Niki Pence
CASE STUDY | ACHIEVE
I Was Hired to Make Videos. The Systems I Needed Didn't Exist, So I Built Them.
Four years. Two brands. Enterprise-wide scope. Here's how I built the systems that made it work.
120+
MEDIA ASSETS DELIVERED PER YEAR
4
REUSABLE PRODUCTION FRAMEWORKS
20%
REDUCED DUPLICATIVE SPENDING & TIME
Problem
The operational layers that enterprise-scale creative work actually requires did not exist. There were no intake process. No approval workflow. No asset library. No vendor relationships. No relationships or processes with procurement or accounts payable to pay vendors when I found them. No way to even pay for a shoot. Just my salary and an endless list of video requests.
Solution
Build required infrastructures from scratch, a huge undertaking that wasn't necessarily part of my job description, but because the things I was responsible for required it. Build these systems while operating them, brief by brief, workflow by workflow, relationship by relationship. Educate the various stakeholders, and collaborators on video production process, and gather their buy in on building it to meet our shared needs.
Outcome
A multifaceted repeatable, documented creative operations infrastructure that could actually scale with a warm bench of enthusaistic production partners, and stakeholders who were more confident than ever to collaborate with the brand marketing team. My efforts in building these systems outlasted any single project, campaign, senior leader, and eventually, even me.
LET'S DIVE IN
I joined Achieve as a Brand Video Lead supporting recruiting content. Within the first year, restructuring shifted my scope to Corporate Communications — and I kept expanding organically from there by building the things the organization needed that no one else was building.
By the time I left in 2026, I was operating as the de facto Creative Operations lead for enterprise video and visual media — authoring formal operating models, founding and leading a cross-functional Video Guild, managing a multi-year motion graphics studio partnership, building the enterprise DAM in partnership with Air.inc, and producing content across brand marketing, corporate comms, lifecycle marketing, app store, and social simultaneously.
The creative work was never the hard part. The hard part — and the part I'm most proud of — was building the operational infrastructure that made consistent, high-quality creative output possible at enterprise scale.
Role v. Scope
A Senior Brand Marketing Media Lead, that drove and lead enterprise-wide media production operations, brand systems, vendor management, DAM, AI tool deployment
Teams
Brand Marketing, Corporate Communications, Lifecycle Marketing, Product, Social, Procurement, Accounts Payable, Compliance
Focus
Specific creative media production, evergreen asset development, DAM infrastructure, workflow governance, asset management, cross-functional alignment, process and tool enhancements
Systems Diagram for one of our common flows:
Workflow Pillars
1
Governance & Operating Model
Enterprise creative functions fail when there's no shared understanding of how decisions get made, who owns what, and what good looks like.
I addressed this directly by authoring a formal Video Storytelling Operating Model presented to VP-level leadership — a complete document including a RACI matrix, goal frameworks, cross-functional partnership agreements, and measurement criteria.
I also built a strict content approval governance framework: no production began without a documented creative brief defining audience, key messages, stakeholders, and distribution strategy. No content was published without full documented sign-off. This eliminated late-stage revision cycles and compliance surprises.
2
The Video Storytelling Guild
In 2024, I identified a significant organizational problem: video creators across Achieve's business units were working in silos, unaware of each other's work, duplicating tools and vendor costs, and producing content that was inconsistent in brand voice and quality.
The solution wasn't a memo. It was a structured program.
I founded the Achieve Video Storytelling Guild — writing the formal Articles of Organization including mission, purpose, governance structure, OKRs, and scope boundaries. I grew membership to approximately 15 members across marketing and cross-functional stakeholders, and used the Guild as the vehicle for shared tool governance, brand standards education, and enterprise-wide creative alignment.
3
DAM & Asset Infrastructure
I onboarded Air.inc as the enterprise DAM and secured a position in Air.inc's beta AI tagging program, securing the associated budget approval and managing the ongoing vendor-product development relationship.
I secured budget for, onboarded and structured a LucidLink brand video cloud-based working server which gave us real time access to all large video projects, large video files, to edit off of or upload assets to remotely from anywhere. All of it securely backed up, and helping avoid much of the dreaded and unsafe hard-drive mailing loop.
I built asset architecture that kept brand consistent at scale: Video Brand Guidelines, animated logo packages across multiple brand expressions, MOGRT template libraries, platform-specific format packages, project-coded naming conventions, and multi-location backup protocols across LucidLink, Air.inc, Google Drive, Adobe's Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition.
What I learned about scaling creativity.
The most important thing I learned building a creative operations function from scratch inside a complex, investor-driven organization is this: systems only work when the people who need to use them understand why they exist.
Every workflow I built, every governance document I wrote, every Guild meeting I ran — the goal wasn't the artifact. The goal was shared understanding.
When stakeholders understand why a creative brief is required before production begins, they stop seeing it as a bureaucratic hurdle and start seeing it as a way to protect their time and investment. That shift — from creative work as a service function to creative operations as a strategic capability — is what I'm most focused on building in my next role