It’s a fact: as the demand for compelling, stand-out content accelerates, creatives and marketers are working together more now than they ever have before. With 600 creatives and marketers in the U.S. and found that the vast majority of them have good or excellent relationships with each other—but they still need more alignment on their actual work. Marketers report being far more focused on data than creatives. Marketers are also going outside of their creative departments to get creative assets.
It’s interesting if you consider how the relationship between creatives and marketers has evolved. Their departments always needed to collaborate, but the pace used to be different. Remember static, paper brochures with a long shelf life? Fast forward, and we all find ourselves pushing the boundaries to create a constant stream of new, personalized digital experiences for customers—which means our content changes all the time, and it has to be designed for multiple channels and audiences.
This explosion of design and content production work within global brands and agencies was apparent in our survey: Nearly two-thirds of creatives in our survey say they create more content now than they did five years ago.
The result? Marketing and design have become two peas in the same fast-moving pod – and they are scaling their design and content needs along multiple vectors. Nineteen percent of global brands are building out more in-house creative agencies and 47 percent are hiring more creatives in house. At the same time, brands are also still outsourcing, with more than half of marketers (51 percent) going outside the creative department for their content needs.