Label Activities

MUM Says: My local Aldi knows it can couple specials on wine and power drills and get me waiting at 8am on Wednesday to purchase, it does this by tagging and tracking its generic products effectively so that their catalogue at the checkout has me returning next week for Vitamin B supplements and potting mix. A Label’s operations are similarly placed to help you manage and direct the production, placement and promotion of products effectively in the market place. 

Labels and Managers work together to effectively manage media assets and other associated digital / physical documents in a way that allows work to be completed effectively and in a timely manner. Small inconveniences in time / process or effort may have a negative effect on a worker's ability to complete their work tasks effectively. This chapter aims to demonstrate strategies that may be implemented to keep track of media assets, product release and marketing. 

Key Concepts:

• Tag

• Manage

• Track

“Media Management” relates to any task media is considered in such as: compressing, computing, copying, moving, or deleting files. Media also refers to metadata information as well. 

Key Acronyms:

DAM -  Digital Asset Management - Entire process of keeping a business running growing & thriving. 

MAM - Media Asset Management - Actual Content usage and management.

PAM - Production Asset Management - Production Operation system, managing staff and product schedules, and output.

AMS - Asset Management System: Store and Manage Data & Metadata, so it is easily searchable and is indexable (the way to find and track data).

What does media assets management involve?

• Choosing the right tool for your business needs (systems, software, processes).

• Automation aspect - saving time on repeatable tasks (automating simple data manipulation, moving assets, assigning permission etc etc.)

• Transcoding - Converting media formats (Picture, video, audio files etc)

• Software systems and implementing software to make asset manipulation easier / streamlined
  

How to monitor media asset management (as a manager)

• Review and approval process:

  1. Should be incorporated into the DAM / PAM system,

  2. Allows a centralised place to track all changes (client and process).

  3. Project time management

  4. Financial management
     

Customising DAM for a business purpose:

• Internal - Internal operations (in-house staff, editing, creation of assets etc.)

• External - 3rd party service (contractor, film maker, editor, audio engineer etc)
  

With the competent management of assets then comes Metadata management and data quality ensure consistency and accuracy across various reporting systems. In other words, the more accurate the data is and the more effectively it is managed, the easier it is to analyse and form opinions on.

For instance a typical data measurement may be Spotify plays by territory. In a general context, you can see which territories your music was played and determine whether it may be relevant to focus energy on an identified sector. But say you take it one step further and are able to obtain age brackets and customise digital campaigns to suit a target audience.

What are the three types of metadata?

• Descriptive :Discovery and identification (title, subject, genre, author, creation date etc)

• Rights metadata: Might include copyright status, rights holder, or license terms.

• Technical metadata: Properties include file types, size, creation date and time, and type of compression.

• Structural - Data “containers” (how compound objects are put together): How pages are ordered to form chapters. Types, versions, relationships and other characteristics of digital materials.

• Administrative; Information to help manage a resource (type, permissions, when and how created).
  

What are the media assets in Music industry:

There are 3 main ways in which media assets come to be, they can be: 

• Sourced - Sourced Assets are often found on the Internet through various Web sites that contain copyright free graphical and audio files.

• Captured - Obtain them through a capturing method (camera, microphone or video camera)

• Created - Create them yourself. Made using various software packages such as Photoshop for graphical assets or Logic for audio assets.
  

Examples of media assets in the music industry:

• Songs Lyrics / Music / Recording

• Photo’s

• Artwork

• Logos Branding

• Video

• Merchandise

• Documents (bio, write-ups etc)