Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. You’ve gone into a project kick-off full of ideas, optimism and momentum, only for them all to get dropped as the workflows get mapped out. Spontaneity is lost to rigid sequencing, and creativity is sapped by all the hours the team’s going to spend manually manipulating, distributing and managing content. You’re not even started, and already the deadline’s looking shaky.
It’s a nightmare, yet it’s a recurring one for many media and marketing teams. Inefficient and poorly mapped workflows sap the lifeforce from even the most dynamic creators. The time to market is slower, nobody’s enjoying the process, and the end results often show it.
Yet as content and channels multiply, teams are under ever greater loads. Research by IDC found that 85% of marketers felt pressure to create more assets, or deliver campaigns more quickly. In addition, 71% said they needed to create 10 times as many assets to support the ever-growing number of channels available. With budgets tight, and complexity going up, where’s all that productivity coming from?
Automating workflows
But if you’re labouring under disorganised, labour intensive processes, there are huge savings to be made through workflow automation. A video asset management solution is fundamental to faster, more failsafe workflows that transform productivity and make new things possible.
“In an age of automation, after 2-3 times of doing a task manually, there must be an easier and more efficient way.”
Dominik Elmiger, Imagen Marketing Director
Even if you already have a video management platform in place, failure to optimise it – for example, through deep integrations with authoring, mastering or distribution tools – could mean you’re not realising its full benefits. And without redesigning workflows to exploit powerful automated tasks such as transcoding, you’re simply not delivering the improvements you could be.
5 media workflows that depend on video asset management
Your video management platform should be the backbone of all the repetitive workflows that would otherwise be clogging up your organisation’s creative flow, and the enabler of new markets and opportunities. Its applications are almost limitless, but some of the most common workflows include:
1. Ingest – the addition at scale of new content into storage managed by the video platform. Filters, rules and actions ensure assets are loaded with the permissions and other attributes defined by the business.
2. Discoverability – metadata recovered from files or generated automatically transforms your ability to find assets. IDC found 57% of digital asset management users had saved at least a quarter on asset creation costs.
3. Management – automated workflows to transcode, add watermarks or make other changes to content – 49% of respondents said digital asset management streamlined their reviews and approvals processes.
4. Distribution – Worldwide CDN traffic is growing rapidly and is projected to reach 252 Exabytes per month by 2022 (up from 190 EB in 2021). Cloud-based video asset management automates and accelerates content delivery, allowing self-service and push distribution to partners.
5. Monetisation – The data monetisation market is expected to be valued at $370,969 million by 2023. Self-service licensing, ‘web shop’ baskets and other automated features can enable new revenue streams.
A video asset management platform provides convincing benefits throughout the lifecycle of each digital asset, from ingestion through to its eventual archiving. Multiple simplified, automated and accelerated workflows remove the burden of tedious, manual file shuffling from the team. Support for collaborative and distributed working arrangements simplifies productivity among multiple teams, agencies and contributors.
The benefits are extraordinary. According to the IDC study, fully 97% of DAM users improved their productivity by 10% or more. And we see the benefits every day in Imagen’s varied base of media, marketing and other customers, including:
- Aon – whose video workflow used to take 12 days – thanks to Imagen, it’s now 12 hours.
- BBC Media Action – which relies on our automated tagging and format conversion to improve discoverability, and produce clips in any format for insertion into broadcasts.
- LADbible – which uses Imagen’s powerful workflow and cataloguing tools to organise and serve its massive content repository.
Simply put, if you don’t have a video asset management system in place, you’re missing out on the tools you need to untangle asset workflows, accelerate delivery and drive wholesale savings. And even if you do, it pays to ask whether you’ve tapped its full potential. Be curious. Challenge yourself to get more from your platform, and let Imagen be a wake up call from recurring workflow nightmares.
“Imagen has helped to build our perfect workflow, enabling broadcast partners to source the content they need in the fastest possible time.”
Louise Lawler, WTA Media
Discover more about Imagen’s powerful workflow automation features.
