Working together, even when apart: Ogilvy and Walgreens

With the help of Adobe Stock and Creative Cloud Libraries, Ogilvy created a creative workflow that kept everyone united no matter where they were working.

Image source: Adobe Stock / CACTUS Creative Studio/Stocksy.

Today more than ever, we are seeing incredible innovation in new ways of work from companies and organizations — teams are laser focused on remote collaboration and getting things done, even when team members and stakeholders are miles or even countries apart from each other.

For Ogilvy, a renowned agency since 1948, the transition has been both challenging and rewarding. Truly global in nature, with 132 offices in 83 countries, the agency already had good processes in place for remote collaboration. Ogilvy’s Employee Experience (EX) team based in Denver, Colorado, was no exception. But with the entire team shifting to working from home as a result of the pandemic (and most clients doing the same), the team needed to ensure that it was able to deliver on its work with the same creativity and efficiency as always. This was especially the case when the EX team needed to deliver well-designed content that would play a part of Walgreens’ own pandemic story.

With the help of Adobe Stock and Creative Cloud Libraries, the EX design team created an incredible solution that kept everyone united no matter where they were working. We recently spoke to Terry Coleman, a visual designer at Ogilvy who focuses on user experience, about this project and the tools his team used to pull it off. Here’s how they did it.

Finding creative assets that look “custom” when photoshoots are off the table

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Walgreens asked Ogilvy to design a piece of COVID-19 thought leadership called “The Power of Preparedness.” For Coleman, the challenge was to find the correct imagery. Walgreens existing imagery of people interacting in store, for example, just wouldn’t cut it. “We wanted to show people wearing masks in a way that was a bit more socially relevant,” he said.

To find the right assets, Coleman headed to Adobe Stock to identify imagery that fit the job. Using carefully curated Adobe Stock galleries, he was able to locate images that made sense and were socially responsible in the context of COVID-19. Given the sensitive topic, he needed a way to work with his creative team and share with Walgreens to ensure the imagery was just right. For this, he relied heavily on Creative Cloud Libraries.

“Creative Cloud Libraries gave us options to search Adobe Stock directly in our project’s Libraries panel,” Coleman said. This was particularly valuable when it came time to show Ogilvy’s designs to Walgreens. Because images could be quickly swapped in and out of the designs via shared libraries, Coleman and his team were able to make changes more efficiently.

“They were able to sign off or tell us, ‘No. This is not an image we want to use,’” Coleman said. “We were then able to quickly iterate on our design process and use the assets that made Walgreens happy and conveyed a feeling of relevance.”

Careful design choices to convey a feeling of safety

Although it was important to Walgreens that the imagery in the Power of Preparedness experience looked relevant, it was even more important to the company that those images conveyed a feeling of safety to its customers. “Walgreens Pharmacy wanted to make sure that their customers felt safe while in the store,” said Coleman. “We wanted to make sure we communicated that story through the assets we were providing at all times.”

Closeup of the Walgreens <u>Power of Preparedness</u> experience, created by Ogilvy.

For example, a previously used illustration from Walgreens of a pharmacist not wearing a mask simply wouldn’t work because it didn’t comply with the company’s in-store safety protocol messaging. Using Walgreens Creative Cloud Libraries — a convenient way to access client brand assets, too — Coleman was able to access the image and design a mask graphic in Illustrator to place over the top of the existing illustration. With a simple click, he was able to update the outdated illustration to one that could be used during COVID-19.

Keeping teamwork and brand consistency at the core

Even before the pandemic began, design teams at Ogilvy were using Adobe Creative Cloud tools with Creative Cloud Libraries to express themselves and execute on projects. There’s long been a culture on Coleman’s team of designers sketching and doodling to explore concepts and ideas — bouncing ideas off each other and “playing” as a form of ideation.

After the pandemic began and everyone started working from home, this culture has continued. The team uses Creative Cloud and Creative Cloud Libraries to quickly put concepts together and share ideas with each other for feedback and iteration. Add to that the way Ogilvy is making use of Creative Cloud integrations with some of its other favorite tools, and Coleman says the toolset has become a crucial part of staying successful on big projects.

“Having all the integrations in one place has been a game changer in terms of our speed, our ability to brand new assets or update assets on the fly, and being able to collaborate with project team members,” he said.

Creative Cloud Libraries also helps the team manage versioning and keeps experiences consistent, even when changes are being made to central brand assets such as logos or photographs. “Nobody is getting hung up on, ‘Is this the right version? Did we use that in the last piece?’ because if it’s live in the library, then we know it is the right version,” explained Coleman.

A devotion to building better, more creative workflows

Coleman is known around Ogilvy for his devotion and desire to empower his fellow team members to be their best creative selves. For him, finding the right toolset has been a big part of this. When the pandemic began, this took on an even greater sense of importance. Yes, the team needed to find a way to work collaboratively like never before, but it also had to find ways to help clients deal with their newfound challenges, too. The pressure to produce amazing content remains, and Ogilvy is far from alone in this.

Recently, Adobe surveyed 600 industry creatives on this subject, with 81 percent responding that they are being asked to develop more content in less time and 84 percent believing that their team’s creative workflow could be more efficient.

With the help of Adobe Creative Cloud and Creative Cloud Libraries, Coleman and his team responded to both the internal challenges of working entirely remotely and the external challenges of working with clients that are doing the same.

Hear more about how to collaborate, create, and connect with Adobe Stock and Creative Cloud Libraries.