A hundred years ago, advertising may have be defined as "selling in print," but of course now it has to be integrated across different media, including TV, web, mobile, and events.

The "creating cross-platform content" session at the NAB Show highlighted the challenges of truly integrated ad production. For example, TV is a linear medium while web/mobile/tablets are interactive. As advertisers increasingly create content simultaneously for multiple media, there are new and different scenarios that  Digital & Media Asset Management products have to support.

Take for instance, Honda's Good Reasons campaign from September 2011. In a series of TV spots and online videos, actor Patrick Warburton promotes the reasons to buy a Honda and directs viewers to online shopping tools. What's interesting to note is the setting: all the action is happening inside the website frame, with different page elements being pointed to or moved around. Producing this calls for exact synchronization between online elements and the offline shoot. From a DAM perspective, this requires maintaining the associations and linkages between different video / audio parts and image assets so as to be able to package them together.

Another example that highlights the complexities of integrated production is the Coca Cola "Move to the Beat" campaign for the upcoming London Olympics. Music Producer Mark Ronson travelled to 5 countries in different continents to record the sounds of sports while aspiring Olympians practice. These beats, instead of the regular music beats, are used to create the "Anywhere in the world" theme song. Here are more details.

A project like this involves multiple different partners and contractors spread across different countries, complex project management and co-ordination, content security and access controls, asset tracking, as well as different types of workflow both in the production phase as well as when the campaign is running.

As they say in the ad world, "Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings." I'm afraid it will be a rough landing for integrated campaigns with many of the DAM products in the market. Currently, many of them are built to support simple, linear workflows across a single medium. You’ll likely have to employ multiple systems and stitch them together yourself to support integrated scenarios that span across channels / platforms.

But in integrated advertising scenarios I can see the seeds being sown for the next generation DAM systems that customers require.