GSD&M Idea City Streamlines Creative Process With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that GSD&M Idea City has improved the efficiency and productivity of the agency’s creative teams by simplifying and speeding access to rich media files using the EMC Documentum Digital Asset Manager.

GSD&M Idea City, a full-service advertising agency based in Austin, Tex., previously stored its rich media files – such as artwork, text, audio and video – on multiple departmental file shares, desktops, CDs or DVDs. As a result, if employees needed files from other departments, it could take hours or even days to find them.

"In advertising, rich media files represent years of creative and monetary capital that can be leveraged for future campaigns," said Lisa McIntyre, Digital Asset Management Librarian at GSD&M Idea City. "However, if we can’t get to this content, our delivery is stalled and our clients risk their time-to-market advantages. Our workaround to this problem used to be recreating files because it could be faster than finding them, which is a drag on productivity and profitability."

After conducting a thorough needs assessment, GSD&M Idea City selected EMC Documentum Digital Asset Manager to centrally manage, edit and organize all of their rich media files and related documents. Gimmal Group, a technology consultancy, then configured and implemented the solution which today allows 600 of GSD&M Idea City’s employees access to approved digital assets.

"We chose the EMC Documentum solution because of its strong multimedia capabilities, including extensive content transformation and authoring integration services as well as an easy-to-use Web interface that provides the same level of functionality and seamless file sharing across Macs and PCs," said Coan Dillahunty, Vice President and Director of Technology Solutions at GSD&M Idea City. "Using EMC Documentum Content Transformation Services, our staff can transform single or multiple documents–automatically or on demand–from one format to another, or from one resolution to another. For instance, with just a few clicks, users can convert high-resolution print images to low-resolution web-ready JPEG files, or turn video into streaming formats."

"With Digital Asset Manager, our creative professionals spend less time searching for files and more time creating and refining their work," said McIntyre. "Now that it’s easier and more efficient to share files, we’re seeing an increase in collaboration, both within and between departments. We also collaborate more easily with our clients and vendors outside the agency. This change has fostered a much more open, productive environment."

Another challenge of the previous environment was working with large graphics files – sometimes more than a gigabyte in size. Content was so dispersed that duplicates of very large files permeated throughout the agency and quickly used up capacity on its EMC CLARiiON CX-240 storage area network. With everything centrally managed in EMC Documentum, GSD&M was able to taper its storage growth and costs because there are far fewer duplicate files on the file share.

In the near future, the agency plans to use Digital Asset Manager to keep track of the IP or usage rights associated with an image or file – for instance, agreements with a photographer to use a photo only in a particular geographic region or type of media and for a certain time period. Instead of cross-referencing the image file with an Excel database, as employees must do today, they will be able to see the usage rights information alongside the image.