Modernising creative workflows for a 148-year-old company
Coaching college softball and working for a Fortune 100 financial services company may seem like polar opposite careers. But for Bridget Esposito, a former athletic coach and current VP and Group Creative Director at Prudential Financial, they couldn’t be more similar.
“There's never a day that I don't see the similarities between coaching and the way I work as a creative leader,” says Esposito. “Accountability, team dynamics, culture, working through adversity — all are valuable coaching and leadership skills that are proving critical in creating a marketing powerhouse at Prudential that is customer-obsessed, driven by data and analytics, with a culture of creativity.”
Those skills catapulted Esposito into a leadership role at a critical time for Prudential. And she would come to rely on them as she and the marketing team took on the challenge of revolutionising and reinvigorating the 148-year-old company’s creative workflow and team culture.
Like other long-established companies, Prudential needed to make a significant transformation to handle the demands of a modern digital marketplace. Content velocity — the ability to create, manage and publish digital content to the right audiences as quickly as possible — is essential for business success, but it’s not easy to achieve. When Esposito took on a leadership role in the newly formed Prudential Creative House, her team was saddled with an extreme volume of work that overloaded creatives with more tasks than they could possibly complete.
Solving these challenges would ultimately involve rework the content creation process, elevating creativity across the organisation and laying the groundwork for exponential increases in productivity. Also key was forging vital connections with other departments, powering the new process with a connected system of tools including Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager Assets — and applying the team-focused approach to leadership she developed as a softball coach.