Checklists: for robust review and approval of creative work

In the fast-paced and ever-evolving world of marketing, compliance with brand guidelines, regulations, and ethical standards is essential for any business. However, managing marketing compliance can be a daunting task. The solution lies in a simple yet powerful tool that can transform your compliance management: checklists. In this blog post, we will explore how checklists are the key to making compliance on creative content simple and effective.

What are creative checklists?

A creative checklist is a structured list of essential items and tasks used during creative projects to ensure quality, consistency, and adherence to creative project requirements. It serves as a reference guide to ensure that all critical elements are considered and incorporated, leading to the development of high-quality and impactful creative work.

5 reasons to use checklists

1. A standardized approach: By developing a well-structured checklist that covers all the necessary process aspects, you establish a consistent framework for evaluating creative content. This ensures that your team follows the same set of procedures, reducing the risk of errors and omissions.
2. Increased accuracy and consistency: Checklists ensure a thorough review of each element of creative content. This scrutiny helps identify inaccuracies, discrepancies, or deviations from brand guidelines. By adhering to the checklist, you guarantee accuracy and consistency in your messaging, branding, and creative assets.
3. Streamline the approval process: Creative checklists streamline the approval process, enabling quick yet comprehensive reviews of creative content. With a checklist to guide reviewers, the focus is on ensuring content meets all necessary criteria.
4. Encouraging collaboration and accountability: Checklists foster collaboration among team members involved in the review process. Everyone is on the same page, following the same checklist, and contributing to the content evaluation. Assigning specific tasks in the checklist also promotes accountability, and creates visibility of responsibility.
5. A comprehensive compliance guide: Checklists can be customized to your needs. They can serve as a comprehensive guide to cover all relevant legal, regulatory, and industry standards. From copyright and intellectual property considerations, to data privacy and advertising guidelines, the checklist ensures that no compliance detail is overlooked.

PageProof’s communal checklists

PageProof takes creative checklists a step further by making these communal, meaning multiple reviewers can check off the same checklist item. By being communal, the need for multiple checklists is removed. A single collaborative checklist can be used, rather than the arduous task of managing several individual checklists for the same piece of creative work. Seamless collaboration is achieved.

This powerful feature can be added to proofs of any type – packaging, video, audio, HTML files, and more. It is simple to maintain a standardized approach across creative projects with checklist templates. And team administrators can not only create checklist templates but also seamlessly duplicate, delete, and archive them – a huge time-saver. And, of course, you can customize each checklist depending on the type of media.

Enterprise customers can create an infinite number of templates for use cases, the Teams Plus plan includes ten templates, whereas the Teams plan is limited to two templates.

By combining checklists with the power of PageProof’s collaborative online proofing platform which includes automated controlled workflows that ensure the right people see the proof at the right time, PageProof becomes integral when seeking marketing compliance for all creative work.

Additional security features

PageProof’s comprehensive proof audit functionality, patented triple-layer encryption, and ISO 27001 certification means customers collaborating on creative work are assured their creative and feedback is secure and traceable. With communal checklists, sign-off can be attributed individual elements of creative work. And, if the proof owner wishes to do so, final proof approval can be prevented until the checklist is complete, bringing another layer of compliance to the online proofing space.

Wrap up

By incorporating creative checklists into your review and approval process, you create a standardized process to be followed – ensuring it is simpler for guidelines to be adhered to, potential risks are minimized, and marketing compliance achieved – for any type of creative work. Checklists increase accuracy and consistency, as well as add an additional layer of visibility and traceability to creative workflows. Leading to smoother operations and a more reputable brand image. PageProof’s communal checklists take this a step further by allowing multiple reviewers to check off the same checklist item.

Note: This article is updated frequently to reflect the continuous rollout of features. The most recent being Oct 2023.