2020 was a devastating year for the travel and leisure industry, which reported a global annual revenue loss of just over $4.5 trillion, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council’s (WTTC).
To recapture revenue lost to the pandemic, travel and leisure brands need to shift marketing strategies to emphasize leisure travel experiences - and the best way to do that is by creating and scaling engaging video content. What’s more, these businesses are tasked with maximizing marketing impact and budgets by producing more with smaller teams (including a bank of freelance talent distributed around the globe).
By failing to adapt to the shifting marketing landscape, enterprises in this industry risk falling behind their competitors and failing to capitalize on the surge of people seeking to travel as restrictions ease. As many brands have adopted a temporary fix, they’re quickly realizing the vast amounts of time and money lost to a solution that doesn’t empower their teams to work effectively in a remote or hybrid environment long term. Furthermore, many of the temporary solutions fail to scale video, requiring them to duplicate their efforts and costing them valuable asset equity along the way.
As the industry reckons with the new normal of marketing, leveraging a multimedia asset management (MAM) system is crucial to launching and scaling successful new video campaigns and engaging a global audience that is ready to jet-set and take the world by storm.
Travel & Leisure Outlook - 2021 and Beyond
As more people are vaccinated against Covid-19, restrictions are lifting and many around the world are ready to enjoy traveling again. According to the top tourism agencies, 2021 has been a huge rebound year for travel and tourism around the world. Beyond 2021, travel is expected to continue to boom and exceed record levels by 2025.
- 9 in 10 Americans have plans for vacationing over the next six months, according to the US Travel Association
- 44% of global citizens plan on taking more trips in 2021 than in 2020, according to Expedia Group’s 2021 Travel Trends Report
- (47%) of all travelers are planning to travel internationally in 2021, per PR Newswire
- Leisure travel will be close to record levels in 2025, according to Skift’s Megatrends 2025 report
As tourism restrictions ease and people begin moving more freely, travel and leisure companies have ramped up their marketing and advertising plans to capitalize on increased travel across the globe. Furthermore, brands have shifted to prioritize producing video content to emphasize leisure travel and recapture lost business travel revenue. As travel and leisure brands ramp up video marketing efforts, there’s a clear market need for faster asset access and collaboration, and a centralized bank of brand-approved content that can quickly be utilized and sent to market.
Pronounced Pressure on Production Teams
To get in front of would-be travelers, it’s imperative for travel and leisure brands to bring their message to market as soon as possible, as often as possible. However, the volume of work required to engage global audiences, combined with an increasing remote workforce and hybrid working models have added a layer of complexity to creating and collaborating on multimedia marketing campaigns. Slimmer teams, differing time zones, varying WiFi bandwidths and computing power and convoluted review and approval process have left many creative teams high-and-dry as they struggle to produce and scale meaningful content.
If leisure brands don't incorporate a state-of-the-art Media Asset Management solution, content to market will be stalled, content contributors will get frustrated because they don't have the tools they need to get content out for approvals, and overall marketing impact and revenue will greatly suffer. Put simply, travel and leisure brands must adopt an enterprise level MAM solution or they will get overtaken by their competitors who have the technological and creative advantage.
Creating Engaging Content with Distributed Teams
Travel and leisure companies specialize in creating meaningful connections between travelers and their destinations. Because of their global footprints, many travel brands utilize a diverse set of user-generated content that engage audiences with the beauty and charisma of destinations around the world. With more creative teams leveraging user-generated content and remote content teams, brands need a way to easily store, access and collaborate on projects that involve multiple team members distributed across the globe. To maximize creative output and retain key talent, it’s imperative that video production teams adopt a multimedia asset management solution to expedite their work without exhausting their time and resources.
Imagine your videographer in the Bahamas has just shot a video detailing the beauty of a local destination, and you’d like to access their working assets to crop into multiple campaigns. But, here’s the catch - you’re not using a sophisticated MAM system, so you have to download terabytes of data to your laptop. After hours of productivity-free waiting time, your files are finally downloaded, but you can’t quickly find the shots you need to create your campaigns. So, now you have to coordinate with your videographer, who is in a different time zone to locate the shots you need based upon their memory of the files and which timestamps might contain the right shots. That’s simply too much effort to locate and work with the clips you need to get your campaigns to market.
All of this could be avoided by adopting an enterprise-ready MAM that automatically generates frame-accurate metadata for quicker asset discoverability.
Video Asset Management can be a Challenge for Travel & Leisure Brands
One unique obstacle facing travel and leisure companies is that a significant amount of their video assets are shot in the form of documentary content, which is difficult to plan on a shot-by-shot level in pre-production. This necessitates producing a higher volume of content assets that can be edited down into smaller, more effective spots and places a larger creative responsibility on the editing team. Compounding the obstacle is freelancers all have varying WiFi bandwidths and IT support, which makes the media asset exchange process differ from person to person. This sets up unnecessary project management challenges and ultimately costs more time and money to produce valuable video assets and marketing campaigns in a timely manner.
Let’s explore another issue afflicting our hypothetical videographer in the Bahamas: they’re ready to upload all of their video assets but their WiFi connection is unstable, so the upload time is taking far longer than usual. This has caused a significant delay in getting your assets into the cloud and now you’ve missed your campaign deadline. All because you’re still working from full size media files rather than working from streaming proxies.
If your MAM solution offered pixel-perfect streaming proxies instead of forcing you to download gigantic working files, you’d be working on your project right away and have the opportunity to deliver it ahead of schedule.
Curator Supercharges Video Content Production, Collaboration & File Storage
IPV Curator is the superior multimedia asset management solution and facilitates seamless collaboration between remote teams and their in-house studios. Curator accelerates video production through rapid asset discoverability and remote cloud editing and offers a single pane of glass through which creative teams can create, collaborate and access their multimedia assets.
This empowers teams to work more efficiently anywhere in the world and improves the ROI of existing content assets by creating an easy-to-navigate repository of branded assets that can be quickly accessed and leveraged for ongoing campaigns. This also saves creative teams hours of valuable work time by helping them avoid having to manually locate and download files, which frees them up to focus on creating meaningful campaigns. More than that, Curator creates a safe, centralized bank of branded assets, which removes the risk of valuable content being lost, stolen, or damaged in any way.
So, when your videographer in the Bahamas is on their way home from a shoot and their files are managed by Curator, you can rest assured that your digital assets are protected. Broken or damaged hard drives are a thing of the past, replaced by easy, breezy cloud-based multimedia asset management.
How IPV Curator Maximizes Creative & Marketing Teams & Assets:
- Increased productivity due to quicker asset discoverability and access
- Offers a single pane of glass to access and utilize large multimedia assets
- Enhanced repurposed content workflows to monetize existing content assets
- Improved editing capabilities through an easy-to-use visual interface
- Increased creative team bandwidth, amounting to a higher volume of video output
- Increased content production speed, which is vital to capitalizing on emerging trends and supporting critical marketing objectives
- Improved remote editing experience and efficiency without waiting hours for downloading and uploading assets
- Provides a centralized & secure storage place for brand assets, ensuring brand-use compliance asset discoverability across departments, and streamlined project management
The increasing demand for video content, combined with a surge of travelers ready to explore destinations around the globe have presented the travel and leisure market with an incredible opportunity to engage audiences en masse. But, brands that fail to capitalize on this trend right now risk losing their foothold on the market, which could take years to regain. The best way to create meaningful, engaging video content and scale it for increasing demand is by instituting a sophisticated multimedia asset management system - and the best enterprise-ready system to do that is IPV Curator.
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