When it comes to workflow solutions, my presentations at Henry Stewart have espoused a decidedly contrarian point of view, based on my experience and a sound business case at Comedy Central.
Our creative review and approval system is built in house using Ruby on Rails, hosted by Amazon Web Services. We chose not to outsource the creativity that is so vital to our process.
Comedy Central’s content marketing arm currently produces 3,000 to 4,000 graphics a month, across all media types. A 30-second spot could easily go through 20 revisions before it’s fit to release. The same holds true for everything else. And there’s a lot of conversation that surrounds this work. We needed a way to manage all this stuff that enhanced and supported our existing team structures and processes.
To better understand and describe our worldview of what we, as a Brand Creative team, need from a digital workspace, I developed a Media Ecosystem Model that I’m including here.
The focal point — what I call the Sweet Spot — is at the intersection of Media, Information, Process and Publishing.
If you plot solution providers on this grid, you’ll see there’s a lot of action in the upper left corner, between Media and Process, with a strong component of Information. (I’m intentionally leaving vendor names off this grid, so as not to imply endorsement and also in recognition that their position on the grid will drift over time ad they change strategy and pursue new business opportunities over time.)
You can hit that Sweet Spot if you build a system. Yes, it requires considerable effort. It also takes time, and lots of research.
But the Sweet Spot on the chart — where the dynamics converge upon the management of media, process and information — is far likelier to be achieved. And the rewards are so worth it.
For the past five years, up to this writing, at Comedy Central we simply haven’t found any commercial product that can do it better than the system we’ve built for ourselves. We had to build it, for it could not be bought at any price.
Bottom Line:
The future belongs to us. We have long-term plans to enhance and improve our system, and nothing can stop us because the only customer we need to satisfy is Comedy Central.