July 18, 2017 by Maria Jollie
Digital assets are essential in the media and entertainment industry so there is no doubt that they are valuable. But how do you determine if you are using them as efficiently as possible? It’s important to understand the significance of how you use your digital warehouse so that you can discover areas for improvement and increase the productivity of your media company. An asset is a piece of digital content such as an image, logo, video, recording, etc. that is owned and/or used by your company. The most common areas to increase the profitability of assets for media and entertainment include time, money, and satisfaction.
Time
Time is a valuable commodity in the media and entertainment industry. With so much rich media to curate, your digital assets often need to be accessed by team members across all departments. A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of MediaBeacon found that only 13% of respondents strongly agreed that they have automated processes for their rich media management. To determine how well you are using your assets, track and document the time your team spends on the items below. If your team spends very little time, then you are using your assets effectively. If you see more time being used than you would like, it could be time to consider a solution like Digital Asset Management (DAM).
- Time spent on search and retrieval. Assets are used by teams in many different departments for companies in the film, gaming, music, television, publication, and advertising industries. How many hours does your team spend looking for the assets they need each time they have a campaign to execute?
- Time spent communicating through multiple platforms. A team member might check all the folders and programs they know of to try to find an asset, but don’t find it. So, they start emailing and chatting co-workers to figure out where the asset they are looking for is stored. Now, you have multiple people searching for an asset that could be anywhere, including on an old employees’ laptop or in a long-forgotten email thread. How much time does your team spend communicating through email, chat, project management systems, etc. about assets?
- Time spent finding the right file types. Eventually, your team may end up finding the asset they are looking for but it might be in the wrong format. Then, it’s time to get the creative team involved to see if they can format the image into the right version to be able to use it. How much time does your creative team spend re-designing or re-formatting assets?
- Time spent dealing with customer issues related to errors in content. Maybe your team went through all the effort to find a particular asset, but it turned out to be the wrong version, or an expired version. Your team didn’t realize it and launched the campaign. Now, you have a flood of consumers and brand owners reaching out to your support team to say the asset is wrong or non-compliant and you start to see negative branding as a result. Not only are you dedicating precious support hours to consumer and brand owner responses, but there could be costly PR campaigns required to offset the negativity surrounding the incorrect asset. Additionally, your legal team could be spending extra time trying to pinpoint the issue and make sure there are no significant compliance ramifications for using the erroneous asset. How much time does your team spend on feedback or additional efforts due to errors in your digital assets? How many hours are spent on preventable legal and PR issues?
Money
If you are familiar with the media and entertainment industry, then you probably know that time is money. In addition to the potential savings on time (that equal money) from above, you can see a return on the DAM investment with dollars saved by decreasing costs and increasing the effectiveness of your dollars spent on campaigns. Examine your costs associated with the items below to help understand if there are areas for improvement or if you are effectively using your assets.
- Reduce the cost of new assets by reusing assets. When you have your assets stored and categorized in a searchable fashion, it is easy for your team to re-use assets when appropriate. This eliminates any unnecessary costs from buying or creating brand new images each time a new campaign launches. Only 18% of respondents in a recent study by Forrester Consulting agreed that their organization is able to easily reuse assets across multiple channels, including digital and physical channels. How much money does your company spend on buying assets? Could this be decreased by reusing assets?
- Reduce the cost of human error. When your assets are stored in multiple locations and are sent through multiple channels, the likelihood of images getting lost, corrupted, misused, mislabeled, and deleted is higher. But if you can manage all of your assets in one single source, everything is easily stored, updated, tracked, and available, reducing the cost of compromised assets. How much time and money is spent on errors when it comes to assets for your company?
- Increase revenue by understanding the value of your assets. When you can track how many times each of your assets is being downloaded, you can see what type of content is being promoted the most by your various marketing departments and agencies. This helps you understand what content to focus on for maximum impact. Additionally, you can track the format each piece of content is getting downloaded in to help understand what channels each asset is being deployed on. How well do you understand where your assets are being promoted and how they are performing? Do you have data that can help you decide which types of assets to focus on when generating new media?
Satisfaction
Time and money are easily measurable ways to understand the effectiveness of your digital assets. An equally as significant, but sometimes less measurable outcome of successful assets is related to satisfied consumers, employees, and experiences for potential consumers. The satisfaction of your employees, consumers, and potential customers has big implications on the overall success of the company. Media and entertainment is all about rich content, so you should be delivering it in a way that delights anyone who sees it.
- Happy, productive employees. When your employees have more time to work on campaigns rather than searching for information, they have a more positive work experience. This helps add value to your company by reducing turnover, increasing productivity, and creating an atmosphere where your employees do valuable work. Do you have happy and productive employees?
- Happy, loyal consumers. Having happy, productive employees usually leads to high quality campaigns and interactions with consumers. And when you have happy consumers, you have loyal consumers who turn into brand advocates that refer your products or services to other people. According to recent Forrester Consulting research, 45% of respondents believe that a best-of-breed digital asset management system will help improve the customer experience. Do you have happy, loyal consumers?
- Positive first impressions. You only get one first impression, but each campaign you run has the opportunity to be a first impression for many people, so every campaign needs to be high quality. When you are using your assets effectively, potential consumers are delighted by what they see and are likely to make a purchase or come back to you when they are ready to make a purchase. Do your assets make positive first impressions to potential customers?
Do you notice any areas for improvement in time, money, or satisfaction that could be solved for your media and entertainment enterprise? If you discovered a few places where your company might not be using assets efficiently, a digital asset management (DAM) solution might be just what you need. The best DAM for media and entertainment will have the capability to offer you a smart repository in addition to sophisticated project management capabilities so that you can experience even more value from the solution.
