Cartoon Network doubles output in 50% less time with ClickUp

In the fast-paced entertainment industry, it’s critical that Cartoon Network’s social media strategy is organized and that the team has everything they need to create and publish compelling content. Cartoon Network’s existing project management tools were holding the social team’s productivity back. This resulted in a complicated workflow.

“We were using a combination of tools for task management and calendar management,” says Sarah Lively, Director of Social Media at Cartoon Network. “The most painful thing was that when we needed to move a post, which is a daily occurrence, we had to make the update in both systems. You could easily see how that layer of duplicative work is time consuming.”

Cartoon Network’s Social Media team knew they had to find a solution that could tie social media strategy and planning together with content publishing and execution. To make that happen, they needed all of their tools into one platform.

One source of truth aligns teams and boosts productivity

While Sarah’s recommendation to create one source of truth was supported by leadership, a high level of due diligence was essential to moving forward. To give Cartoon Network’s Procurement team confidence that the company was choosing the best new platform for the job, the Social Media team tested almost every solution on the market. Sarah even put together a 17-page comparison report.

Ultimately, Sarah's team decided to adopt ClickUp for three key reasons:

• Custom statuses: Many of the other tools evaluated were too rigid. The flexibility to customize Task statuses and accommodate workflows for different project types across Cartoon Network and Adult Swim was highly appealing.
• Task management UX: Users can quickly decipher comment threads and attach and visualize files, which is crucial when up to 10 people are collaborating in a high-volume, fast-paced environment. The other tools in the evaluation process had a clunky user experience at the task level.
• Dashboards: ClickUp’s comprehensive Dashboards not only allow stakeholders to see a high-level view of the social media’s team impact, but make it easy for the team to run these reports in just a few clicks.

Today, ClickUp is driving big benefits for Cartoon Network. Let’s dive into each.

Real-time collaboration to boost efficiency and save time

With all work and collaboration happening in one platform, the foundation is set for the team to become even more efficient. Sarah and team take full advantage of the time-saving capabilities with ClickUp by creating distinct Templates for each brand network’s processes, allowing the team to save time on project prep and execution. Even better, the team no longer has to worry about managing two different systems.

ClickUp gives the team the trust and accountability needed to move fast. Teams trust the statuses are accurate and that each teammate is accountable at their assigned stage of work as social content moves from ideation to creative and copy review to ready to publish. This makes troubleshooting easy if issues do occur, because everyone can see who is responsible for which aspects of each project.

2. Flexible ways of viewing work accommodate each team’s preference

With ClickUp’s customizable views, from Board to List to Table views, team members can tailor task management, project tracking, and workflow visualization to their preferences.

“ClickUp is so customizable that no matter what someone needs, you can figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t impact the whole system, and that works for everyone,” Sarah says. “There are things like Table View that we didn’t even know we needed until we had them.”

For example, Table View allows users to see all of the social media channels across both Cartoon Network and Warner Brothers that are supporting large marketing campaigns.

3. Real-time insights into the Social Media team's workload and effectiveness

Last but certainly not least, ClickUp Dashboards enable the team to track the real-time progress of their work, which helps prove their value to the organization.

“Before ClickUp, I never knew what our content production was like. The fact that I can now pull data and create Dashboards to show the volume that our small team is producing is what I’m most proud of,” Sarah says. “That was a big change for us to be able to do that.”

Implementing ClickUp has been so impactful for Cartoon Network’s Social Media team that the company plans to expand its use of the platform to more of its global teams and on-air production teams. Cartoon Network also plans to tap into the power of ClickUp Automations to save even more time and focus more closely on the work that matters most.

From complicated workflows to a seamless process, ClickUp helps the social media team use their time more effectively, ensures that the execution matches the strategy, and gives the team confidence that the content they publish is accurate, and complete every time.