Rob Tarleton – Chief Technology Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Roy Walter – Consultant, Digital Media Solutions
Jen McGrath – Senior Director Creative Operations
Raj Kumar – Enterprise Architect
In case you missed this NYC DAM Meetup or want to review this discussion again, below is the unedited audio recording of this panel discussion (Duration: 92 minutes)
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jan Delos Santos. How are you involved with the Digital Asset Management?
Jan Delos Santos: I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for over a decade now. Currently, I’m the digital asset manager for RPA, which is Rubin Postaer & Associates. Prior to my stint here, I’ve worked as the Digital Asset Management for Saatchi & Saatchi LA for two years. Prior to that, I was an art producer/digital asset manager at TBWA\CHIAT\DAY for about eight years. Really much of my experience has really been on the agency side of things. Back in 2003, when I first became involved with DAM, I was just starting out as an art producer and was responsible for commissioning various artists for the different campaigns that came through. The agency needed a way to keep track of these assets that were being produced, especially as the amount of digital files grew. Because I was one of the most tech-savvy members of the team, they pretty much charged me with creating the system. I worked with our internal IT department at that time to create an in-house solution.
I was hired by RPA to revamp the system they currently have and just develop their workflow processes for DAM. Prior to my arrival here, there wasn’t anyone devoted solely to the Digital Asset Management who understood the particular needs of an advertising agency. The system was basically being used as file storage. The taxonomy was out of date. There was no overall structure to the system. Since there was no clean ingestion workflow, many of the assets in the DAM were either incorrect or never even made it to the DAM. That’s been my challenge to leverage the technology already in place, to introduce some best practices, and to broaden the agency’s understanding of the benefits of having a DAM. Anytime you’re going through this type of DAM revamp, restructure, and expansion, it’s never a quick fix. It’s been really important to me, through this transition, to work nimbly and have flexibility, but at the same, stick to a well-thought-out roadmap for implementing the new processes, technologies, and operating procedures.
Henrik de Gyor: How does an independent advertising agency use Digital Asset Management?
Jan Delos Santos: As a creative agency, we’re responsible for generating many individual visual assets used. Even though we’re an independent agency, we still have to work with a number of different client partners that rely on the assets we create. Because we have so many different teams, clients, or client partners that need these assets, we use DAM to keep track of the product metadata, usage rights, and to distribute those assets across the network. In that may, being in an independent agency is not that different from working at other agencies. We run into similar issues and have similar needs, so standardizing our workflow and getting users to adopt the system is key. Much of my experience has been with the various automotive clients, so it’s vital that they DAM keeps track of the product information for the vehicles featured in the assets. What’s product correct for one model year could change in the next. Depending upon the nature of the marketing, users may need a vehicle with very specific options. By centralizing and keeping these assets on the DAM, it ensures that users are locating the correct image for their needs. Also, it helps to make the branding consistent across the different media channels, whether it’s print, digital, or social media.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Jan Delos Santos: I think that although awareness is growing, I still find that many companies don’t understand what Digital Asset Management is and what the benefits are for having a DAM system in place, or if they have heard of DAM, they focus all their efforts solely on the technology when really there’s so much more to it than that. You can have the greatest technology in the world, but you still have to adapt it to your needs, especially as they change, and have people behind it to support, maintain, and grow the system. It’s not uncommon for a digital asset manager to be hired onto to clean up a previous situation. Often those responsible for creating the system don’t communicate clearly to all necessary holders involved, so no one utilizes the system either correctly or at all.
In one case, I had to cull down the required meta data fields from 140. After meeting with different stakeholders, I quickly realized that none of the users ingesting assets had the time nor were there a need for this huge set of data. I was able to pare it down to the essentials, and I reduced the number to 38. By doing this, it made the process significantly more efficient and made the option of this step less of a concern for others. Because I was focused on their needs and valued their input, those stakeholders became more willing to work with me and through me to solve future problems and eliminate future technical roadblocks.
I think that success for me happens as our user adoption grows. I love it when the light bulb clicks on for people when they work with their DAM and realize how it can make their work life easier. They’re no longer bogged down by spending so much time digging for files, and they can find what they need quickly and can move on to the more important stuff.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Sounds like a great investment. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jan Delos Santos: As much as the industry is growing, I still think it’s a niche area that even some long-time agency veterans aren’t aware of. There’s certainly not a lot of information to new, prospective candidates unless they have been in this type of role previously. Most digital asset managers don’t start out as such, and they’re coming into the field from very diverse disciplines. I think that it’s important for someone aspiring to work in DAM to always be curious. You never know what experiences will help you along the way, so you have to be open to a variety of challenges. It’s not just learning about new innovations and technology. You have to be proactive and get to know your users and their needs. Also, never underestimate the value of the human part of DAM. The more you’re able to connect with people, the more successful you’ll be.
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Mike Bevans.
Mike, how are you?
Mike Bevans: I’m good. How are you doing?
Henrik de Gyor: Good. Mike, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Mike Bevans: I’m currently the senior digital asset manager at The College Board, but I’ve been involved with large-scale digital collection since 1998 when I was a digitization specialist at Cornell’s Fine Art Museum. It was one of the first large-scale digitization efforts in the country, and it became kind of a model for subsequent digitization projects. In any one of these large-scale projects, of course, you have asset management concerns because you have your whole workflow that has to be designed. Granted, this was back before people were talking about digital workflows. It was actually kind of the birth of the thought process of digital workflows, getting from the camera through editing and creating an archive and creating derivatives, so that was actually my first exposure to asset management.
From there, I went on to work with other cultural institutions dealing with other large collections and in each one of these projects, there’s a lot of money being spent on equipment and personnel, and all of these were not-for-profits so they really had to justify their expense. The best way to justify their return on investment was through repeatability, quality, and efficiency. I think these same principals apply to asset management as well, being able to have high-quality metadata, for example, being able to apply it on a repeatable basis or on a consistent basis, and of course efficiency so that you’re not spending all of your time tagging and searching. You’re actually producing work.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Mike, how does a nonprofit organization focused around education use Digital Asset Management?
Mike Bevans: Well, the College Board publishes materials year round to help students achieve a college degree. We maintain over 120 websites. We produce training videos for teachers and counselors. We publish all kinds of printed material from postcards, flyers, brochures, all the way up to publishing books like curriculum frameworks. We’re really constantly churning out products, let’s say. We also host several national conventions every year, national and regional conventions, so we’re producing materials for that, marketing materials. We’re also producing trade show installations, so entire conferences, entire conference halls or lecture halls. We have an archive of over 120 marketing photos, and I just checked this morning, and I think we’re around 10 to 15 terabits of video footage. All of this goes back to about 2008. Because we’re working in a cyclical environment around the school year, we’re constantly refreshing our library. We’re constantly archiving and creating new materials. I just got back from our latest photo shoot, so I’m about to once again overhaul our active collection of photographs.
Henrik de Gyor: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Mike Bevans: I just migrated our legacy photo library to more modern cloud-based asset management system that integrates with our production, our design production, and it was really kind of a revelation for us since I was looking at asset management tools to realize that our assets weren’t just our photographs that we were using and materials we were producing, but actually the materials we were producing are our more valuable assets. Until now, working in a design environment, we would get a task to produce a book or a flyer or something, and as soon as it was done, it went off to print. We considered that done, and the digital files would just be saved on a file server, and that’s where they would sit until next year when they would say, “Oh, we need to update this brochure, this flyer, this book.” Then we’d have to go back into the file server and find it.
We have all of our designers working in a Mac environment and our file server’s a PC, and the Macs for some reason can’t index those files, so it makes searching and finding things difficult for the designers. When we started looking at asset management systems and we saw that these could be integrated with our production, we got very excited, but that, of course, brings up what I think is the biggest challenge, which is getting users to change behavior, to adopt new systems, because you learn one way of doing things, and it may not be the most efficient way, but that’s the way you know, so when somebody comes along with a change, managing that change is actually very challenging. At the same time, the biggest success that I see in asset management is when the users actually start to adopt those changes and start to realize efficiencies and start to come up with new ways of making their work better, faster, and more efficient. On the one hand, I would say user behavior is the biggest challenge. It is also the biggest success.
Henrik de Gyor: Right. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Mike Bevans: One of the lessons I learned was early one, back in 1998, was to establish a good foundation so that you can be flexible to try new things and not to be afraid to make mistakes. If you have a good foundation that you can fall back onto, you have a lot more freedom. For example, when I started working with College Board, just like any large collection in a production environment, the question grows kind of organically, and asset management becomes a necessity. It’s almost an afterthought. You end up with, when I came in we had multiple files with multiples of the same file with different file names, derivatives with different file names that didn’t match the originals, and then originals that were duplicated in multiple places in different sets of collections.
The first thing I had to do was bring all of the originals together and then try to find some order to them. We also had, you know, as I looked through the keyword tags, we had over 8,000 different unique keywords that were not applied consistently throughout. If you were going to search our photo library, it would be luck if you found anything. For example, we had multiple misspellings in our keywords, so we would have one keyword that had 10 different spellings, and that doesn’t help you if you have an exact match keyword search. The next thing it had to do after gathering all that data together, threw out all of the old tags and established a new hierarchical tagging system that again, this way it would be consistent throughout the entire collection. It was very efficient to apply because it was a much more limited set of terms and then basically only applied them to the derivatives that I made from the new gathered originals. Everything had to fall in line with a single naming convention.
There’s a lot of different foundational steps that went into building a good collection and then when it came time to migrate, it was actually very easy because the foundation was in place. We could spend more time working on new production techniques rather than trying to migrate messy data from one system into a new system. Again, my advice would be make a good solid foundation based upon the principles of findability, and you’ll have freedom to expand in other directions.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Well, thanks Mike.
Mike Bevans: Yeah, okay. Thank you.
Henrik de Gyor: For more on this and 185 other episodes, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jenn Terbosic. Jenn, how are you?
Jennifer Terbosic: Good, thanks. How are you? Thanks for having me.
Henrik de Gyor: Good. Jenn, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jennifer Terbosic: I’m getting ready to approach my second full season with the Philadelphia Eagles and with that, I’m responsible for managing our media asset management. With that, I help my team organize their content that comes in on a daily basis by creating metadata fields and values for those fields that makes sense to everyone on our team to improve our search and our organization of our assets.
I also coordinate day-to-day MAM activities just like normal MAM needs and maybe some support issues that arise. I just kind of handle and coordinate that stuff as each day goes on.
Henrik de Gyor: Jenn, how does one of the most storied sports franchises in history use Digital Asset Management?
Jennifer Terbosic: We use our MAM and stuff in several aspects. For example, on game day we have a lot of moving pieces, a lot of different content is being produced… photos, videos and our goal with Reach Engine was to streamline and automate how that content got into our MAM. On game day, our replay operators are constantly creating clips and sending them off to a hot folder.
That hot folder then pulls those clips directly into Reach Engine and from there we have our loggers kind of waiting, watching and reviewing that content as it comes in and they immediately start logging and tagging that content. Then, it’s easily and readily available for all of our editors as they need to start creating their pieces on game day. It helps move and speed that process along a little bit.
Another area I think we’ve been really successful in is automation and workflows. I work really closely with our integrators at Chesapeake Systems and we take our manual processes and automate them as much as we possibly can. We found that automating these processes really saved time and improved efficiency. It helps improve delivery time to our social channels as well as our affiliates. A big part that I’ve seen with creating workflows is it’s really, to be successful in it is really understanding and learning the manual process inside and out.
After that process is created, the automation goes smoothly and you really see the benefit of automating some of those manual processes. We’re also in the process of bringing on our design team content and on-boarding their team as well as going through our entire physical archive. We have tons and tons of historic photos, negatives, slides that all need to be looked at and kind of surveyed and then we actually have to go through and come up with processes and get that stuff digitized and bring that content into our MAM as well.
Those are some of the three key areas that we’re starting to kind of really use our MAM for and just keep going with those projects. As you talk to people in your department, you come up with, “Hey, maybe this idea … Maybe this stuff can go in the MAM.” It kind of just becomes that niche application. I think as you expose it to your, not just your internal team that is maybe your creative team, but letting everybody else know that it’s available.
Then I think that’s really how you can make your media asset management system a niche application that’s looked upon as almost definitely necessary to have.
Our loggers, as I said on game day, they kind of come in. They just are watching the content flow in on game day and they basically are reviewing the content and adding the metadata that’s requires for each asset. If there’s a play that happened, they’ll tag that play. If there’s a player, they’ll tag all the key players seen in that clip. They basically just kind of go through and add all the appropriate metadata to each asset that comes into the system.
Henrik de Gyor: Jenn, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Jennifer Terbosic: A big challenge for me this time around was learning a new system and just becoming more familiar with video content. I previously worked more with photos and PDF documents and that was a huge challenge for me. Another challenge I think a lot of digital asset managers may experience is just making sure that every user is comfortable using the system.
It’s something that I just find is important and it’s a challenge and you have to have continued patience and kind of just be able to go with the flow and maybe … Some users might pick up a system right away and some you might have to sit with a little bit longer. I think that is a huge challenge for us is just kind of the continuation of training and just knowledge sharing.
I think too some of our other challenges we had work were kind of more maybe pre-MAM or DAM, more of our content was stored on drives and then it was unorganized and it wasn’t easily shared. You had to walk that drive physically over to somebody. It was not easy to search for it. Those things I think are all being addressed with our MAM and we still come across small challenges day-to-day, They are usually more less like, UI or functionality-based challenges. We just work through those and continue to move forward.
Our successes are largely based on the workflows and automations that I mentioned earlier. I should also mention that our content is now managed. It’s protected and easily searchable. Like I mentioned in one of our challenges was in the past that wasn’t there.
Having all your content in one centralized location I think is key and getting there is a success in itself. I think for us, just kind of finally beginning to have all that content in one location is a huge success. I think as we bring on other teams and make that content available for other end users, it’s just going to continue to be successful.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jennifer Terbosic: I would say attend as many conferences as you can. I like to attend the Henry Stewart DAM Conference every year. I think it’s a great conference. It’s a great place to network and meet other digital asset managers and digital asset managers I think tend to usually be pretty nice and friendly people and willing to share information. I think once you get us talking about these topics, we’re excited to talk to other people that are interested in it. I think conferences is a really great place to start that networking.
I also really enjoy the Mod Librarian site. She lists 10 DAM things to check out every Thursday, I think it is. It’s one of my favorite websites. I look forward to checking out this list weekly. It’s a great resource and I think if you’re already tasked with managing your assets, you have to continue to talk to your team and learn and understand their current processes.
I would also suggest holding meetings with them, explain metadata, have metadata discussions, understand and make sure everybody’s on the same page with those definitions and their values. I also think it’s important to keep your team involved and listen to their ideas as well. A lot of times they are the experts in the content that you’re actually going to be managing and organizing, so I think it’s important to hear what they have to say too and listen to their ideas.
Just remember too that metadata is organic and it changes with every project that’s coming in as things change in your company so just remember that you may have to go back and revisit it every once in a while. Other than that, I think that’s all I have.
Another DAM Podcast 