The Interactive Content Management Opportunity

Effective ICM requires four key components—each addresses specific business challenges.

Media repository and archive. The ICM platform’s central component is its media repository and archive, which must store, register, index and manipulate a huge volume of digital and Web assets in all known content formats. The media repository provides a single point of access for capabilities such as metadata modeling and automated transformations and classification. It secures business-critical content with the potential to enforce policies at the storage layer. Information rights management capabilities—including digital shredding, electronic signatures and watermarks—enable organizations to securely share and distribute assets both within and beyond the enterprise.

Creative process support. With seamless, multiplatform access to the media repository from within any creative tool, knowledge workers can achieve greater productivity. Workflow, role-based access and collaboration process automation streamlines, standardizes and improves business processes throughout the creative organization. A standards-based, service-oriented architecture framework can manage the creative process internally, and track it globally, throughout an asset’s lifecycle.

Multi-channel publishing. Multichannel publishing creates or reuses content and delivers it, from a single system, to Web, print, digital media, wireless or broadcast channels. An effective ICM platform provides a unified set of content services for creating page layouts and templates, simplifying format transformations and streaming media. Multi-channel publishing lowers operating costs, increases efficiency and creates additional revenue-generating opportunities.

Content usage analytics. Content usage analytics involves discovering and mining the metadata associated with rich-media and Web content to help create data-driven process models, simulations and dashboards. Companies can then identify the most effective content and analyze how it is being consumed. Armed with this closed-loop feedback, organizations can improve the quality of their content, messaging and product promotion, as well as enhance business agility.

The explosive growth of rich-media and Web content, and the individual’s ability to both produce and consume it, offers important implications for business. Organizations are being driven to reevaluate the technologies and processes they use to manage their digital assets, Web content, intellectual property and other information. To capitalize on emerging, revenue-rich opportunities, organizations must leverage their interactive content in an ICM solution built on an enterprise content management system. The result: dramatically improved customer experience, streamlined media production and minimized marketing costs.

Customer Success Stories

Customer Success: Athletic Apparel
One of the largest global designers and distributors of athletic apparel and gear uses an EMC Documentum solution to streamline how it selects, processes and distributes hundreds of thousands of digital assets. Formerly, the process would take two to four weeks. Today, it’s a matter of hours, resulting in higher throughput and greater branding proliferation. Additionally, by eliminating the need to burn and ship CDs and duplicate photo shoots, the system saves the company more than $8 million every year.

Managing and protecting its global brands is a top priority. Before a consumer sees one of the company’s global marketing campaigns, an extraordinary number of people may work with a digital asset. This includes more than 3,000 internal brand managers and designers as well as external PR and advertising agencies and pre-press printing shops.

The system enables photographers, fresh from a photo shoot, to log in remotely and easily upload images. The headquarters-based team can review the images and recommend additional edits and processing. Once approved, the images are color-corrected by outside vendors. The final version is made available in the system for distribution to the Web, to a brochure, or to television.

Customer Success: Wines and Spirits
Another ICM platform success involves one of the world’s largest spirits and wine companies, which uses the EMC Documentum platform to help market and sell products to more than 135 countries. The company reduced Web publishing cycle time, eliminated brand-asset shipping costs, slashed agency fees by up to $28M a year and increased brand manager visibility for all marketing resources.

To drive down costs and improve efficiencies, the company decided to automate content management. Previously, it had mailed paper invoices between offices, resulting in expensive, time-consuming communications that were not visible across departments and were easily lost. Use of an advertising agency was also costly and slow: anyone needing a brand asset had to request it from the agency, which then had to find, copy and ship it.

The company created a brand-asset resource system with an easy-to-use Web interface for making approved brand assets accessible to employees and outside service providers. Assets are easier to find, render, control and repurpose. Using customizable templates, brand managers now create and update press releases, fact sheets, contacts, historical information and calendars. In addition, the ICM platform enabled the company to bring in-house 36 brand websites formerly managed by an external agency. Approved content and metadata from the media repository are cached for fast delivery to site viewers.