Content production: knowing your end user

That’s a wrap! The studio has completed production and the assets have been uploaded for: your printer / your marketing team / your paid media team / your web build team / your local markets teams / your external agencies for localisation.

Often times there are many different teams on the other side of the fence awaiting the content your studio team has delivered. But do you have enough knowledge of those people on the other side of the fence?

Now, there’s two key parts to this you might rightly be thinking. Firstly, the output is wholly dependent on what was briefed, and the if the brief is wrong or incorrect the end result will not match requirements.

Second, creating the work based on requirements is really the end of the line for the studio. Which it is, until it comes back because the localisation agency were unfamiliar with what they needed to do and the studio now needs to step in.

Understanding the end user or end requirements is a collaborative effort. And in some cases it may be well defined and fairly straight forward. For example if the output is print collateral perhaps for POS or OOH, then the printers will have clear specs with established lead times and unless this is a new undertaking, it should be painless. In addition, if the end user is a printer you can have direct conversations with them to mitigate potential issues.

However, if the end user is a series of third party agencies in different countries then communicating directly with each of them is not simple. And if they are localising an ad campaign across print and various digital channels, you want to be sure they receive the expected assets. And if they don’t that they are equipped to create the content themselves within the parameters of the campaign.

Another consideration in this space, is how you share your assets. If you are using Specle to distribute your print collateral then it’s less of a consideration but perhaps you are using a DAM, or a Cloud service such as Dropbox, or via some form of intranet. Whatever it might be, a way to mitigate ‘end user’ challenges is to use your sharing platform to include documentation, guidelines (brand and/or campaign) to ensure that your end user is as informed as they need to be, and thereby reduce any comeback.

A further consideration is whether the end user skillset matches your studios. This may be a non-issue but if you are sharing After Effects files with complex animation for localisation, does the end user have the necessary skillset. Again, this arguably isn’t the direct concern of the studio but in larger businesses with wide networks of distribution it can be vital.

Further to that is version numbers of apps and third party plugins. Looping back to After Effects, if your studio is using a Trapcode plugin is that going to cause issues further down the line. Or if you are using apps which are not backwards compatible with older versions, then do you need to align version numbers with a wider audience (this can apply just as much within a business in addition to third parties).

If you are starting a new studio or inhousing, these large scale considerations need upfront planning so that you don’t find yourself committed to a production schedule which then falls at the last hurdle. Creating content on the basis someone else will have to use the studio files at some point is a godd rule of thumb to ensure anything shared is as useable as possible.