Rob Koghee is Managing Partner and co-founder of publishing house New Skool Media. He bought 19 titles from Sanoma and titles from Relx, including Elsevier. The publishing house now has a turnover of 16 million euros. New Skool Media is one of our clients.
Change
The publishing world is characterized by one thing: change. Publishers have to constantly reinvent themselves. Not only are advertising revenues falling, they also have to compete with people who start their own publishing house: bloggers.
Employees within the publishing industry have to go through a 180 degree change: they have to understand the online world and know everything about lead generation, CPM and CPC, Google Adwords and Google Analytics. Koghee daily challenges his colleagues to change their mind-sets and adapt to the needs and expectations of readers.
No magazines but brands
New Skool Media has numerous websites for its titles and publishes through various online channels. In fact, the publishing house has become an online business. New Skool Media no longer talks about magazines, but about brands. The only way to keep magazines successful in the future is to build those brands through other means.
However, you should not underestimate the value of professional content, according to Koghee there will always be a need for it. Every reader has specific interests, and you have to respond to that. Thanks to all the possibilities that the technology offers, you can, for example, know that a certain reader is fond of preparing fish dishes, especially cod.
You can then offer such a reader 15 alternative cod recipes for free via their mobile phone.
But then your content has to be organized in such a way that this is possible. For that you need a DAM: a Digital Asset Management system. With this you can ensure that your content about fish dishes is easy to find and reuse.
Structure your content!
You can enter your content into InDesign, but to extract text and images from an old publication you have to manually pull your content apart. Consistent, well-ordered metadata – the labels you place on content elements – are important to properly structure your content. But metadata only has real value when the hierarchical relationship between your metadata is clearly formulated, and taxonomy does that.
DAM
DAM is a solution that uses metadata and taxonomy, among other things, to ensure that you can easily reuse existing content and create new content faster – together with other parties such as an internal studio, advertising agencies, designers, DTP studios, photographers, illustrators, etc. and printers.
DAM enables publishers and their partners to create content based on centrally developed assets in a brand portal using guidelines. Digital Asset Management is therefore the basis for omnichannel content creation, personalization and transcreation.
Elsevier leads the way
In short, DAM is the answer to efficiently manage and effectively distribute all your digital brand assets and content such as photos, illustrations, videos, music, copy and designs.
Graphit has helped New Skool Media with the implementation of a Digital Asset Management system. Thanks to DAM, Elsevier uses and reuses its content efficiently, but they are an exception within the publishing world.
sparring?
Do you also want to easily reuse your existing content and create new content faster, so that you can serve your readers even better? Then don’t hesitate to spar with us.
