Screendragon, a Lean Marketing software specialist, has launched sd_Annotate, billed as the answer to a major pain point within creative and marketing communications teams.
Until now, using iPads and other tablets for marking up marketing materials has been a frustrating experience for in-house teams, agencies and clients alike. Working offsite and onsite previously meant maintaining different marketing apps and ensuring their compliance with enterprise security policies, at significant cost.
Now, using sd_Annotate, marketing professionals can provide secure, centralised visual feedback on creative assets like advertising campaign proofs, copy drafts and video rushes, early in the marketing lifecycle, when revisions are at their most common and least expensive to correct.
Screendragon’s different Lean Marketing approach meant instead of building individual Apps for iOS, Google Android and other platforms commonly used by creatives, sd_Annotate is built with the latest HTML5 technology. Creative users now have powerful mark-up capabilities on standard iPad and tablet browsers and can annotate on all types of creative assets, placing shapes, sticky notes, authentic colours or lines on packaging, print asset or any other common creative asset.
sd_Annotate was co-developed with teams from innovative brands to create the optimal user experience for marketing execs at such fast-paced global branded organisations. It needed to be simple to use, across internal and external stakeholders and to sync up real-time annotations made on desktop web in real time.
After a successful pilot, it has been adopted by both marketing and agency users at a major global Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company to provide mark-up feedback as part of a global communications compliance workflow process.
Empowering its executives to review and approve on their tablets, on the move has been critical to creating time and cost efficiencies in the process and return on investment has been swift.
Avoiding the need to deploy via an Apple or Android app store greatly simplifies the user install and adoption process. Enterprise authentication and compliance is streamlined and content permissions can be accurately controlled. Using sd_Annotate’s review and annotations functionality from within Screendragon’s wider marketing project management or workflow system turns mark-up from an isolated activity into an integral part of Lean Marketing.
John Briggs, CTO, Screendragon, said: "Of all the current Apps on the market, none met our customers’ needs. Most annotation tools are limited to the types of file they support, nor do they automatically synch the same document in real-time with file annotations on laptops and desktops."
