Research from MillwardBrown shows the average Australian spends nearly 5 hours every day on digital screens like laptops, desktops, mobile phones and tablets. Clearly, brand owners can no longer afford to ignore the digital screen. And marketers, agencies and production houses alike will have to evolve in order to cater to the demand for digital deliverables.
For many advertising production studios, adapting to digital has thus far been a fairly simple matter involving small tweaks to their workflows.
According to Keira Tanko, studio manager at DDB Sydney, workflow changes have been minimal.
“Instead of creating artwork in millimetres and 4-colour, you do it in pixels and RGB. That’s pretty much the only difference. In the past, the bulk of our artwork was created in InDesign, now we rely more on Photoshop or Illustrator.”
Regarding assets supplied by third parties, Tanko added: “We prefer the file sizes to be in-line with print first, because that requires high resolution files. Then we scale it down and convert to RGB for digital.”
And keeping assets organised is a simple matter of adhering to logical file naming conventions. But as the demand for digital ramps up, production studios and ad agencies alike are keeping an eye on the two major challenges of the day: the demand for ever-more-diverse assets, and the need for increased collaboration.
Problem 1: More assets, different but same
Production studios today need to supply a greater range of assets than ever before: in addition to traditional print files, there are the layered PSDs destined to be cut up and built into web pages, and source frames for looping animations – but that’s just the start.
One of the major opportunities for engagement in digital is native advertising content. Whether we are talking about widgets or in-feed units, agencies and their studios will need to deliver native advertising assets that are customised to mimic and fit into the spaces around them.
Brand owners, seeking to connect with the right individuals, are looking to leverage location and history data to deliver increasingly localised and personalised content. Agencies playing in this space will need to be ready to deliver a high volume of customised, but brand-consistent, assets.
Take all that, and multiply it by the new mediums, platforms, and screen sizes emerging from the tech industry seemingly on a monthly basis, and you have the ingredients for an explosion in the volume of assets that need to be produced.
How will studios and production houses keep track of all this? If a late client change comes down the line, can we ensure those changes are mirrored across all the versions of the asset? And how would you allow customisation while ensuring consistent branding?
While simple organisation mechanisms like naming conventions and folders remain useful, studios are increasingly looking to adopt more robust tools to keep track of assets.
Problem 2: Working together in the digital world
According to Tanko, the biggest competition for established agencies comes not from digital agencies, but from overseas.
"It’s exciting to expand into the digital space, but we now have to work even smarter locally in order to remain competitive with businesses overseas," he said.
Savvy agencies will convert these competitors into allies by acting as brokers of these offshore service providers. This will let them offer those offshore services along with their own capabilities as integrated packages to clients.
But this means agencies will need to find ways to neutralise the geographic and time-zone barriers to ensure that the work delivered by its external teams are up to its usual client-pleasing standards, and that its production team can work efficiently with external providers.
Solution: Collaboration from end to end
After years of decoupling, agencies and marketers are realising that the pendulum might have swung too far – the isolated silos of creative, media, accounts and production cause inefficiency and a lack of visibility.
To truly thrive today, agencies are looking to enable teamwork across departmental, company and geographic borders, not just by transforming their culture, but also by pulling their asset management and workflow systems together. They are taking cutting edge developments from the IT world, and creating truly end-to-end systems that enable faster and smarter workflows.
Using these unified systems, distributed marketing and advertising teams can work collaboratively and intelligently on a wide range of assets, with visibility into the entire process from briefing to booking to production and delivery.
DDB Sydney, for instance, is moving towards a paperless workflow with an online approval and asset management system that encourages accountability from client to delivery.
“If there is a breakdown in process, it will be documented,” says Tanko. “At the moment, because everything is done via email, phone calls or face-to-face, jobs may stall in a particular department for whatever reason or deadlines may get overlooked – that’s all going to change.”
With the use of APIs and cloud-based technologies, DDB will be able to integrate their internal systems with external services, and effectively scale their solution by “plugging in” new systems as required.
Digital advertising and marketing continues to evolve, and this is placing new demands on agencies, studios and production houses. What is certain is the need to deliver ever-greater volumes and varieties of assets, and to improve collaboration between departments, service providers, contractors and clients.
To this end, many agencies and production houses are implementing processes and solutions that bring together their asset management and workflow systems, presenting a united front to deal with the challenges of a changing marketplace.
Dubsat offers an eBook on workflow automation.