An established procedure in most media or advertising agencies is to write a creative brief for every new campaign that a customers might want to implement.
The understanding is that the creative brief should help to consolidate the knowledge of the account manager that he/she has about the upcoming campaign and give the creative team a circle of activity space in which they are encouraged to find appropriate solutions to the stated campaign problem.
A successful campaign builds on its ability for a creative team to find novel solutions to communicate to an ever increasing cluttered media and an overloaded consumer, meaning that reconnecting with past experience is essential to compare what did and what did not work.
Speaking of which, it is inevitable for smaller and medium size agencies as well as for large agencies to keep their knowledge in one place so that creative teams can use cross-referencing and collaboration as tool to stimulate the creative process.
Most large agencies use their own accounting system to deal with information about customers and their campaign progress but what about small and medium size agencies, how can they get an equal chance of collaboration without involving too much resources and administration.
It is a common approach, that information is stored in office documents but this will bring one only so far as it can be reviewed by the ones with knowledge of their existence. Interlinking documents and information is the most appropriate way to reconnect past experience with present problems. But not only interlinking them is important, the difference is made by quality of the taxonomy (type of connection) used, so that various retrieval automatism can accelerate access and search precision.
Using Semantic Mediawiki and Forms
Using the help of Semantic Mediawiki and Semantic Forms can give an easy tool at hand without having spent too much time in educating employees and administrators.
The creative brief normally consists of more or less similar information containing target audience, market and product information, media, and message. Using those entities a form can be fairly easily be created with help of Semantic Forms and look like below.
The secret are structured data
The form make use of structured data fields that are pre-defined by the systems, implying that one don’t have worry too much about development or adoption.
Fields automatically can be customized, so that auto-completion or cross-referencing is possible without additional development and access to information is self-exploratory as well as straight forward.
It is a tool but not a magic show
A lot of people expect that ones such a system is deployed it can work wonders but it only works as tool, helping organizing data and information in way it is more accessible implying that members of an organization constantly store those information in order to re-connect it.
For the case above, once information are stored with proper semantics pairs, the systems provides a reusing and cross-reference ability on:
- Display all documents related to a specific account
- Display all document managed by the account manager
- Select creative briefs where specific target segments (youth, professional etc.) are used
- Certain type of type of media was preferred
- Attached files (office, pdf etc.) or research documents
Other information can be attached at any time by linking too the same semantic pair, which means semantic properties with the same value can be group and categorized by its meaning independently from any existing search algorithm.
What has the user to do?
He or she just have to follow some simple rules in how, what and where to input the information, and let the system support in a way in handles the data.
What does it cost?
As the system shown above, it is all based on the freely available software used by Wikipedia and some extensions that smart developers have provided for free. The cost running a web server where those components are installed should not add much cost to any existing IT infrastructure.
What do I gain?
A collaboration tool that has been used worldwide (Wikipedia) to disseminated knowledge, a proven and stable development framework and a large community that is eager to support a free tool of collaboration. A tool that store information most other collaboration systems can’t do for now because storing semantic information has not been a primal focus of commercial application.
What about security?
As always, the system can only be as secure as its weakest link, meaning the existing infrastructure should be designed as required by its organization otherwise the shown scenario should be used as open gate within the organization to encourage collaboration.
Further
- Semantics that help to visualize information and interconnections
- The Information Cloud and the Semantic Web
- Semantic database to keep research results in line
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