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Scaling Creative Operations

The first HYPER release of 2025

Last year, we released a Creative Ops Field Guide with our friends at Air, debuted by It’s Nice That. The goal was to fill the gap every creative team was having of “there is no roadmap for this”. The modern social media era has all of us living on the operational edge. We have few best practices, even less shared knowledge, and higher stakes than ever to not just create things that are unique, interesting, on-brand and resonant, but also package and distribute them across a rapidly changing web.

We released this last summer, but even just halfway through the year, things are just different. So to start the year off strong we took the time to update the guide, add exercises, change the callouts, bring in more tools for using references, and make something relevant for all creative teams going into 2025.

Inside you’ll find:

  • The creative work trends that will define 2025

  • 10 steps for better work organization and followup

  • Strategies for staying current

  • New-age tools for improving workflow

  • 5 techniques for making creative references your own

  • A database of new reference sites and newsletters

  • Tactics and content ideation

The guide is available from Air (for free) here:
https://air.inc/hyper

Please note you will need a work email to access.

An excerpt from our introduction

  1. Thoughtful moments versus constant communications. Brands that have it figured out are realizing that they can be more impactful by going dark for a bit.

    By structuring their content in seasons, abandoning a network or two for a few months to double down on where performance is.

    Just because you can be everywhere doesn’t mean you have to be, and this conversation is happening in real times as worn out teams have to choose where to focus.

    Our recommendation - test until you find real, organic momentum that exceeds your expectation, then double down their on your terms.

  2. Two strong creative driven brand personas are emerging. Brands as guides, and brands as entertainment. The third, more cursed persona to be aware of, is brands as views.

    • Brands as guides help consumers navigate challenges and subcultures, focusing on learning and enablement as a core for sales.

    • Brands as entertainment tell their story, or fictional stories, in a way that competes for consumers time spent consuming funny TikToks, Hulu, or Netflix.

    • Brands as views have started to crack social, and do numbers online, but without either of the above, it is merely performance content for performances sake. They do the content, because it works, but its missing the connection that translates to real follows and sales.

  3. Everyone’s content, ad campaigns and ideas look alike, because marketing teams are consuming the same newsletter, following the same creators, the algorithm is giving them the same subconscious ideas. Even the algorithmic driving of moodboard apps is merging culture closer to together. Creative teams that want to stand out are “Referencing above the algorithm” — buying lots of magazines from eBay, traveling as groups to odd places, consuming more physical books, and developing techniques that will give them references unlike anyone else.

  4. Brands who have found resonance with their ideas are “Multi-Platform Narrative Threading” - and telling different but overlapping versions of their story on different social networks, such that fans that are reached across different mediums begin to get a bigger, more holistic view, and feel truly in on the brand story in ways that have never before been possible

  5. Brands are focused on The Elevation of All Touchpoints, aka The Art Direction of Everything. Instead of new initiatives and channels, going back through every consumer touchpoint and improving it, making it unique, and leveraging every existing brand touch to its maximum.

  6. While the above are all trends we are actively observing, this idea of “Doing things that don’t scale” in marketing is one we haven’t seen, but instead expect.

    As more AI content comes, as more customer service becomes handled by agents, as things feel personal but deep underneath aren’t… Brands are going to stand out by being more human and connected than ever.

Get the guide:

Inquiries? Shoot us a note here: hello@hyperstudios.us

We’d love to chat!

Oren & Clayton ❤️ you