Planning, planning and more
planning – that’s what it takes
to establish a digital asset
management system that allows a
publisher to grasp the opportunity that
image sales and content syndication
represent. Few publishers have yet taken
the leap though.
What is required, if the Emap Active
experience is anything to go by, is a
dedicated team to pull it together, and a
system that fits all the requirements that
the long planning process has identified
both for the immediate and for the future if
the business grows as hoped.
Susan Voss, who heads up Emap
Active’s team as assets director, has
been the driving force behind the
successful development of an asset
management system that serves both
as an internal editorial tool and as an
external commercial vehicle for selling
the thousands of images and articles
that Emap Active, and now also Emap
Automotive, produce.
“We thought about it for 12 months
before we started and we had a very clear
plan,” says Voss. “Know what you own and
what you don’t own. That’s very important.
Really think very hard how you are going
to keyword things. We fell foul of that and
had to go back and reword it. You have to
put a lot of thought into what you want a
system to do – is it just an editorial tool or
a commercial tool.”
Voss says she worked alongside a
repro house with a mini system to prove
that there was some demand for usage
before seeking funding from the board
to roll the project out fully. It showed
there was a clear commercial viability to
developing a system that allowed Emap
Active’s external customers – which
might be greetings card companies,
book publishers, design and advertising
agencies, newspapers and TV companies
– to quickly search and access imagery
and content they required.
There were also internal benefits
to be gained by such a system, so Voss
researched the digital asset management
market for a system that would grow with
the business, that provided ease of use,
full reporting functions to track usage, and
security features to open up or close off
areas of the system to specific users.
Action Library is the result, and it is
based on Picdar’s Media Mogul digital
asset management system with a few
tweaks. Voss says that before Action
Library was set up Emap Active was
achieving about £150,000 in image and
syndication revenue per year, which it
hopes to quadruple this year – the first in
which it has started to heavily promote the
library.
“Sales of images and licensed copy
paid for the system even before we’d
fi nished putting all of our content onto it.
The business model is fantastic and with
Media Mogul it is now very profitable,”
says Voss.
Before, when customers wanted to
buy pages from a magazine, they would
have to send in marked up copies of the
magazine, which Emap Active would copy
from original page make-up files and
scans to a CD and send back. A repro
house would also sometimes be used,
adding more cost to a time consuming
process. Keeping reliable records of who
had bought what was consequently also
problematic.
Action Library makes pages instantly
available and licensing and syndication
auditing is properly tracked and managed.
“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,
wherever they want it. The system gives us
control over our assets and we can now
see what is happening to the business,”
says Voss.
Using Action Library, one greetings
card customer now selects four times the
number of images it used to in the same
period of time because searching and
retrieving is now so much quicker, she
adds. All the content is visible as a low
resolution thumbnail, with high resolution
material stored by Emap, and managed inhouse
for internal users (such as editorial
teams). Picdar hosts the external website,
which makes the installation easy and
cost-effective for the publisher.
In implementing Media Mogul, Voss
says the biggest issues were human ones
- getting the team onside. Emap Active has
23 titles and Automotive has 14, so there
were lots of different teams to convince
about the system. Some proved easier than
others. Voss continues: “We’re introducing
new workfl ows to people, and a lot of
people still like their transparencies. The
communications were different from one
team to another. We found it worked very
well to have some early wins to talk about;
Bird Watching magazine was going to be
the last, but they came to us and said they
wanted it sooner.”
“You have to be very quick and have
meetings with the teams on a one-to-one
basis. They all have their own concerns. It’s
the fear factor, but Emap people are very
proactive on these kinds of things, and are
very adaptable to change.”
Indeed the editorial teams are now
delighted with the asset management
system, Voss reports. “The teams love
it: they don’t have to go through filing
cabinets now; it’s all in the library, nicely
keyworded. Departments are using other
people’s assets, so there’s a lot more
sharing going on, and most of the teams
are using it as a production tool.”
Content is still being uploaded to the
site, and even with some tough editing
decisions being made, this will probably
still be a three-year process to get all
the assets that Emap wants on board.
There are about 100,000 images on
there currently, increasing daily, and the
publisher has invested in a drum scanner
and operator to undertake this task. It’s
a massive one – for example, there are
about 30 years worth of material from Car
magazine alone that would make ideal
content, says Voss. By the end of next
year the “cream” of the content should be
available.
The future plan is to get the library
further embedded in the editorial process,
and to make it a successful commercial
vehicle for the publisher. Growth in image
sales, syndication and internal usage is
therefore the aim. Other areas of Emap are
also showing an interest in what Action
Library can do for them, says Voss: “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, and we just
employed a sales manager.”
Voss laughs at mention of her new
title of assets director being an unusual
one, and says it’s indicative of the way
the industry is moving:
“I think companies
are realising more and more that all of
these fantastic images and words they’re
producing actually have a value. It’s an
area that a lot of publishers are looking
at, but you need to have a dedicated team
to bring it together and that’s what we do
here.”
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