Carin Forman discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

• How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
• How does a premium television company use Digital Asset Management?
• What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I am Henrik de Gyor. Today I am speaking with Carin Forman.
Carin, how are you?
Carin Forman: [0:10] Good, how are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Good. Carin, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Carin: [0:14] I have been involved with Digital Asset Management for about
the last 18 years. Primarily, I was with the Discovery Communications Company
when we started Digital Asset Management application to ingest, access and
upload all of our assets, primarily for international use. [0:28] Through doing that,
it has grown where I then moved onto Sony Entertainment, where I worked with
them to build an online video repository that moved digital content for them for
video. More recently, for the last three years, I have been with HBO.
[0:43] For the first two and a half years I was with them as their director of Digital
Asset Management and the IT department, where I built and deployed IT
solution for my clients internally at HBO. In doing that, my primary client base
was the creative marketing team, where we housed and stored all of HBO’s
photography.
[1:00] Recently, about nine month ago, I moved over to the creative services
team, where I’m now the director of digital photo services and building Digital
Asset Management solutions with our IT department to enable a digital workflow,
a digital end-to-end for all of our photography and graphical content.
Henrik: [1:17] How does a premium television company use Digital Asset
Management?
Carin: [1:21] HBO has a lot of downstream channels, from our new premier news
solution called HBO GO to some our social linear and nonlinear platforms. We
put a lot of content out on Facebook, where people are chatting about our programming
content, and on other social nets. We do work with Fancast, Comcast
and those. [1:41] All of those mechanisms need access to our content, whether
it’s graphical content, logo content, photography content, poster art or video,
so HBO is looking at building central repositories to start to be able to digitally
distribute our content to these downstream applications, with the old adage of,
“Ingest once and use many.” Much of our photography goes out on multiple
platforms.
[2:04] By having a robust asset management system in which we can either
export content out or we can create a pull method for people to get content,
the goal is to build a “storefront,” for lack of better, so that we can start to use
that content and get it out into the marketplace. HBO primarily uses it to access
for marketing purposes, to promote. Wherever you see one our brand identities,
the goal is to house that content in such a way that it can be used in many
locations.
Henrik: [2:33] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Carin: [2:38] I think the only advice I would give is be patient. There are a lot
of new tools in the marketplace, researcher tools. [2:43] Understand your workflow,
understand what you’re trying to solve. Sometimes you can look at more
lightweight solutions, so I think the first advice I’d give a professional is, really
understand your workflows. Really understand the pain points and the business
challenges that you’re trying to solve, and really start small and then grow
from there.
[3:02] Put a proof of concept in place if you have the opportunity to do that,
really prove out with metrics utilization. An example of that with metrics and utilization
is if you need a tool, for example, for collaboration, figure out how much
you collaborate, how many parties are internal, how many parties are external,
where the content is. If you can justify your business case by starting off a small
use case and prove it out and make a larger scale deployment easy.
[3:29] The other thing is, I would say, one of the things that I’ve found have been
successful is really a top down approach, really trying to get a person who can
spearhead a task force or somebody at an executive leadership level, who can
really engage multiple people throughout the company.
[3:44] Any Digital Asset Management engagement has to involve your IT department,
the customers, which can be the consumers of the content, and usually
external third parties who you’re trying to get content to or get content from.
Anytime you can have a really, a project champion or a project spokesperson
that has the ability to harness the efforts of people across the company to mobilize
this type of an effort is very valuable.
Henrik: [4:10] Thanks, Carin.
Carin: [4:11] Thank you, Henrik.
Henrik: [4:12] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. If you have any comments or questions,
please feel free to email me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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• Another DAM podcast interview with Paul Nicholson (anotherdampodcast.com)
• Another DAM podcast interview with David Klee (anotherdampodcast.com)

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