Space to Breathe for Download / Air HQ / Air

Space to Breathe

An exploration of Creative Ops for the overwhelmed, disenchanted creative professional and the organizations that rely on them.

Ask yourself

Right now, at this moment, "am I proud of my work?"

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe “meh”. But the answer should be yes. And for far too many of us, it is not. Maybe you won an award. Maybe you earned a headline. Maybe you got a raise. But are you proud of your creation?

Stunned

Humans now capture more than two trillion images and videos per year, and generative algorithms are already responsible for billions. Every business trying to sell or market a product today needs an ever-increasing amount of content.

Every company is a media company.

~68M Creative Pros
~900M Communicators
~4B Consumers

Teams, content, channels, pressure on creatives.

We've brought on more tools to templatize and democratize creative work - all it has done is create more.

Phase 1 — 1990+

Digital Professionals

Phase 2 — 2010+

Democratized Creation

Phase 3 — 2022+

Generative AI Takeoff

We are our own worst enemy. We are responsible for shaping the brand, but we no longer have the capacity to influence it. We need tools that allow us to scale our judgment and to distribute it into other teams and processes. Returning the time to think, debate, go on a walk, or do absolutely nothing. Clear your head, be totally unstructured, free — this is how to generate something truly original.

Inspired

Creative minds need time to do nothing. Creativity requires nothing for as long as possible.

Every day, creatives head out into the unknown in search of the new and powerful; in search of rare creative seeds. And once a seed is discovered, these creatives aim to develop it into something original, comprehensive, and compelling. But it all starts with the vast unknown and the perennial appeal of exploring it. Today, the unknown is as magnetic as ever.

We need a factory, a container for our thoughts, ideas, and priorities. One that syncs across our technologies, our teams, our worlds. A language that understands the complexity of our work. Where working files are as important as the ones we publish. In this world, there is no definition of done. Original work is impossible without time.

Everything is expanding. Everything is proliferating. Everything is shifting. And we cannot be scared. There are more sources of inspiration than ever. There are more people bringing ideas to market than ever. More tools to help us do things better. More platforms for our ideas to live.

Opportunity is everywhere, but everywhere needs to be explored. This might feel overwhelming but it HAS to be understood as empowering and enabling. Culturally relevant art that achieves a desired goal. Potentially the single most difficult thing to do today. It’s not art for the sake of art. It’s art for the sake of impact. If you fail, well, back to the drawing board. If you succeed, it is truly fulfilling.

Broken

Without automation, we cannot foster the space to be magical. Decentralized organizations sifting through the chaos of content manifest tooling and endless iterations: all of this requires a new way of working. There will never be one tool that solves this, but there can be a unifying language that translates it — that can tame it, and ultimately create that space.

“For us to be successful, we need to automate everything that can be automated, in order to have the capacity to do the things we can’t. If you can create the capacity to be magical, then you might have a chance to do it. How can we create space?” — Andrew Robertson, CEO BBDO

That potentially beautiful idea, no matter how big or small it may have been, doesn’t look or sound like it used to. Stripped, butchered, hollowed out. Sloppy processes, pulled in different conflicting directions without a grounding centralizing force, take our high-potential concepts (and our human creative integrity) to the shed. They don’t stand a chance. Yes, these are our realities.

This future won’t be created by the existing. The need for speed, today, is real. But managing speed is, mostly, poorly managed. Bureaucracy is real. But, bureaucrats can be managed. Managed up. Managed down. Uninformed opinions are real. The helicoptering professional-parent is a staple of the process that needs to be understood and considered. Feedback loops are real… but vicious. How do you keep it constructive and committed to progress?

Uncertainty is real. Is human creativity on the brink of a new dawn or Armageddon? It used to be that making content was hard. Now it’s making sense of it that’s hard. Yesterday’s systems just don’t cut it.

Orchestration is the future of creativity.

Orchestration creates space.

Inspiration → Production → Review → Deployment → Archival → Analysis

We need a system of record for the creative process. We need something new. Not just new tools, but a reframing of the problem itself. We need to move from thinking about how to organize our creative assets to thinking about how to orchestrate them. This shift from organization to orchestration is at the heart of a new category: Creative Operations.

Creative Ops is the process, people, and tooling that channels creative assets into productive use. The tools that enable orchestration will become the new center of the creative tools universe.

Understood

If every company is a media company, and media companies are creating more and more content, and more and more content has to be evaluated by creatives, and creatives need this work to be original, and creating original work requires space, and space requires automation, and automation is only possible through orchestration… then Creative Ops is a requirement for every company.

Because the creative mind is claustrophobic. Creativity is a deeply personal process. A process that is claustrophobic and averse to encroaching forces that, intentionally or unintentionally, kill momentum and potential. These forces aren’t all external. Sometimes they lie within us. Sometimes it is our own doubt and skepticism of our work that needs a minute to sort itself out.

Because breathing room unlocks potential. Ideas need to breathe. They need to scream a bit. They need to get stretched and twisted. They need to be added to, trimmed down, stress tested, hated on, loved. They need a good night’s sleep. Because maybe that small idea can be a huge idea. Or maybe that one good idea, said differently, becomes an iconic idea. The idea is only as good as our ability to put it through a process. A fair process that is truly and honestly aimed at helping it realize its potential.

The power of a grounding, centralizing force.

Process that provides the space. All the thankless, manual parts of the creative process are usually where it all breaks if not managed well. It is where great feedback is lost. Where bad feedback gets overvalued. And creative walks the line between memorable and forgettable. Toward a system of record. We need something new.

Not just new tools, but a reframing of the problem itself. We need to move from thinking about how to organize our creative assets to how to orchestrate them. This shift is the heart of a Creative Operations system: the process, people, and tooling that put creative assets into productive use. The objective of this system is to automate decision making so that creatives can focus on high level work… or nothing at all.

Creative Ops is a system of record for the creative process:

Today is the future of Creative Ops

In a world of endless content the only thing that matters is the real-time understanding of how much content you’re building, where all it’s going, who’s using it, and how it’s performing. Creative Ops is not an idea, it’s a system, and it’s built for your ideas.

Credits

Published by Air, Inc.
Printed in Belgium
Typefaces: Control Upright Regular by Commerical Type and Nitti Typewriter by Bold Monday
Special thanks to Andrew Bartholomew, Ryan Mack, Barbie Bertisch, and Paul Raffaele
Daniel Dorsa
NASA Image and Video Library
Thais Varela
Jared Bramblett
Fanette Guilloud
Patrick Chin
Rosanna Jones
Felix Bethge
Thatch RCHKM
Gregory Orekhov
Adam Whyte
Alessandro Saletta

Learn more at air.inc
Air automates how you collect, approve, and share content. We call this Creative Ops.