I just read a great article about how photography studios should ‘farm things out’ to become more profitable, less stressed, and overall more productive. Brilliant! The author of “Farm It Out,” (PDN Online) Sarah Coleman, discusses how once photography moved to digital, photographers started doing more and more work. Retouching images, tweaking color, storing client images, burning CDs and shipping them to clients – the list goes on and on! These secondary tasks not only take away from spending time shooting images but also take additional time and resources to complete. By outsourcing things such as these – photographers spend more time shooting – less time doing time-consuming administrative tasks – saving time and money. By hiring outside service providers to take care of image management and photography workflow – photographers can earn more doing less. Now who doesn’t want that?
Generally, by hiring a software as a service provider such as Widen to take care of image management – studios find that they don’t have to worry about storage, IT, infrastructure, hardware, etc – which is both an emotional and financial relief. Backdrop™ helps streamline photography workflows by automating, centralizing, and tracking all reviews, comments, and approvals from anywhere in the world. By combining this with digital asset management – photographers not only improve their workflow but provide their clients with a secure, centralized location in which they can access their images (by permission, of course).
For studios looking to expand, farming out digital asset management and workflow applications can help move them to another level of business growth. By utilizing partners who are experts in their respective markets, studios can enhance what they do best and offer their clients the latest technology to outpace their competitors. What better way to do this than offer your client’s digital asset management and Backdrop for photography routing and approval?
Widen was recently ranked among the Top 10 Premedia Leaders of America as the 8th largest provider of premedia services by sales volume, according to a 2008 study by Graphic Arts Monthly and The Association of Graphic Solutions Providers (IPA).
Widen made the list of firms whose premedia sales are greater than 50% of total sales. Within the >50% categorization, the market size is $1,340,276,000, primarily dominated by the top 3 providers. Widen’s share of this market is 1.2% using data reported in this list. However, isolating just prepress service providers whose primary market is the Corporate space, Widen owns 42.6% market share.
Premedia services are defined to include: preflighting, proofing, color retouching, color separations, image assembly, platemaking, photography, data management, workflow and other media production.
For the full list, visit: http://www.graphicartsonline.com/article/CA6549650.html
For more info about the IPA, visit: http://www.ipa.org/
Several articles have been published since the Aberdeen Group recently released a study on “Marketing Digital Asset Management: Capturing, Storing, and Retrieving Digital Media to Deliver Strategic Value,” however I want to focus on one particular figure from the study – “Qualitative Value in DAM.” To clarify, Marketing Digital Asset Management is DAM for the marketing function – makes sense. The report was authored by Ian Michiels, Sr. Research Analyst for Marketing Management & Digital Marketing, Customer Management Technology Group.
The Qualitative Value in DAM
The study reveals the following improvements for Best-in-Class organizations as a result of digital asset management implementations:
- Time spent locating content DECREASED 75%
- Employee productivity INCREASED 83%
- Asset utilization INCREASED 67%
These are some impressive stats. I particularly like the increase in asset utilization, which is a good indicator of high user adoption, high return on marketing investments and greater marketing effectiveness. Since DAM is the central repository for brand-approved assets, increases in asset utilization should also represent increases in marketing efficiency. This makes the protectors of the brand (like myself) very happy as well.
To provide a quick customer statistic, Widen’s DAM system has helped the Reebok On-field Apparel Group (now the Sports Licensed Division of the Adidas Group) repurpose each digital asset created over six times in its lifecycle versus a one-time use prior to Widen. Before Widen, Reebok used to ship physical apparel samples to their retail customers to conduct their own photography for use in catalogs and e-commerce sites. Widen’s digital sampling process and digital asset management technology allowed Reebok to give their customers on-demand access to official Reebok images, each to be used for a different purpose an average of six times per asset. In a library of 200,000 assets, that’s a lot of repurposing and brand exposure. View the case study to learn more.
Another interesting part of the Aberdeen report were the “Steps to Success,” separating companies into three categories of Laggard, Industry-Average and Best-in-Class.
Steps to Success
Laggards
- Provide sales & marketing access to marketing assets
- Evaluate asset usage
- Identify business drivers and formalize process for measuring ROI
Industry Average
- Extend access to key stakeholders beyond sales & marketing to others in the value chain
- Standardize the use of one DAM system vs. multiple systems in one organization
- Integrate with workflow processes
Best-in-Class
- Extend access to external members in the marketing value chain
- Integrate DAM with creative applications
- Formalize process allowing users to provide feedback and rating system for content – along the lines of web 2.0
- Invest in people and processes to support the technology
