Optimizing Investments in Media Assets
Media production can be an expensive and time-consuming effort. Making the most of existing media production assets can allow a brand to control costs and be more agile in its campaigns. Pivotal Allies worked with one market leader to provide insights and solutions to resolve the media campaign cost overruns and timelines while raising quality and impact.
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This client, a large multi-national consumer beverage company, had set out to develop a campaign focused on extolling its corporate values to consumers, shareholders, and market influencers. This ongoing series of campaigns would include various media including video, print, static and animated banners, and outdoor advertising. What began with a modest set of goals and budget soon faced limitations and challenges.
As one of the world’s largest advertisers, historically spends tens of millions of dollars per year on creative work to support advertising campaigns. The output of this spending was the continued creation of thousands of compelling assets per year used for multi-channel advertising campaigns. In this case, the original assumption was that select advertising content could easily be repurposed for the corporate communications campaign. That was not the case, and our client quickly realized the timeline and creative expectations may need to be rolled back and perhaps the creative budget would need to be significantly increased.
Across the company, each brand portfolio had built unique advertising campaigns and employed a broad set of advertising agencies and creative houses. This resulted in many unique media silos within the company. Each brand had its content library, sometimes in-house and often existing at third-party agencies. Making this challenge more complex was the fact that the creative rights for these assets were documented and managed uniquely. There was no common way to browse the asset library, much less understand which assets could be used outside their originally intended campaign.
Pivotal Allies was brought in to work on a solution for this challenge. They needed project leadership to help them find a solution so they could put their corporate campaign advertising plans back on track.
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The Pivotal Allies team had extensive experience with media and delivering efficiencies for its client base. As a result, we took the lead with this client in defining the requirements to address this problem. Working closely with our client in corporate communications we reached out across the marketing teams of the major brand’s portfolios to understand and document the existing media asset landscape.
It was immediately clear that a browsable asset library would be needed to serve this company’s needs. Using the Pivotal Allies project intake process, a common set of requirements was developed, considering various stakeholder needs, technical requirements and budgets. In addition to defining a browsable media library, data security needed to be clearly defined, documented, and implemented to protect the assets and support the necessary media rights metadata. The was necessary to ensure licensing and talent rights were documented for each piece of media and controlled for all future re-use, and any additional licensing fees would be well documented for new campaigns.
Pivotal Allies strongly encouraged this company to license a commercially available software platform to fulfill their needs. While building a custom platform that could be customized and controlled by the firm might have sounded appealing, the benefits of a commercial product and support would be the right choice. Pivotal Allies then worked with the client through the vendor evaluation process, finally selecting a solution that met their functional and budget needs.
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The result of this project was significant cost savings for this company, into the millions of dollars over several years. It also allowed them to move faster, lowering the cost of content reuse and ensuring campaigns could be delivered quickly and on budget.
Pivotal Allies’ experience in the technology & media markets benefited this client by bringing strong project management skills to bear alongside significant domain expertise in this media supply chains and data security.