Digital media and marketing agencies are no strangers to a challenge. But it’s no exaggeration to say that 2020-2021 severely tested people and processes. Working remotely with clients that were (and might still be) working from home, pivoting projects that had changed due to the pandemic, coping with cancellations and reallocated spend… All of these obstacles contributed to a difficult year.
One underlying theme that is certain to continue through the recovery is the need for impeccable creative project management software. Whether dealing with large video files, iterative projects that require multiple levels of signoff and stakeholder input, or international distribution and approval scenarios, creative project management software has delivered success for thousands of agencies of all sizes, and in hundreds of verticals.
If you’re not already using one, you should be. Or if your current solution isn’t coping well with the demands of remote working and large video files, it’s a good time to look at other, smarter solutions.
Ad spend recovery imminent
The coming years are set to see a huge rise in demand for marketing and creative assets across the board. According to the Advertising Association/WARC, advertising spend in the UK has been predicted to rise 15.2% to £27bn in 2021, highlighting a recovery from pandemic lows. The report further predicted a full recovery of the market during 2022, particularly buoyed by strong performance in online display advertising. This includes social media and online video channels, which are forecast to grow and account for two-thirds (66.4%) of UK ad spend in 2021 alone.
That core role of video across these channels should come as no surprise, especially given the accelerated video trend that has been emerging throughout the last 12 months. In a recent annual Hubspot survey, businesses agreed that the use of video as a marketing tool had increased for the sixth year running, while 93% of marketers who use video say that it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. A final astonishing stat from the report is that 87% of video marketers report that video gives them a positive ROI…
Building a better media library
When working with multiple clients, on multiple projects, often with different creative teams, there’s always a danger that content doesn’t get filed away effectively. Instead, the final version of a client video might sit in a folder on someone’s hard drive, where only they can access it. Or maybe it is archived onto a portable hard disk and stuffed in a drawer. If somebody asks for the video again, it’s not always easy to find.
To be fair, most digital agencies already have their own connected media libraries. This might be a dedicated media server in the office, a NAS device, or some rudimentary cloud storage like Google Drive. But these solutions all have their limitations when it comes to managing and storing video. Chief amongst these is the huge size of video files themselves, which can swallow up 150-450MB of space (per minute of HD video). But there’s also speed, discoverability and security to consider, as well as the overall efficiency of the collaborative process – which is where creative project management software comes to the rescue.
Collaboration is the key
Streamlining collaboration in the creative process has long been a challenge for all of those reasons, but the pandemic has thrown these into stark relief. Agencies with strong digital leadership have survived and thrived, concentrating their efforts on delivering quality content for their clients new and old, without internal barriers. As an example of the collaborative explosion we’ve seen, Zoom saw around 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019. In March 2020 that figure had hit 200 million daily meeting participants, rising to 300 million the following month.
The flexibility to work smarter
Digital Asset Management systems (DAM) like Imagen Go can be an answer to these problems. By having a centralised, cloud-based platform to host video, assets can be quickly and easily uploaded by creators and contractors; tagged and catalogued (for speedy discovery and retrieval); then shared to the people that need access to them. Files can be available in different file formats, or clipped and repackaged for use across different media channels.
When it comes to supplying assets to a client, a DAM convincingly beats all other methods of file sharing. With built-in themes, Imagen Go can be customised to reflect an agency brand, presenting a more professional, user-friendly portal for asset delivery. And thanks to built-in security features (such as watermarking, geo-IP blocking and time-limited download links) plus Imagen’s Accelerated File Delivery, video can be securely and speedily shared.
Using one platform for video storage, management and distribution enables an agency to be more efficient and responsive, which becomes particularly useful when juggling multiple clients and multiple deliverables.
Addressing the scalability problem
Looking to the cloud can certainly solve the scalability problem for digital agencies working with video. But adding more storage is only part of the solution. The other part is a MAM/video management system that sits on top of that storage, giving you the processing power and capacity to build, maintain and scale a video library that is accessible, searchable and protected by advanced security features like watermarking and secure downloads. And that’s where Imagen Go starts to shine
Discover how Imagen’s suite of powerful security technologies help protect and preserve your valuable media assets. Book a demo today.
