The Production Industry Needs to Invest in More Inclusive Tools

Several years ago, I consulted for a global advertising agency. Their digital asset management platform was exclusively accessible with a company email, which they had to create for me, and from within the office’s ethernet network. Not only did that system completely shut out external contractors—an employee would have to download individual assets to a hard drive and physically hand them to outside freelancers—but it made working from home nearly impossible, both for contractors and the staff themselves. I hope the pandemic made them rethink that model.?

Someone could argue this setup existed in the name of security, but I spoke to the company’s executives about this extensively. The reality was far more quotidian: migration to the cloud, they believed, would simply cost too much, be too complex, confuse too many people and not deliver enough ROI. So they continued with this hodgepodge system of outdated technology rooted in a lack of foresight.?

This might sound like an extreme example of a complicated digital asset manager (DAM), but, sadly, it isn’t so unusual. In the marketing and production industries, digital asset management gets complicated, and this complexity becomes a permanent fixture of that company’s culture. Most DAMs require at least one month to get set up, create metatags and train the staff in how to use it. Standing up a new DAM requires significant investment, as well, because few are scalable. You pay for the maximum amount of storage at all times. This is a problem in the production industry, which ebbs and flows—companies rarely see consistent workloads throughout the year. If you experience a few dry months, you’re still paying for the same level of asset storage, even if you don’t need the assets.?

In an ideal world, a DAM would scale with your company. If you’ve wrapped on a project and won’t need assets for the foreseeable future, you should be able to scale down, storing them in an archival storage space for less money. When you suddenly need more space, scaling up should happen automatically. The financial impacts of being able to scale your traditional asset-management system are enormous.?

As well, file transfers should be intuitive for all staff members, so contractors can work more quickly. With a quality cloud-based DAM, this doesn’t mean sacrificing security. Using separate platforms for file transfers and storage is needlessly complicated.?

I’ve previously written about the ROI of organization, because it’s a value I’ve adhered to for decades. According to a study of 18,000 business leaders, company-wide disorganization cost 57 percent of respondents six working hours per week; meanwhile, a separate industry report by a cloud-based DAM has suggested that employees spend eight percent of their workdays searching for files.?

The bottom line is clear: getting organized will save you money and make your company operate more smoothly, and outdated DAMs are foundational to this increasing problem.?

These issues are not exclusive to companies, either. The biggest DAMs in production target large enterprises, but don’t prioritize collaboration with independent creators, who comprise a significant portion of the industry’s workforce. The future of digital asset management must consider the reality that this industry’s workforce is largely freelance and increasingly remote; frequently comprising small teams splintered off from larger ones; and in dire need of the same tools currently being built for, and marketed to, the big players.?

These are topics I’ll be discussing during my upcoming talk at the Festival of DAM. For the past two years, my company, Third Summit, has been developing a new cloud-based platform, built specifically for production professionals, called Alteon Cloud. Our goal is to provide enterprise-grade tools for the mainstream marketplace. Cloud-based digital asset management, storage and transfer exists, but virtually all companies working in this space target large corporations, broadcasters and major film studios. Our goal is to bring that top-tier technology to independent freelancers, in-house marketing teams and small and mid-sized businesses.?

To that end, we’ve partnered with IBM for high-speed file transfer and world-class security, Vidispine for enterprise-grade collaboration tools, and Bluescape for integration with global production clients looking to more easily collaborate with their vast network of freelancers. Thanks to these partnerships, we’re able to deliver a product whose value to the end-user is significantly greater than the price we charge.?

The production industry is built around collaboration. Modern-day creators are lucky to live in a world where technology exists to allow them to do the work they love more easily than ever before, and with more options for remote work. Our goal is to usher in the inevitable future of this industry by helping to foster creative teamwork, inclusivity and the democratization of world-class technology for all.