Niki Pence
CASE STUDY | ACHIEVE
Building Cross-Collaborative Scalable Creative Operations Infrastructures
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
No centralized media production practice
Solution
Built scalable production workflows
Approach
Modular shooting + reusable asset library
Outcome
Increased output quality, asset organization, & improved consistency
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.
For legal risk management, I designed the Media Release Revocation Process — a cross-functional workflow covering paid media, web, social, email, and DAM asset quarantine, with a dedicated intake channel and automated legal receipt.
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, established quarterly roadmaps and async communications, 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 built the 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, and Frame.io.
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