Cartoon by Nicholson from "The Australian" newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au
It’s Friday afternoon, so I hope you’re all putting the finishing touches on a productive week and cruising into a relaxing weekend with family and friends. And I don’t know—hobbies?
But I expect you’re wrapping up an already 60-hour week by frantically trying to finish enough of the high-priority, super-urgent, ASAP tasks on your plate to justify delaying the remainder to whichever parts of your weekend you habitually allocate to work.
Now for investment bankers and medical residents, perhaps this lifestyle is defensible. But for marketers, this level of habitual overwork crushes our ability to think creatively and strategically.
And this is our poor excuse for a work-life balance in which some smug speaker at a conference stands up to say that it is our responsibility to provide a consistent customer experience across all the rapidly proliferating set of communication channels. Omnichannel is not the feather that broke the camel’s back; it’s the elephant asking that fully-burdened camel for a piggyback.
What happened to working smarter instead of harder? Instead of spending endless cycles in meetings to coordinate consistency on every channel from TV to Snaptagram (if that’s not a thing already, someone just registered the domain name), why not let technology make our lives simpler?
..Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the rare technology that actually reduces our workload. Even basic DAMs provide a central repository of assets and auto-generate appropriate renditions for each distribution channel. Many DAMs provide toolsets that facilitate efficient, asynchronous collaboration—goodbye 10-person meetings to argue about a cropping decision or color palate or jump cut Sophisticated DAMs even provide workflow and project management tools that operationalize the complex set of steps necessary to launch a consistent omnichannel campaign.
Now I realize that the 3 minutes you’ve spent reading this post is probably all the procrastination your schedule can spare on a Friday afternoon. But if these 3 minutes rang true, why not spend another 1 minute setting up a time to talk about a solution?
What are you scared of? Having to choose hobbies to occupy your weekends?