Rich Media: Images, Video, Business Asset and Intellectual Property

"Content chaos" is something organizations have become very familiar with, but discussion about it is often limited to email, documents, forms, contracts and spreadsheets. Many organizations overlook the importance of rich media as a valuable component of their enterprise’s collective intellectual property. Primarily the realm of marketing departments, so-called digital assets must be considered essential to any sound enterprisewide ECM strategy.

Take, for example, the recent findings from independent research organization GISTICS Incorporated, indicating that the absence of a digital asset management (DAM) system forces the typical company to spend upwards of 2.9 minutes searching for a single file. More importantly, the user typically fails to locate the desired file 39% of the time. Similar to the problems with locating and accessing traditional business content, such as email and documents, the inability to readily find and retrieve rich media files leads to cost and process inefficiencies.

Adding to the challenge, organizations are faced with a mounting number of file types and distribution channels. In order to deliver their critical marketing message to target audiences and stakeholders, organizations must fully leverage their rich media across a variety of distribution devices—such as TV, Web, cell phones, digital media players and in-store advertising.

Rich media usage is exploding, and it will continue to expand within the typical corporate enterprise. Although DAM has traditionally been used in companies where media drives the business (entertainment, advertising, media, etc.), digital content is also having a profound impact across virtually every business. DAM has clear and tangible benefits to a wide variety of industries, and progressive organizations are beginning to treat rich media as the intellectual property that it is—leveraging to generate competitive advantage and incorporating it with broad ECM strategies to generate a truly holistic view of business content.

The Opportunity to Control Brand Assets
Regardless of the industry, marketing is a ubiquitous function, one that has traditionally managed the lion’s share of a company’s rich media — logos, collateral, TV and radio spots, corporate video, photographs, product packaging design, graphics and presentation materials. Marketers managing both established and emerging brands need to understand that today’s multichannel, digitally oriented environment requires a well-conceived digital asset management strategy to ensure ongoing brand integrity with the ability to scale up your marketing team’s ability to produce new types of digital marketing products. As budgets remain tight and new regulations impose greater scrutiny on marketing spend, marketers must justify expenses with a defensible return on investment.

Certain companies need a strong marketing asset management solution more than others. Companies who spend a lot on advertising and work with multiple agency partners can realize an incredible return on investment by creating and controlling a centralized repository for all brand assets. Companies with large sales teams, especially those in the hi-tech, pharmaceutical and financial services industries, are challenged with keeping digital marketing materials up-to-date and disseminated. Companies that deal in "packaged goods" have complex workflows and policies involving large digital media files that surround the packaging of products. Marketing departments need to distribute these assets from the points where they are created ("production") to the points where they are used ("operations") and in the formats needed for those uses. Whether the media are meant for large format print or broadcast (very large files in the multiple gigabyte range) or for presentation on a Web page (as small as several kilobytes), organizations must craft efficient ways for rich media to be located and used by those who need them.

This means both the rich media elements and the metadata that describes them need to come together; beginning with the collaborative creative process, and flowing smoothly into the media distribution processes where the media are used. Imagine product photography created by a retail company to support its product marketing campaigns. The asset management solution must ensure that business-related metadata, like the all important product code, SKU or UPC information, is captured and made available as the assets are received from the creative services department, approved for usage and delivered to the Web department for use in an online catalog, or the marketing operations group for use in a print brochure. Without this information, the effort required to actually use digital media will remain very high.

Rich Media Chaos?— Help Is On the Way
While the recent focus of "content chaos" surrounds the burgeoning amount of email and documents, organizations often overlook the importance of rich media to broad ECM and intellectual property management.

Even though the flavor and amount of rich media assets differ among industries, DAM provides similar (and tangible) benefits:

• Increased revenues due to the flexibility of repurposing assets (e.g., the licensing and resale of easy-to-find rich media);
• Lower costs result from collaborative workflow, business processes and productivity enhancements (e.g. reduces duplicated work and workflow bottlenecks);
• Strategic advantages resulting from the efficiency that DAM provides (e.g. faster time to market);
• Sophisticated support for unstructured rich media content types—video, audio, images and desktop formats from Adobe and Quark; and
• Greater control over brand messages across all your media campaigns, encompassing print, television, Web, mobile devices, etc.

DAM: Clear and Significant ROI
There is no single metric for measuring the ROI for DAM. Measuring ROI depends on how the DAM system is implemented. Oftentimes, DAM is employed to establish a clear brand message, while other times it is integral to the full content development, production and distribution lifecycle. Over recent years, organizations have identified a variety of business drivers for DAM systems. These include: excessive time locating and accessing files; lack of flexibilitywithin business processes and workflows; poor collaboration around rich media; and the inability to include rich media as part of holistic compliance programs.