Choosing the Right Technology for Your Marketing Team

By: Ryan Miller

Let’s talk about what it means to be efficient as a creative professional for a minute.

Efficiency is the ability to achieve maximum production with minimal wasted effort and energy expended.

And all creatives strive to find that balance between efficiency and creativity.

It’s a fine line to walk without becoming either too sloppy in your work or losing all the heart and soul that drives you to create something truly exceptional for your clients.

You may have thoughts like these:

• How much time do I really need to spend researching options?
• How many sketches before I can get to my best possible solution?
• How many cups of coffee can I have before the number of bathroom breaks really start cutting into my development time?

As part of our ongoing COACT Book Club, our team just finished reading the wonderful book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.

Clear outlines some great ways to try and rewire the way you think about efficiency and how day-to-day improvements – as microscopic as they may be – will stack up over time and accumulate to wonderful results.

Get 1% better every single day, and you’re literally seeing an improvement of 365% by the end of the year.

His intentions are to give you the proper toolset to understand how you can be more efficient rather than just giving you an arbitrary list of “life-hacky” solutions and tricks.

And in truth, that’s how everything we work towards in life operates, doesn’t it? Time + effort = results.

You won’t instantly be good at playing the guitar, but once you get past that big hurdle, that grinding little obstacle that takes days and weeks and months of struggling and practice to get over, the payoff is exhilarating.

That moment when it all clicks, and your mind and fingers finally connect in harmony (no pun intended), the sense of accomplishment is like no other.

And not surprisingly, it’s pretty darn beneficial to your mental health.

The Technology Hurdle

But we creative professionals have another little annoying hurdle to get over, and it’s something that’s not always in our control. Yes, my friends, I’m talking about technology.

They say it’s a bad craftsman who blames his tools, but that’s only applicable when you have the correct tools to begin with.

Carving wood with a properly maintained and sharpened bench plane? Like a hot knife through butter.

Carving that same wood with said hot butter knife? Not gonna happen, chief.

But not all creative endeavors are created equal, and not all creatives require the same tools to get the job done.

At COACT, we take great pride in being as flexible as possible with a strong emphasis on mobility to ensure that we are making regular interactions with our clients and teams.

That mobility means we can work just about anywhere from bustling manufacturing facilities, to 30,000 feet in the air, and occasionally, a nice, quiet, temperature-controlled office.

Our marketing team has an incredible range of skills and disciplines allowing us to tackle just about any problem that comes our way.

Videography, animation, photography, social media and market strategy, content creation and strategy, graphic design, web development, software development… you get the idea.

While each member of our team requires a computer to operate in 2019, we don’t all require the same solution to get our work done.

For example, our videographer may require a good traveling kit in order to capture and store that perfect shot while out on the road, but in order to process, edit and render that video, he needs something with a lot of power under the hood.

Especially when he captures his subjects in crisp, beautiful 4K. More often than not, that means an immobile, but powerful desktop computer.

Our manager of marketing, however, who meets regularly with clients in person or in one of our various meeting rooms at the COACT office? A laptop computer makes far more sense to effectively communicate and strategize with clients anywhere need be.

(Especially when a hail of nerf bullets rains down on our department, not unlike the opening scene to American Gods.)

Sometimes, you just need a quiet place to think.

While we’re starting to see the gap in performance vs. mobility shrink ever so slightly, we’re still in an era where creatives need to choose between mobility and raw computing power.

Infographic: Laptops vs. Desktops: A (Mostly) Unbiased Comparison

Ever the avid researcher, I wanted to investigate what solution is best for each member of our team and just who exactly benefits from the functions of either a laptop or a desktop computer.

Initially, I wanted to put together an in-depth presentation for our leadership team, citing all kinds of sources, big numbers and scary facts about cost vs. performance, the cost of mobility… and I can see I’m losing you already.

Often a cause of tension and discomfort amongst creatives, I decided an infographic might inject some much-needed life to this topic we often struggle with.

And when I was done, I realized that this information doesn’t just apply to us; it can apply to other marketing departments as well.

Check out this infographic to answer the not-so-age-old debate of laptops vs. desktops: an unbiased comparison.

Choosing What’s Best for Your Team

So, how do you decide what’s best for you?

Ask yourself a few questions:

• Where does your department stand in the choice between power and mobility?
• Are you paying more to be mobile when building a powerful desktop solution would be a more fiscally and process-efficient solution?
• Is a desktop keeping you from making those important client interactions needed to build strong, lasting client relationships?
• Or do you maybe really just want to be that guy and play with your Oculus rift headset in the middle of LAX while you wait for your next flight? (Who are we to judge? You do you!)

The ultimate verdict is that there is no one-size-fits-all computer, and no one solution is better than the other. Both offer pros and cons.

It’s about selecting the right technology for your team that empowers them in their workflows to produce excellent work, efficiently.