Leslie Osborne is the Assistant Manager, Worldwide Creative Content at Paramount Pictures. With a long title and an even longer list of responsibilities, Osborne is at the charge to create and oversee marketing content across some of Paramount’s largest feature films, including Interstellar, Transformers, The Big Short, and more recently, Arrival, Fences, and Silence.
Paramount is one of Hollywood’s most well established studios, founded in 1912 by early film pioneer Adolph Zukor. Over its evolution as a mainstay in Hollywood, it has produced films like Titanic, Forrest Gump, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, and Ghost, to name a few. With numerous blockbuster releases under their belt, Paramount’s marketing division works with many outside creative vendors, coordinating screenings, junkets, and events, and collaborating with key advertisers to make sure their film releases are as impactful as the movies themselves. Wiredrive helps keep all of their operations as efficient and user-friendly as possible.
Saving countless hours
Six years ago, Paramount moved their marketing division onto Wiredrive technology to help best manage workflow and ensure everyone was on the same page. With so many moving pieces on countless projects, the marketing team was quick to adapt to the new interface.
Before the advent of Wiredrive and sharing files digitally, managers like Leslie were forced to work around time-consuming analog solutions. “Back when we used tape delivery, we had to do everything from duplicating or sending tapes to making viewing CDs or DVDs. I was personally grateful for our company’s decision to use Wiredrive and embraced it right off the bat, because I was the person having to ship out tapes at 10 o’clock at night.”
The use of Wiredrive has not only allowed a more fluid workflow, it has freed up countless hours for Osborne and her team to focus on creative marketing activations, like the massive campaign around Office Christmas Party, the upcoming holiday release starring Jason Bateman, Jennifer Aniston, T.J. Miller, and Kate McKinnon.
Developing as the industry grows
Collaboration is key to what Osborne and her team accomplish, and the more creative minds involved makes their product all the better. The nature of her business has changed drastically in the last decade or so, providing for much easier communication among a wider group of collaborators all excited to lend their hand in the game. While telecommunications and wireless have made notable advances, the importance of having a quick and secure assets sharing service was essential to the team and makes something as simple as an internal meeting that much more productive. “In meetings, like today, [a client] messaged one of the gals in my office and said, ‘I need all these promos ASAP.’ They hadn’t mentioned that beforehand but it came up in conversation, and it was like ‘well it would be beneficial if we can just look at it right now.’ So she was able to send him the link to the folder that had everything. Instead of having to set another meeting, they were able to cover it when it was being discussed in literally five minutes.”
There’s no going back
“Wiredrive is a genius tool that not only revolutionized delivery within the film industry, but also continues to evolve in ways that are very advantageous for team collaboration and efficient workflow.”
Just as Osborne’s team continues to manage an ever-growing slate of blockbuster releases, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Meryl Streep-led Florence Foster Jenkins, the nature of their collaboration with Wiredrive has also evolved. What started as implementing a new system has drastically improved their operations across the board, with quick uploads and a cloud-based server to ensure that deliverables can be seen instantly anywhere in the world you need them. Wiredrive acts as the behind-the-scenes player to ensure that Paramount’s marketing teams can spend as little time delivering assets and still feel rest assured that everything is where it needs to be. “It’s a great tool for organizing things so that even if you aren’t aware of something you can go into the project and see what’s in there, because sometimes there’s so much going on that we may not all get the ability to sit down together and watch.” So besides the joys of not rushing out to overnight something before the store closes or hoping a postal worker arrives in time, Wiredrive’s digital asset management allows a certain security from very natural human errors by making everything you need available at just the click of a link.
