Food, Spices, and Reviews—A pandemic story

Imagine a blog and its associated YouTube channel with over 10,000 unique visitors daily. If you’ve ever run a successful blog or video channel, you know what I’m getting to. Deadlines, pressure and “no, I don’t like this” is what we deal with every moment of the day. Oh, and there is always that marketing team report about thousands of people that move away from the video or the website for no apparent reason. In the end, the creative team must deal with all this—and much more! After all, we are a recipe website, and we must retain our customers—at any cost!

The problems with pushing quality content—consistently

Take a number. Any number you can think of is good—and multiply it by 10. Now you know the number of ideas thrown at a creative team every day (the number you thought of initially is the number of stakeholders in your team). While working from the office, shooting these ideas and last-minute reviews was easy. However, things went way out of hand once the pandemic hit, with reviews and ideas flying in every 5 minutes.

We were low on resources and needed recipes out faster than before because people were cooking food at home at a rate that we could not match with our review cycles. To put things into perspective, our recipe website went from 2,000 daily hits to over 10,000 hits per day in a week! What we initially thought was a DDoS attack turned out to be real people who wanted to try out our recipes. It sounds like Christmas came early, right? Well, not when you must ensure quality, consistency, and reliability with 3x the workload.

Here is the list of problems we were facing:

1. Too many ideas floating around
2. Too many comments coming in via email even when a recipe’s creative was nearly final
3. People felt left out of the review thread and could not make head or tail of what was going on
4. Designers and recipe creators were confused
5. It was all a huge mess

This mess resulted in our creative team being under constant duress to maintain quality while not having enough time to get things right the first time around. We needed help, and we needed it in a way that was not overtly technical or required us to read a 12786781236789123-page manual to understand. In short, we needed someone to help us get creatives out without too much fuss or technicality.

Enter QuickReviewer

The moment you tell your team that you’re going to implement a new software, the first thing you hear is “Another new software that promises the world? Again?”. I know, I know. If you’re a creative director under pressure, you will understand what I am getting at.

Here’s how QuickReviewer helped us meet deadlines every time:

1. Everything’s in one place

We created folders for each recipe and added videos, audio, images, PDF files and all other creatives at the exact location. This eliminated the need to hunt around for files in emails or at 100 different locations on a computer. All the files are at one location, and everyone who needs to edit or review them has access. Even better, the entire creative team can share the folder amongst themselves, making it easy to work on more than one file.

2. Reviews are in one place

Now everyone can review the current version of a creative, and others can see their comments to ensure everyone is on the same page. No more email hunting! Even better, I can go back to an older version and see if I missed a comment.

3. Annotations on videos are frame by frame

Goodbye “play-pause-note time stamp-play”. Hello, seamless reviews. My video review team is ecstatic! They can now put reviews and annotations in the video directly instead of typing things such as “10:55-Change the colour of the creative on the top left corner next to the dog creative to blue”. QuickReviewer makes it just oh so easy. Now our reviewers and designers can pause, annotate, and move on. Everything works like clockwork.

4. Website reviews are simple

Recipe creators often needed to see “the whole thing” before they signed off the page. The website review feature allowed us to add a page with the URL, ensuring that reviewers could add their comments just like on any other creative.

5. Side-by-side reviews

We were often asked for the older or original version of a creative so reviewers could do A/B testing. QuickReviewer allows side-by-side views that help to compare both versions simultaneously. We’re so glad this feature is there by default.

A review after nearly a quarter

We used QuickReviewer for three months –of which the first 15 days were with the free forever version. Our reviewers loved it so much that we quickly switched to the paid version and are now using the full power of the platform. We’re churning out creatives in record time—and for the first time, our Christmas and New Year creatives were uploaded a week in advance! QuickReviewer has made the impossible possible!

Final thoughts

Finding review software is easy. Finding the one you love is difficult. With QuickReviewer, we found ourselves using the platform for every aspect of our website, including graphics, headers, videos, audio clips (for our podcast), recipe PDFs, and so much more! In fact, we even have our own acronym for the tool – QR! So whenever our design team is done, they just “QR” the design and everyone else knows where to look.

Try the free version. I highly recommend it. QuickReviewer is unlike any other review platform you’ve seen. I love it, and I hope you do too! Have a lovely new year!

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