Adobe Success Story

Bernstein-Rein reduces ad review cycles 50% or more using Adobe Acrobat Pro and PDF

Automating a time-consuming, paper-based collaboration process
Ask a group of advertising agency project managers to describe their typical day, and they are likely to give you similar answers. The job typically involves creating hard-copy proofs for internal distribution within the agency—to creative staff, art directors, and the production studio—waiting for everyone’s mark-ups, then manually routing the comments through multiple rounds of reviews. There’s a lot of going desk to desk to obtain comments and signatures. And, staff frequently have to deal with long printer queues and inadvertent printing errors.

Then, once approved internally, account management takes over and undergoes a similar time-consuming, manual, paper-based process to obtain client approvals on the creative work. The account managers must consolidate client feedback and send it on internally, enabling staff to make the necessary changes.

Benefits

• Reduced time to market for ads by 50% or more
• Eliminated duplicate data entry
• Supported ad hoc workflows, a must in the hectic ad agency environment
• Freed staff time for more strategic services

Project Details

Reviews in half the time
Bernstein-Rein, one of the largest independent agencies in the United States with nearly 300 employees serving clients like Time-Warner Cable, McDonalds, Hostess, and Bayer, knew there had to be a better way. After weighing several possible options, the agency adopted Adobe Acrobat software and Portable Document Format (PDF) as standard tools for reviewing, marking up, and approving creative work digitally. Today, project managers and the account team alike can usher projects through internal and external review processes in half the time or less.

“We needed to improve our time-to-market for creative work of all kinds, and our solution based on Adobe Acrobat Pro proved ideal,” says Creative Systems Analyst Jason Eaton. “We evaluated other solutions, but they were too rigid in terms of workflow. Acrobat, on the other hand, gives us the flexibility to send materials to whomever we need to, whenever we need to.”

An end-to-end Adobe workflow
Whether it is a print ad, a direct-mail piece, TV work, radio script, or an interactive website or game, everything the Bernstein-Rein creative team generates starts in Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium and Web Premium software. “Our use of Adobe creative software spans the gamut, from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign CS3, to Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, and Fireworks CS3.”

All of the creative professionals within Bernstein-Rein work daily in Adobe Creative Suite 3 software and have it on their desktops, but that’s not the case for personnel such as project managers and the account team. This spurred the need for a universally accessible digital format that would span staff within the agency as well as clients, allowing everyone to view creative work with all of the fonts, visuals, layouts, and other attributes intact. Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe PDF provided the tools and format the agency needed for everyone to share creative work, including e-mail campaigns, print ads, and more.

Getting everyone on the same page
Bernstein-Rein staff also needed robust commenting and markup tools that would enable everyone to clearly communicate the changes requested down to the most minute detail. “There are so many great tools in Acrobat Pro to help get everyone on the same page,” says Eaton. “Our print buyers can dissect a piece to see what colors and fonts are being used, and our proofreaders love the text edit tool because they can simply mark up the text right within the Adobe PDF file. And the date and time stamp let people verify their comments.”

Going further, the agency wanted to put a permanent end to versioning issues and to provide an easier way to reconcile contradictory comments. To accomplish this, Bernstein-Rein uses shared review in Acrobat Pro, which enables the comments of all reviewers to be stored in one location. Users can easily initiate a shared review by e-mail or via a shared folder on the network. Participants can view and respond to the input of other team members as comments are being made.

Review initiators have access to the Review Tracker in Acrobat Pro, which provides a comprehensive interface for controlling a review and viewing everyone’s comments at a glance. Once projects are finalized, Bernstein-Rein staff send them to print service providers as optimized PDF files to help ensure accuracy, timeliness, and quality.

Improved client services
Almost everyone at Bernstein-Rein now uses the Acrobat and PDF workflow for reviews, and the agency is eager to bring everyone on board to increase productivity. “Project managers can route internal reviews in about half the time, and account management can expedite their reviews much faster than the previous paper-based system, which frees them up for other client-related work,” says Eaton. Previously, account management personnel had to mark up client changes manually on printouts to translate client comments into easily understood Bernstein-Rein terms for creative staff. These changes then also had to be entered into the company’s traffic and billing system. But, says Eaton, “Today, it’s a one-step process of marking up a PDF file.”

Clients appreciate the quick turnaround the agency can offer, and staff within the agency is applauding the new electronic processes. “Using Adobe Acrobat Pro and PDF, our review processes are faster, and our staff is happier because they can make changes to creative work remotely if they need to—there’s no need to stand by a printer and wait. They can generate a PDF, and be on to the next step in the review cycle,” says Eaton. “Our Acrobat Pro solution translates into a huge improvement in efficiency and speed; but more importantly, it has dramatically improved our client services. People here are freed from doing repetitive busywork and have more strategic time and energy to contribute to every project.”

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