*Note: this is the 7th post in our series on thriving in the content tornado. Previous posts focused on:
- 1. The content tornado
- 2. Gaining adoption for solutions
- 3. The folly of trying to centralize all your content in one place–and what to do instead
- 4. Leveraging cloud power and cloud services to make DAM easier and more effective
- 5. Cutting costs and getting better return on assets–3 customer case studies
- 6. Making workflow transparent
When most people talk about multichannel or omnichannel distribution, they usually mean “don’t forget about mobile”. And when they talk about rich media, images and video come to mind. But these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Learn more about Digital Asset Management (DAM) best practices
Distribution Diversity
On the distribution side, omnichannel is much broader than addressing different screen sizes. Every output channel – from every social network to every mobile app, CRM, ERP, packaging development process, and product information systems – has its own requirements. Not just sizes and resolutions, but also related information. As an example, delivering a movie to Google Play requires a particularly-formatted information file with almost 200 different data types like name, credits, artwork, trailers, descriptions, administrative rights, and many, many more. As I just talked about in my first blog of this series, a master TV commercial has a lot of rights complexity before you even consider output channels.
When your content probably ends up in 100 or 1,000 different places – most of which you aren’t even aware of because it takes several hops to get there – you have to look beyond what’s available out of the box, and ensure that adding or changing distribution points to your content system is a cinch.
Content Complication
On the content side, it’s a similar, if slightly less scary story – a lot of new types of content are becoming important. Snap is pushing circular video, AR camera filters are here, VR is around the corner, and who knows what will come after. Whenever new content types become important to your audience, will you be able to respond? Or will you have to manage them in an ad hoc way because your systems can’t hold or preview the relevant files?
Solution: Be Open
The only way to manage this diversity of asset types and distribution points is with systems that are fundamentally designed to be connected and extended, without requiring a lot of custom heavy lifting. Recent research by Forrester Consulting shows that the #1 DAM adoption challenge is making DAM and related systems work seamlessly together*. Systems that can provide services to each other – from managing data and documents to workflows, search, access controls, and distribution – are the only way to ensure that you’re prepared to handle the content requirements that we can’t foresee but have to anticipate.
Embrace the Change
Not far behind the integration challenge on Forrester’s list were the challenges of investing in solutions that can’t adapt to a changing business, and being stuck with customizations that are hard to maintain or upgrade. So we have objective evidence that a lot of companies really struggle with this.
But this isn’t going to get any easier. In 2011, Chief Martec identified about 150 marketing technology vendors. By 2012, the number had doubled. The next two years it tripled. Then it doubled again in 2015, to 2,000 vendors. And in the last two years the growth hasn’t flagged – there are now a whopping 5,000 vendors in this space!
So the content tornado isn’t just passing through, and every company has to contend with it. The winners will be those who can unlock the full value of all their digital content to drive new revenue sources, disruptive business models, and enduring competitive advantages. Those who can’t will get left behind. Flexibility and agility are the way to ensure you’re on the winning side.
That wraps it up for this blog series on the content tornado. We’d love to get your feedback, so please tweet us @nuxeo.com or you can reach me at @content_is_all and on LinkedIn!
* Unlocking The Power Of Digital Asset Management Solutions, a June 2017 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Nuxeo.