Food for Thought

January 5, 2010 by tele2002

A Happy New Year to all of our readers. I hope that we provided you with some interesting topics during 2009 and to continue into 2010 I want to touch upon one today that puzzled me a little over the festive season.

The story starts like this; My daughter is just about to turn 6 months old and in the last month she has become  very aware of her surroundings – all normal development I guess. So we decided to stimulate her senses by taking her to London Zoo and so, rather crazily, we headed out in the miserable drizzle on the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year, both of us with horrible colds but determined to show our little bundle of joy the animals that she has only seen on the TV so far.

Whilst there, we stopped at the completely over priced Oasis Cafe in the center of the Zoo for a quick snack – two sandwiches and 2 bottles of pop at £18 (and strangely my partner didn’t tell me the price at the time knowing what my reaction would have been!). Anyway the pop she purchased was Pepsi and a very good proportion of the bottle’s label was covered by a QR Code. OK, nothing new since Nick Butcher wrote about the QR Codes hitting the mainstream back in Feb of 2009 on his blog here (oh and I nicked his images since I forgot to snap one myself!).

Now, two things here got me thinking about the use of QR Codes, Microsoft Tags, Datamatrix Codes etc., etc. 1) Considering this is  in the mainstream consumer arena the god damn things are ugly and any designer would struggle to add them to packaging or promotional material without them being an eyesore and 2) What exactly does the consumer get out of it anyway? Read the rest of this entry »

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Jack of all trades?

December 23, 2009 by tele2002

You know what, with all this talk about pre-media and the diverse channels of media that need to be addressed that fall into it’s scope, I thought we ought to look at the types of skills a ‘pre-media specialist’ should hold… This has really come about after a discussion and then one of those lovely google alerts coming in for a ‘pre-media specialist’ job in London.

Firstly lets take a quick look at what this job wanted the candidates to be able to do:

To be considered for this role, you will ideally have:
Commercial experience in professional graphics software applications including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXpress and Dreamweaver
Sound working knowledge of HTML and CSS
Data processing experience, preferably gained in MS Excel or Access
A demonstrable track record of working to client briefs and interpreting requirements.
Knowledge of variable data mark-up for digital print and knowledge of digital workflow in a print or online production environment
Any experience gained in XMPie, DirectSmile or Yours Truly designer VDP extensions is highly desirable, but not strictly essential as full training can be provided.

My god they should have thrown in Video Editing in Final Cut Pro just for good measure!… I’ve just exaggerated the keywords there for them to jump out at you, this is a pretty good job spec and to be honest if anyone could demonstrate commercial experience in just Photoshop they would probably be in for a 25k a year job, but these guys seem to want you to be a jack of all trades here, and to top that their owning willing to pay between 20-30k a year… Now hold on, I know we’re living in desperate times, but to me there is 4 distinct jobs outlined in this spec…. An Artworker capable of page markup and image composition. A web designer building pages in HTML and CSS. A data processing/VDP person and last but not least a workflow guy. Now, I’ve been around for some 20 years in this trade and met some pretty clever people, but none of them have that sort of diversity and if they did know a little of each, they were by no means a specialist.

So are we now expecting too much for our money?

http://www.sillydaddy.net

Cartoon by Joe Chiapetta http://www.sillydaddy.net

I know so many companies that struggle to get good Quark, Indesign & Photoshop operators and the good ones they do get are paid over 35k, the to add Illustrator to that, good Illustrator people are worth their weight in gold. As the cartoon displays the skills gap that UPS identified in Illinois, we tend to hire just on the basis that the potential employee writes it on their CV.

(thanks to Joe Chiappetta for allowing the use of this cartoon picture, check out all his great work at http://www.sillydaddy.net)

But if you were a brand owner and knew your pre-media company employed pre-media specialists who, well, specialized in everything rather than any one of the given disciplines of pre-media, how confident would you be in the specialist services you were getting?

In fact each of the Adobe application have a certified expert program were a user can take an exam based on one of the applications (in the UK they are provided through a series of authorized training centers) if you pass you are provided a certificate to say you are a certified expert in that version of the application…. Have you ever even asked your pre-media supplier if they have any certified experts employed and if so what versions of the applications they are experts in…. Or in fact if you are an employee have you asked your company to sponsor you to become an expert? I mean it would benefit them as much as it benefits your own career, and lastly as an employer do you encourage and support your staff to become experts?

On the whole most of you will answer no to the above, yet if we are to really and truly benchmark the skills and salaries of the people we employ we need to start encouraging accreditation in the applications we employ them to use, unfortunately for me, years of experience doesn’t mean the person is actually any good in the applications, and I can tell you from experience I’ve employed some youngsters in my time that are worth 10 times their peers.

While I understand that there is a need to employ people with multiple skills, companies are constantly running the risk employing people who aren’t particularly skilled in anything, I mean, I could say that I am fluent in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, yet I only really know 5% of what Corel is capable of doing and that’s where the problem is when a person states they can use a graphic application.

So where does this leave our modern pre-media companies who need to deliver services across multiple disciplines and deliver those services at rates that are competitive against the other pre-media companies in the market. Well better pre-employment screening can only help you employ the right people, there’s plenty of great people out there, I hope you can find them and have a good performance rating program to assist the weaker ones in becoming a true asset to the company.

Author: Gary George

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A Very Merry Christmas

December 22, 2009 by tele2002

For all our readers, and the people we couldn’t send this to personally, we here at Tunicca would like to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous Pre-media New Year!

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Helios is like an old Volkswagen

December 22, 2009 by tele2002

I’ve just been delighted when I received a google alert on my old favorite term Pre-media only get get whisked away to the Helios website…. Upon arriving I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, I mean the last time I was here is was pretty awful looking, so I have no idea when they had a face lift, but it is pretty refreshing…

What I liked most was their text within the Ad Agengy/Pre-media section of the site…:

The way that Volkswagen promoted the VW Beetle in the nineteen-sixties greatly changed the advertising world – just like that car moved the audience. If the agency copywriter had known then that this claim would prove right, he certainly would have gone to bed deeply satisfied that night. The VW Beetle assembly line kept running from 1946 until 2003.

Of course, we cannot tell if our “Unbreakable” server solutions will keep running just as long. But we are confident that they will. This confidence is based on the feedback we receive from our customers who have worked with our server software for more than a decade, day by day, and without any downtime. It could run likewise for you.

I like the way they are admitting they are not perfect (but then what product is) but the would like to pitch themselves up there with the reliability of a Volkswagen car…. neat.

Maybe I’ll take a closer look at their product offering for this new Pre-media could and report back, hopefully their grant me a demo licences for a little while to truly have a play.

Author: Gary George

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Is your asset manager generating you income?

December 21, 2009 by tele2002

Over the past year you’ve heard me ramble, get confused and talk out of my backside, but everything we have brought to you has been about possibilities and the business process thought behind driving your pre-media operations, in a forthcoming post I’m going to touch upon the staffing requirements (or the perceived staffing requirements) for the next generation of pre-media operations.

So today’s subject is about the asset manager you have; ask yourself this question:

Do we use our asset management system today the same way as we did when it was installed?

 Invariably the answer to this will be no, why? well it’s a relatively simple answer, very few companies actually know want they want when they invest in a DAM system, so few perform a needs analysis and produce a future requirements document. Every company has a strategic direction, whether that filters down to the staff or not, it is always a consideration when the CEO sign’s off on a major purchase, it’s part of his preflight check of releasing the funds; but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the DAM systems roadmap fits with your own strategic direction.

On a whole most companies will have growth, flexibility and diversity in their own roadmap knowing that they won’t be doing the same thing in 5 years as they are today, so does the digital asset management system you invested in all those years back provide you with the framework to generate that future income?

We have seen companies suffer through poor or nonexistent taxonomies, through poor file management and through poor management in general, companies have looked at the cost of asset librarians and felt they can cut down or do without, but is that at the cost of securing more income through the reuse of those assets they look after. Today more than ever with the explosion of media output channels digital asset management should play a pivitol roll in any companies strategy for multi channel, multi tenanted environments.

So before you work out how much potential cash has already gone in the bin, evaluate if the DAM infrastructure you have is inline with the companies strategic direction and make sure that you invest in the right people to meet those targets, although you may see this as a short term overhead you can do without, the long term gain will pay dividends that you can not yet realize.

Author: Gary George

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The Demographical Difference

December 18, 2009 by tele2002

As 2009 draws to a close perhaps we can start looking for some solace in 2010 in a hope that our economic downturns in the UK & US will start lifting and maybe give a lift to our pre-media industry that was hit hard by the downturn. Technology has always been a key driver in our market and it’s being driven further with consumer data mining speeding up the fast lane to support our desire to target individuals with marketing information. Some companies like the Car Phone Warehouse have used their customers’ data very well in producing tailor made, specifically targeted campaigns that are focussed around their knowledge of customers’ preferences. But what about the everyday online profiles that we generate; what about the subscriptions we pay to newspapers and magazines that collect all of that demographic information….

Yes it’s great that Joe Bloggs publishing can tell their readers and the publishing industry that 53% are male readers between the ages of 18 and 25 who earn on average £23,568 a year, yet they still send the same magazine to all of their readers! Why do that when they actually hold so much information about their subscribed users? OK, I can suffer the fact that a generic magazine needs to hit the news-stand as they will have no idea who is going to buy it, but their subscriber base could certainly be benefiting from a more focused magazine.

Are you getting my drift here? The consumer will benefit as the advertising content would be tailored to their demographic profile, the advertisers will benefit as they have a target audience for their products that actually matches who they want to sell to and the consumer reads adverts that will actually engage them rather than skip to the next article. Also media booking could be streamlined to remove the huge amount of human work and administration that goes into it. Lets take an example; for some reason we subscribe to Ideal Home, I actually love looking and reading all of the editorial about what’s available and how these average people have transformed their homes. But the advertising content is way off the mark – our family income is pretty average (well, I think it’s pretty average as we don’t live a lavish life and have very little disposable income, I know our Chancellor thinks 20k is enough for a family to live on but we who live in the real world know it isn’t) and the magazine is targeted at us average people. Yet the advertising is targeted at people who have bucket loads of cash, you know the people that can afford handmade kitchens rather than a Wickes flat pack! Yet the magazine know our demographic profile and it’s not like the technology is not available to produce these with our profiles in mind.

By Industry

Image based Ad Impressions Oct 09 By Industry - marketingcharts.com

 

Now thinking about what’s happening online – again demographics seem to have been left out of the advertising equation. I login to my Yahoo or Google account and I get content-aware advertising, not consumer aware advertising. If I go to a site that is plastered with advertising (and sorry, if it’s a professional site that has had adverts added for them to gain some extra revenue then I feel it cheapens what they have on offer) the advertising is targeted on the content and not the vistors demographics…..and that’s without going into the magazines and newspapers that are now delivering digital editions.

If I took this one step further and looked at broadcast, the like of Sky & Virgin in the UK and the cable networks in the US hold so much demographic data about their viewers they could cash in with the advertising community by broadcasting adverts specific to demographic bands. They say that the adverts during the superbowl are the most expensive in the world! Now imagine the revenue the advertising companies could gain if they had adverts had a better demographic hit rate! Just think the first commercial of the first quarter this year was for Bud Light, that was aired to 114,500,000 households in the US, what percentage of those households was it actually relevant to based on their demographic profile? It could just be that a different Bud Light advert could be used for different demographics to help get the brand across, or a completely different advert say for Pepsi could be used that would  more relevant to a percentage of households. Either way, again the technology is there to do this, so when will broadcasters start getting clever and cashing in?

Missed opportunities or is it what we have to look forward to?

My prediction is that in 2010 will see the start of the advertising market becoming demographically aware as they start to try and find out why their huge advertising budgets don’t bring in the sales in the volumes they used to.

Author: Gary George

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Cloud computing with a DAM

December 18, 2009 by tele2002

After Sean’s interesting little entry on whether more companies are going to move their application offering into the cloud, I had the pleasure of spending a lengthy amount of time Murray Oles of Chalex. They have taken a rather different approach to providing Digital Asset Management as a service and not as the key application driver. Workflow orchestration is their approach and storing assets is just a process that happens during our working day, and lets face it in our pre-media environments we are all about getting our jobs out and the assets are attached to our jobs, so this is a refreshing approach from a DAM vendor.

There are two things that make this system stand apart from the other; the first one which isn’tunique to what I have seen, but is unique in their implementation to it is the ability to build workflows to manage the process flow of your jobs, now this could be anything from the automation of tasks, to the people that need to review and approve something and right down to the assigning of tasks to people, studios or outsource partners. Now I said it wasn’t completely unique and that was because we have seen workflow in systems offered by Artesia and ADAM, but the workflow is all based around the assests and not the business processes.

The second thing that is pretty unique is that the system is offered completely in the cloud… yes completely – assets and all…. It all sits up there on the Amazon servers, this provides them with the ability to deploy an instance of the basic setup in a matter of hours, for more advanced configurations where the processes need to be mapped and custom panels need creating then these can be developed after the process has been worked out.

The system is using some great technology under the bonnet, such as Cozimo the collaborative, review and presentation system for online digital content in real-time, this is similar to other systems out there from Kodak, Dalim, and ProofHQ but also allows you to annotate video!

On top of these they are able to integrate additional services into the system such as:

  • Google integration –iGoogle “Gadgets” –Google Apps
  • Collaboration services
  • Video previews
  • FLASH previews
  • Web to print services
  • Promo planning
  • Adobe In Design Server engine
  • Translation services
  • On-line page building

Naturally there are the normal features such as published workflow models, resource groups, workflow teams and roles & permission setting along with a dashboard that allows you to keep track of your work assignments. They have also started developing smart forms based in Flex allowing for the information to be dynamically generated.

On top of all this they have an Adobe Air application that allows the users to connect and interact with the assets connected with a specific task. All for either an annual subscription fee or an outright price with annual maintenance fee that is very very competitive against other offerings on the market.

So with the prediction for 2010 being the year of the DAM Cloud Explosion, these guys are well positioned to get ahead of the race with a concept that doesn’t put the digital asset management as the key driver, but rather the business process is the heart of the solution.

We look forward to seeing how this system develops over the next 6 to 12 months as they find more integrators around the world to help them get a better saturation in the market.

My only closing comments would be that you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, unfortunately their main website for the products http://www.pakzar.biz does need a bit of a marketeers touch.

Author: Gary George

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The Popularity of Video in Digital Asset Management

December 11, 2009 by tele2002

The third and final blog in the series on Video & DAM that comes from our friends over at Widen Enterprises, this one is written by their video expert Al Falaschi and looks at how video is becoming more popular in DAM systems, I hope you enjoy his view on this.

We would like to thank Widen Enterprises for allowing us to republish their content and please do checkout their content direct on the Widen Blog link that you will find on here.

Video & DAM

The growing popularity of video is well documented… There are a number of reports available. They explain the power and attractiveness of using video, specifically in the enterprise environment.
More than 65% of companies are using online video and that number is expected to continue increasing (VideoBloom, 2009). (Remember an earlier post, Gartner Predicts 25 Percent of Content in the Workforce to be Images, Audio or Video by 2013.) Online video is a key method of delivering and consuming information that educates, entertains, and/or inspires in ways that touch emotions static text on a page cannot achieve.

Director of research and design at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, Dr. BJ Fogg, writes that for a consumer to make a purchase, it requires a “behavior change.” Fogg’s behavior model talks about the convergence of three things that need to happen for the change to occur – a trigger, ability and a motivation. Motivation is strictly tied to “sensation.” Inherently, video combines the use of more human senses than most other traditional sales and marketing tools. Read more about the reason “why” video use is on the rise in business marketing.

How does that impact Digital Asset Management? Video is a digital asset. As its popularity grows, enterprises will struggle to manage the creation, storage, and distribution of it. Video files are exponentially larger than text documents. Multiple copies of a file in multiple locations use even more storage. Version control is nearly impossible since someone has to remember each file’s location and update or renew it when a new one becomes available or when it expires. Plus, there isn’t always an easy way to search for the right video based on the content. Beyond that, an increase in video will also mean an increase in the amount of bandwidth required to serve the video – a requirement that many SMBs struggle with.

We can learn a lot just by looking at trends within Widen’s own organization and DAM software customer base. There are notable increases in not only the number of video assets being added to our DAM systems, but also in the rate of videos added per year. Due to the raw size of high resolution video, the percentage of the overall file size of our DAM taken up by video has grown extensively. Again, the rate of growth per year is also increasing as we choose to use video more and more for marketing, sales and customer service purposes.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, there are dramatic increases in the coverage of video as a topic in many of our sales calls, and in RFPs that we receive. There are a number of factors that are causing these increases. One is the growing popularity of video. Again, this is well documented. In addition, there is the entire social movement. For video, this requires organizations to not only produce video content, but to make it accessible and publish it to as many online video channels as possible.

An often unnoticed factor is the shift in video camcorder technology from “tape” to “tapeless.” Tape has been a crutch for video storage and backup for… well, for forever. With the new tapeless camcorders recording very high resolution files resulting in very large file sizes with no tape to put them on, suddenly, organizations are faced with storing, securing, backing up, and distributing files that are ten times the size of the files they are familiar with managing. And remember, it is GROWING!

Bottom line, the increasing demand for video will place demands on DAM software and digital asset hosting providers to make sure that video is handled seamlessly alongside all other assets.

Stats on video usage from VideoBloom’s VIEW Index (Video-Enabled Web Index):
100 Web Sites Surveyed

In August of 2009, the VIEW main index for the 100 surveyed companies was 30-75-25, which indicates that 30% of the companies had video on their home page, 75% had video on their site, and 25% didn’t use any video on their Web site.

  • 41% of the 100 surveyed companies have placed their Web videos 1 click away from the home page.
  • 25% of the surveyed companies have placed their Web videos deep into their Web sites, 3 clicks or more away from the home page.
  • 25% use online video in an advanced manner: contextual integration of videos, variety of video players, call-to-action tied to the video.
  • 32% offer a full-fledged “video center” comparable to a corporate TV channel.
  • 21% give access to such video center directly from their home page (one click away).
  • 12% display video ads for products on their site; 7% display video ads on their home page.
  • 36% offer full-screen video option.
  • 4% have video on auto-play (i.e. video starts as soon as the user lands on the page).
  • 11% open video in a new browser Web page.
  • 18% use a pop-up window to display video.
  • Video uses: 48% of the surveyed web sites use video for promotional purposes, 24% use it for informational purposes, 20% use it for demonstrative purposes, 6% use it to deliver news, 5% use it for entertainment purposes, 1% use it for other purposes and 0% use it for UGC (user generated content). (The percentages don’t add up to 75% because many sites use online video for several different purposes.)
  • Video formats: 61% use Flash video, 21% use Windows Media Player, 8% use QuickTime and 4% use Real Player. (The percentages don’t add up to 75% because some websites use more than one video format.)

Author: Al Falaschi Video Expert at Widen Enterprises (www.widen.com), a Madison,WI-based provider of digital asset management software and services.

Poster: Gary George

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Widen Enterprises – The reason “why” video use is on the rise in business marketing.

December 10, 2009 by tele2002

So here we are with a little more from the Widen guys on video, this isn’t the third one in the series I spoke of, so we still have that to come.

Widen Enterprises – The reason “why” video use is on the rise in business marketing.

Author: Gary George

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Pre-media vs Pre-press

December 7, 2009 by tele2002

Righto, so the weekend is over, the sky is cloudy and the temperature is dropping here in the UK! So to start the week off, I can report that we had a mass of hits on the blog over the weekend and whilst noticing that our Pre-media on Wikipedia page had several hits I headed over to Wikipedia to see if anyone had contributed to the page…. To my amazement someone had! But they’d gone in and redirected the page to prepress…. PREPRESS!! Come on, that is so far from Pre-media now with companies all over the world redefining their service offerings to be more Pre-media based rather than prepress based. I mean let’s just break down the words for a start….

PRE a prefix occurring originally in loanwords from Latin, where it meant “before”

So PRESS would indicate the destination to be a printing press of sorts, or really any device that makes paper dirty.

And MEDIA would indicate any media channel available which could include print.

Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data

As one of our Twitter followers put it, “Perhaps a bit too simplified but: Premedia is a bigger concept than Prepress since it concerns any output or media – not just print.” (thanks jgradvall)

Anyway, if my google alerts are anything to go by, more and more companies & individuals are taking an interest in Pre-media and converting themselves to provide a more diverse service-based offering. Just this weekend I received 5 alerts from companies all over the globe with ‘Pre-media’ in there somewhere…. Maybe any or all of those companies could join the discussions to open up and define what Pre-media means to the masses.

Author: Gary George

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