Marketers taking work in-house isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s a growing trend — one that has pros and cons — that’s affecting agencies at a time when they’re feeling the pressure of more project work and fewer agency-of-record assignments. Marketers aren’t simply taking work in-house to stop working with agencies but to have a greater hand in how their marketing is handled and to be more nimble when that’s required.
The modern workplace has radically transformed. Where we work, how we work, and what we work on are no longer the same as they were ten, or even five years ago. Marketing, IT, and other enterprise leaders today have to ensure that their teams can succeed while dealing with massive change and limited resources. This shift requires new approaches to getting work done to enable teams to move at the speed and scale of digital.
Join us for a live workshop to learn how you can master modern work. Whether you’re a power user or a newbie, you’ll get the training you need to get things done and do them right. Get inspired and add rocket fuel to your career.
Media asset management (MAM) is sometimes used interchangeably with digital asset management (DAM). They both help manage assets, but are they really the same thing? Sort of…
What is media asset management?
Media asset management (MAM) is the process and software used to manage high-
volume video and multimedia files. It originated within the film and broadcast industry to accommodate the need to manage large rich media files. As a result, MAM became an essential part of the video production process as it allows you to store and manage your rich media library from a centralized, reliable source.
Screendragon is a leading project, resource and workflow management software solution designed for marketing, agency and professional services teams. Trusted and loved by global enterprises and agencies including Kellogg's, Virgin Atlantic, McCann World Group and TBWA.
The uncomfortable truth about DAM is it takes a lot of effort, it costs more money than anticipated, it needs more resources than planned, and needs more pre-DAM strategy and effort to make it all work.
But, it’s worth it.
John always remind people to not only be prepared, but be ready for the DAM journey because it will take time, and it will be worth your while.
It's a familiar story: trying to do too much with too little, sorting out the best tools for the job, losing sleep over all of the things thrown at you…and what's that, you'd like to have a rewarding career too?
Here's an idea: instead of trying to figure everything out by yourself, why not just connect with fellow DPM pros, and get a front row seat to all of the latest strategies, tools and resources? In just two months, we're bringing together DPMs from across the world to do exactly that at the Digital PM Summit. Read on for some of the agenda highlights, and what speakers pledge to teach you.
We all need to read and cherish the core texts from the brilliant marketing minds. Reading How Brands Grow, The Long and Short Of It or Ogilvy On Advertising should be part of any marketer’s training. But they should only be table stakes. If you’re looking for a fresh perspective, it can be useful to pull concepts from books and places your peers won’t think to explore.
To find an ‘edge’, it’s important to steal with zeal from other disciplines and find ways to apply your findings. We’re often told that marketers should be ‘T’ shaped (know one area really well and understand the broad strokes of others). This should also apply across disciplines – being a generalist in what you read and learn about, rather than specialising in just one area. Specialisation is for insects.
Advanced digital businesses are evolving their business models and embracing new technology. New ways of working require a focus on skills, not roles as more people are choosing to take the freelance career path. Over the last five years, the freelance market in the US has grown by $3.7 million to over $60 million. The Gig Economy is booming but there are many challenges associated with hiring freelancers. Join this webinar to find out how to overcome obstacles such as on-boarding, work management, resourcing, time management and off-boarding.
Content Marketing World is the one event where you can learn and network with the best and the brightest in the content marketing industry.
You will leave with all the materials you need to take a content marketing strategy back to your team – and – to implement a content marketing plan that will grow your business and inspire your audience.
Over 120 sessions and workshops presented by the leading brand marketers and experts from around the world covering strategy, storytelling, ROI, demand generation, AI, and more new ideas than you can shake an orange stick at.
In 2018, 3,700+ marketers from over 50 countries joined us – we expect even more in 2019! More brands, more breakouts, more hands-on forums, more networking (yes, it’s possible!) and more CONTENT!
"An essential gathering of professionals proving that no matter how sophisticated an online experience can be, it can't compete with the energy and electricity of face-to-face engagement."
These days we expect customer service to be quick, efficient, and effective. Business stakeholders want their work prioritized quickly, all while delivering a first-class service.
We know that’s a lot to ask in a service desk portal. Through Jira Service Desk in the Atlassian suite, Content Bloom has implemented several SD portals that enable IT professionals, content editors, business stakeholders, and product owners the visibility, quality, and measurement they are asking for.
In this article, Content Bloom
will uncover and touch on some of our favorite strategies and tactics, so you can immediately improve your Jira Service Desk.
Articles:
- EMBRACING THE DARKNESS: SETH PIMENTEL’S JOURNEY TO ARTISTIC FREEDOM By Jamie Matroos
- AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK LOOKS AT DYSLEXIA IN A NEW LIGHT By Charles Purdy
- MOVING PICTURES: REBECCA MOCK HAS TURNED GIFS INTO AN ART FORM By Scott Kirkwood
- HOW TO MAKE A STRETCH EFFECT IN ADOBE PHOTOSHOP By Joe Cavazos
Nearly 70% of marketing operations professionals say they’re using so many tools it actually makes their jobs more complicated -- when the whole point of adding technology is to optimize and streamline marketing.
To be truly efficient, marketing operations teams need a solid strategy for crafting and connecting their ideal martech stack. At the same time, you have to consider the needs of your entire marketing department, including connecting teams, eliminating inefficiencies, automating workflows and providing a single source of truth. Easy, right?
Join Workfront for this live webinar as we share six, simple steps to build a martech stack that can help your marketing department work more effectively, amp up your efficiency and improve collaboration.
Attend this webinar and learn:
- The process for designing an enterprise-grade martech stack
- How to refine, optimize and evaluate your tech stack to support organizational goals
- How to map your current martech tools to your workflow to achieve your ideal state
- The secret to integrating key systems to form a single source for truth
It’s in our nature to try to control our surroundings. But Lee, a famous martial artist, film star and cultural icon, understood that there is power in mastering the art of detachment.
In many ways, Lee’s philosophy has less to do with “toughing” things out and more about balancing our energy — of becoming flexible instead of trying to exert our will. And this easily applies to our tendency to overwork ourselves.
While startup culture often glorifies the 24/7 hustle, one of the biggest misconceptions about building more resilience at work is that we have to gut things out, when in reality, it’s about taking the time to fully recharge.
You’ve been eyeing that upgrade to a new or a better DAM but now it’s time to find the budget to make it happen. Join MediaBeacon Solution Architect Chris Janczar as he explains how to make the argument for your next DAM initiative and learn:
- How to explain the value of your digital assets
- How to show your decision-makers the need to allocate budget to DAM
- Tools to present the case for your DAM initiative
A link to the recording will be shared post-webinar with all registrants.
As new technologies emerge and client demands increase, the need for improvement is ever-present, and with that comes change. Change is an essential element of doing business and the process for implementing and evaluating change is even more critical.
In this webinar, you’ll hear sage wisdom from two thought leaders who have been in the trenches, implementing software systems and streamlining workflows for some of the most lauded creative agencies in North America. They’re going to teach you how to take the sting out of change by managing fears and having a plan that mitigates risk and ensures success.
This insightful webinar will cover these topics and more:
- What to avoid when revealing impending changes to co-workers
- How to build and assess your internal change management team
- The importance of role mapping and definitive job descriptions
- Providing a tailored tech stack so your team can scale
- How to solicit and evaluate change ideas
Who should you pick to lead your company’s digital transformation? Imagine you have a choice of three candidates:
- William — an insider who has a proven track record but doesn’t know much about digital
- Sarah — a young digital guru who’s just led a new category expansion at Amazon
- Sophia — a sharp ex-McKinsey consultant with experience advising clients on digital
Which would you pick? Most of the executives we survey pick Sarah, the digital guru. But is that the right choice?
Getting documents approved in a structured, timely fashion is one of the more understated challenges in project management. You might have everything lined up perfectly, but if a key stakeholder doesn’t give the ‘okay’ on schedule, things can go downhill quickly.
To add to your problems, “quality” is inherently subjective in nature. Designer A might approve a design in a heartbeat, but Designer B might dump it in the trash. The end result is wild inconsistencies in what gets approved and what gets rejected.
This is why developing a document approval process is crucial for every agency. Subjective quality criteria and ad-hoc approval can work fine for small agencies, but any business that wants to scale will want to standardize the how, when, who, and what of the approval process.
Sitecore has announced the release of 22 new eCourses and 4 redesigned, modernized instructor-led courses. The groundbreaking on-demand model lets learners customize their experience and learn by reading, watching, doing, or playing and is available 24/7 via laptop, tablet, and/or mobile device.
In today’s world no system can operate in a silo. Interconnectivity between systems is essential to enable users to achieve maximum efficiency and productivity. Screendragon provides deep integrations with almost every top enterprise system on the market today, and our road map is filled with more to come.
The ANA has teamed with the Boston Consulting Group and Reed Smith on an initiative to understand the top concerns in-house agencies have for both creative content development and legal issues. Importantly, our work also provides strategies to address those concerns.
In-house agency penetration is rising and workloads are increasing. According to the landmark 2018 ANA study, "The Rise of the In-House Agency," 78 percent of ANA members have an in-house agency and for 90 percent of those agencies, the workload has increased in the past year.
Our new study, "Managing In-House Agency Creative Content and Legal Concerns," identifies four primary issues in-house agencies have with creative content development:
- Attracting top-tier in-house agency talent
- Keeping in-house agency talent energized
- Applying key marketing processes
- Having healthy creative tension
Andrew Ofstad is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Airtable. Previously, he lead the redesign of Google’s flagship Maps product, and before that was a product manager for Android. Andrew studied Electrical Engineering and Economics at Duke after a childhood in rural Montana.
The information needed to support even the simplest ecommerce or retailer website, its output and input channels, its integrated systems and related platforms, is phenomenal. And of course, keeping it up to date and in order is a mammoth task. A single brand may have a variety of products range on sale across numerous retailers and countries, and undergoing endless iterations and innovations. Every change has to be fluidly and accurately logged, distributed, and published. And equally, every redundant asset has to be found, and either removed, archived, repurposed or even deleted for good. Just thinking about it all is enough to give you a migraine.
Everyone wants to jump on the DevOps bandwagon. This de facto standard for software development that has taken the IT world by storm ensures quicker results, an increase in agility and a reduction in manual errors. Companies like Amazon and Netflix have embraced DevOps principles, which has allowed their teams to produce thousands of builds a day and millions of production releases a year, leading to a truly agile business model.
You might have developed the best creative in the world as far as your central team is concerned, but the real test is when the time comes to implement the creative in local markets.
Carrying out thorough research is key to ensuring your global creative can be adapted for local markets — but if you rely on central assumptions, the road ahead will be rocky.
Read on to discover the common stumbling blocks businesses face when they haven’t taken local markets fully into consideration, ways to avoid them, and how a global toolkit can help.
In this video, Julia Arenson, Head of Creative Production at VCCP Blue discusses the key principles of candour, collaboration and ownership.
These days, it’s not uncommon for design teams to double in size in less than 12 month, and not just in tech startups. Insurance, banking, and many other industries with long histories are investing in design as they feel competitive pressure from younger companies using digital customer experience as a competitive advantage. Design is increasingly seen as a key component of any successful company — great news for those of us in the design field.
Picturepark is offering a webinar to introduce people to the Picturepark Content Platform. The webinar will provide you with:
- A general introduction to Picturepark.
- The Picturepark Content Platform in a nutshell.
- Headless publishing and master data capabilities.
- Semantic metadata & AI principles.
OK, first of all, nobody is going to teach you how to actually kill an intern. Instead, this is about how I almost killed our interns by unintentionally breaking their hearts.
Through exit interviews, I became newly empathetic to their struggles. Even when you’re young and talented, it’s not easy to break into our business without the resources and connections to get that coveted first job.
The Apollo 51 program is a network of creative shops committed to doing just that. It comprises 18 agencies, including Droga5, BBH, BBDO, Grey and Mekanism, the last of which is my workplace, with a goal of launching the careers of diverse future talent. We’ve been able to curate our internship programs into one that ensures there is more diversity at the ground level of our creative teams—at least 51 percent diverse talent, to be exact.
A digital transformation is a business transformation. It should be treated as a process - not a project.
It is easy to fall into the trap of treating a transformation like a technology project, but technology is the facilitator, not the end. At the outset, a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how your business will fundamentally change will require a more holistic approach.
Whether you are rolling out Analytics, IoT, Cloud, Social, AI, Mobile, Blockchain, Martech or Augmented Reality, digital transformation is all about being agile - move with speed, make adjustments and move forward.
Focusing on five essential elements will help to maximize the return on digital investments.
What are project management methodologies? A project management methodology is essentially a set of guiding principles and processes for managing a project. Your choice of methodology defines how you work and communicate.
So how do you choose a project management methodology?
The names of people, places, and things help us understand and navigate the world. The same holds true in digital environments, where descriptive names allow files to be easily understood, located, and retrieved.
Everything from file folder directories to collaborative work tools are more effective if their digital files have thoughtful and appropriate names. So it should come as no surprise that strong file naming conventions also help maximize the power and efficiency of a digital asset management (DAM) platform.
Neil often get asked where the idea for a Global Marketing Supply Chain came from and how it sustains the creative value chain. It’s an interesting evolution that comes primarily from the experiences I’ve gained in the field having been fortunate to work with many thought leaders and clients to understand how their businesses have evolved, and the role content has played as we move into this digital-first world.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” said one of the most influential management consultants of all time, Peter Drucker. Or at least Mark Fields said he said it. This was 2006, before Fields went on to become chief executive of Ford motor company, and the quote has been circulating online ever since.
As popular as this aphorism is, most executive boards pay only lip service to the idea. Just 20% of respondents in one survey said they spent any time managing or improving culture, according to Andrew Cave in Forbes. In fact, 63% failed to routinely consider the impact of culture on business, and only a quarter said they perform an internal or external audit of their culture.
In this video, Kelly and I discuss how we approach this issue. We talk about how we deal with requests for extra work when our teams are already maxed out. Find answers to questions like:
- Who should I approach with the request first, and why?
- Is it okay to bribe my team? What can I bribe them with?
- When should I issue a change request for additional out of scope work?
Watch the video, and find some additional resources in the links below to help you motivate your overworked team.
Agencies are seeing an uptick in younger employees reporting burnout.
Some see it as a symptom of a buyer’s market, with agencies encountering a faster-paced work environment, longer hours, tighter budgets and harsher deadlines to keep clients happy. Others believe younger employees, specifically millennials, might not know how to unplug from work or set work-life boundaries. How burnout manifests and how employees report it varies by agency, and by employee.
The impact of micro moments can be hard to quantify in the workplace. Even the most avid follower of time and motion studies would be hard pressed to account for the cost of a single extra click or unspoken thought. But bring thousands, or perhaps millions, of those micro moments together and a company is suddenly faced with an enormous chunk of time and money that it can either win or lose.
A great example of this, point and case, is the effect that unique, joint venture agency, Spark44, and a digital asset management (DAM) platform has had on Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) business results.
Agile frameworks can be overwhelming to marketers encountering them for the first time, so it’s no wonder the simplest practices have the highest adoption rates.
Few things are simpler (at least on the surface) than the daily stand up, making it one of the first rituals to make it into a new Agile team’s day-to-day routine.
When done right, Requests for Proposals (RFPs) will lead to more relevant and revealing responses from vendors. Alas, most RFPs become overly vague and feature-driven, rather than outcome focused. We can do better.
The Designers’ Secret Source
The best design inspiration — expertly curated for you.
IntelligenceBank CEO Tessa Court explains five ways in which technology can prevent a marketing compliance breach
The FDA and Federal Trade Commission’s recent crackdown on social media influencers omitting health warnings about nicotine has once again put the topic of compliance in the spotlight among marketers. With so much more now at stake for brands, many C-suite executives are having to check that their marketing departments are dotting their ‘i's and crossing their ‘t’s as well as ensure measures (such as the right tech) are in place so the company doesn’t end up being slapped with a compliance breach.
The day-to-day life of remote work has its upsides. Your commute is the distance between your bed and your living room. You have privacy. You can wear what you want, eat when you want, and set up your desk how you want. In a way, it’s liberating.
But it’s also lonely. “I really love working remotely, but it seems like the relationships I have with my virtual peers are merely professional and nothing more,” says Déborah Andrade, the San Francisco-based vice president of communications for the Brazilian data warehouse SlicingDice. “I don’t feel my remote colleagues are as much a part of my life as they’d be if I worked with them in person.”
Summer is here and many within the Bureau community are taking the time to pick up a new book, plug into a fresh podcast or tidy up tools and operations. This month, we have recommendations on services, tools and reads to help improve the way you work and offer inspiration.
In a recent survey conducted by Nuxeo, the leading cloud-native Content Services Platform (CSP), two-thirds (67 percent) of respondents said sensitive content is accidentally leaked externally at least once a quarter, while one in five (20 percent) said this happens at least once a month.
The survey of 1,000 sales, marketing, and creative professionals in the US and UK also revealed that 74 percent of respondents have recreated content they know exists but cannot find.
A lack of the right tools to manage company content was a clear theme that emerged from the study. More than half of respondents (56 percent) admit to using systems or tools not provided by their company to store and share company content, a concept known as shadow IT.
A recent Gartner Report predicts that by 2021, only one-quarter of all midsize and large organizations will successfully target new ways of working in the majority of their initiatives. Which means most will fall behind when it comes to enabling distributed and multi-generational workforce via cloud-based tools, adopting IoT to transform the physical workplace, and leveraging new technologies to drive higher employee and customer engagement.
Yes, the new technologies might be installed. Some employees may even be trained to log in and use them. But a truly successful digital workplace goes further: it helps employees understand how to use these new tools to solve problems and create opportunities that provide unanticipated value to the organization. Over the next several years, this — the ability to creatively exploit emerging technologies, rather than simply knowing how to use them — will be the greatest source of competitive advantage for 30% of organizations.
Join Fellow Operators in San Francisco. It’s tough to gain traction and champion the good of the team when your view is narrowed to your own set of experiences or those of your company. Hearing from others who do the same thing you do every day helps you sort through your ideas and challenges, and avoid costly missteps. So let’s get together in San Francisco and fine-tune our operations together. Also come in early to join the Team Dynamics Workshop for some extra value!
Artificial intelligence brought the promise of automating one of the most time-consuming and manual processes in digital asset management – asset tagging. With artificial intelligence, thousands of existing and new assets can be processed in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.
But, while AI is able to suggest relevant metadata, human verification is still required to evaluate the levels of accuracy and relevance to the business. As we implement AI into a DAM, we need to be careful to do so in a way that makes asset metadata more meaningful, not less, so that DAM administrators can make assets more easily discoverable.
Here are 6 best practices to help you achieve this and ensure your team successfully implements artificial intelligence in your DAM.
Abigail Hart Gray, Director of UX at Google, is one of the most inspiring design leaders we know. A self-proclaimed analytics nerd, Abigail uses numbers to deftly communicate the value of design to her colleagues, giving her team the runway to do great work.
In this episode of the Design Better Podcast, Eli and Aarron get Abigail’s take on measuring design’s impact on business, how parenthood has changed her approach to problem solving, and more.
With DAM Europe just over, here is some great content that you may have missed in the run-up to Europe's largest conference dedicated to Digital Asset Management.
Whether you traveled to London for the event or your on the daily commute, enjoy something to make the journey go that little bit quicker.
As organizations grow and become more complex, it becomes necessary to implement a project management solution to effectively distribute resources and meet deadlines. But, while a project management solution can help to assign tasks and coordinate people, it doesn’t offer an effective way to manage work-in-progress and final files. This often results in files being stored on individual creatives’ desktops or unorganized in disparate storage solutions.
This is where digital asset management (DAM) comes in.
Digital asset management (DAM) offers organizations a single source of truth for all their customer experience assets: from images, photos and videos, to 3-D, audio and editorial content. But DAM is more than just a parking lot where those assets sit — it’s an interactive solution that enables organizations to create a true hub for customer experience content.
The key to that difference is its use of metadata and taxonomy. But what exactly are these functionalities?
As VP of Program Management at the real estate company JLL, Rose Hayes has worked all over the world. “I’ve taken conference calls from hot tubs on Greek island, and I dog-sat in Guam for a month,” she says. She also tells the story of sitting outside a dumpling shop in Hiroshima when she got a notification on her phone to approve a charter, which she was able to review and approve right on the spot.
Currently, she lives and works on the north shore of Kauai, Hawaii.
Register for Brandfolders webinar, Minimal Disruption Involved, with NEON Consulting, specialists in MarTech delivery. We’ll be discussing:
- Practical tips on how to gain widespread adoption and simplify workflows
- How to champion a tool intended to be used by hundreds or even thousands of users
- How to avoid common MarTech project roadblocks
- Real life examples of how organizations get it right
Join host Kristina Halvorson and guests for a show dedicated to the practice (and occasional art form) of content strategy. Listen in as they discuss hot topics in digital content and share their expert insight on making content work.
Why is Digital Asset Management (DAM) so hard to explain?
We all grasp content. We spend significant portions of our days consuming content - at work, on our mobile devices, at home. Content speaks to us. Digital assets are misunderstood. They are the pieces which, when combined to create content, become a story. Alone, they are someone else’s concern.
Digital assets sit on a file system or a web drive with very limited search capabilities and weak taxonomy. Housing and managing digital assets isn’t really the end use of those assets. The assets appear as content in presentations, articles, websites, catalogs and social media. This is where they are accessed and consumed. The fact that they are shared and accessed easier from a DAM is not relevant to many consumers. It is relevant to the creators.
According to Gartner research, marketing leaders report allocating 7.4% of the marketing budget to content creation in 2017. Furthermore, marketers named content creation and management as their top two digital priorities for 2018 in a Gartner survey of marketing decision makers conducted at the end of 2017.
Managing marketing assets and scaling content operations are top priorities for marketing leaders, which is driving increased investment in digital asset management platforms.
Accessing the latest industry information is essential for true innovation. We need your help identifying key performance trends impacting the global agency industry.
With growing budget pressures and performance-based KPIs, agencies have an additional layer of complexity added when managing the way they do business.
The survey is diving into how internal processes, client demands and other external factors are reshaping the way your agency is run. How are you future-proofing your operations to ensure success? We want you to have your say.
This survey will take no more than five minutes to complete. As a thank you, you will receive an advanced copy of the detailed report of findings to benchmark your agency, plus you’ll be entered into a prize drawing to win a £250/$250 Amazon voucher.
When getting ready to attend a digital asset management demo, preparation can allow you to lead the conversation and truly understand how each vendor can meet your needs.
As part of your preparation, it’s important to have a list of questions that you want answered over the course of the demo. These questions should reflect your must-haves and what you’re hoping to achieve with your new digital asset management system.
Aquent is surveying working professionals in North America and would really love to get their input if their actively employed.
The survey questions are focused around skill development, job role, and career development/progression.
Two good reasons to complete the survey:
• Aquent will donate $1 to Visible Alliance for every completed survey. They’re a non-profit dedicated to providing free creative services to organizations serving BIPOC, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ+, and underrepresented communities and causes.
• You can request a copy of the report at the end of the survey if you're interested in seeing the results.
It’s not just you.
Although there’s been numerous reports about the buoyancy of the job market for creatives and designers, many veteran and mature aged professionals say they are struggling to gain traction when looking for new opportunities.
To an increasingly jaded group of creatives and designers, the interminable number of reports about a jobs bonanza in their industry seem almost surreal.
“In all other aspects, 40 is considered the new 30, but in the advertising world it might as well be 100 when it comes to recruiters,” one creative director told me last week.
Host Adam Fraser interviews marketing industry thought leaders from around the globe, including CMOs, academics, authors, consultants and speakers in this podcast about the strategic marketing landscape. By speaking to the brightest minds in the global industry with a wide ranging 'fire side chat' interview approach, this podcast will help you rise above the noise to join the dots and make sense of the fast moving and ever changing marketing sector.
With guests including Scott Brinker, Jay Baer, Jeremy Epstein and more, you’ve come to the right place to hear from the who's who of the global marketing sector.
Download FADELS whitepaper Content Usage in an Omnichannel Marketing World, featured in the Journal of Digital Media Management. Authors Melissa Pauna, Creative Content Steward for Banana Republic, and Devi Gupta, Marketing Head at FADEL, provide advice on centralizing content and content rights, process governance, automation and leveraging data insights, and drill into a real-world example to examine how omni-channel marketing affected the content strategy at Banana Republic/Gap, Inc.
There’s no sure-fire formula for the best marketing campaign, but unpick any memorable effort and you’re likely to find a brave brand, some brilliant creative, and a moment or two of inspiration. The right message at the right time can supercharge your brand in its home territory, or even help it conquer new markets.
Creating a global marketing campaign means more than translating ad copy into regional languages. Where cultures and sensibilities vary, global brands need to temper their global messages with local understanding. The best global marketing campaigns work because they appeal to what we all have in common while understanding and responding to what it is that we don’t.
Recently, MediaBeacon has been talking about the importance of creating a standard brand guideline for your company. In order to maintain consistency across all your marketing initiatives and customer touchpoints, a brand standard guideline is crucial.
However, there are more guidelines to consider.
For example, how do you ensure that your retail locations are consistent in terms of the customer experience they cultivate?
Think about Apple, Target, and Lululemon. Despite having thousands of different retail locations, you know exactly where you are when you step into any one of their store locations.
This can be attributed to a thorough visual merchandising guideline.
Merchandising guidelines can help create a consistent customer experience within retail stores, particularly with in-store displays.
How does an established, global brand transform itself into a digital powerhouse? Nearly ten years ago, Land O'Lakes, Inc embarked on a mission to do just that. Join us for a live webinar to understand the challenges the company faced at the beginning of their journey, and the key decisions around people, processes, and technology that enabled Land O'Lakes, Inc to evolve into the highly effective, highly integrated digital marketing organization it is today.
Hear from marketing operations and content leaders from Land O'Lakes on best practices for uniting your marketing tech stack and delivering alignment, efficiencies, and ROI on an enterprise scale.
In recent years enterprises have worked hard to modernize and optimize their marketing and digital experience technology stacks. In most cases, however, silos still persist, and enterprises struggle to provide coherent customer experiences and campaigns across touchpoints.
In this recorded briefing RSG founder Tony Byrne takes you on a tour of a new reference model for the omnichannel era. Tony shows you how to guide your future stack investments towards supporting omnichannel needs, and what this means for content, data, decisions, and operations. If you manage one of these tech stacks, this is a must-see educational session.
To help you better understand the opportunities and drawbacks of adopting a headless CMS approach, download SDLs whitepaper to learn:
- What is a headless CMS?
- What are the benefits?
- How to choose between a headless and traditional CMS?
There’s a shift underway in how enterprises operate.
Just look at four basic elements of operations:
• Leadership
• Outcomes
• Work execution
• Cadence
In many organizations today, leadership functions hierarchically in command and control fashion, outcomes are mostly initiatives and projects, work execution happens by function (usually in siloes), and the cadence is relentlessly focused on the quarter.
But business leaders in cutting-edge enterprises are realizing the strategies of today won’t cut it tomorrow.
As the well-known adage goes, change is inevitable.
Some of us embrace it while others resist. Managed well, change can be incredibly impactful and transformative. It gives people the opportunity to find better ways to work or challenge the status quo.
For marketers, change is a fact of life. Campaigns can change on a dime. Deadlines and budgets can shift and some ideas never make it to market. For marketers who work in Opal, change is often met with optimism and order. But not all teams who work in Opal are similar and the path to becoming champions of change, vs. those who are more reactive or resistant to change, is not a straight line.
With the primary goal of making creative production as efficient, productive and compliant as possible, Creative Operations is responsible for formally defining and streamlining the creative process. They work to optimize workflows for producing, revising and approving creative assets to meet deadlines and stay on budget.
Creative Operations is responsible for optimizing people, technology and processes to deliver the maximum output of creative production. With an increasing need for personalization at scale, they identify tools to minimize gaps in asset production and work with technology vendors to implement new initiatives.
Automation technology intends to replace the repetitive, rules-based tasks that are required of your human employees. In so doing, it allows them to spend more time on higher-level assignments that play to their strengths, e.g. activities that require creativity and problem-solving skills.
A marketing plan with visibility (from multiple points of view) is one that’s designed to meet often complex corporate goals tied to specific strategies for growth. And while this might sound fairly obvious, a lot of companies aren’t hitting the mark when it comes to visibility in their marketing plans.
Visibility is a big deal and your marketing plan depends on it. A viable plan needs to include KPIs that can measure the effectiveness of its campaigns, programs and tactics. Without this, you're unable to track progress and use the findings to create a more viable and effective upcoming plan.
Do you know where all your marketing / campaign / packaging assets are? Have you ever used the wrong version of a file? Do you know where your library of packaging specificat ions is? Do you know which existing creative digital assets you could repurpose in your next ad campaign?
The workplace never stands still, but right now you can feel the ground shifting underneath your feet. Among the biggest changes, technology is reshaping how organizations collaborate and communicate with huge implications for how, and where, teams are built. Beyond that, companies are welcoming new generations and perspectives into the workforce (hi, Gen Z!) just as jobs and the skills required to do them are evolving in double time.
Of course, changes come with challenges, but there are also huge opportunities for the ways you and your team work and grow. Here’s a peek at what’s coming, plus thoughts on how you can take advantage of these changes to reshape the world of work in smart, inspiring ways.
Moda Operandi is a luxury online shopping experience for an affluent clientele who like to stay on the cutting edge of fashion. Moda Operandi is the only online retailer to invite clients to pre-order next season’s looks straight from the runway. They also have an expertly curated in-season boutique of fashions available for immediate purchase.
The concept of metadata has its roots in libraries and the practice of library science. The first known application of metadata comes from the Library of Alexandria. The librarians attached tags to the ends of scrolls that contained details of each one’s author, title and subject. This made it easy to return the scrolls to where they belonged after use, and saved patrons from having to unroll each scroll in order to learn the nature of its contents.
The term was coined centuries later and in the decades following, metadata has taken on a life of its own. metashop has researched and written a new paper on introducing the concept of metadata, what it does, how it works, and the many ways in which it benefits companies today by enabling them to protect their products, their content, their partners and their own good name. Download the paper today to read about how metadata benefits every business.
With 60% of marketers creating at least one piece of content every day, it's becoming increasingly challenging for organizations to effectively organize and manage their growing libraries. This detrimental problem has caused a variety of solutions to emerge, ranging from simple file repositories to enterprise-level digital libraries. But, with each vendor offering similar-sounding features, it can be difficult to nail-down which solution is right for you.
While we've already covered the major differences between DAM and CMS or a file-sharing platform, it's time to tackle another solution: media asset management.
Mauro Porcini shares how Pepsi embeds design into every aspect of their business, and how it drives the creation of new products and services.
Mauro Porcini, as PepsiCo’s first ever Chief Design Officer, is responsible for leading innovation by design across the company’s food and beverage portfolio, extending from physical to virtual expressions of the brands, including product, packaging, events, retail activation, architecture, and digital media.
Creatives can benefit from beginning with the end in mind and understanding who is the downstream consumer of the digital assets. Often there is a disconnect between upstream and downstream on the overall creative vision and perspective; a social media director may have an entirely different point of view than a photographer or retoucher. Thus, creatives must start with the consumer of the digital assets in mind and truly understand the consumer. A consumer-first approach will optimize the potential of the digital assets.
The Creative Operations Technology Reference Model (COTRM) is the body of software capability categories and tools used by creative professionals to store, manage, create, and deliver print, video, and digital experiences.
The COTRM is an amalgamation of all the Domains, Sub Domains, and Capabilities which make up the creative stack. The COTRM is made up of three core domains: Input, Execution, and Output, which follow the process all creative goes through. There are five sub domains areas: Data, Engagement and Operations management, Creation, Delivery, and Channels. Each capability area is broken into capability categories. The COTRM is a growing, developing entity and is creativeopsreviews.com current thinking. It is neither right nor wrong, but a best guess based on the knowledge and input from other creative technologists.
An exclusive study by Marketing Week finds that while almost two-thirds of marketers are measuring the impact of creativity, they are still reliant on more “old-fashioned” research methods.
C-Sweet provides agency-style services to Hershey's brands, bridging its corporate marketing and individual brand departments.
Do you have a colleague who tries to sabotage you and your work? In addition to setting very clear boundaries, it is important to establish a game plan moving forward to secure your reputation and position.
Join Aprimo for a discussion with Laura Patterson, 3X Digital Asset Management architect, as she describes how she broke through barriers and became a change agent to help CVS Health evolve from using manual, disparate asset management processes to embracing a sophisticated, automated Azure cloud-based solution that enables increased creativity, streamlined visibility across its partner ecosystem, and integration with marketing operations. Learn how Laura persisted and gained leadership support throughout the 8-year transformation, which empowered the organization to be strategic and innovative with customizations—without needing to engage IT—so it could truly enhance its DAM experience.
Managing content has become increasingly essential as consumers place more importance on customer experiences than ever before.
But without maximizing the time you spend on each stage of the content lifecycle, your enterprise can’t be sure your content is going to produce the ROI you desire. So how do you focus only on the things that matter in your creative processes and stop wasting time?
Read this ebook to discover insights from 7 content experts, including:
- Specific strategies and solutions for optimizing the entire content lifecycle
- How to overcome enterprise challenges to creating impactful customer experiences
Creative operations leaders are used to making the impossible a reality (while also delivering it on-time, thank you very much) but where do you turn when you feel you’re up against a wall, needing extra motivation, or deciding how to address the challenges of tomorrow?
One of the most effective and engaging ways of providing your career and department a boost is by connecting with those that truly understand your on-the-job problems and can share how they’ve navigated them using the lessons they learned.
IEN’s Creative Operations Exchange – COEx | Seattle is your opportunity to join a like-minded community of creative problem-solving leaders where you’ll find practical solutions to your thorniest obstacles and form long-term connections with other creative ops peers that you’ll regularly be able to turn to for inspiration and ideas when you feel stuck. All in one of the country’s most picturesque and leading economic regions.
The rise of ecommerce has flipped traditional studio photography on its head with much faster production cycles, higher image volume, and shrinking budgets. Attend the only event focused on ecommerce photo studio operations to hear from veteran studio leaders as they discuss best practices and common pitfalls in developing and maturing a sophisticated, efficient, and competitive photo studio. They’ll share how they’ve learned to adapt and scale in lean and cost-conscious ways, all while maintaining profitability, quality, and boosting ROI.
Mindy has a lot of clients asking her about artificial intelligence. And a lot of programmer types telling her how librarians are going to be obsolete because "AI is coming." But she’s not worried. Yes, AI is smart. Yes, it can tag an image of a boat, or a tree, or a dog and that is very cool. But what the folks selling you on the promise of AI aren't exactly highlighting is the amount of data that you're going to need to feed into your artificial / augmented intelligence or machine learning (ML) system for it to be able to automatically and consistently identify and tag your products, logos, lesser-known models, etc. And as quickly as product design, branding, and marketing campaigns change these days, you'll be moving onto the next massive batch of data to educate your system by the time it learns enough about your last product to really be "smart."
For an in-house creative services team, random requests can come from anywhere in the company at any time—HR wants a new employee flyer, marketing needs a web banner designed, sales wants you to create some cool graphics for a presentation. And they come at you in every conceivable way: phone calls, emails, taps on the shoulder, or scribbled on a sticky note.
Henry Stewart DAM & Creative Operations Conference in New York confirmed that Marketing Operations is 'the new black'
DAM New York, and the co-located Creative Operations Conference, was another great opportunity to meet with industry peers, valued clients and other senior marketing leaders. There were more attendees than ever this year and a different kind of buzz.
Keeping tabs on project management metrics is crucial for optimizing your agency. This article looks at the 11 most important project management KPIs you need to track and why.
There are dozens of content marketing metrics you can track, but if your time and resources are limited, these 7 metrics should tell a pretty clear story on how your content initiatives are performing.
So you’ve finally decided on a creative idea that’s going to turn heads, win hearts, and showcase your brand in just the right light. That’s the hard part over, right?
Well, not exactly.
Widen is always proud to share the good news about their customers, especially when they’re doing great things with their technology!
Sargento recently won a 2019 MarTech Stackie Award for best marketing technology stack design. While MarTech Today spotlighted the story of how Sargento cooked up their stack, Widen had the chance to meet with Cami Schenck, the senior marketing manager of media and digital at Sargento Foods to learn more about the secret ingredients.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) has greatly advanced since its inception 20 years ago, its future is anyone’s guess. At least that’s how David Lipsey, founding partner of KlarisIPand one of the founders of Digital Asset Management, sees it. We had the opportunity to sit down with Lipsey to chat about how DAM came into being, the critical juncture it’s at now, and how it might evolve in the future.
The result is a two-part series including fascinating insights into the world of DAM from the man who first dreamed it into existence.
Welcome to part two of our interview around digital asset management (DAM) with David Lipsey, founding partner of KlarisIP and widely known as one of the founders of DAM. While the first part focused on where DAM has been, let’s take a look at what he envisions for the future..
A collection of recent DAM-related articles from around the web, sourced from DAM Federation member, Planet DAM.
Retail, Fashion, and Apparel (RFA) brands face a new and intimidating digital commerce landscape requiring rapid transformation to survive. One of the key strategic initiatives for RFA brands is building a modern and complete Marketing Technology (“Martech”) Stack. For those unfamiliar with the term, the Martech Stack is the collection of technology tools and platforms enabling Marketing effectiveness. Hot new trends such as data personalization, “big data” metrics, online assistants, “Shop The Look,” and related initiatives cannot be achieved without significant upgrades to the brand’s technology suite.
The way you manage projects is probably broken, though you may not know it. There’s a big lie embedded in our traditional view of project management, one that creates excessive optimism, followed by deep despair and then loads of pain as teams struggle to succeed.
The creative brief is the foundation of any successful creative campaign. It outlines the client’s vision and ensures that everyone is on the same page. So let's get started!
Communication - including the creative brief- is the cornerstone of success for any marketing campaign. And yes, it's more important than the creativity.
