creative-operations
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Rob Gaedtke Learned Every Side of the Table - Then Took the Head Seat
The KPS3 chief came up through design, technology, accounts and strategy. His real operating system is simpler: show people the numbers, trust them with the work, and keep moving.
The Ad Is the Easy Part. The Groundwork Is the Business.
Plus Online Marketing sells the unglamorous machinery behind paid ads - the edits, variants, creator wrangling, uploads and pixel checks that turn a campaign idea into something a platform can actually run.
360 Solutions and the art of getting 4 million files out the door
A movie gets one release date and thousands of chances to miss it. Two former studio insiders built 360 Solutions around the unglamorous work of making global artwork arrive ready.
Friends Everywhere and the art of making one shoot go further
Seven mini-campaigns. Two shoot days. Friends Everywhere’s Levi’s work reveals an agency built around a practical question: how much can a good idea do before you need another one?
The Ad Was Approved. Then 160 Files Needed Fixing.
The Resize Guys works in the gap between a good idea and an ad that can actually run. Its business is making the last mile of a campaign less eventful.
Ziflow takes on ‘just one more round’
One customer cut average proofing rounds from three or four to 1.6. Ziflow’s business is built around a familiar creative headache: getting everyone to agree that the work is finished.
Pencil Wants the Whole Marketing Brief
The AI ad generator has grown into a full marketing workbench. Its best trick is not making one more image - it is keeping the brief, brand rules, edits, approvals and performance data in the same room.
From Climbing Copywriter to AI-Era Operator: Jen Rapp Keeps Creative Close to the Business
She learned brand storytelling at Patagonia, performance discipline at DoorDash and public-company theater at Klaviyo. Now Superside's Chief Customer Officer is trying to make creative work faster without sanding away the human judgment that makes it worth seeing.
The $825 Million Business Hiding Behind the Fonts on Your Screen
Monotype sells beautiful letters. The more interesting product is control: one place for global brands to find, license, ship and police the type that holds their identity together.
Superside Fired the Marketplace and Built a $16,000-a-Month Creative Department
The first version did everything from PowerPoints to measuring roofs on Google Maps. Then weak retention forced a sharper bet: design only, subscriptions only, and a global team built for enterprise creative overflow.
Eliza Chiang Is Making Proof of Humanity Feel Human
The operator behind playful World campaigns has built a career around a stubborn idea: complicated systems become useful only when real people can feel what they mean.
Sehan Sanjula Turned the Overnight Shift Into a Design Company
Zyner began with two laptops, months without a client and midnight calls from Colombo. Sehan Sanjula’s real product was not another design package - it was a way to make creative work arrive without the chase.
Ravid Razak Turned a GoPro Editing Problem Into a Global Video Company
A post-trip editing headache gave Ravid Razak the idea for DreamItReel. More than a decade later, he is still applying a consultant's eye to the unruly business of making video at scale.
MediaValet Built a Business Around the File Nobody Can Find
A photography company choked on 20 terabytes of its own work. The fix became a cloud-software business - and a useful playbook for any team whose content library has turned into a junk drawer.
Workfront, Wrike or Smartsheet? Follow the Work
The best project platform is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one shaped like the work your team already does - Adobe-centered creative production, adaptable cross-functional workflows, or spreadsheet-native portfolio control.
The Agency That Moves Into the Machine Room
Aquent Studios does not merely deliver the campaign. It builds the team, workflow and technical plumbing that help an enterprise keep delivering after the first brief is finished.
Drew Carroll
Drew Carroll is a Georgia-based Fractional CMO and creative director who helps founders, leaders, and teams turn fuzzy brand ideas into clear marketing systems and growth-driving content. He has led marketing and creative for the leadership community Catalyst for six-plus years and serves as creative director for Student Led Worship and First City Church, with campaign work spanning Barna, Orange, Convoy of Hope, and Erwin McManus.
Air
Air is a New York-based creative operations platform - a system of record purpose-built for creative work. It helps marketing and creative teams collect, organize, search, review, approve, and share visual content, layering AI-powered tagging, conversational search, and creative intelligence on top of traditional digital asset management. Founded in 2017 by Shane Hegde and Tyler Strand, Air serves tens of thousands of creatives across thousands of businesses and has raised more than $70M in venture funding.