, and reduce the workload on the Creative Director.
The Challenge
The Creative Director's responsibilities included reviewing, guiding, and approving all assets delivered by the creative team, which consisted mainly of less experienced designers. This required a significant amount of time and feedback per piece, causing project delays, rushed work, burnout of the Creative Director, and dissatisfaction within the design team.
THE SOLUTION
Our team took a two-pronged approach to address the challenge. First, we dissected the creative process, examining every idea expansion and contraction inflection point. Simultaneously, we mapped out every human interaction required to deliver a piece. By overlaying these two maps, we gained a comprehensive understanding of the design system.
Using an LLM, we broke down the Creative Director's role into smaller tasks and steps. We validated these findings and overlaid them on the previous two maps, identifying which tasks required human intervention and which could be AI-assisted.
We identified three main functions where an AI assistant would be valuable:
1. Concept Co-Creation: The AI assistant helps designers generate more concepts during the expansive part of concept ideation. In the contraction phase, the assistant compares designer-selected concepts to the brief for alignment.
2. Design Review: The AI assistant tests designs for audience fit, providing critique based on established design principles, adherence to the concept and brief, and aesthetic input to increase desirability.
3. Final Review: Designers upload a final presentation-ready PPT/PDF, and the AI assistant analyzes it for design justification and persuasion.
The RESULTS
By implementing the AI assistant, the Creative Director could focus on more targeted work, guiding designers towards better ideas and more successful persuasion. The AI assistant saved the Creative Director an average of 60% of their time, allowing them to concentrate on more effective campaigns and design management responsibilities.
Lessons Learned:
- AI can effectively streamline the creative process and alleviate bottlenecks caused by overburdened Creative Directors.
- Identifying tasks that can be AI-assisted versus those that require human intervention is crucial for successful implementation.
- AI assistance can lead to more focused work, better ideas, and more effective campaigns.