Marketing services firm W&J Linney, based in the U.K., is a family-owned agency that has, over the last five generations, evolved from a newspaper manufacturer into a full-service, multi-channel marketing corporation. Its services cover the entire marketing supply chain, from insight and consumer research to design, print, digital signage and film production, events, social media and more.

Linney film, the production arm of Linney, produces over 1,500 films a year. The content ranges from animations to newsroom-style productions, all with tight turnaround times and a large production team of 2D animators, 3D animators, camera operators, producers, production managers, VR experts and more that must remain in sync at all times.

Pivoting to a modern creative workflow for multimedia production

Maintaining long-term client trust and loyalty for major retail and consumer brands requires constant agility and innovation. As clients’ marketing needs have shifted towards new video and animation styles and integrated social media assets, Linney’s creative department needed its many business units and content systems to sync closely in order to shorten delivery timelines across all media.

“We're at this digital pivot. Campaigns that used to involve 48-sheet billboards now live on modular LED screens. When you're creating things, it's multi-discipline from films and animations to studio and creative. Speed is the name of the game,”

explained Luke Dennis, Producer at Linney.

A typical project for Linney that demonstrates this need for speed is the agency’s newsroom-style productions, which creates an eye-popping eight films a week.

After receiving the script on a Monday, Linney gears up and shoots on Tuesday, then edits on Wednesday. Typically, a video will go through three or four cuts by the end of the week. With this many videos and versions, feedback management is crucial.

Linney had been using a legacy proofing system and had tested out a video management platform, but neither offered Linney’s production team the right level of collaborative review for storyboards, animation, and video content.

“Ultimately the downside of post-production is a lot of the amends and a lot of the feedback process,” said Dennis.

Linney began searching for a more comprehensive, reliable review system that could expedite review for video and animation while also providing one collaborative solution that hundreds of Linney employees, multiple teams, and clients could use to hit campaign launch deadlines.

A creative collaboration platform for every format

As a busy video production team working on tight deadlines, Linney needed a creative collaboration solution that could easily replace its legacy system without compromising access to its extensive back catalog and approval histories for customers. It also needed a solution that could keep up with the intense pace of content delivery for which Linney was known.

Linney was first drawn to Ziflow due to on-demand client support. This enabled rapid deployment of a more flexible approval workflow — and all without the need for content migration and training for Linney’s hundreds of employees using the system. Additionally, the large number of formats supported by Ziflow meant that the platform could serve the entire 1200+ company.

“It’s a fragmented world, there’s lots and lots of systems that we use. I needed something that would not only serve the purposes of Linney film, but also the wider agency,” explained Dennis. “One of the key things my team liked particularly is the fact that there’s a plugin for Premiere, so they don’t need to leave their editing or animating application in order to pick up amends directly from the client.”

Linney’s creative teams embedded onsite with clients like McDonald’s and Royal Mail now use the system to review and approve a range of film, animation, social media, and print assets on very tight timelines.

Using a modern video review and approval to quickly move projects forward with clients is the key to Linney’s deliverability edge.

"As soon as it's shot, we're producing it on trains, in production vehicles and on planes even. By the time we're back to our facility, clients are wanting to see a first cut. All of that content needs to be reviewed, optimized and approved," said Dennis.

According to Linney, Ziflow has “one of the fastest upload speeds in the game,” which means Linney can reliably share creative with clients within that 12-hour window, converse with them, and collaborate on iterative versions. This contributes to building solid relationships with clients, improving Linney’s speed to market and fortifying their reputation as one of the best in the business.

“It's that 12-hour window that's keeping us in the game really. Ziflow is contributing to keeping us in that window. It's really grown and we're really happy with it,” said Dennis.