“That asset made me laugh so hard, I cried.”
“When you get here, I’ve got to show you this asset.”
“After I saw the asset, I knew I had to donate to his cause.”
No one talks like this in the real world. So why do marketers live in a world of assets and campaigns?
Marketers want engagement and conversions. But human beings don’t engage with assets. They don’t convert because of assets.
We live in a world of stories.
Whether it’s being told by our great uncle Jim or an iconic brand, a story we’ve heard many times can give us the nostalgic feeling of coming home. Aspirational stories can make us dream — and buy — bigger. And some stories fill us with curiosity for what comes next.
Why your best stories can get lost in a world of assets
Content and assets bombard us from every direction: online banners, television programs, outdoor billboards, social apps. In a crowded attention economy, we engage with content because it tells us a story we want to hear (or inspires us to tell ourselves one).
Consider the car. It’s important to have great photography and content for a car ad campaign. But the image or video a potential customer sees isn’t what gets them into the showroom — it’s the story of the person that asset makes them feel like they could become, if they bought the car.
An asset becomes a story when it is given relevant context. At too many companies today, that context comes primarily from customers themselves, absorbing content and context by chance from a mixed bag of channels, campaigns, and assets.
DIY customer context building isn’t ideal, but it happens. Why? Because for most enterprises, individual campaigns and assets are created by many teams, working in many locations, with limited visibility into the bigger picture. Before long, you have tens of thousands of assets … and absolutely no idea what story you’re really telling.
Omnichannel strategies present major opportunities for storytelling, but there’s one big problem. Today’s legacy tools are so genuinely bad at the job of getting from asset to story that omnichannel content creation can make marketing efforts disjointed, rather than seamlessly contextualized. When you can’t see the forest for the trees, planting more seeds may not deliver the value you’d hoped for.
Tenovos saw how deeply this problem impacted today’s biggest companies. We knew we had to find a way to help companies tell stories — not just deliver assets and campaigns.
Enabling Storytelling with Technology
Assets become stories with context. So what is context, anyway?
Context is made up of relevant connections between your content and data. In most organizations today, context is applied to assets on an as-needed basis: a graphic designer shares context with a creative director for why an asset was produced in a specific way, but that context is shed by the time analytics are applied to find out which assets worked best and why.
As assets move through a typical enterprise organization, they are re-contextualized and de-contextualized many times, moving through multiple systems of record that store different types of data for different teams.
Tenovos brings together the pieces of context that your assets have been shedding, using data-centric technology that allows for interoperability of features from predictive analytics to AI data modeling.
Instead of seeing context as ad hoc and applicable only to specific functions and stages of an asset’s development, Tenovos sees each asset as the center of its own ecosystem. Our platform uses the same kind of graph database technology that powers Facebook and Google to bring the hidden connections between your assets to light.
This is a database model that has never been applied before to digital asset management (DAM) — and it makes Tenovos the first asset management platform that can create the contextual connections to help you build stories from assets.
Ready to take the next step toward taking storytelling seriously, with a platform that makes it possible to unite your omnichannel strategy and product storytelling? It’s time to talk to Tenovos.
Get more information by downloading our white paper, or contact one of our representatives today.
