In our latest webinar, Increasing Cost Consciousness, we discussed how we evaluated our martech stack to decrease cost while increasing efficiency. We also provided tips for getting your CFO on board with new tech spending.
Getting more out of less.
Many companies fall into the trap of buying specialized software used only in specialized production areas. So people doing production work, location scouting and casting are using different software than you may use for dailies. And dailies are being done by a post facility that isn’t also handling pitch materials or screen reviewers. Although folks tend to fall in love with the applications they use and hire people because they know how to use that specific equipment and software, we’re finding that most people are saying, I like the illusion of choice, to be able to choose any number of tools that I want, but the problem is that there are too many. All have deficits in one area or another.
Trying to find one tool that serves everyone can be difficult, but the flip side of that is when you stop looking for tools that can do everything, you end up with a stable of monthly costs and different solutions, and they don’t quite work the way you need them to. Almost across the board, people are saying it was good to have this little app for this and this little app for that, but we’re looking for someone who can bring us creative and collaborative flexibility in one platform.
All teams can benefit.
If one software can be used for review and approve and allows you to make notes, telestrate and share amongst others and the crew, it would likely be helpful to others on your team. If you’re already housing all of your content in the cloud, which is already being indexed, why not use that same service to enable the sales team instead of transferring it from one platform to another? Homogenizing all of this into fewer applications that can do more is something that we feel very strongly about here.
Customer insights.
Though we can’t name all our customers, we had to include some feedback from our recent Annual Video Production Workflow Report demonstrating our customers’ need to streamline their techstack and how MediaSilo has helped them achieve more with less.
“It’s made our lives a lot better, being able to work remotely and be productive. However, we are always wishing there was a way for us to do most of all the work on one platform instead of having to use so many different vendors.”
– Award-winning Producer
“We get as much done in pre-pro to prep for production, so things go more smoothly. Using tools like MediaSilo and Asana, we’re able to access any assets or briefs we might need.”
– Managing Director
“Having a platform that has offline cuts, press clips and final screeners housed in one place has been incredibly useful for our major shows.”
– Chris Schwachenwald, Head of Post Production
We’ve been lucky to work with Chris, now at Amazon Studios, for many years, and he’s someone who’s seen the benefit of having everything hosted in one place and not having context switching and tool switching.
His comment perfectly highlights the theme that if you manage the number of viewers and try to consolidate the use cases into one tool, it’s easier for your entire staff to find content across the production lifecycle.
Selling into the CFO.
We at Shift Media have done exactly what we’re talking about today: evaluate all the different applications and consolidate them into a more efficient martech stack. And we’ve found it easier to use because we have fewer tabs open in the browser and fewer applications running at one time. It’s become more manageable for our marketing and sales departments to work with a consolidated number of applications.
Tech spending is still growing.
Gardner recently published a report forecasting 2023 IT spending worldwide, projecting an increase in software spend by 2.4%. When comparing IT spending in the next year, they’re seeing more growth in software than all other IT services combined, projecting an increase from $783,462 million globally in 2022 to $856,029 million in 2023.
Remote work is here to stay.
When you look at where the more significant spends are, you see increases in software and IT services but not data center systems, which is an indicator that companies are investing in remote working conditions. Because you need software to work remotely and IT services to keep that running because not every user at home is an IT wizard, we see that many of them may not be using the cloud as much because we’re only seeing a 0.7% growth. This indicates that many companies have a bolster of infrastructure to handle folks working remotely but still access everything back at home base.
In the Annual Video Production Workflow Report, quoted above, a lot of the feedback pointed to the fact that people are still trying to optimize that remote and hybrid tool set to allow them to be more efficient.
In our next installment, we’ll discuss how to quantify the ROI. Don’t want to wait? Watch the entire webinar now.
For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.
MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.
