VICE Media | Staying agile as the leading brand in new media
VICE Media has been creating edgy and informative content geared towards youthful, curious minds since it began in 1994 with a small, provocative magazine.
They have become famous for bravely telling the stories other news outlets miss. The journey since then has taken VICE from a free zine to the leading brand of new media for millennials. VICE now uses iconik to store their master mezzanine media in a true global library.
💡 They plan to use iconik as the heart of their distribution where it will route content to a content management system (CMS).
Jack Skinner, VICE Media Technology
We spent some time talking with Jack Skinner, the Product Manager of the Media Technology team at VICE, to learn more about how VICE has grown, and why they needed a solution like iconik.
Overthrowing a legacy MAM
VICE expanded very quickly as a brand. Within a few years, the production company went from a team of 200 to 1000+. This growth required space, which led VICE to set up one of the largest production spaces in New York at their headquarters in Brooklyn. The 75,000-square feet of space includes more than 125 video editing stations, outdoor gardens and a boardwalk that overlooks Manhattan.
VICE needed to add new channels and content to meet the growing demand, but their old media tech did not keep up.
The legacy MAM they had was for digital distribution, and could only store mp4 files. It couldn’t meet the needs of their increasingly complex productions, which needed varied types of media files. Any given project could have media from a high-end RED camera or footage from an iPhone. That same content could originate from VICE’s massive production house or the hotel of their journalist in the field.
The complexity compounded further as media went through different workflows for film, TV, and social media. They quickly ran into issues of finding media—their product— across multiple storages.
Valuable intellectual property was untraceable!
The old solution had been a self-contained “black box”—with no integrations and redundant metadata. They knew that beyond their legacy MAM, their whole production needed an overhaul.
Jack shares more about his early impressions of iconik:
“We found iconik at NAB 2019. We loved that the setup was super easy.
Once we read through the thorough documentation, we could see that iconik could do everything that we wanted. We also loved how agile it allowed us to be by allowing us to bring our own AI and cloud storage.
Soon after NAB, we were approached by the commercial department at VICE. They needed help getting ad values from our media. After a quick briefing, I knew we could do it by tying in our ad delivery solution to the iconik API.
After we implemented that simple addition with the iconik API, our commercial team could respond to ad buying much faster.
Before, this had been a manual process where they simply couldn’t supply the demand fast enough—leaving money on the table.
When we showed this to the leadership at VICE, they were shocked that iconik worked so effectively! These victories were usually hard-fought.
I’ve had other data retrieval tasks require two weeks, whereas, in iconik, I can get that same data in two seconds.
"Other vendors don’t come close to how flexible iconik is. It suits the digital media revolution better than any other media management I’ve seen”
Image: VICE Live wristband by Xyarnés
