Just heard that IDC’s CMO Advisory research team is pulling together their 2009 Benchmarking Survey. Always a good read, and a great help in not only planning out, but also justifying your marketing budget.  IDC’s July newsletter also includes a preview of CMOs’ marketing automation priorities for the coming year, with a more comprehensive analysis in their 2010 Marketing Investment Planner, due out sometime this fall. 

A few areas in their summary of surveyed CMO priorities really stand out.  In no particular order, they include:

• Development of a formal marketing automation roadmap.  CMOs are looking to take a fresh look at marketing tools and applications for redundancy and cost savings. (Shows that more investment in automation is not necessarily a priority, but process improvement is, followed by whatever automation is required to achieve efficiency.)

• Sales enablement and marketing asset management technologies.  OK, now here’s something we marketers instinctively suspect - quantified, at last, by a leading international research firm: 40% of all marketing assets handed over to sales are not in use today!  According to IDC, this includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects and current customers. Moreover, they estimate that at least 30% of companies’ marketing investment, including program and people spend, is dedicated to creating content and marketing assets.   

Wow. What if you could achieve a 3-5% reduction in your asset development spend in 2010 and reallocate it to something else?  Like customer retention programs or opening up new markets?  Isn’t that roughly the same thing as a bigger budget?   FeedRoom can help.

Our digital asset management system provides out-of-box capabilities for workflow configuration that deliver instant cost reductions by automating and streamlining marketing asset management - while also significantly reducing the overhead required to manage these assets, including those that are expired or could be re-used instead of re-invented.  In fact, that’s what many of our customers like Autodesk, Raytheon, TAC and others are already doing every day.  If you want to learn more about ActiveMedia and its workflow automation capabilities, check out this Webcast from last week. -Lisa C.

I was on a sales call last week with Mike Hardiman, sales director for The FeedRoom’s digital asset management solution, when he casually mentioned to a prospect that ActiveMedia has over 30 possible workflow actions. That got me thinking… Statistically, how many workflow combinations are possible?

I started working on the math, but quickly realized that this was way over my head, so I jumped over to Mike Petro’s desk, one of our resident MIT graduates. His eyes lit up at the prospect of a fun problem to solve on the train ride home.

5,805,205,274,748,320,000,000. That’s the number of possible workflow combinations, assuming 30 work actions, each with up to 5 sub-options and assuming that a workflow can have up to 10 steps.

In reality, there are more than 30 workflow options, each of those have more than 5 sub-options and, in theory, you can have an unlimited number of workflow steps. So, I made some reasonable assumptions to arrive at this number.

Here’s the math:

When, n= the maximum number of workflow steps, and z= the number of workflow options times the number of sub-options.
Or, n=10 and z=150, in our example.

z*z0 + z*z1 + ... + z*z(n-1)
150 + 1502 + ...15010
=5,805,205,274,748,320,000,000

5.8 sextillion possible combinations. That just blows my mind. - Andrew B.

I’m spending this week transplanted from our bustling New York City headquarters to what we lovingly call “FeedRoom North”, our Westborough, MA office. This office came along with our ClearStory acquisition and is largely inhabited by The FeedRoom team working on the ActiveMedia product. New England has a unique charm that my home, Manhattan, lacks, and while I’m enjoying that charm, I’m here for more important reasons.

ActiveMedia is our digital asset management product for the management of all assets across the digital media supply chain, end to end. This is important for The FeedRoom, and the market in general, as video is rapidly becoming ubiquitous with other forms of digital media. Our enterprise customers are embracing video for communicating to their employees, partners, customers and prospects. This is very exciting to us.

Our clients have been using other types of rich media assets, images and documents for years within their respective digital asset management systems. I’ve said it over and over, and I’ll say it again, video is just another data type. FeedRoom is the only company poised to take advantage of that with a system specifically designed to manage video alongside all of the assets you’re already used to managing on a day-to-day basis.

I’m here in Westborough to learn the ins and outs of this unique combined system so that I can bring the solution to you next time we meet. - Andrew B.

On December 1, 2008, with the acquisition of Clearstory Systems, The FeedRoom added market-leading technology for digital asset management to its portfolio of SaaS solutions.  At precisely the same moment, Gartner released a five-year prediction foretelling that the rapid adoption of enterprise video, user-generated content and rich media would catapult this mature software category back into the cross-hairs of enterprise buyers and drive renewed market growth. As hopeful as this seemed during a time when “non-essential” software purchases appeared to be shelved for better days TBD, vendors across the space wondered what this would mean for ‘09.  

Albeit off to a less explosive start in Q1, the market for digital asset management is, in fact, thriving.  In the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen more RFPs and RFIs for digital asset management solutions than perhaps all of the previous 12 months combined.  Why?  Certainly if the technology ROI was not evident, these efforts would be wasted.  That’s not the case.  Companies are seeing that DAM solutions featuring workflow automation, integration points with other enterprise systems and support for a wide variety of content standards can reduce costs dramatically, create new efficiencies, and if implemented swiftly and successfully, deliver unprecedented ROI.  Sure, some of the these cost savings can come in the form of headcount reduction, but many are derived in other ways such as optimization of investments in rich media, or the ability to serve a global audience and support multiple lines of business on a single platform.  These forward-thinking companies are the ones who will lead the way, and if their assessments are correct, then perhaps your company should be thinking about digital asset management in ‘09, too.  - Mark P.