Time Magazine is known for its timely news and information as a weekly publication. And media giant Time, Inc., continues to expand its timely presence through acquisition and new offerings. Inside the media giant, you could also say that time is a precious commodity. One group in particular, Time Consumer Marketing, has benefited over the last three years from a much more efficient use of its time thanks to its implementation of MetaCommunications' Virtual Ticket.
According to John Tighe, Vice President of Promotions and Operations for Time Consumer Marketing, "We do all of the creative for customer acquisition and retention for the various Time, Inc., magazines, including such well-known names as Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated and People. In the course of preparing these campaigns, we process some 7,000 different jobs in a year and we needed to put some automation in place to ensure that we could keep up the pace."
In 2004, Time installed Virtual Ticket primarily for its digital asset management capabilities. Tighe adds, "The 7,000 jobs we process in a year range from pulling up an existing job and changing a price, to developing all new creative. Associated assets include cover images that we use in promotions, photos, magazine logos, art files, copy and more." With the deployment of Virtual Ticket, not only did it become easier to locate and work with materials for each job, but Time discovered significant redundancy in assets, particularly in large art files, with multiple copies of the same materials being stored in different places on the network.
"Having real-time access to all of the assets has been a big benefit for us," says Tighe. "Especially for quick modifications of an existing job, we are able to get the work done quickly and efficiently and move on to the next task. We also saw immediate savings in terms of storage space as we began to eliminate redundant assets."
Having real-time access to all of the assets has been a big benefit for us.
John Tighe, Vice President of Promotions and Operations
Another reason Tighe selected Virtual Ticket was the ability to easily customize workflows, especially the routing of jobs to different departments for required approvals and the incorporation of familiar Time, Inc., forms that enabled a fast roll-out and minimized training needs. "One department that has benefited significantly from the routing process through Virtual Ticket is our Legal Department," remarks Tighe. "They are able to review each project to ensure compliance in a completely digital workflow. Another big win for the Legal Department is the ability to have the history of changes to any given project at their fingertips, which Virtual Ticket tracks as well."
Since installation, the Virtual Ticket user base at Time has expanded to about 50, and Tighe expects that number to continue to grow as he brings other critical departments into the loop, including the Audit Bureau of Circulation. "They are able to quickly review the PDF for each job to see how the offer is presented and sign off on the final copy. We are getting ready to roll out the latest software version, and will close the approval loop with the marketing department. They are already using Virtual Ticket to initiate the job ticket, and now they will be able to do approvals within the workflow as well."
As long-time users of Virtual Ticket, Tighe's team has both contributed to and benefited from ongoing enhancements to the product. He says, "With this latest release, we got everything on our wish list and we are ready to take it to the next level at Time. While it is hard to actually quantify savings, we know the savings have been huge. We feel it, and we see it every day. Everything is right where we need it, in one place, including the history, all of the comments and even the billing information at the end. And we are much more efficient in our ability to track jobs and keep them on schedule. With each subsequent release, MetaCommunications delivers an even better product, and we expect to continue accruing the benefits of those enhancements into the future as the pace continues to pick up here at Time."
