Success story
HZIndustry• Professional Services,Marketing & Creative Services

Solutions• OpenText™ Hightail™

Challenges• Fast growing business with 80+ projects inflight daily• Multimedia campaign assets made the review
process inconsistent• Feedback on creative was a slow processcollected one person at a time
• Project management platform had low
adoption and did not hold teams accountable

Results
Enabled instant previews and inline
comments for all visual files
Allowed campaign content review
and approval in a single place
Provided availability of every asset
and new version to external partners
Offered easier team onboarding,adoption and accountability with auser-friendly interface

How HZ improved consistency
and efficiency of creative reviews
US-based creative agency uses OpenText Hightail to deliver
better client service“OpenText Hightail is very user friendly and immediately madeour review process much quicker. We no longer have to taketurns to review something—people add comments to PDFs
and visual files at the same time.”
Cary Gilbert

Traffic ManagerHZ

How HZ improved consistency and efficiency of creative reviews

HZ is a WBE-certified, fully integrated creative agency operating
for more than 30 years. Its more than 200 employees at five offices
across the United States specialize in branding, marketing, contentand digital marketing. As a full-service, in-house agency, HZcounts some of the most recognizable consumer brands as clients,
including Hilton Hotels and Resorts, Organic Valley and Volkswagen
and local companies, such as EagleBank and Ridgewells Catering, ona mix of B2B and B2C projects. HZ is also the digital agency for its
local NFL team, the Washington Redskins.
Working on up to 80 different projects each day for integrated campaigns, HZ manages a large volume of creative assets across all media
formats. There is never just one piece to the campaign. Producing bothprint and digital components means asset production of banner ads,
websites, landing pages, print ads, brochures and video.
With so many different types of projects and file formats, the way HZreviewed creative work varied a lot. “We’d upload PDFs to our internal
servers and email a file path to that PDF to the relevant teams forreview,” said Stacey DeOrzio, SVP, Client Relations at HZ. “Each person
would take turns reviewing it because you could only comment on
the PDF one at a time. Other times, we’d print hard copies of thecreative, which meant feedback wasn’t captured in one place. Eitherway, it was a slow, inconsistent process that opened us up to errors.”
After testing various solutions, HZ found that most of the technology tools
for creative review and collaboration had way too many features and werehard to use. OpenText™ Hightail™ was different. Its user-friendlinessand ability to make the review process much quicker meant no morewaiting to review creative content one person at a time. Users can add
precise comments to PDFs, videos and visual files in real time.

Prior to Hightail, when using another popular project management tool,
conversations often led nowhere. People would ask questions, but
nobody would take responsibility, so no action was taken. With Hightail,tasks are assigned to specific team members with due dates attached,which helps ensure the next step is taken. “Nothing gets left hanging.
With OpenText Hightail, it feels like we’re saving a lot of review
rounds and jobs are closing faster than our normal timeframes,”
said DeOrzio.
The approvals feature in Hightail has been most useful in promoting efficiency. “We love the way you can request approval from specificpeople,” said DeOrzio. “You want the entire team to be able to accessthe work and leave comments, but only a few people need to beapprovers. Being able to call them out and request their approvalin a specific order has been very helpful.”
After the initial test, HZ felt confident Hightail was the right choice forcreative content collaboration. “Hightail’s partnership and support
throughout the trial period and on-boarding process gave us nohesitation whatsoever that they were the right partner for us,” saidDeOrzio. Obtaining buy-in from the CFO and daily users was easy, inlarge part due to Hightail’s ease of use. “When new employees join
HZ, they spend a few minutes learning how it works and off they go,”said DeOrzio.
Once comfortable using Hightail internally, HZ started to roll out the newprocess to select clients. Previously, they shared PDFs with clients andcollected their feedback by email. Now, clients can use Hightail to leavecomments exactly where they want the edits. They can also accessall campaign assets in one place, see what’s been approved and track
the creative progress from one version to the next. “It’s been sucha positive experience,” said DeOrzio. “We’re starting to introduce
Hightail to more clients.”“Nothing gets left hanging.
With OpenText Hightail,it feels like we’re saving
a lot of review rounds
and jobs are closing
faster than our normal
timeframes.”
Stacey DeOrzio

SVP Client Relations
HZ

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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