VSNCrea and the rule of three

The boom of online video content means that as a social media management company, the nature of our game has changed quite dramatically over the past five years. Where previously our content creation and management services comprised only marginally of video, now it forms the majority of what our clients need. 

In many ways; that’s great. Video content and advertising has the potential to be so much more effective and engaging for audiences – so it drives the value we can provide to our clients. But it comes with a significant amount of more work; not only in its creation, but in its management. We ingest content in a range of different formats and have to schedule them to a range of different channels, with each client maintaining different criteria for how and when.

As a start-up, this had the potential to be a real barrier for us. We need our team to be fully engaged in creatively shaping a compelling, authentic and engaging brand for our clients, not wading through the backbreaking but tedious task of content planning, scheduling and managing client assets. At the same time, we simply don’t have the capital needed to invest in a system to automate the process. 

Which is why VSNCrea has been the answer to our prayers. With an online SaaS subscription model there have been no upfront costs, but we’ve still gained all of the benefits of an incredibly sophisticated but intuitive scheduling system and VSN’s MAM application – VSNExplorer, which is not only accessible via HTML5 web browser, but also fully integrated with VSNCrea. 

It has granted us all the functionality we need in terms of the management and scheduling our clients’ assets – both content and advertising – across social media platforms, but because it’s intuitive and usable then it has also been quick and easy to train new recruits on. In essence, it means that our team spends a fraction of the time that they used to on the ‘admin’ of content planning and non-linear scheduling, meaning they can get on with the tasks that really drive value for our clients, and which keep our employees themselves far more engaged – after all, they joined us in order exercise their creative muscles, not to work as scheduling monkeys! 

And perhaps one of the biggest benefits is that with cloud-based functionality, VSN fully supports our working-from-home model, which has always been a key component of our employee philosophy; we want them to have the freedom and flexibility to do their job in the way they feel is best for them, from wherever they need to be. 

VSNCrea and its online subscription model have taken what was once only accessible to broadcasters who had huge investment capacity and put it in the hands of niche businesses and creative start-ups. It democratized the whole idea of managing video content, which is great for us, but also great for an increasingly wide range of industries as a whole. 

As one of the leading digital publishers in Malaysia, we represent over thirty major brands and maintain an extensive distribution network reaching more than 15 million people each month. That’s about 75% of Malaysia’s internet population. 

Such an extensive reach means we have to juggle a lot of balls in the air at the same time. We originally came to VSN seeking a more powerful Media Asset Management (MAM) system, with our focus being on achieving more effective metadata automation and greater efficiencies in relation to the scalability of our underlying storage. VSN had a clear market-leading offering in relation to these elements, as well as cross-platform publishing potential, which was key to us as we work across a multitude of platforms, including all the main social media outlets. 

But it became clear as we developed our relationship – ongoing Proof of Concept, demos, documentation exchanges and multiple meetings –  that we were really going to be able to expand the potential of our solution beyond what we’d originally even hoped for. The integration abilities of VSNExplorer (VSN’s MAM) with the wider Broadcast Management System (BMS) abilities of VSNCrea meant that we would be able to leverage a much more streamlined, effective and efficient workflow process across the full content planning process; exporting the programs and schedules of linear channels, incorporating data for non-linear scheduling, automating ingestion, creating production placeholders where needed, and – crucially – importing the full metadata set associated with these XML files automatically between the MAM and BMS. 

All of this also involved first migrating our extensive (250TB) set of video files to a cloud environment, from which both VSNExplorer and VSNCrea could coordinate their activities. Since the implementation of VSN’s solution, we’ve seen tremendous improvements in our content distribution workflow, not only in terms of efficiency but also in our overall user experience. Everything works more smoothly, more quickly, more accurately, more efficiently and more intuitively. 

Moreover, core to our provision of services is the idea that what we deliver to clients is data driven; it uses metrics and concrete evidence to inform the choices we make, drive strategy, and constantly improve results. The data-driven feedback and reporting that VSNCrea gives is fundamental on this front. 

Perhaps best about the entire operation is that our relationship with VSN remains open. Whilst the on-site VSN installation we have now is successfully meeting all of our needs, we know the door is open for modifying, tweaking and expanding the system; it’s a dynamic and evolving relationship that will continue to meet our needs in the future. 

Linear scheduling can seem almost old fashioned when compared to the multitude of ways that video content is now used and distributed, but the fact is, the maintenance of ‘traditional’ channels remains incredibly complex. And with a channel as big as ours that goes doubly-so; there are a huge number of moving parts in terms of time slots and content type, distribution rights and usage parameters, not to mention the same again for associated advertising management. 

VSNCrea contains an incredible set of tools to make these processes much quicker to implement, much more likely to avoid mistakes, and as a result, grants a number of opportunities to leverage increased value from an activity that would normally be considered nothing more than a practical necessity. 

This means that in addition to associating metadata with content assets to ensure that they aren’t mis-scheduled, we can do really useful things to those assets. First of these is the ability to engage in content segmentation with the logger tool. Integrating with VSNExplorer, it’s possible to use VSNCrea to directly access each asset (and if desired, preview it), adding content insertions or advertising slots as desired. This can be done using automation – making the process quick and easy, or through manual selection – granting flexibility and specificity where needed. 

Similarly, the automated processes for advertising revenue allocation are a gamechanger. The ability to allocate slot prices by a number of different rubrics and metrics – many of which can be informed by automated data such as that of viewership performance – not only speeds up the decision-making process, but makes it more robust and accurate. With these tools we can be sure we’re leveraging the most possible revenue from each slot – and moreover, we can communicate this information to our clients on a real-time, constantly updated basis. 

Furthermore, as well as being able to manage advertising relationships before the sale more effectively, we can report on them more robustly afterwards; serving benefit to us in relation to our own internal reporting and strategy development, but also giving our advertising partners a much clearer picture of the ROI benefit they’re receiving, which strengthens our relationship with them and makes it much easier to maintain repeat custom. 

But VSNCrea hasn’t only made our core tasks more achievable, it’s also expanded the scope of what we do. Where previously our promotional activities had been entirely focused on the channel itself, with VSNCrea’s ability to take video assets and automatically transcode and schedule them for multi-platforming publishing, it suddenly made a lot more sense to promote ourselves across social media. We’ve achieved a notable uptick in engagement as a result – and it’s an avenue we wouldn’t have actively pursued unless the tools had been there at our fingertips.