"We talk a lot about e-commerce products, photography, the process—there's a lot," says The Creative Operations Podcast host Daniel Jester. "I mean, it's really a science at this point. But the editorial side still lives very much in the art half of the brain. It's a lot going on—a lot of variables, a lot of unknowns."
To delve into some of these unknowns about editorial, Daniel chats with David Iscove, Creative Technology Practice lead at Cella, a consulting and staffing firm for marketing and creative industries.
Want to hear Daniel and David's chat? Listen to this episode of The E-Commerce Content Creation Podcast on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our website. For an assortment of high-level takeaways on editorial, though, read on.
The Future is Highly Targeted and Hyper-Personal
In David's view, one of the biggest macro-level changes to editorial content is in its intended audience. Gone are the days of broad audience content. Niche is the new reach.
"We're living in a hyper-personal targeted approach to marketing in general," David says. "The days of producing one creative—like a radio ad aired for 6 p.m. rush-hour traffic, hoping as many ears as possible can hear—is long gone. We're now in this world of hyper-personalized, targeted creative, and the requirements to produce creative, to deliver against that are tremendous."
The implication here is that your studio's editorial content stems from a well-executed discovery process that informs your creative briefs.
Tech Stacks Should Carry Editorial Assets End to End
There's plenty of chatter about refining your tech stack. But of course, that begs a question: What are we talking about when we talk about tech stacks? If you ask David, the answer needs to be all-encompassing, including stages before and after a production team's involvement.
"It's this misnomer that the asset only begins the moment the photographer takes the photo or the designer opens Photoshop," David laments, "but all of this upstream planning is absolutely crucial to informing the overall integrity of the file and the asset. On the flip side, downstream analytics and the performance of the asset is also really important to track as well."
"Track" is a key word there because David's broad view of the tech stack makes room, even for analytics.
"Analytics itself has to be considered within your overall asset lifecycle because the analytics then goes back to informed strategy," he says. "And that's where we get into this loop of continuous improvement, where we have strategic planning that then goes into the request for content. We have production of content. We have a distribution of content, publishing of that content, performance measurement of that content through analysis, and what have you. And then we're just back into strategy—in this continuous improvement loop."
David's continuous improvement loop calls for a broad tech stack that your studio uses from end to end, and back again.
Tech is Communication, and Editorial Needs Plenty of It
One outcome created by better end-to-end tech stack solutions is heightened communication, Daniel points out. "We're not focused on just that communication part of it, or getting up to speed, or trying to understand goals and how we can relate to them. It now allows us to respond to requests faster, and we can turn things around more quickly."
This is especially important for editorial, where multi-channel content, for social and elsewhere, has a lot of slight variations to track. "Social is going to be a significant chunk of the editorial work," Daniel says. "It's going to end up on those channels. And there's a lot of them. They all have slightly different requirements and needs."
So get a tech stack that helps you organize and streamline your communication. This will free you to do something so badly needed in editorial production: dealing with chaos. As Daniel says, it's good to leave about one-fifth of your studio's resources open to managing unexpected last-minute needs. Greater organization, even in the free-flowing world of editorial, will make it easier to see the full picture of your studio and pivot to meet sudden demands.
For the full chat, including David's belief that the editorial content industry has a glaring gap in its tech stack, between project management and DAM, stream the whole episode on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the website.
