TBWA Worldwide

Managing digital advertising assets

As an advertising leader serving some of the world’s best-known brands, TBWA knows firsthand that a successful global campaign requires highly effective collaboration with each client company and dozens of local agencies around the world, including:

• Efficient, standardized communication on a regional and global level, including proper distribution of marketing assets to each target audience around the world
• Monitoring and control of go-to-market timing across respective countries
• Maximizing financial efficiency – as expected by client firms – by achieving lower price per unit and streamlining all processes

In the global marketing world, an adaptation is a version of a master asset customized for use in a particular country or region of the world, created by agencies local to that area.

A global advertising program typically requires hundreds of adaptations, each consisting of several key concurrent processes that must be completed with great care and in timely fashion:

• Briefings: Requests from a local agency to create an adaptation of a given master asset, including full details of work required
• Transcreation: Very precise language translation that aligns with and respects local culture
• Post-production management, such as a new local language voiceover for a video or audio asset
• Rights management: The client can incur significant liability if an asset is used without the proper global and local level contractual rights in place:
• Talent rights from actors, musicians and other performers permitting use of their likeness and/or intellectual property in a media asset
• Usage rights defining when and where an asset may appear on TV, radio, print, etc.
• Digital asset management functions such as versioning, transcoding and more

Recently TBWA selected Nuxeo as its new Media Asset Management platform to provide clients with a new level of process management, operational performance and cost effectiveness, beyond what was possible using TBWA’s existing homegrown solutions.

The TBWA technology team utilized the Nuxeo platform to build a new application called GAME (Global Adaptation Management Engine) for one of the company’s largest clients, to more effectively manage its adaptation management processes across its many countries, agencies and partners.

Building a new global media asset management application … in just three weeks

Actively leveraging Nuxeo’s web-based configuration and customization tool (Nuxeo Studio), which eliminates virtually all custom coding, "We developed the new GAME application in just three weeks, with only some minor assistance from a Nuxeo solutions architect."

Working together to develop a rich and complex metadata model and customized workflows using the Nuxeo platform, TBWA successfully resolved its client’s specific adaptation management challenges and provided critical additional functionality, including:

• Significantly improved collaboration between TBWA and the client during the asset creation process, as well as between the customer and local agencies on adaptations, leveraging Nuxeo’s flexible workflow engine
• Effective automation of mundane but highly critical tasks, such as creating a new job upon receipt of a briefing from a local agency, directed to appropriate TBWA managers for approval, followed later by delivery of the adaptation to the subsequent delivery of the adaptation to the local country
• Quick and easy linking to all types of assets, from master assets to briefings and adaptations
• Complete, transparent and traceable talent and usage rights management

“Our clients are looking to centralize their media asset management processes, from collaborating with us on the creation of master assets to management of adaptations – one of the most complex parts of a global marketing campaign.” Stefan Born, TBWA director of IT for Germany, Central and Eastern Europe

“Our GAME application not only improves handling of adaptation workflows but also gives our client a comprehensive tool to manage and supervise internal processes, including seamlessly integrating procurement, legal and production, establishing access controls on the assets, and customizing the workflows that create the assets which are then put into the Nuxeo repository.”