Digital Directions: The Marketing Silo

To varying degrees and rates of speed, publishing companies are transforming themselves into digital organizations.

While the vision varies from organization to organization, the essence of the transformation is the adoption of an approach in which content is created and transformed on a common digital platform, and in which the publishing life cycle itself is supported by a data-driven system.

The rationale for such a transformation typically consists of two principal arguments:
1. There are new revenue opportunities to be had through digital distribution of content, and a digital asset management approach can better support these programs.

2. There are significant cost efficiencies to be realized with the use of a common digital production platform.

This is a pretty compelling return on investment.

But there is a third argument as well, that (while perhaps a bit harder to quantify) is no less compelling: A digital platform keeps an organization’s departments synchronized by making content and related data accessible throughout the organization.

Marketing Can’t Promote What It Can’t Access
Perhaps there is no better beneficiary of this than the marketing department. Marketing’s central mission is to tell the wider world about content offerings prior to and at their release. Marketing links the publisher to the wider world. In order to fulfill this mission, marketing departments need access to digital assets—both data and content. Marketers are voracious consumers of data and make great use of it.

Specifically, marketers need access to:
• Accurate and advanced information regarding upcoming product releases. More than just a list of next season’s titles and their publication dates, this needs to include the wealth of data associated with titles in the editorial pipeline. This could include both a richer set of bibliographic information as well as status of the project.