How implementing a DAM not only saves money, but also drives revenue

Benefits

With WoodWing Assets:

• The organization is able to work in sync.
• Workflows have become simpler and faster.
• A streamlined process to generate revenue by licensing and sharing content with other publishers has been implemented.

About the customer

BuzzFeed is the most famous digital-first news and lifestyle publication in the world, famed for both its viral content and serious, hard-hitting reporting.

Challenge

BuzzFeed is a startup culture, which has grown fast and by necessity needed to (re)create workflows and systems as they scaled. Until relatively recently, many people in the organization had either not been aware of Digital Asset Management, or not been aware of the benefits such a solution could bring.

This led to a situation in which the organization:

• Was working with tools that didn’t have visual capabilities, particularly important as they brought on more staff photographers.
• Had no way to distribute assets, and instead were relying on email and Google Drive.

There was one more challenge to overcome, and that was how to convince management of the ROI of WoodWing Assets.

Evaluation

The key breakthrough in this conversation was when the rights team put forward a compelling case that implementing DAM would not only save money, due to a single source of truth and clear workflows, but also become a revenue driver.

Leveraging DAM as a revenue driver is related to the fact that BuzzFeeed generates vast amounts of original content (especially photography) that they earn revenue from by licensing out to other publishers. This is a differentiator for the business, as they source content that other publishers don’t have. But without some way to store and manage rights information, including what they could license out, to which organizations, and under which circumstances, was a time-consuming process.

However, with WoodWing Assets, having all the rights management data stored in one place ensured that relevant people within the organization would always know what they could and could not sell, unlocking value for the organization.