• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, October 20, 2022

About three-quarters of in-house creative and brand teams have restructured in the last 12 months or are currently being restructured, according to a new report from creative operations platform Lytho.

The top reasons centered on the experience of employees, customers and other stakeholders, and included “better internal collaboration” (45%), ensuring a “sustainable workload” (39%) and “improving customer experience” (36%).

The report, which can be accessed here, contains interviews that illustrate how some organizations restructured creative teams. For example, headcount pressure during the pandemic forced one creative team to modify its processes and approach to technology.

As the pandemic wound down and the creative team staffed up again, the company saw an opportunity to have the marketing leads function more like account managers in an agency. They found centralizing work, particularly at project intake, enabled the team to work more efficiently – and ensured better brand and message consistency across channels and tactics.

Additional findings in the report include:

• · Technology influenced restructuring. Most respondents (91%) indicated their in-house creative team uses project management or creative workflow software. And 81% said data from these systems influenced the organizational design of the proposed restructuring. 
• Restructuring brings clarity to roles and processes. 87% of respondents indicated restructuring clarified “who on the in-house brand and creative team has the authority to make important project decisions.”
• Benefits of creative team restructuring. 37% of respondents said restructuring improved their team’s ability to deliver creative projects to clients or stakeholders faster as the top benefit of restructuring. This was followed by their team’s ability to improve their products or services (19%) and improved collaboration (12%).

• Data-driven restructuring decisions. Among the data points that creative and marketing leaders used to sketch restructuring plans were the number of project requests their team received, the type of projects their teams were currently working on, the hours associated with creating projects or deliverables, and the utilization or availability of team members.