Melinda McLaughlin

Marketers used to brag about their budgets and now it’s the size of their tech stack. Heading into 2022 and beyond, that stack deserves a better foundation.

Agility means to move quickly and easily. It’s the “and easily” part that the industry must confront. The keys to creative and media success today bear no resemblance to the past. But the “messy middle” of execution is stuck in it and holding brands back.

As the media landscape increases in complexity, so too do the strict payment obligations to the performers and rights owners who bring the brand stories alive. Because talent and rights payments are intrinsically connected to where and when ads play, tracking them across our expanding digital universe is beyond what is possible using manual-heavy legacy practices.

To bolster and exceed their ROI goals, marketers need systems and processes to enable their teams and partners to leverage video assets without any friction or slowdowns.

Brands are creating more stories for more screens and devices than ever before. These assets also carry strict rights for usage and talent payments, and marketers and their agencies must be ready to make changes quickly to react to a mercurial business landscape.

Each piece of ad creative holds a wealth of metadata. This data can help marketers at each stage of the creative workflow — if they have a centralized way to organize, manage, and maintain control of their assets. Here’s a look at the layers of data available within a marketer’s ad assets, and how that data can help drive more effective marketing and better ROI while ensuring precise compliance with talent and rights.

Using old, brute-force ways to meet new demands has reached a breaking point. Traditional digital asset management systems simply weren’t built for brand TV and video campaign asset workflow, and new research is showing why they can’t go the distance.

Once considered a passing fad, the in-house agency is an increasingly common component within many marketing organizations. At a recent ANA conference, marketers from multiple industries discussed the benefits of building an in-house agency; here are a few key points.

The growing popularity of over-the-top programming is having a transformative effect on the entire video advertising ecosystem. For marketers, this development opens up exciting new opportunities to connect with hard-to-reach audiences and engage them through more digital touchpoints than ever before.

Is there 21st-century wisdom for marketers in the 16th-century words of William Shakespeare? Marketers must adopt a new workflow for putting ads in front of consumers — one that ensures a brand’s love doesn’t go unrequited.