How media companies use Dropbox to connect teams and tools

When you’re immersed in a movie, magazine, or TV show, it’s easy to forget how many people are involved in a major media production—until you see the credits or the masthead. That’s when you get a sense of the cross-continental collaboration it takes to bring those stories to life.

So how do global media teams manage to keep everyone on the same page throughout the content lifecycle?

Turning competitors into collaborators

At this year’s NAB show, we learned how new technology is changing the way these teams work together. As the landscape of the industry evolves, more companies are motivated to transform competitive relationships into collaborative ones. That’s challenging long-held beliefs about what constitutes a collaborative team, whether they’re independent contractors, boutique firms, or large organizations.

No matter the size of the team, though, there are common pain points to solve. And Dropbox can help reduce the grind that slows down the process of producing and distributing digital content.

In part one, we spotlighted partners and integrations that give media teams the freedom to use a wide range of tools. Today in part two, we’ll look at how our publishing, production, and creative customers use those tools to make collaboration easier.

Coordinating work with a global team

With hundreds of content creators covering 350,000 travel destinations around the world, Lonely Planet might have the ultimate remote collaboration team. They use Dropbox to bring together field research, photos, and drafts, then prepare them for publishing across the company’s various platforms.

Diego Jiménez, Lonely Planet’s Head of Mobile Product and Design says, “Dropbox Paper and Smart Sync are bringing our team together across huge distances by creating a truly seamless global collaboration network spanning product, design and content.”

“Today’s travelers expect information to be constantly up to date and accessible anywhere. Lonely Planet has used Dropbox to meet that demand and build mobile offerings that are pushing the limits of how travel content is delivered and consumed.”—Diego Jiménez, Head of Mobile Product and Design, Lonely Planet

Founded in 1969, Westchester Publishing Services is the only US-employee owned company that manages editing, composition, design, and digital conversion of content for books, journals, textbooks, and white papers. After acquiring Antares Publishing Services in 2008, their team expanded to include over 300 employees in India. Dropbox is making it easier for them to work across borders.

“Dropbox offers a more modern approach to file access and management for our employees and clients across the globe, and provides the scalability we require as our company grows. Having one consistent, global space for collaboration has introduced huge efficiencies.”—Michael Jensen, Director of Technology, Westchester Publishing Services

4 ways to improve collaboration on your team

Before becoming Dropbox Business customers, Westchester relied on FTP, VPN, and servers. Unfortunately, some customers (and employees) found those tools challenging. Westchester recognized the need for newer technologies that would allow them to continue growing, and turned to Dropbox for solutions. Since incorporating Dropbox into a customer-facing portal, they’ve been able to streamline communication and project management.

“Dropbox is not only fostering a simpler, faster, and more scalable way of working together internally, but is also serving as the back-end file system for our Portal through the Dropbox API. With this powerful combination, we’re creating a transformative collaboration experience that seamlessly connects internal and external across our global operation and client base.”—Tyler Carey, Chief Revenue Officer, Westchester Publishing Services

Using integrations to improve workflows

A few years ago, global creative agency Sid Lee had been running into challenges collaborating between remote offices. With files spread across several servers, team members were struggling to find what they needed. They realized they needed to reimagine their technology stack to become more nimble.

One of the deciding factors for choosing Dropbox was the integration with Slack. Collaborating over email had led to constant re-sharing and a loss of version control. Now that Dropbox content shared through Slack gets automatically updated as users make changes, the Slack and Dropbox integration is helping to solve those problems.

“If the tools don’t talk to each other, well, it doesn’t really make sense. We’ve been able to connect Dropbox with Slack, Microsoft Office and Adobe, ensuring our team can use their preferred tools.”—Maxime Levasseur, IT Project Manager, Sid Lee

Grace Moshfegh, Partner & CEO of Superdigital, also touted the value of integrations. She says her creative and digital agency relies on several tools to stay organized, including Slack, Hootsuite, Flow, Adobe and Google.

“With Dropbox housing all the creative work we do, it's incredibly important to find tools and platforms that integrate with Dropbox and help support a seamless workflow. One of the ways I like to promote efficiency in our work is to eliminate as much mental hopping as possible, like accessing Dropbox right from Slack instead of leaving a conversation to grab a file.”—Grace Moshfegh, Partner + CEO, Superdigital

Creating a unified home that bridges business units

At Dow Jones, Dropbox integrations with Okta, Salesforce, Adobe and Microsoft help bridge gaps between tools and create a simpler, more connected way of working—which is especially important considering data from their 4,000+ users is spread across domains and networks.

“As a unified home for collaborating on files and documents, Dropbox has enabled those users to share seamlessly across those business units.”—Ramin Beheshti, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Dow Jones

Last week, we announced that Shift.io is one of the newly expanded partnerships giving Dropbox users more flexibility for collaboration. It’s already been bringing benefits to customers like Pilot, a full service creative and branding agency that uses SHIFT and Paper to streamline every stage of the content lifecycle, from creation to distribution.

“With Paper, it’s like we’re all in the same room. What’s more, often when we’re in the same room, we throw our Paper doc up on the conference TV and use it while we’re together. I think that says a lot about Paper’s ability to absorb and capture all the incredibly important content and ideation that comes out of a brainstorm.”—Louis Venezia, Owner and Chief Creative Officer, Pilot

Once content is created, Pilot uses Dropbox and two of SHIFT’s suite of products: MediaSilo and Wiredrive to collaborate and distribute the finished content to all stakeholders. Louis Venezia says his clients ask them to use MediaSilo (which layers on industry specific security features like watermarking to help secure IP) when uploading to their internal teams. With the Dropbox and Wiredrive integration, Pilot is able to distribute content to clients in an organizational structure that helps secure final approvals.

Combining creative ideas in real time

Future Classic is an artist management company with offices in Sydney and Los Angeles that uses Dropbox Business to produce music, videos, and events with collaborators across the globe. Most of their employees—and many of the artists they represent—are Dropbox users. So they set up Dropbox Business to allow easy, remote sharing and secure mobile access to large audio and video files.

“Many of our artists already used Dropbox to collaborate on music being released, so centralising this between our Sydney & Los Angeles offices made sharing files between collaborators, staff and artists seamless. We now use it in the studio, throughout our offices and with our wider teams across the world."—Harry White, General Manager, Future Classic

Sam Spiegel is not only a musician, filmmaker, and DJ—he’s also founder of Squeak E. Clean Productions. His music production company uses Dropbox Business for storing and sharing files and documents. Sam says he also uses Dropbox to collaborate with other musicians. “We do save as workflow from the same session, which lives on Dropbox,” Sam explains. “We bounce back and forth between each other’s sessions combining what we do. It’s a great way to work.”

Stay tuned for the next post in our series on Dropbox adoption in the media and entertainment industry.

To learn how your team can benefit from Dropbox Business, sign up for a consultation with our media team.