Today we’re announcing the newest addition to our product family - online proofing from Ziflow.
Why did we decide to develop an online proofing solution? To put it as simply as possible - unmet customer needs. As we talked with customers of our tools for automating creative production tasks, we’ve been continually asked what we could offer to automate the the review and approval of creative content, and to help deliver projects faster and with more quality.
We know this market very well, being the team behind ProofHQ, which we grew to become the market’s leading online proofing solution at the time of its acquisition.
Even though a couple of years have passed, marketing teams are navigating many of the same roadblocks that we saw before; the proliferation of digital channels continues, as does the demand for more content from marketing teams. Marketing cycles are continuing to shrink, so marketers need to produce more content in less time. Marketing compliance also continues its march. For entire industries, marketing content needs to meet strict brand, corporate and regulatory compliance requirements.
Marketing teams have traditionally relied on email and/or hardcopy printouts to manage review and approval of marketing content. Those methods are no longer appropriate in an environment with increasing volumes of content, multiple stakeholders (internal and external), shrinking timeframes, and within rigorous compliance frameworks. Email simply doesn't scale.
We have therefore focused on streamlining, and automating where possible, the actions and processes related to providing feedback in the creative process. Combining our markup tools with our intuitive commenting capabilities, results in more clarity and context, which drives creative assets being delivered faster, with more quality.
Marketers have shared new challenges as well. Given the rapid adoption of marketing technology there’s an insatiable need for these tools to perform specific tasks well and work together, regardless of vendor. We aim to solve that challenge as well, by developing Ziflow as a completely ‘pluggable’ application within your existing - and future - marketing stack.
We also believe passionately that automation of mundane, manual tasks will become the norm in marketing teams. We have therefore built Ziflow online proofing on top of the powerful Flows functionality already available in Ziflow. This means that manual tasks taking place before review and after approval can be automated, saving marketers even more time.
For the rest of this year, we’ll be offering extended trials of our Online Proofing application. We invite you to check it out and share your feedback. We’d love to hear from you.
