Today’s publishing and media organizations are facing multiple challenges when it comes to producing engaging content. To stay competitive, content needs to be produced faster and published across more channels than ever before: The future of content is changing. The turn-around times are quicker, everything is multi-channel or preferably even channel-neutral and video content is becoming even more popular. But not only these examples will determine the future of content. What about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? Or workflow and marketing automation? In this article Madré Roothman, Product Marketing Manager at WoodWing, spills the beans on the possibilities of these emerging technologies and how they can allow every piece of content to realize its greatest potential.
Channel-neutral content
Let’s talk about multi-channel and channel-neutral content before deep diving into the more technical emerging developments. Take Red Bull for example. This brand has a ‘content pool’ and a magazine, called The Red Bulletin. The brand creates stories for their audience and publishes them onto their social channels, platforms and in their magazines. These kind of brands are increasing the competition for publishers and demanding more and more audience attention. It is all about reusing your content the right way.
When it comes to recycling these stories or content, it is imperative that, firstly, it is easy to find, and secondly, that it can be easily tweaked and republished on another channel or brand. For large media organizations that have many brands, stories often get lost or are not reused in an efficient manner. There are even companies that use copy and paste to transfer a print story into a digital story. Remember that print has different requirements than digital, such as copy fitting and page styling and layout, while with a digital story it is more important to ensure SEO and an easy to read content structure. Luckily, there are products that solve this problem by automating mundane and repetitive editorial tasks, for the fastest content creation yet. The result is stories that are enhanced for their respective channel, ensuring audience satisfaction on every single channel.
Artificial Intelligence
As a publisher, brand or marketing agency, you’re constantly challenged to create compelling content that will grab your reader’s attention. At the same time, you might be sitting on a hidden treasure of archives, full of digital files, that could be repurposed, if only these were easily searchable and tagged with the right information. As we all know, manually tagging assets costs valuable time and is subject to human mistakes. That’s where the emerging technology Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in. AI can be perfectly used as the ‘new collegue’ to assist in finding the right content in a heartbeat which leads to unveiling the true value of your content archives and reduction of production time.
Next to auto tagging and color and image recognition, AI can also be used to generate articles, create chatbots and automate processes. Look at Google Planet for example, that can figure out where a photo was taken based on details embedded in the photo, while Google Photos is using it to improve the search experience. And for digital marketing, AI can help tremendously with automated reports and content generation.
Machine Learning
But what if AI has a more advanced self-learning element to it? Imagine a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that analyzes user habits to better predict their actions the same way a company like Amazon does with its customers when thinking of Alexa. That would result in discovering the most popular content, similar assets or the assets users need to complete their jobs. This could become reality in the near future resulting in DAM solutions that could serve up the perfect assets to the users while reducing time spent discovering content by hand.
Thanks to automatic tagging and Machine Learning, DAM systems could also process real-time voice commands. Imagine giving a presentation and pairing an infographic with real-time visitor statistics on the website without having to upload or tag the material beforehand. For these possibilities that are offered by algorithms, the sky is the limit.
Workflow automation
All media companies are unique and dynamic. Their processes and workflows are constantly evolving, as media creators produce content that pushes the boundaries. Publishers and digital marketing agencies store a huge amount of digital assets – such as photos, videos, logos, illustrations, animations, design documents – on a daily basis. Often, different creative teams within an organization or even colleagues have not made clear agreements on where and how they store these assets. As a result, marketers and designers are losing valuable time searching for the right assets; time they could have spent on designing or setting up creative campaigns.
So to be competitive in today’s marketing and publishing world, efficiency and smart use of technology is not a ‘nice to have’ but mandatory. There is a shift in the way we work, where mundane tasks can now be automated by smart technology and software mentioned before. On top of this, time and resources cannot be wasted, but rather reused in the most efficient ways.
