Digital Content Supply Chain

A digital content supply chain entails the whole process of planning, creating, managing and deploying digital content such as videos and images/photos to your desired channels and target audiences. It’s as Bill Gates said: “Content is King”. To be able to target specific groups and create personalized experiences, you need content – lots of it. It needs to be of high-quality, available in different formats, adjusted to different audiences, and engaging people across numerous channels.

This is usually achieved through what you might call a “Media Service Platform”, or in the case of Vidispine: VidiNet. It’s Vidispine’s own digital media/content supply chain, supporting your content production through the whole process, allowing you to use the VidiCore API as a fully managed cloud service. The Vidinet advantage includes:

• Cloud native services and centralized cloud storage
• Dynamic scalability – both upwards and downwards
• “Pay for what you use”-price model and cost predictability 
• Access to third-party tools for editing and transcoding 
• Sophisticated search functionality
• Cognitive services for automated watermarking, image tagging and face recognition
• Advanced video QC 

The big up-and-comer within the B2B industry, and the thing we at Vidispine also specialize at, is video. Video content has become an important aspect of every business, simply because the consumption of video content is steadily increasing. It’s estimated that a person will spend approximately 100 minutes watching online videos by 2021, as compared to the 84 minutes we spent in 2019 – and the evidence points towards that it will continue to increase. Here are the reasons why you need a digital content supply chain to support your video content production:

• People prefer watching rather than reading content online
• A video is able to tell a more compelling story, adding colors that can’t be replicated in a text or a single image
• A video educates and informs. What would you prefer: reading a “How-To” instruction, or watching it together with some visual feedback?
• People do business with other people. A video allows for a more personal connection and a visual representation approach
• Videos makes a website more “sticky”, as it tends to increase how long and how many pages a user visits

To be able to handle this process – you need a rigorous approach to your content strategy, and an architectural way of thinking.  Which is what Vidispine is here to help you with. Together with Vidispine you get access to the required resources, software and programs to be able to create and effectivize your digital supply content delivery and create digital content at scale.

We give you the necessary tools to design a digital content supply chain according to your organization’s needs, helping you plan, create, manage, and distribute both video, photo, image and textual content. With Vidispine you will be able to reduce waste, drive out costs, and achieve efficiencies by:

• Maximizing resource productivity
• Developing standardized processes
• Eliminating duplicate efforts

On the most basic level, a digital content supply chain is about meeting the demands of the customers. It’s about matching supply with demand in a timely manner, and using the most effective means to do so. The process of a creative digital content supply chain consists of 5 components:

• Demand planning:
  What market and social signals are out there for you to capitalize on? Find them, analyze them, and start creating content based upon them.

• Production schedules:
  Create a detailed plan and schedule for your content creation; think of it as an editorial calendar and project plan all rolled up into one integrated entity.

• Blueprints:
  By blueprints we refer to descriptions of how everything is connected – how content elements map to content assets and how they in turn map to distribution channels. The blueprints ensure your marketing efforts within your digital content supply chain process will be orderly, efficient and leveraged.

• Bill of materials:
  The bills of materials is a detailed list of required content elements and artifacts, including their various formats and renditions, for publishing across your desired channels.

• Production:
  The production of your content is the culmination of the previous steps where you put everything into practice. This is where you look into sourcing, approval and distribution of your digital content assets across various paid, earned and owned channels.

Read more about the content supply chain here.

A content supply chain strategy is a plan for creating, producing, distributing, and delivering content to the intended audience. It involves identifying the target audience and determining the types of content that will be most effective in reaching them. It also includes creating a workflow for the production, distribution, and delivery of that content as well as the process for tracking and measuring the performance of the content.

When developing a content supply chain strategy, it's important to consider which automation tools to use and how to use them. The right tools for you depends on the specific processes that you want to automate and the resources that are at your disposal. It's also important to think about how the tools will integrate with other systems and how they will affect workflow. By carefully considering these factors, one can choose the right automation tools and optimize their content supply chain for efficiency and productivity.

A content supply chain strategy is important to ensure that the right content is created, distributed, and delivered to the right audiences at the right time. Additionally, a well-designed content supply chain strategy can help to improve the return on investment for content marketing efforts by better aligning content with business goals. Overall, having a strategy can help you ensure that your content is of high quality, relevant to the target audience, and synced with the overall goals of your organization.

Our digital and global era has given rise to several new challenges regarding an organization’s content creation:

• Quality: Usefulness and insightfulness
• Speed :  Time to create and deliver content
• Cost: Resources, effort, skills, money
• Relevance: Context, personalization,situational, versions
• Availability: Time, coverage, case requirements
• Formats: Channels, preferences, file types, encoding
• Scale: Volume, critical mass, accommodate
• Share & Re-use: Editing, re-configure, transcoding, package
• Maintain: Long-life assets vs. short-life expenses

In the end, your content creation, managing and distribution process needs to be a holistic and agile exercise. You will need to incorporate the latest technologies and software to be able to create content at scale at a fast rate, of high-quality. With Vidispine’s services you will be able to meet all the above mentioned challenges head-on. Contact Vidispine today and we’ll help you create the ideal digital media supply chain for your organization.