How Huel consolidated performance creative workflows

‍Challenge

With a growing number of creative streams to manage, a need for more efficient processes for iterating on content and a focus on testing new creative concepts in their performance marketing, Huel found it increasingly challenging to stay on top of the production pipeline and also spent significant time organising their performance creative assets.

Huel’s creative production process stretched across tools like Asana, Frame, Google Drive and Slack, combined with spreadsheets for specific steps in between. In addition to their internal creative team, Huel is also leveraging a number of creative agencies, further adding to the complexity. Granular asset naming conventions helps Huel track and learn which creative elements are impacting performance, but maintaining it meant a ton of extra steps for all new assets produced.

The endless copying and pasting of links, downloading and uploading of files, and navigating the endless Google Drive maze, drove Huel to seek out a simpler way to handle their creative workflow.‍

Solution

"All of our performance creative assets are being run through Focal. It helps us save time and brings all functions involved in the creative process closer to each other. It has changed the game for us."

- Elissa Bottomley, Senior Creative Accounts Executive

Huel started by moving all creative briefs from Asana to Focal. Using Focal's Creative Boards, they were able to consolidate the briefing process with both the internal creative team and their creative agencies under one roof. With the board view they are able to track designer workloads to make more for efficient internal resourcing.

All new creative assets are uploaded to the brief for feedback and review, allowing them to manage multiple rounds of feedback from all stakeholders more effectively, by keeping all discussion and information visible in one place. 

Focal has successfully provided a solution that brings together different teams into one collaborative platform. They now have one place where creative strategists, campaign managers, designers and external agencies operate alongside each other to deliver more creative assets than possible before.

Huel is able to easily filter out assets based on creative variables like the hook, theme or target audience. The same taxonomy is used in Focal's Automatic Naming Conventions, helping the team standardize asset names across all new uploads, while also avoiding manual errors.

All approved files get consolidated and stored in the Focal Asset Library, which provides visibility for all teams into the creative testing pipeline. From there, the assets are bulk exported to ad account media libraries across Meta, TikTok and Youtube.