The Right Balance of Investments
Large companies, in particular, often spend millions on technology product licensing. A study by Genpact Research suggests nearly 70 percent of what they spend may be misallocated.
Genpact’s study found that of $600 billion spent on digital projects, almost $400 billion of it was invested in projects that fall short of expectations and expected returns on investment (ROI).
At ICP, we often hear about technology falling short of expectations. In these situations, our audits invariably uncover a lack of:
- A strategic blueprint for a content ecosystem
- Governance, with senior people working across departments and making decisions
- People focused solely on content and metadata, whose mission is maintaining data governance and quality
Once a strategic north star is established, and the right governance team is in place to communicate and initiate a strategic plan, a Managed Content Services team is what makes the plan happen.
While the technology team maintains the infrastructure and tools, and marketers work with creative agencies to conjure up the latest campaign, an MCS team owns key tasks such as:
- Understanding the usage rights and restrictions for every asset, and ensuring that the proper metadata is in the system to log those rights, mitigating the risk of misuse downstream
- Cleaning up any existing metadata that may be outdated, or need to be enhanced
- Migrating assets from creative drives to a DAM system, and adding metadata relevant to an upcoming product launch or campaign
- Acting as a central group for uploading all assets from different brand groups and agencies, ensuring consistency and uniformity of metadata across all assets
- Ensuring that technology within the ecosystem runs smoothly from an end-user perspective - effectively acting as product owners
- Identifying automation points, and working with technology administrators to link parts of the workflows, speeding up time to market
- System training, rollout communications, and change management
- Increasing content reuse: as subject matter experts on the content and assets, an MCS team allows marketers to focus on what they do best... planning campaigns and targeting customers!
Effectively, members of an MCS team become the experts in brands and campaigns, faster than agency partners, who are busy working with marketers on ideation and content creation.
"Brand and e-commerce teams at global, multi-brand companies often have a lot of different people throughout the process. There’s also frequent rotation of personnel who want to work on different brands in a company with lots of opportunity,” points out Marco Dominguez, Managed Content Services Lead, EMEA at ICP, and working with Unilever’s global brand teams. “By having one team to manage assets and metadata across all the global brands, the consistency is much better. Agencies create something brilliant, but once they put something in the DAM they don’t want to manage it. They’re not focused on what keeps the search results high quality. Enterprises shouldn’t rely on creative agencies to tag and maximize the use of the assets. A Managed Content Service orchestrates between agencies and brands.”
Utilizing a Managed Content Service is how you can avoid disappointment in your technology investments – ensuring not only that you have a good set of technology tools, but the proper product owners and metadata stewards to run them. This ensures adoption and return on investment – allowing you to take control and drive business growth.
