Don't worry, there's a solution
There is hope!
You can plan your creative content for a lifetime of value, with its repurposing, adaptation and localisation options baked in from the start. By avoiding duplication of asset creation, you can avoid waste and enjoy a better Return on Investment on that original creative. You can create Content for Life.
These are the three key areas that we need to bring together to unlock the full potential of Content for Life:
Smart Planning
Smart planning is about reimagining your processes to deliver new creative content for a lifetime of value.
Smart Assets
Smart assets ensure that your technology ecosystem gives your team the best chance of avoiding time delays, content duplication and wasted effort.
Smart Choices
Smart choices enable content repurposing to crystallise the time and cost savings and to feed your content channels, saving resources to dedicate to new content.
Together, these three activity areas will help you build a new model for your marketing content that maximises the value of existing and new assets, shorten speed to market and reduce average asset cost. Let's explore what putting these into practice looks like for your organization:
Smart Planning
When you create new creative content, you must provide a framework for internal teams and external agencies to ensure its lifetime of value is well prepared:
1. Ensure it’s not already been created (see ‘smart choices’).
2. Get the brief right.
Have a briefing process that anticipates, then clarifies what is needed from all your new content in order to guarantee a lifetime of value. In addition to all the standard well-known briefing protocols, smart planning should include:
- Anticipate and document future reuse beyond the short-term campaign requirements.
- Over what timeframe will the creative content have validity?
- Predict its use in different media channels over time.
- Predict its use in different geographies, languages and cultures over time
- Be prescriptive about assets to be delivered: what resolution, what specification, how many variants, etc?
- How, when and where to upload all asset deliverables; considering naming, tagging and any other parameters that will aid search effectiveness in finding this content in the future
- Ensure assets are available in a modular format so new assets can be reassembled from component level. This can avoid rework by internal teams, and production companies and even permit brand marketing teams to develop their own content using automation and templating solutions.
3. Get the production right.
Variants cost you so much less at this stage and will deliver economies of scale to your creative investment. Anticipate future reuse requirements at the time of production by considering some of the following:
- Ask yourself what might be sensible to capture alongside the main shoot/creation process.
- Save, upload, and store the unused footage in a way that it can be found, inspire new campaigns and/or be repurposed later (see “smart assets” and “smart choices” for more on this).
- Think about localisation needs early. For example, take into consideration any differing regulatory requirements for your alcohol advertising in different countries by creating content that complies with every relevant country.
- Think about media adaptation needs early. Don’t just plan the hero content for the TV led campaign, think through its use across omnichannel.
Smart Assets
Have a Digital Asset Management strategy, not just a technical solution.
· Your strategy should clarify what is stored in the DAM - is it only final artwork, or is it all content whether it’s finalized and published or not? The wider you cast the net for asset inclusion in DAM, the more potential you give yourself for speed and cost savings.
· The DAM counts for nothing if you don’t embed it in your marketing content processes. How is it consulted to ensure briefs around the world are checked against what you’ve already created? How will you avoid agencies pitching for work you’ve already created somewhere once already?
· Make DAM compulsory, not optional. Avoid ways around the process. Governance is, of course, part of the solution. But so is proactive change management to drive user adoption, and the best possible DAM User Experience so that the right ways of working become the natural ways of working.
· Set specific targets for reuse. Translate that target into cost and time savings. Track progress towards this. Budget holders, finance teams and procurement will all lend their full support.
· If you’ve adopted a modular content strategy, you will be a further step ahead of your competitors, leveraging the true power of your DAM and providing a far higher degree of repurposing value for your business.
DAM is the manifestation of this way of thinking. DAM is the platform for all the benefits. DAM allows every asset to have a lifetime of value.
FROM 1,
MAKE 1000
We can work with the "finished" content you have today, but consider the potential on what has never seen the light of day!
You own it, put it to work to create:
- Social
- Static digital banners
- HTML5 display banners
- Rich media display banners
- eCommerce assets
- Video
- Digital OOH
- OOH
- BTL
- POST
- Product imagery
Smart Choices
Smart planning and smart assets give you have chance to make smart choices. If you have these strategies in place, the route to achieve Content for Life is open.
Now that you’ve set yourself up for success, you are in the position to reap the rewards by making the right choices for the majority of your content production. From 1 asset, you make 1000.
- Define your ecosystem for content creation – whether it involves external partners or inhouse capability, or increasingly likely, a mix of both
- Consider what happens at regional and local level not just at corporate and global
- Making DAM a central part in the process of new asset creation allows you to check the fridge before you go shopping.
- Even when no immediately usable assets can be found for a new brief, the work to interrogate what you have can often influence the briefing process for the new creative. You’ll find great new ways to monetize the value of the assets you’ve already invested in.
- So much of the work done for a new campaign is great and on-brand, but there might be rushes and b-roll that never saw the light of day. These assets might find their place in the future if you give them a chance!
- When assets are found but need to be repurposed, consider a tiered process to find the best solutions to finalize, for example:
- In-house brand management team using a self-serve automated or templating technology
- In-house production studio
- Specialist creative production partner
- Creative agency
Content for Life
Content for Life is not an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solution. It's a whole suite of options that can complement what your brand is already doing well.