Agencies: The Digital Transformation Challenge

If dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is at the heart of dis­cus­sions in most com­pa­nies, it is also a cen­tral chal­lenge for so-called “tra­di­tion­al” agencies—those that aren’t “pure play­ers,” where tech­nol­o­gy isn’t at the heart of their activ­i­ties. They now real­ize that dig­i­tal occu­pies a cen­tral place in their needs and in those of their clients. Man­ag­ing to change and adapt in order to face this dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion is a big chal­lenge for them.

Adobe works direct­ly with many agen­cies that are already heavy users of our cre­ative solu­tions, such as Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor, and InDe­sign, or our dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing solu­tions. These agen­cies, how­ev­er, are real­iz­ing more and more that these solu­tions can also be use­ful for their own inter­nal pur­pos­es, not only to their clients.

One par­tic­u­lar tool is at the heart of these chal­lenges: dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment. DAM allows orga­ni­za­tions to cen­tral­ly man­age media con­tent, facil­i­tate inter­nal and exter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tion around such con­tent, and auto­mate many tasks (auto­mat­ic ren­di­tions, for instance, which is the auto­mat­ed gen­er­a­tion of all ver­sions of a mas­ter image). I have already writ­ten an arti­cle about it.

So far, agen­cies have most­ly focused on the cre­ation part, but the impact of dig­i­tal on their cus­tomers has led to two new issues:

• The dri­ve to expand their foot­print, and also man­age the mar­ket­ing aspect
• The desire to improve col­lab­o­ra­tion and work inter­nal­ly to opti­mize exchanges and processes

The impact of DAM on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and satisfaction
Very often, DAM is at the heart of these issues because it has a major impact on these two chal­lenges. Let’s look at a Euro­pean adver­tis­ing agency I work for, which now faces two major challenges:

• Improve team sat­is­fac­tion, ensur­ing that peo­ple spend less time on unnec­es­sary tasks
• Use this freed-up time to work on its posi­tion­ing and thus be bet­ter equipped to face the dig­i­tal transformation

After con­duct­ing a thor­ough review of the agency’s sit­u­a­tion, we found that 28 per­cent of its work time was spent on tasks relat­ed to func­tions with­in the scope of DAM, which is the equiv­a­lent of 3,560 days of work per year across the whole office! By set­ting up a DAM solu­tion, it could recov­er an aver­age of 2,000 days per year. Pret­ty impres­sive, I think.

This work time could be used to make rich­er cre­ations, but also to invest in trans­form­ing the teams’ occu­pa­tions, going toward a broad­er approach, a more com­plete mar­ket­ing sup­port for clients. Thus, a DAM solu­tion may prove to be the start­ing point for a much broad­er inter­nal trans­for­ma­tion, and may have an extreme­ly strong impact on productivity.

And I speak about pro­duc­tiv­i­ty delib­er­ate­ly: the use of DAM is usu­al­ly approached from an ROI point of view. How­ev­er, it is essen­tial to keep in mind that it also allows for a dra­mat­ic improve­ment in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and effi­cien­cy, thus boost­ing sat­is­fac­tion at work. By using DAM to auto­mate the non-intel­lec­tu­al­ly reward­ing tasks, employ­ees can focus on oth­er, more ful­fill­ing aspects of their work.

What about you, what do you think about the role of DAM in the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of agen­cies? Feel free to give your opin­ion in the comments!