The reporting structure of creative operations matters a lot
Where creative operations report, either to the creative team or to marketing operations (MOps), is not a small decision. It shapes your company’s ability to move fast, stay aligned, and turn creativity into real enterprise value. Most companies treat this as a procedural issue. It’s not. It’s strategic.
When creative ops report into the creative org, they protect their autonomy. That means more creative freedom, fewer compromises, and a work environment that supports original thinking. You’re optimizing for creativity, but at a cost. The team often operates in a silo. They’re left out of conversations where strategy, data, tools, and budgets are locked in.
Let’s compare that to being housed under MOps. Creative ops teams suddenly get access to advanced tools, performance data, and, importantly, decision-makers. They’re in the room when campaign goals are formed, tools are selected, data is analyzed, and performance is tracked. That doesn’t just reduce friction, it changes the creative team’s position in the business entirely. They become a true strategic contributor.
Cella’s 2024 Creative Intelligence Report makes this point clear: many in-house teams aren’t being seen as innovation leaders. They’re considered on-demand producers, not strategic operators. That perception changes when operations align with marketing, making creative teams more visible, influential, and capable of delivering measurable business results.
This is about gearing your organization for speed, clarity, and long-term leverage. If creativity and business results both matter to you, which they probably do, this is a decision that demands executive attention.
Know the value of your creative team before you decide anything
Before changing reporting lines, understand where your creative team stands today. Ask three direct questions: Is your creative value clearly understood across the business? Can you measure it? And is it aligned with current company goals?
If the answer is “no” to any of these, your problem is positioning. Creative operations should not be viewed as a support desk for producing deliverables. Their work should be seen as a driver of company performance. But to get there, you need clarity, on value, visibility, and impact.
If your team isn’t receiving the resources it needs, or if it’s being brought into discussions too late, you’re likely dealing with an operational gap. And those gaps can’t be filled by talent alone. You need systems, tools, and a seat at the table early in the process. All of which tend to live inside MOps.
Positioning creative ops under MOps helps fill these gaps. You get workflows that scale, data that shows impact, and more direct input in planning decisions. It’s a step toward validating the business case of creative, not just the aesthetics or execution, but their direct link to revenue, market traction, and performance.
This is where structuring choices start delivering long-term value. If your creative team’s contributions are invisible to the business, no structure will change that. Get clear on the value they offer. Then align the structure to support it.
Integration with marketing operations increases creative ops’ strategic firepower
If your creative operations team isn’t embedded in the core functions of marketing, planning, workflow, reporting, and budgeting, you’re missing leverage. These aren’t peripheral tasks. They’re where business strategy turns into real execution. Creative needs to live in that territory.
When creative ops join forces with MOps in these areas, they shift from executing tasks to driving outcomes. In planning, they bring visibility into timelines and creative capacity early enough to shape better decisions. Right now, that’s not happening often enough. According to Cella’s 2024 Creative Intelligence Report, only 39% of in-house creative teams are part of forecasting and planning conversations. That number tells you most companies are setting goals without clear creative insight. It slows teams down and creates waste.
Workflow alignment also matters. Creative ops can identify where processes break down and fix them. That includes streamlining internal tooling, making sure the right people are using the right platforms, and removing unnecessary steps. Better workflow means faster output and fewer errors.
Then you’ve got metrics and reporting, another weak spot for many teams. Creative output often lacks clear performance data, which means executives can’t track its strategic value. When creative ops are integrated, they define success metrics, build useful dashboards, and contribute to cross-functional analysis. That’s not a reporting layer, it’s strategic intelligence.
Budget and forecasting? That’s where real influence shows up. Creative teams know what it costs to produce high-impact assets. Let them inform the budget. Let them weigh in on prioritization. It’s about using data to back it up and showing where trade-offs can be made.
Put simply, creative operations need the infrastructure, and authority, to act at scale. Embedding with marketing operations makes that possible. The result is faster execution, clearer plans, and more alignment across the organization.
Operational integration removes barriers and ensures alignment
Silos don’t collapse on their own. If your creative ops team is operating in isolation, you’re going to see misaligned priorities, duplicated efforts, wasted resources, and slow reactions to change. That’s a leadership problem, not a team problem.
To fix this, bring creative ops into the same operational system as MOps, or at the very least, ensure there’s structured collaboration. That means shared workflows and visible goals. That means including creative ops subject matter experts in forecasting sessions. And it definitely means sharing real-time performance data across teams, not locking information in functions.
Without that connection, you lose clarity. Creative work doesn’t line up with campaign objectives. Metrics don’t reflect what’s actually being optimized. And project delays turn into business delays.
With proper integration, there’s alignment before execution. Everyone sees the same priorities. Creative understands what the business is targeting. Marketing knows what’s possible from a resource and timeline standpoint. It’s a cleaner system and a more accountable one.
This doesn’t have to mean a full org restructure. Creative ops can still sit within the creative organization. But without intentional alignment, shared accountability, predictable data sharing, and clear process links, your teams will keep missing opportunities to collaborate at full strength.
For C-suite leaders, this is about removing friction. When alignment is built into operations, decisions become simpler, outcomes improve, and creative performance becomes easier to measure, and scale.
Strategic alignment between creative and marketing operations drives scalable success
If you care about scalability, speed, and measurable innovation, you need marketing and creative operations to work as a unified system. When these two functions align, through reporting, tools, planning, or joint accountability, the entire organization becomes more capable of delivering creative work that actually moves the business forward.
That alignment doesn’t require placing creative ops under MOps, but it does require leadership to intentionally engineer the connection. Informal collaboration isn’t enough. High-performing teams build shared KPIs, agree on data definitions, use common dashboards, and structure touchpoints into planning cycles.
This matters more as your operation grows. When creative and marketing ops operate in sync, data can move fluidly, decisions come faster, and strategic shifts happen without breakdowns across teams. It also means creative effort can be measured in terms the business understands, ROI, efficiency gains, campaign performance, not just internal deadlines.
Leadership teams that want to scale should focus less on hierarchy and more on capability. Ask: Are our processes built for visibility and speed? Can both teams work from the same data without second-guessing it? Do they influence upstream planning decisions together, or sequentially after the fact?
If the answer to those questions is no, you’re leaving opportunity on the table.
Creative ops are often closer to the evolving needs of the business than people realize. They sit at the intersection of demand, execution, and delivery. When paired correctly with MOps capabilities, reporting, forecasting, tooling, and budget prioritization, your creative function transforms into a performance asset.
Companies that scale well do this by design. They structure integration, fund both sides of the operation adequately, and tie their output clearly to enterprise results. It’s about building operational systems where their contribution is always part of the equation. That’s when scale starts to feel consistent, and when innovation is no longer at odds with efficiency.
Key executive takeaways
- Reporting structure shapes strategic impact: Leaders must decide whether creative ops should prioritize creative autonomy or operational integration. Positioning under MOps enables greater access to data, tools, and decision-makers, driving stronger enterprise alignment.
- Value clarity drives organizational fit: Before restructuring, executives should assess whether their creative team’s value is clearly understood, measurable, and aligned with broader business goals. If not, operational alignment with MOps can help close the gap with visibility, metrics, and influence.
- Integration boosts planning, speed, and ROI: Embedding creative ops within MOps improves campaign planning, streamlines workflows, and strengthens performance reporting. Executives should capitalize on this integration to enhance forecasting accuracy and quantifiable creative impact.
- Structural alignment reduces silos and inefficiency: Without operational connection, creative teams risk misaligned priorities and delayed execution. Leaders should establish shared goals, structured collaboration, and cross-functional data use to maximize joint outcomes.
- Strategic partnership enables scale and innovation: Scalable creative performance depends on strong, consistent integration with MOps processes and systems. Executives should invest in this partnership to ensure creative work directly supports business performance and agility.
