Success Story - Buzzfeed

Challenge

BuzzFeed is a startup culture, which has grown fast and by necessity needed to (re)create workflows and systems as they scaled. Until relatively recently, many people in the organization had either not been aware of Digital Asset Management, or not been aware of the benefits such a solution could bring.

This led to a situation in which the organization:

• Was working with tools that didn’t have visual capabilities, particularly important as they brought on more staff photographers.
• Had no way to distribute assets, and instead were relying on email and Google Drive.

There was one more challenge to overcome, and that was how to convince management of the ROI of WoodWing Assets.

Evaluation

The key breakthrough in this conversation was when the rights team put forward a compelling case that implementing DAM would not only save money, due to a single source of truth and clear workflows, but also become a revenue driver.

Leveraging DAM as a revenue driver is related to the fact that BuzzFeed generates vast amounts of original content (especially photography) that they earn revenue from by licensing out to other publishers. This is a differentiator for the business, as they source content that other publishers don’t have. But without some way to store and manage rights information, including what they could license out, to which organizations, and under which circumstances, was a time-consuming process.

However, with WoodWing Assets, having all the rights management data stored in one place ensured that relevant people within the organization would always know what they could and could not sell, unlocking value for the organization.

We are thrilled to see our DAM solution being adopted by Buzzfeed to drive both their internal efficiency, as well as to support their content syndication business.

 

John Roderick, SVP - Strategic Partnerships, WoodWing USA

Results & benefits

With a single source of truth that houses all the right information, Buzzfeed has seen the following benefits.

• The organization can work in sync.
• Workflow is much faster - photographers or content creators now source viral content, upload to WoodWing Assets with the associated rights metadata already attached, and then send out an email blast to let people know what content is available.
• Content reuse has been improved across the entire organization, meaning more value is generated from content, as well as repetitive internal requests being reduced.
• Legal risks are reduced, since rights information is easily accessible.
• Remote collaboration - with photographers on-site or staff working at home due to Covid - is much faster, since creators can upload their images and enable editors to select or work on images immediately.