How future proof is your creative production process?

  1. chevron left iconHow future proof is your creative production?
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censhare Editorial TeamSeptember 25, 2015
  • Digital Asset Management
  • Content Management

It is predicted that by 2018, marketing organizations that invest in creative production management will increase project capacity by 30% and decrease time to market by 75%.

This is set against a backdrop where markets are becoming ever increasingly competitive. Marketing departments are under even greater pressure to deliver projects and creative output faster against ever dwindling budgets.

It is thought, however, that effectively managing the creative production process through the right technologies and resources will result in significant benefits not only for marketing departments but also for the organization as a whole including:

  • Enabling existing resources to support more marketing programs.
  • Decrease time to market for content, campaigns, promotions and product launches.
  • Increase time in the market before products become obsolete by getting to the market faster.
  • Reduce agency fees by streamlining processes and facilitating faster decision-making.

Yet how can these investments best be made?

Much will depend on the nature of the marketing department and growth stages of the organization and what the future will look like.

The vendor map is quite confusing. The best possible solutions are likely to come from one of 3 major technological directions:

Digital Asset Management (DAM) providers where the strength lies in being able to ingest, store, retrieve, collaborate and manage rich media assets and having the ability to manage the lifecycle and reuse of the assets through workflows.

Workflows are also used for creative reviews and approvals — for example, idea/concept approvals, budget approvals and content approvals, as well as agency, branding, legal, and compliance reviews and approvals.

By automating the review, search and approval process, the creative review process can be reduced by 50% or more for most initiatives. Further improved productivity gains can also be achieved through easy search and reusable assets.

The downside however is that DAM solutions do not include the planning and budgeting features that are foremost in tools such as Marketing Resource Management solutions.

Marketing Resource Management (MRM) solutions enhance a company’s ability to optimize and manage internal and external marketing resources and run projects in the creative production process. MRM solutions miss the in-depth feature set for asset editing, alteration, versioning and management.

What MRM also provides is budgetary control and project management capability to keep projects in time and allow faster collaboration, which in turn can drive a faster time to market for product introductions.

Faster decision-making and streamlining agency and freelance collaboration are the results of advanced MRM and content management solutions, cutting time in the overall journey from idea to fruition.

Content Management solutions, often chosen for the network and digital capability. Do not expect enterprise wide document management solution to act as a substitute for DAM or MRM. They very often play the role of a content repository in a strategy of cross-channel optimization of content, particularly for digital channels, as organizations across all verticals increase their efforts to render delivered experiences that are more relevant, compelling, engaging and ultimately effective. However they still do not have the capability to handle assets in a way a DAM would nor budgetary and resource and project management in the way of MRM solutions.

So what would be the ideal answer for the type of technology that could satisfy your future needs?

One suggestion is to integrate the best of breed from each of these individual solution tools sets.

All the right parts are there but problems can still arise when different solutions are bolted together as the smooth running creative production process becomes ‘clunky ‘ rather than seamless.

By far the best solution arises from providers that have placed content management, DAM and MRM as the core of their technologies. The combination of these three solution areas allied with technological flexibility to be configured according an organization’s needs both now and in the future will not only result in significant organizational benefits in terms of speed to market, improved productivity and cost reduction but also drive competitive advantage. Have a look at our solutions to learn more how to streamline your creative production process.

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censhare Editorial Team

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