Breaking away from traditional MAMs at Complex Networks

The immediate benefit of managing 800TB of assets in iconik was rediscovering content. Having it all indexed and searchable in one place will allow Complex to find and reuse videos that some of the team have never seen.

Ben explains why their video archive is so valuable and how difficult it used to be to find content.

“We tend to utilize our library of footage a lot. We have so many interviews with celebrities, lots of B-roll, news clips from around the country, and food clips. Before iconik, it was a constant issue to have producers and editors request library footage and not know how to get it.”

Over the years, Ben has developed a file structure for Complex that has added a powerful level of organization. That same structure is preserved as iconik collections. Complex has also had a dedicated person tagging nearly 3 million assets. Information, such as show, episode, people, and camera shot have all been carried into iconik. In the past, a person with a media request was prepared to wait for it to be retrieved, but now they are pleasantly surprised at how quickly they can get the media they need to continue editing.

Ben shared a recent story that illustrates this perfectly.

“I had a producer from Sneaker Shopping, one of our top shows, call me up. They were making a documentary about Pop Smoke, who’s no longer alive, and one of his last interviews was with us on Sneaker Shopping. They wanted all the raw footage to see if they could use it for the documentary. He knew I was working remotely and said that he totally understood if this would take forever. I just typed in ‘Pop Smoke’ and sent it to him within a couple of minutes. He couldn’t believe it.”

As more people were brought in to work with media at Complex Networks, iconik transformed onboarding, which used to be a time-consuming task, into a simple process.

Ben explained what it’s like to bring new editors into iconik.

“Onboarding has been a big win for us. After our initial training with our post team, we set up an internal wiki for how we work and how to use iconik, but we can still work with an editor who hasn’t been onboarded to Iconik. It’s pretty easy for us to just send an iconik link and say, ‘Here’s your stuff. Bring it into your project with the Adobe panel.’ People are usually able to figure it out from there.”

When the marketing team needs artwork or branded content, iconik allows them to be brought in with the right group permissions to be able to view all their assets in one easy, unique place.

The distribution team at Complex is also starting to use iconik to help them distribute content to third parties. Before, there was no tool to help them with this. Now, Complex Networks can give its people access to the media they need to create content that will grow the company’s brands.

Five years ago, Complex launched an IRL cultural festival, ComplexCon where last year 70,000 people attended. It was also the first time the Complex team could upload event content from onsite. Before, they had relied on temporary storage that was set up in a temporary post-production room, then had to ship the high-end edit blankets to another location. Iconik allows Complex Networks to be decentralized. No matter where new content is ingested from, iconik will make it available to anybody at any time to edit and release as fast as they need to.

As the events of 2020 began to unfold, everyone began to see that the timing of implementing iconik—after years of hunting for the right solution— was, as Jermaine put it, “insane.” By the time New York City was restricting movement to suppress COVID-19, Complex was ready to work remotely with their media in iconik.