Prepress
The UNEDISA group centralises its editorial assets to enable it to create new business lines
Thursday 18. February 2010 - A portal has been set up for the online sale of its editorial contents
One of the most important communications groups in Spain, the UNEDISA group, with numerous publications in the market, has completed an ambitious project involving the centralisation and modernisation of all of its editorial assets. To meet this important challenge, the group decided to rely on QUAY, the solution for managing multimedia editorial assets (DAM) created by Protecmedia, who was entrusted with the task of centralising this huge amount of contents.
The main idea behind the project was to be able to get as much as possible out of the groups editorial assets, which are a genuine source of knowledge. For this, a tool is needed to manage this enormous quantity of documents quickly and easily, regardless of the place from where access is required or the type of asset that is wanted. The key is to be able to have readily available in a simple manner any document that is required from the companys archive, and to use this commercially.
Including the different titles supplements, the project covered a total of 33 publications, whose editorial assets have been centralised. This translates into a very large number of documents. In fact, at the end of the project, the number of UNEDISA documents already stored in QUAY was well over ten million, including photographs, graphs, pages and articles. To have an idea of the size of the archive for a group like UNEDISA, we can look at the daily figures. On a normal working day, 300 photos, 1200 pages and 900 articles are archived, to which must be added the total number of photographs, whether taken internally or by an agency, which enter the archive every day, a figure that amounts to approximately 10,000.
A new business model
UNEDISAs Director of Information Processing, Julio Miravalls, explains the choice of QUAY as an archive system for centralising all of the groups assets: “We needed a database system that allowed us make available to the newsrooms of our four newspapers, ten magazines, supplements, guides, radio and television, verified information published by all of our media in a controlled, reliable and easy-to-use manner and in direct connection with the editorial system.”
From now on, the UNEDISA group is in a position to get much more out of all the documents that its different titles create. Through a QUAY module called e-Commerce, the group will be able to market its editorial activities simply and profitably through a portal where its clients can acquire these assets in a completely secure manner. Gracia Cardador, Director of Special Supplements, is clear on this point: “Technology allows us to exploit our editorial products as much as possible and to create new business lines. Communications groups need to make the most of new technologies so that they can organise, classify and distribute their contents to clients.”
This project is another example of how technological developments help the media to launch new business models, a key matter given the state of the market currently facing news companies. And this is where Protecmedia, with its vast experience in the sector, comes into the picture, offering news companies the resources that they require.