Member Article

Screendragon chalks up industry-first transforming annotation for marketeers

Screendragon, the Lean Marketing software specialist, today announced the launch of sd_Annotate, the answer to a major pain point within creative and marketing communications teams.

Until now, using iPads and other tablets for marking up marketing materials has been a frustrating experience for in-house teams, agencies and clients alike. Working offsite and onsite previously meant maintaining different marketing apps and ensuring their compliance with enterprise security policies, at significant cost. Now, using sd_Annotate, marketing professionals provide secure, centralized visual feedback on creative assets like advertising campaign proofs, copy drafts and video rushes, early in the marketing lifecycle, when revisions are at their most common and least expensive to correct.

Screendragon’s radically different Lean Marketing approach meant instead of building individual Apps for iOS, Google Android and other platforms commonly used by creatives, sd_Annotate is built with the latest HTML5 technology. Creative users now have extremely powerful mark-up capabilities on standard iPad and tablet browsers and can annotate on all types of creative assets, placing shapes, sticky notes, authentic colors or lines on packaging, print asset or any other common creative asset.

sd_Annotate was co-developed with teams from the world’s most innovative brands to create the optimal user experience for marketing execs at such fast-paced global branded organizations. It needed to be simple to use, across internal and external stakeholders and to sync up real-time annotations made on desktop web in real time. After a successful pilot, it has been adopted by both marketing and agency users at a major global Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company to provide mark-up feedback as part of a global communications compliance workflow process. Empowering its executives to review and approve on their tablets, on the move has been critical to creating time & cost efficiencies in the process and return on investment has been swift.

Avoiding the need to deploy via an Apple or Android app store greatly simplifies the user install and adoption process. Enterprise authentication and compliance is streamlined and content permissions can be accurately controlled. Using sd_Annotate’s review and annotations functionality from within Screendragon’s wider marketing project management or workflow system turns mark-up from an isolated activity into an integral part of Lean Marketing.

John Briggs, CTO, Screendragon explains “Of all the current Apps on the market, none met our customers’ needs. Most annotation tools are limited to the types of file they support, nor do they automatically synch the same document in real-time with file annotations on laptops and desktops.”

sd_Annotate’s features include:

• Real-time synchronization between tablet and desktop annotations
• Trigger Approval and Change Request workflows
• Mark-up with both fingertip and stylus with high quality pinch and zooming of graphical assets into finer details
• Wide range of drawing tools and pantone colors available for annotation.
• Sticky note commenting with discussion/reply feature
• Automated Email notifications based on user actions
• Fully integrated with workflow modules in Screendragon’s suite of marketing applications

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Screendragon .