Emap Active’s Action Library breathes the fresh air of syndication success with Picdar’s Media Mogul
“Sales of images and licensed copy paid for the system even before we’d finished putting all of our content onto it. The business model is fantastic and with Media Mogul it is now very profitable.”
Susan Voss, Assets Director at Emap Active
“400% growth in just a few months” reads like a classified advert for Soopa-Gro plant fertilizer. In the highly competitive world of picture syndication, this is exactly what happened to image sales with one of Emap Active’s customers.
Growth in sales is only one metric for increased profit. “One of our clients used to come into the office and spend hours and hours looking at hard copy images. We would then spend hours scanning and burning them onto CD. A few days later, the CD would be ready and then we’d send it to them in the post,” recalls Susan Voss, now Assets Director and the brains behind Emap’s Action Library.
Action Library, built on Picdar technology and know-how, is a new, fast growing and very profitable syndication business of Emap Active. Emap Active is a substantial division of the second largest consumer publisher in the UK, Emap Consumer Magazines.
Emap Active prides itself on the quality of its magazines, titles that are invariably number one or two in their sectors. They cover all manner of activities from angling to bird watching, horse riding to football and photography to walking and gardening. All are subjects that lend themselves to glorious images, and enthusiastic writing. One way that the company guarantees its high quality is by hiring the best writers and commissioning original photography.
Building the business case for an on-line syndication system
“We have this wonderful content that other companies really want to buy, but we didn’t have a vehicle to sell it,” says Susan. Only 18 months before Action Library formally existed, Susan’s desk was almost invisible under the piles of CD jewel cases that sprawled above and below every spare space.
“I tried using a repro-house who would copy all the images and manage them for us. But once we’d hit 3,000 images, it was easier to re-commission work than to try and find the picture again.” Bad economics, especially when demand was outstripping the company’s ability to meet it.
Susan was managing that demand single handed and, knowing that there was a better way to do things and much bigger sales to be had, applied to the Board for permission to progress with ideas. “I told the Board, ‘I’ve got the business, but I just can’t fulfil it as well as I could’”. Susan had seen one digital asset management system, and the repro house suggested another.
Media Mogul – right for today and tomorrow
“Picdar’s Media Mogul would grow with us, where other systems clearly couldn’t... We knew it would work. It also has the best reputation in the industry.”
When Susan saw Picdar’s Media Mogul solution, she knew it had all the right attributes she wanted now and the flexibility that the company would need to grow. “Whatever we bought on day one was going to change on day two,” says Susan. “Picdar would grow with us, where other systems clearly couldn’t. We knew it would work. It also has the best reputation in the industry and it fitted the budget.”
Susan looks after three different types of customer:
companies that buy whole pages of magazines on a regular basis and then reprint them under licence;
organisations that use Emap’s images to support their own product range, for instance photographs for the covers of maps for walking tours, glossy calendars and greetings cards publishers; and
Emap’s own internal users.
Making Media Mogul work for Emap Active
“When we set about changing how we do things, we thought it was going to be really easy. It isn’t the technology, it’s the people that make it more complex,” reveals Susan. In the image business, some people believe strongly in transparencies, others are convinced by the digital revolution. Some magazines have fixed views about how they want to work; others embrace a new idea quickly.
“Now Media Mogul is in … people love it.”
“Having to sell the idea internally to users was a real surprise to me,” admits Susan, “but now Media Mogul is in, and people are using it, they love it.”
Susan believed that any digital asset management solution should save costs by making it easier to share content, and that the same system would, therefore, create an easier method of syndicating content to the outside world, wherever they were. While the idea seems logical, not every digital asset management system is designed with that in mind, whereas Picdar’s is.
The desire to do things differently at Emap Active started when Susan discovered that two different magazines could commission the same image, and often did, because it was quicker than finding it internally. If, thought Susan, you can make internal content sharing faster, and more compelling, then you can sell material externally just as quickly and more cost effectively.
Now that these problems at Emap Active have been solved with Media Mogul, people find themselves using the system as if it had always been there. Philosophical arguments about wet film vs. digital images are now left for the purists to enjoy in the pub.
Media Mogul delivered an immediate return on investment
Emap Active’s external clients were more easily convinced at the outset, and the money being generated proves it. “Sales of images and licensed copy paid for the system even before we’d finished putting all of our content onto it. The business model is fantastic and with Media Mogul it is now very profitable,” glows Susan.
“Sales of images and licensed copy paid for the system even before we’d finished putting all of our content onto it.
The business model is fantastic and with Media Mogul it is now very profitable.”
Some of Emap Active’s magazines are also syndicated and Action Library’s clients buy a number of pages every month. Before Media Mogul, customers would have to send in marked up copies of magazines, which Emap Active would then copy from original page make up files and scans to a CD to send back. Sometimes the process would be managed by the repro house, but that would add extra costs. It also meant that keeping control over who had what became almost impossible.
Complete control and immediate access
The Media Mogul solution makes pages instantly available, and the licensing and syndication audit is properly tracked and managed. Media Mogul’s on-line processes make it very easy for customers to search, order and download any combination of copy and images from Emap Active’s available material. Time lag from original print to syndication is a thing of the past, as Susan explains, “Whole magazines are put up onto Media Mogul the moment they are published, and our customers, from wherever they are can download whatever they want, whenever they want it. Media Mogul gives us control over our assets and we can now see what is happening to the business.”
“Media Mogul gives us control over our assets and we can now see what is happening to the business.”
400% growth
Susan is particularly excited about a greetings card customer. “Because it used to take them so long to find images, there was a natural limit to the number of pictures they could choose. They now select four times the number of images in the same amount of time, not just because they can, but because it is good business for them too.”
Shopping for Penguins …
Closer customer relationships
“[Our customer] now selects four times the number of images in the same amount of time, not just because they can, but because it is good business for them too.”
The UK greetings card industry is, according to consumer intelligence organisation Mintel, worth £1.2 billion. Being competitive in a sector that, in the year 2000 had over 800 publishers and produced 2.6 billion cards and is still growing, makes it essential to get hold of the best and most eye catching pictures faster than the competition. It would be easy to imagine that the close relationships that have been built over years between Emap Active and their customers is diminished by so much automation, but Susan says it has only got better.
“Our clients say that Media Mogul is very simple and easy to use.”
“The latest imagery is available immediately, and they get instant gratification. Our Christmas gardening shoots in 2005 have been a huge hit for the 2007 Christmas card market. Our customers phone us up for ideas, and we can still look at images together because they are visible online. We’re much more involved with the creative side of the business rather than being bogged down in the process of scans and copying,” enthuses Susan. “Our clients say that Media Mogul is very simple and easy to use.”
There are other benefits too. Advertisers, who ordinarily want evidence of an advertisement appearing in print before settling their accounts, are now happy to accept ‘tear-sheets’ of advertisements as PDF files. It is faster for Emap to administer, and easier for advertisers’ accounting staff to process and also file.
Having a strong portfolio of images and stories is a massive advantage, but, says Susan, it also takes a lot of heavy marketing to make it really work. “We telemarket, use direct mail, attend shows, all sorts. We’d really thought through the business model and, with Media Mogul at the heart of the process, it works.”
Ready for growth with Media Mogul
“We’d really thought through the business model and, with Media Mogul at the heart of the process, it works.”
People want Emap Active’s images and stories. Scaling the system was carefully considered at the outset. Susan was confident the business would grow at high speed, and it has. All the high-resolution material is stored at Emap, and they are visible as low-res thumbnails on the web for anyone to see. The content library is managed in-house for internal customers, with the external facing web-site hosted by Picdar. This split makes installation extremely easy and very cost effective for Emap Active.
Revenue share was not a problem because Emap already established licensing as a cross-group activity, and so Action Library just bolts onto the existing accounting practices. Rights issues are straightforward with Media Mogul because it is so much easier to track who owns what, and where an image is being used at any time.
Other parts of Emap are becoming aware of the power of Susan’s business. Ambitious for the company, Susan had always set her sights high to build something that could develop and grow as fast as Emap wanted it to. That capability to grow and to develop ideas is what attracted her to Picdar, and it is paying back handsomely. “The more bits of Emap we can get, the bigger the library will become. When we started, it was just me. Now it is a department with two sales people, someone else to load images and a designer. We’ll have a sales manager soon.”
Picdar has made it possible for Susan and Emap to be much more ambitious with their ideas. Managing copyright is easy, and the digitisation of the assets means that its markets are not limited geographically or by resource.
Action Library is now so popular and so effective that there are times when Susan only sees an Action Library image that’s been licensed when a new book appears in a shop window, or when a walker is holding a map with one of her pictures on the front. “I don’t have to worry about processing rights, or revenue, because that is all looked after these days. It’s really nice when I see one of our images on a greetings card. One of our images used for a mother’s day card stayed in the top ten for two years. We’re certainly getting the awareness.”
Not one to leave a business opportunity unturned, Susan is also very proud that two of Emap Active’s own calendars, for Max Power, an automotive title, and Steam Power, are also up for awards. “I’m now also Assets Director for Emap Automotive, so watch this space,” says Susan.
The benefits of Media Mogul for Emap Active:
fast syndication sales growth
lower origination costs
easier syndication of both images and pages
better customer satisfaction
higher profits
faster to market with new content
more effective rights control with less effort, delivering an immediate return on investment.
EMAP Automotive use Action Library to syndicate features in Bike Magazine like this …
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Action Library’s in-house/hosted combination provides flexibility
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