Is your Marketing Budget working for you or full of wooden dollars?
Marketing assets, work, or content as it’s now more frequently referred to, are all forms of communication materials. These have all been carefully and tirelessly created, shaped and formed, re-formed, translated, repurposed and today we’re able to make thousands of personalized iterations developed to meet different consumers and audience needs. But how often do you reflect on where they all are, or how and where are they stored?
Back in the day, there was a warehouse and when we needed more space, we would have a clear out and get rid of what we didn't need anymore. Inevitably this would cost us more money in manpower to review the old stock, gather it together, transport and dispose of it securely. I recall back in the noughties at Sony, despairing at why we had ordered so many brochures, catalogs, and POS materials when faced with the haulage bill and the important secure incineration cost! But that was then, and today, we benefit from cost-effective, efficient Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems that handle all these tasks, don't they?
Have you recently audited what you're storing, identified the specific assets and content you're keeping, and calculated the gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, or exabytes of storage being used—and its cost? Shutterstock and Forbes project content creation will double by 2025, presenting a looming challenge. While digital asset management (DAM) systems streamline storage invisibly, this convenience can obscure the growing costs unless you're directly handling the invoices and are aware of the associated storage expenses.
There is a bigger challenge here and the real question is are these assets ‘working’ for you or just ‘wooden’, meaning dead; of no use, or duplicated and critically not seen by your customers? I daresay they are held in the HQ DAM and additionally in every office DAM system across your network, costing multiple wooden dollars. As head of a multi-million marketing communications budget, I was one of those executives who saw DAM systems as highly effective storage systems – and an effective way to share, adapt, reuse, and repurpose assets reducing waste. We aligned our DAM to the media schedule to see what assets were being used where, when, and how frequently, only to discover that 30% of the assets created had never been downloaded or used.... what a total waste of creative thinking and production, plus we were paying to store them all. Added to this, what about those assets that aren’t in your DAM, that are sitting with your agencies, production partners, on hard drives here, there and everywhere that don’t have that critical metadata attached.
When I first saw MedialakeAI, I asked myself, why? Not another DAM system...but then I began to see how by adding the use of AI, Medialake were making the DAM system cleverer. No one wants the job of tagging assets, adding the growing range of metadata needed to make DAM systems truly SMART. But Medialake does this for you, trolling through your content and telling you amazing things about your content making it Asset Intelligent.
Old Content Management Systems rely on humans to enter metadata and are ‘walled garden’ systems not connected to CRM, websites, E-Commerce processes, and other operational tools at the heart of the brand's ecosystem. They fail to meet the needs of a modern marketing organization and inadvertently cause wider ESG problems, leaving them unable to find inappropriate content exposing brands to the risk of fines and penalties, not to mention the spiralling storage and energy costs. In a fragmented communications landscape, MedialakeAI can help to connect assets wherever they live, including third-party platforms, working as an intelligent layer that sits above a DAM helping brands manage their brand guidelines, tracing and identifying content and communications not on brand.
Advertising budgets continue to grow (according to PWC Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2023–2027) and are set to become the biggest sector within the Entertainment and Media landscape by 2026. We know on the ground that budgets must stretch further than ever before to reach customers across the ever-growing number of touchpoints and channels to reach audiences. It’s marketing’s role to ensure most of the marketing budget is invested in ‘working’ dollars and not behind-the-scenes wooden dollars.
MedialakeAI is therefore a highly valuable tool for marketers, more than just a time-saving way to help ‘sort out’ the storeroom, it can help you gain full visibility of all your assets across your company's and partners' eco-systems. It has the ability to make all your content easily searchable and auditable, reduce duplication and wasted budgets and save time. This gives marketers and procurement the potential to increase the proportion of a brand's budget being invested in ‘working’ dollars to drive growth.
Janet Markwick is a seasoned Commercial Performance Consultant who specializes in spurring profitable growth within creative businesses. She has a talent for marrying creative empathy with commercial savvy, delivering actionable transformation plans that harness value and drive change.
