Storing digital assets on cloud key to efficiency

By Warwick Boulter, CEO, Collaboro

A brand’s digital assets are more than just image, video or artwork files – as marketing content continues to be produced at exponential rates, these creative assets become high-value legacy pieces, forming a significant part of the business’ asset portfolio.

There are hundreds of shoots taking place everyday, ranging from full-scale TVC productions to one-man content shoots, the vast majority are being undertaken by creative agencies and production companies, commissioned by their clients.

If we consider that a standard TVC shoot generates 500GB of data per shoot day, and a content shoot around two-thirds of that – managing digital assets becomes a huge task in terms of infrastructure and maintenance.

A task a client may prefer to hand this over to their agency, and one the agency has been happy to accept, with the benefit of providing a valuable retention tool. As a result, the assets from all these shoots end up increasingly fragmented and difficult to access and share across team and agency borders.

Disappearing media assets

And that’s only part of the problem; more often than not, the devices on which these valuable assets are stored as not entirely fit for purpose. By its very nature, a portable hard drive is designed to be a temporary storage solution. In fact, there is a 20% drive failure rate after 4 years and after a further 3 years, that failure rate falls off a cliff.

If we consider that the digital revolution really started picking up speed in the late 1990s, it’s safe to assume that most brands will have digital assets dating back well over seven years. This means that some of the data stored on hard drives in agency cupboards, or on storage unit shelves,  may well have already fallen off the cliff.

And so this content flairs on people’s screens for the duration of the campaign, then disappears into the abyss, with files, footage and data stored on a hard drive never to be seen again or accidentally erased from history, as a result of the unstable storage device used. This is more than just a waste of time and resource, but more importantly is a costly mistake for the brand.

Let’s crunch the numbers.

If an agency shoots 15 TVC and 30 content shoot days in an average year, with a client commision of $100,000 per shoot day and $20,000 per content day, that’s $2.1 million of media creation. If this media is stored on hard drives, the calculated likelihood is that there’s around $400,000 of extreme risk or potential loss over the next four years.

And if this volume of data had been created for the four years previously, the $400,000 loss is almost certainly happening right now.

Where does the responsibility lie for the loss of these high-value assets? Does it fall to the client who commissioned and owns the assets, or the agencies who store and maintain them? As a brand’s pool of content grows, this grey area becomes ever-more prevalent.

Cloud-based data management can avoid the loss

To counteract the escalating issue, cloud-based data asset management (DAM) software began to emerge, however, there has always been major stumbling blocks to efficient and effective use:

•    The process of collecting all the data from various agency and production partners is a complex and arduous task

•    DAM software is unable to keep up with the exponential creation of a brand’s content and scale with their content library.

This is why some forward-thinking brands are sensing the need for a fully integrated and service-based data asset management solution for their business and in turn protecting their valuable assets.

Let’s consider the true value of unlocking every piece of content a brand has ever, and will ever create has to the business.  Ultimately it means time and budget isn’t wasted reshooting footage they already have (or did have once upon a time).

Smart-sharing and collaboration means the right teams can get access to any files, anytime, without calls to production partners and time and resource spent searching through USBs, hard drives and servers. And that results in content getting to market faster.

The creation of content continues to rise and as we see it bridge the gap between brand and consumer, allowing marketers to engage with their audience on multiple channels – the potential for brands to use content to set themselves apart from competitors will only increase with it.

The old ways of managing, sharing and using content are no longer working. The digital revolution is behind us, what we see now is the norm. It’s time for marketers to address the elephant under their desks, regain control of their creative assets and protect the legacy of their brands.