Managing the difference between traditional and digital media production
Ghost Writer | Monday, February 22nd, 2010 | No Comments »
Since Iworks caters to both the traditional and digital media production industry, I found this of great interest.One of my fav feeds by Ed Richardson from the UK.
I’ve talked about the digital evolution that is occurring at a rapid rate within the digital and more traditional media agencies before.
Where digital teams are having to grasp in greater detail traditional marketing metric requirements, and the approach of delivering media on a large scale to meet the new demands being placed on it from more traditional advertising sources.
Equally, how traditional media agencies are having to evolve their thinking in order to understand how the digital media format works. Then leading on to how they can utilise the format to achieve the same results and metrics that their clients demand from press and television and other above the line formats.
The collaboration that is currently going on between more traditional agencies and digital agencies is producing some nice hybrid work, that takes the best from each of their key skills sets.
Digital agencies have a lot to learn from the more traditional channels, long may this relationship continue to grow.
There is a bridge being built between agencies through the sharing of knowledge and skills. An essential component of this bridge in understanding is a grasp of the difference between each of the respective production processes.
While delivering a banner campaign is likely to have a lot of parallels in general with running a campaign in a press channel, delivering a community engagement site is a different beast altogether.
It’s the delivery of community and engaging digital media that is the big differentiator between the more traditional formats and this is very much the type of digital investment that clients should be, and are, looking more often to leverage.
The main issue with estimating production demands of digital work is having a deep enough understanding of the technical requirements needed to deliver particular types of functionality.
Where traditionally a change to copy on a press campaign might involve some additional spend with your creative agency to implement the changes, this type of change with experience is easy to estimate.
However, how about changing a community site to allow visitors to login and tailor content to their own needs? It’s not a simple matter of just placing a login link in the top right corner.
In order to complete this work there needs to be a lot database driven work implemented, not only to create the whole user account registration and management, but also to then associate the user account fucntionality with content on page.
Acquiring the insight into estimating work like this is a lot more complex than it might first seem and it’s not something that most can produce off the back of their hand. I still rely on the technical development team, whom I trust, to assist me with estimating this type of work
It is this relative complexity involved in the digital production process that will catch many out as they tentatively dip their toe for the first time into digital media.
During this transitional or learning process having an agency or individuals that you can turn to assist with this understanding is an essential component that any brand should be ensuring they have at this time.
As the media industry as a whole becomes more digitally aware technical understanding will become more common place; more will have a greater idea of the work required to complete a specific task.
In the meantime traditional agencies will have to take the lead from more technically capable agencies when quoting and calculating work.
Attempting to scope functional and technical requirements to deliver digital elements without the requisite knowledge, in order to please a demanding client, can result in some potentially very expensive mistakes that will only harm your relationship with your client.
Delivering digital work is very different from traditional formats. What appears to be a relatively simple process, to the untrained eye, often takes more resources than expected to deliver. Equally sometimes there may be a method to deliver something seemingly complex more easily with the right knowledge.
Having a good production management process/team in place with digital media is essential to providing you with the reassurance that you will receive the value for money that you are calculating for your campaign.
This isn’t intended to be interpreted as a “holier than thou” praise of digital agencies, far from it.
More of an encouragement to trust in those that hold the expertise to be able to advise you correctly, leaving you with an informed process to deliver what you desire.
Source: Digital Signals , “Managing the difference between traditional and digital media production”
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