Brand Marketers have traditionally relied upon their creative colleagues to deliver all brand related communications to encompass customer experience management (CXM), and omnichannel engagement.
Increased competition however, ensures marketers are continually under pressure to bring their products, services and brand communications to market faster and cheaper and to be first in the market.
In so doing, can companies consistently maintain their creative brand edge in a multi-channel or international environment.
Most often “creatives” create and handle assets either through stand alone tools or complex systems. It is often a laborious and time consuming task just to find assets, develop and gain approvals to progress to some form of engaging ,multi-channel output.
For Creative professionals to be productive (and thus have more time to do “engaging” things) they need to be unhindered by complex technologies they are dealing with. Too often they were wrestling with how some DAM systems handle content, creative files, collaboration and creative workflows. So much time is lost either searching for or repuposing assets that most companies need to fix this problem before even thinking of customer experience management.
Who’s creating?
Complexity also arrives in the form of coordination of different technologies, new channels, new asset types and new ‘creatives’.
Digital Asset Management is the type of technology that is closest to creative professional’s hearts. Yet theoretically for many ‘creatives’, a DAM is about as uncreative as it can possibly get.
While it’s true that they mostly work in applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, various photo processing and editing software, maybe even still Quark, and video editing software from AVID to iMovie — DAM provides a central repository where all those creative files can be created, stored, searched, collaborated on and managed.
The problem derives from the fact that the designers, who were the original “creative natives,” are no longer the only ones creating complex assets. Marketers, social media managers, community managers, sales people and many others are now also actively engaged in the process of content creation, utilizing various assets and collaborating across multiple teams and continents to get that information or packaging material or brochure right.
Practically all people in the organization are conceiving, creating, editing managing approvals and looking for better creative workflows, production and distribution opportunities within their DAM system. The days of a single designer exporting his PSD file into a nice, distribution-ready PDF are long gone, even for print-driven businesses.
…..and what if creative output is needed for international or regional markets?
…..how easy is it to manage everything?
What is needed
What organizations are often looking for is an integrated global workflow process that is fast and easy to use.
What a normal DAM system usually provides is an array of mainly disjointed tools and processes. A toolset or semi-integration with, say, Adobe for designers, an integration with CMS for content managers, different tools for collaboration and file sharing among marketers, measly if any integration with Facebook and twitter for social media managers, and often very little insight into the DAM system for other systems.
In reality, most companies need a system where they can design and implement their own creative workflows more efficiently on an international scale. Easy use of metadata in defining assets brings new speed and efficiency at the very heart of a platform flexible enough for both todays and tomorrows requirements.
Getting More Creative with an Intelligent DAM
While your goal may be better Customer Experience Management, it all starts with assets: the assets that live in your DAM and the multiple people that touch them in the creative workflow. When you start by fixing the problem of ill-designed creative workflows, you start to eliminate duplication of efforts. Do you know how much time is wasted as the asset moves from internal designers to internal approvers to external agency and back?
Managing creative workflows, collaboration, governance and associated processes allow you to be faster and more agile. And that means the opportunity to create more revenue.
Imagine how happy marketers and sales teams will be when they can respond better and faster to customers’ information needs. Having the ability to easily access or build relationships between integral assets and have a way to modify and personalize them quickly and efficiently means greater time to focus on the engagement side of creative output. Automating certain workflow tasks is also closely associated with cost savings.
There are multiple opportunities for removing complexity from businesses that start with a truly functioning creative workflow with a platform for managing the entire creative and output process.
censhare is a new type of intelligent DAM that solves these problems, as it enables organisations to manage the whole creative development, workflow and production process. It also allows planning of resources through its own specialized asset management and associated marketing resource management /collaboration modules providing a clear and easy way to manage multiple creative resources and projects.
What censhare offers is an all in one platform geared towards unlocking ‘creatives’ from the burden of time consuming and often wasteful searching for and managing assets in the creative process. It allows transparent creative workflows that delivers on an multi-channel basis to provide the focus for real customer experience management.
Mike Owen
