North Plains' Automotive Solutions Powers Global Automotive Companies

Global Product Launches Depend on Rich Media Productivity

Automotive manufacturers need to launch and build their brands globally in a crowded market in months, not years. Every single channel that can be used to reach consumers needs to be filled with relevant, fresh, content, targeted to the demographic and geographic market being addressed. This makes brand building a rich media creation, management and distribution challenge where any improvement can have drastic effects on brand success and profitability. In this environment, Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a strategic and operational necessity for the auto industry.

An Industry in Transition

The automotive industry is in transition. Economic recession. New demands for fuel efficient, hybrid, electric and clean diesel vehicles. Maturing manufacturers. Concerns and perception about vehicle safety. Restructuring of US and global automobile manufacturers. Increasing global competition. The complexion of the automotive industry world-wide has changed over the past couple of years.

To remain competitive or gain advantage, auto manufacturers continue to cut costs, streamline operations, and increase efficiencies across all parts of the organization. At the same time, developing, maintaining and expanding brand equity and customer loyalty is critical. Those who do it best will emerge stronger from the recession.

The Marketing Challenge

While the Internet offers automotive marketers a variety of cost efficient opportunities to reach and engage customers and build the brand, including several new, interactive, and social media approaches, traditional media such as television, radio, and print cannot be abandoned.

As an auto marketer you are constantly challenged to “do more with less”. Now you’re challenged to develop consistent, increasingly global, cross-media campaigns that involve both regional agencies and internal marketing teams, while still reducing costs, and boosting productivity. And now you’re being tasked to launch vehicles globally in multiple regions simultaneously. How do you maintain the brand across geographies, campaigns, media and devices and launch them all in parallel?

The New Global Digital Assembly Line

Automotive marketers are just starting to realize the value of Digital Asset Management (DAM). Not only does DAM allow you to realize cost and productivity benefits in the creation, production and distribution of all your rich media “assets” – pictures, product shots and videos, photo-realistic CAD images, logos, brochures, ads, and promotional materials – it allows you to manage the increasing volume of rich media content: to create it faster, collaborate globally easier, and deliver it to more channels and devices, in more regions simultaneously. DAM is the new global digital assembly line.

Be Where Your Customers Are Cost Effectively

Automotive product marketing needs to create massive amounts of this rich media content, and convert and publish it to many different channels and devices – print, broadcast, online, social media via phones, tablets and computers – where your customers are.

Many of these channels result in duplicate content because you can’t find the images you created for the last channel or device you were marketing to, or each region reshoots the same products over and over again, or you spend a lot of resources converting the same content from one format to another for a particular device or media.

Digital asset management creates significant return on investment simply by reducing or eliminating wasted, duplicated effort, providing a single place to find your rich media, and by automating conversions to fit specific media requirements.

Multi-Channel Global Marketing with Local Autonomy

Most auto makers work hard to maintain their global brand. But regional differences introduce challenges. Not only do campaigns need to be adjusted or adapted to the local market, but so does the rich media content.

The solution to this is to design marketing workflows that create the core brand message and assets globally and collaboratively, and then enable local agencies regional autonomy to modify and market to local interests and needs while still maintaining global brand consistency.

This may involve replacing copy on a brochure with the local language, or changing photos to match the culture or region. It may involve a multiple agencies, using small more agile local agencies for regions with tougher competition or a particular agency with interactive or social media expertise.

All of these activities are extremely expensive and hard to manage without a collaboration process to manage the marketing collateral and review and approval processes across the extended global organization.

Digital asset management solves this problem by collecting all assets in a single location, whether created in-house or by one of a dozen agencies spread across the world, yet providing secure, managed access from anywhere, regardless of location.

Leverage the Value of Your Historical Media

Historical product media – photos, images, videos, ads and other rich media – have tremendous value that is only realized if you can find and use that media. It could be inspiration for new products, revival of old products, better merchandising by developing fewer duplicate products, or monetization of images by selling them direct to consumers – a solid revenue source for automakers.

Without digital asset management, your history becomes inaccessible. And that history has a lot of value.
To talk to an expert or request a tour of North Plains' manufacturing solutions, please contact us.

To talk to an expert or request a tour of North Plains' automotive solutions, please contact us.