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Founded by a Facebook co-founder and ex-Google-and-Facebook engineer—who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook—Asana is a work management platform teams use to stay focused on the goals, projects, and daily tasks that grow business. WNIP caught up with Dave King, CMO, Asana to find out more.
Can you give us some background about your company?
Founded in 2008 by Facebook and Google alumni Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, Asana is a leading work management platform that’s pioneering a new way to work by giving teams the clarity they need to achieve extraordinary things together. Asana helps teams organize and manage all of their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives, by giving teams clarity of purpose, plan and responsibility.
Over 60,000 paying organizations and millions of users around the world, from Airbnb to Sony Music to National Geographic to LVMH, rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives, to digital transformation, to product launches and marketing campaigns.
What business problem is your company addressing?
Forty-percent of UK employees spend most of their day in meetings, tracking down or organising information, or updating others on the status of work, as opposed to their actual work. It’s like having the busiest day, but feeling as though you haven’t accomplished anything. We call this ‘work about work’.
At Asana, we’re focused on eliminating the universal challenge of work about work. We do this by acting as the GPS for your organisation – ensuring that everyone knows the plan of record and is updated as each piece comes together. We know that the best teams have clarity of purpose, plan and responsibility. ‘Work about work’ is what happens when these elements are absent and teams fail to achieve what they’re capable of.
What is your core product addressing this problem?
Nowhere do we see the challenge of work about work come into play more than with marketing and creative teams. In our always-on digital era, companies are asking their marketing and creative teams to create always-on campaigns. That means they need to create more content for more channels than ever before – without additional resources. As a result, today’s top marketing teams recognize that optimizing their process has an even more profound impact than optimizing their marketing channels.
While other departments and industries have centralized software tools to manage their process, marketing is still largely run on spreadsheets and in email. According to the Content Marketing Institute, more than one-quarter of marketing teams report persistent bottlenecks in campaign development. Given the cross-functional, highly collaborative nature of marketing campaigns, this is a universal pain point, particularly for global marketing teams.
To address this challenge, today we’re launching Asana for Marketing and Creative Teams – an end-to-end solution for teams to manage their entire marketing and design process from start to finish. Asana for Marketing and Creative Teams serves as a single source of truth for companies to set marketing team objectives, coordinate global marketing campaigns and manage the entire creative production process from initial brief to final asset delivery.
New features of Asana for Marketing and Creative Teams include forms which standardize the creative intake process and an approvals workflow that keeps all project participants updated on what stage work is in and what needs to happen next, resulting in an airtight approval process. An in-depth integration with Adobe Creative Cloud gives designers the details they need to complete their work, without ever having to exit their creative canvas. Additional integrations with Litmus, Slack and Dropbox ensure that wherever the creative work is happening, Asana is there.
In order to deliver always-on campaigns, marketing teams need to eliminate bottlenecks and busy work. With Portfolios, teams can see how work is progressing in real-time so people can quickly identify and remove bottlenecks. With Portfolios, a CMO or Head of Design can dive into their team’s portfolios to see how certain pieces of content are tracking in line with the deadlines and goals, eliminating the manual work of piecing together information and status updates.
Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your product/solution?
Sony Music’s catalogue division is responsible for keeping artists like Jimi Hendrix, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson & Beyoncé in heavy rotation with creative social media & email campaigns. Supporting over 1,000 artists with multiple campaigns happening simultaneously meant that creative & copy requests were frequently getting lost in never-ending email threads & “drive-by” conversations. With Asana, all of their requests are centralized in one project that’s connected to the campaign team’s calendar so creative needs & due dates are clear. Not only are requests being completed on time, but now the team can accurately report on the status of all creative to stakeholders & leadership. By moving their team onto Asana, Sony Music’s catalogue division has been able to streamline their processes and reduce creative production time by 75%, saving an average of 60 hours per month.
Pricing?
Asana for Marketing and Creative Teams is available starting today for Asana’s Business and Enterprise customers. Asana Business is available for £15.47 per month per user and our Enterprise solution is priced based on the unique needs of larger enterprises.
What are other people doing in the space and why?u
The sad reality is that beyond some of the world’s most iconic brands are still a lot of ugly spreadsheets, never-ending email threads and laborious status updates. Teams have never had a solution for managing the entire process from marketing strategy to planning to production and execution. The launch of Asana for Marketing and Creative Teams delivers these highly cross-functional, collaborative teams a single source of truth guiding their work from creative brief to campaign launch.
How you do view the future?
Last year was a breakout year for Asana. We achieved eight consecutive quarters of accelerating growth rate, passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and closed our Series E funding round at a valuation of $1.5B. We now have over 60,000 paying organizations and millions of customers around the world who run on Asana every day. To support this growth, we’re hiring across all of our global offices including our EMEA HQ in Dublin.
I’m very excited about our product roadmap this year, and Asana for Marketing and Creative Teams is just the beginning. Our customers are our number one source of inspiration and we’re constantly evolving the platform to meet their growing collaboration needs. In addition to bringing a first-ever, best-in-class tool to marketers everywhere, we’ll also be delivering Workload – an entirely new way to help teams balance their work later this year. It’s all part of our mission to give teams the clarity of plan, purpose and responsibility to focus on the work that matters most.
Thank you for your time.
