Customer & Stakeholder Relationship Reporting

So, obviously some transparency is needed. Not only do people need to understand what you do, and the value you provide, but they also need to be able to access this sort of information easily. And preferably not have to chase it down. This brings me to what I call "the email."

• 1.What is the status of [xxxxxx] product? When will it be available?
• 2.What's our cost per shot?
• 3.When are we shooting [xxxxxx]?
• 4.Did you receive [xxxxxx] yet?
• 5.Have we received a sample for [xxxxxx] yet?

It's easy to be annoyed by these inquiries, but it's not the sender's fault. They need info to do their jobs! And information is already siloed in most companies, before even taking into account the specialized tools that studios use. These tolls often have steep learning curves or paid user seats not available to others. So how can we make this easier for everyone? We have to free the data and make it available to all. But how do we do that?

Well, the short answer is to unlock your data. Let people in! If someone needs a user seat, even if it's read-only, so they can see what samples are missing, get them a user seat! If you can schedule a report to a stakeholder weekly, or daily, you cut out the need for emailing back and forth. These things are incredibly helpful for keeping your team in the studio on-task and not always reacting to the latest question. They're also great trust-builders with stakeholders and overall great way to knock down some siloes

Still, the more honest answer is that this all requires some relationship building. All that talk about people needing to understand what the studio does? It goes both ways! You need to meet with your stakeholders regularly, talk to your customers, and truly understand what they do (and how your studio fits into their needs). Perhaps you were delivering everything 5 days ahead of the deadline, but you were unaware that the copy team needed 7 days to complete a product's copy. You'll never know if you stay hiding out in the studio. Invite people to the studio, go meet with them at HQ, and get to know who's on the other side of "the email." And most importantly, learn what they need and provide it - preferably automated deliveries or customized dashboards that they care about.

So what would these stakeholders care about? Well, as we said, you have to talk to them. But here are a couple examples, based on my own experience.

The Added Value report is an awesome one because it supports an under-represented goal of creative organizations: Creating Better Content. The word "better" can seem ambiguous, and that's where added value comes in. It's pretty universally accepted that additional angles, detail shots, and especially video all increase sales on PDP pages. There are exceptions, and of course a point of diminishing returns. But for most studios, it would be considered a definite win if you are able to increase creative output, adding angles and detail shots, potentially even adding product videos, all while on a flat budget. I've seen this happen first hand and it's a great feeling of accomplishment. It's also difficult to measure, which is where an Added Value report comes in.

Let's start off a hypothetical studio and some hypothetical financials - these will help demonstrate concrete ways to report on added value.

• 1.In-house studio for a denim brand
• 2.$2m/annual budget
• 3.10,000 products yearly (50% mens, 50% womens)
• 4.4 angles shot per product (front, side, back, detail)
• 5.Based on above, cost per shot is $50

Let's use this example studio as a jump-off point. They are currently shooting the basics: front, side, back, detail. A great move in a situation like this would be to offer your teams a challenge: continue to hit the numbers each day, but let's add in one "lifestyle" shot, with more fluid posing, to all womens products (50% of the line, or 5,000 products). Photographers love this direction and models absolutely do as well. The energy stays higher on set, people get to be creative, and things still move quickly (sometimes faster, since people aren't in their "front, side, back" rut!). It's simply not that far-fetched to target one additional angle of shooting once you have a model dressed, styled and on set.

Assuming our hypothetical studio was able to successfully add that one angle to womens denim, the annual added value is in the $200k - $250k range, depending on exactly how you calculate it (5000 I view this KPI/report as best being two numbers side by side: one, the percentage of products you managed to produce an additional angle for, and two, the dollar amount of value added.

There are additional ways to make this even more interesting, like incorporating conversion rates for example. After all, additional angles don't mean much if they don't convert. All things considered, I'm comfortable saying this: if your studio can produce more editorial style content, more quickly, at the same price? People are going to be very pleased about that.