End-to-end asset management for your TV campaigns

Preferred Media and Group IMD are excited to announce a new integration. You can now send your broadcast masters straight from the IMD interface to your archive at Preferred Media. What happens next is crucial. Preferred Media matches up the masters with all the other elements from the same production and imports into our Preferred Connection library, which creates a single source of truth for the whole campaign.

From masters to sub-masters and rushes, it’s all done for you by our Customer Service team! Forget sending another courier, loading the hard drive and all the rest.

Creating a single resource for your entire campaign, is now as easy as ticking a box.

Group IMD software screenshot showing preferred media options

Why a single source of truth for content?

In the wild world of digital assets, trying to find the right file in a hurry can be a challenge. Masters take one path to be broadcast while production elements are packaged up on to hard drives for deep storage. If you ever have to remake an ad it’s an expensive process to bring everything back together. Especially when your content is scattered across a range of different suppliers.

For brands

In the Mad Men days, you used to have one agency acting as the sole custodian for your brand library. But over the years you changed agencies, produced for more mediums and added new suppliers. Maybe you even produced some jobs in-house. Media has fragmented, and brands are looking for greater visibility over their content .

Sometimes you want to remake an existing ad, but you don’t know what files you have, and you don’t know where to look. Till now. Just ask your agency to make Preferred Media available as a destination on their Group IMD account, then despatch to Preferred Media at the same time as your normal broadcast despatch. Your complete library will populate progressively, and you’ll be future-proofed for any urgent jobs.

For agencies

Those old enough to remember the pre-digital production era will know (and likely miss!) the old agency job bag and the agency tape library. All the production elements, with all the information that you need about them, was visible, touchable in one place and on a shelf! That job bag and the agency library was the agency’s single source of truth for productions. Now,

  • you have different versions for TV and online
  • you have local and international versions
  • you use a range of production companies
  • and then there’s a series of campaigns you produced entirely in-house.

When you need to re-version an old ad in a hurry, what do you do? Where do you look?

Next time, despatch to Preferred Media through your normal broadcast despatch with Group IMD. We’ll align your masters with all the other production elements you archive with us.  By doing this, you will progressively build a complete library that helps you respond quickly to an urgent brief. All you need to do is ask Group IMD to make Preferred Media available as a destination on your account.

Missing pieces

Today’s broadcast digital asset libraries have evolved to solve the problem of content management for the advertising and marketing sectors. Whoever owns the video archive, agency or brand, the cloud promises online visibility and seamless sharing of assets.

Importantly, for your Media Asset Management system to work, you first need to get all your content in there, with all the relevant metadata, categorised correctly. Otherwise, tracking down the elements is like trying to finish a puzzle – without the picture on the box. That’s why Preferred Media created Preferred Connection.

Completing the puzzle

What’s special about Preferred Connection is that it can handle the most data-hungry video file you throw at it. It eats 8K rushes for breakfast and size is never a problem. So with Preferred Connection, you have the option to keep all the rushes, audio, artwork, sub-masters and masters – in one place. Easily accessible and safe in the cloud.

Your master provides the key archive record of each completed job and is the essential reference point for all of the elements.

You’d never throw it out. Why not archive it along with all the elements? That way, you’ll never again be stuck wondering where your material is.

Your final broadcast master also has all the metadata for the job already attached. Key numbers, job numbers, the works.  So when you add that metadata to your Preferred Connection library, it makes searching – and finding – all the associated files a breeze.

Preferred Connection offers what most DAM systems can’t – a single source of truth – for all your content. For as long as you want.

You don’t want to chase different suppliers every time you need an asset. Now you don’t have to.

What’s next?

You can deliver your files to Preferred Media at the same time as you send them to broadcast. Please ask either Preferred Media or Group IMD to set up Preferred Media as a delivery destination. Then, when you complete your IMD despatch, simply find and tick the Preferred Media destination and we’ll take care of the rest.