Media and broadcast customers spend a lot of time and effort selecting a Media Asset Management (MAM) platform. Rightfully so. MAM project success depends on finding the right fit at the start.

So, it’s pertinent to ask what a successful product selection depends on.

The Case Against Checklist RFPs

First, let me tell you that the road to success is definitely not paved with lengthy, checklist-style RFPs. Such a practice is prevalent, particularly among first-time customers, but suffers from many drawbacks.

For one, it does not help make clear distinctions between products . Odds are, many vendors in your short list can answer “Yes” to “Does your product support XYZ feature,” and all you’ll end up with is an excel spreadsheet full of “Yes” responses at the end of a lengthy process.

More importantly, such an approach does not focus on your specific requirements, special context, or unique constraints. 

The Case for Scenario-based Testing

What’s a better approach, then? We recommend a test oriented, scenario-based approach to product selection. A vendor may claim to do myriad things, but what you really need to know is how it will enable solving your particular business problem. This means putting product functionality into the context of a specific set of scenarios that key stakeholders can recognize. This is the only real way to get to the right fit. And remember: it's all about fit.

In my experience, this empirical approach remains relatively new in the MAM space, such an approach is quite popular and may even be considered a standard practice in many other categories of enterprise software product selection. 

Our Broadcast and Media Asset Management research helps you conduct just such a scenario-based evaluation. Different MAM products may claim to offer similar functionality but the differences become rapidly clear when you evaluate them against scenario-based business objectives. 

Scenarios Reveal Differences

For instance on the Television side, we have three broad scenarios: News, Sports and Features. As you can imagine, what goes on behind the scenes to deliver each of these types of programs – be it the tools used or the teams involved and how they use the tools is very different. News and Sports have a “live” element and “real-time” stories. In News, as and when a story is breaking, you may have to supplement live feeds with archival footage. In Sports, the rules of the game are known and the tools have to help support a better user experience and drive engagement – you need the metadata models and tools to easily log all the on-field action.  If your staple is feature-length TV, you’ll need a particular type of back-end technology architecture. Naturally, the requirements and asks from the toolset are different in each of these scenarios.

Continuing along, the other scenarios in our evaluations relate to Radio, Media Archives, Government & Parliaments and Corporate Libraries. 

Again while all of these may require certain common functionality like metadata management, workflows, and editing tools, each scenario requires its own special sauce. Radio stations can do without complex installs and integrations. If you are a major public-sector archives tasked with preserving your country’s cultural heritage for posterity, you’ll need a system that supports not just audio and video archives but also helps manage physical artifacts as well. Legislative bodies like Parliaments typically broadcast their proceedings and also make them publicly available, often in multiple languages. Corporate customers (even whose primary business is not media related) have to handle vast amounts of rich media assets and typically make them available to employees and customers via the web.  The idea is that you focus on the functionality based on the specifics of each scenario. 

Wrapping Up...

In short, when sending out your MAM RFP make sure you base it on the scenarios and optimize your selection process instead of a features-based, laundry list approach.

For RSG subscribers, we have decision support tools that can help here. Try out our Custom ShortList Builder to see a concrete example of scenarios in action.