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Another DAM Podcast interview with Laura Patterson about Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does a leading health solutions company use Digital Asset Management?

What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript

Henrik de Gyor 0:00

This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Laura Patterson.

Laura, how are you?

Laura Patterson 0:08

I’m doing great. Thanks. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor 0:10

Great. Laura, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 0:14

I have a lot of different roles in asset management for my organization. I am part strategist, part project manager, developer, coder, I do a whole gamut of different things within the DAM world. And it’s been about 10 years of me being in this field. And within the organization I’m in now, I have actually built three different DAMs, and each one has been progressively more complex than the next. And we’ve done so because of obviously, the technology changing in the world and the changing business needs of our organization. So we’re just finishing up building our third DAM for the company.

Henrik de Gyor 0:59

Laura, how does a leading health solutions company use Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 1:05

We use it in a very wide variety of ways. We are all encompassing our entire enterprise is utilizing this DAM to search and download assets. And this is across many different business areas. We have our retail marketing and creative teams, obviously, they’re one of our primary users. But we also have folks in corporate communications and HR, learning and development, our prescription benefits management groups. So we have a very broad audience. But we also service a number of external partners, including design agencies, photographers, and illustrators, some of whom might be coming to the DAM to consume our assets, utilize them in partnership work that we’re doing with them, or they might be contributing assets to us, such as photo shoots or video shoots, etc. And our other primary external users are our product vendors, they are actually our heaviest uploaders of the system. We have a partnership with these product vendors, where we advertise their products, and they help us with our marketing campaigns. So they will provide us with their imagery that then gets stored in the DAM, access by marketing and creative and subsequently used in our marketing materials. We are expanding very quickly, we are getting more and more people that are involved in participating in the DAM. And I think with the technology and digital transformation, we’re really bringing a lot of consistency to our technology stack across the organization.

Henrik de Gyor 2:47

Laura, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Laura Patterson 2:52

I’ll start with one of my biggest challenges that I’ve experienced, and then how it became successful. So one of the biggest challenges that we have had is user adoption and change management. That can be a really big deal for folks that have never used an asset management platform before and trying to understand why we need it, why we have to participate in it, what benefits does it bring. So, you know, definitely with different types of business areas that can be far more challenging to convince than others. And I would say that the success of dealing with that challenge is as you’re building out your DAM, whether it’s from the very getgo, starting your strategy, metadata development, the actual platform development, any business areas that are going to be touching this platform at any level, you should engage with them right at the start of the project and get their input and their feedback, understand their problems and their needs, and work with them to come up with solutions. I found that it’s more successful when you involve all of these different groups that you want to adopt the DAM, and how let them have their say, and how it gets applied to their world and give them those sorts of real life experiences and how it will directly relate to them. And you will find that the adoption and the change management becomes much smoother when you have that communication and that open door for them to give them what they need.

Henrik de Gyor 4:27

Laura, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Laura Patterson 4:34

I would say my advice is and this would go for both new and existing again, really thinking through your strategy really working with the different business areas. Not thinking about DAM in a vacuum of how you as the asset manager is going to work with the assets, work with the application, but to think broader in terms of how it’s going to to impact your direct users, both incoming and outgoing, and if you really put your focus on the users, you’re going to have a much better DAM solution, a better experience for your users. And you’re really going to get people engaged and wanting to participate. I found that has been probably the biggest success for me in my career in really getting the asset management out into the organization and really making it successful and worthwhile for all of our users.

Henrik de Gyor 5:35

Well, thanks, Laura.

Laura Patterson 5:36

Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor 5:37

For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.


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Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify, TuneIn, and more

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jennifer Anna on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Jennifer Anna speak about Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does an independent conservation organization use Digital Asset Management?

What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript

Henrik de Gyor 0:00
This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jennifer Anna. Jennifer, how are you?

Jennifer Anna 0:08
I’m great. Thank you for having me.

Henrik de Gyor 0:11
Jennifer, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Anna 0:14
Right now, I’m serving as the Digital Asset Manager for World Wildlife Fund. And my responsibilities actually encompass several different roles ranging from, say, contract manager, librarian, photo editor to product owner, so kind of a jack of all trades, if you will. And throughout my, I guess, 10 plus year career, I would say that the majority of my roles have been as product owner in some capacity.

Henrik de Gyor 0:52
Jennifer, how does an independent conservation organization use Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Anna 0:57
So our Digital Asset Management platform is accessible by our entire network. We are a network of approximately 100 offices spanning from Columbia to Myanmar to US to UK. And at this point in time, our library is of photography and video that tells the story of the work that WWF or World Wildlife Fund does. So the way that we work, the DAM team are very small, but I’ll say DAM team works might be a little bit different than how maybe other DAM teams work, in that, we tend to be kind of involved with the full pre-production to kind of post-production processes as well as like the DAM processes of ingestion, cataloging, and distribution.

Jennifer Anna 2:08
What our library contains is the commissions, the trips that we send photographers, or filmmakers out into the field, again, to sort of tell the story of World Wildlife Fund’s work. So we actually have commissioned shoots in the library. We also have staff photography, because a lot of our colleagues are working in program science. And so they’re actually out in the field. And part of their research work is to actually document it. So we also have staff photography, in the system as well. Another thing that we have, to a lesser extent, are what we called camera traps. And this is the way that our science folk capture the actions of animals to sort of understand better how we can help conserve their landscapes, and also kind of like, yeah, conserve their landscapes conserve wildlife. So those are sort of and then we also, of course, have licensed images from stock agencies like nature picture library, we used to license from National Geographic or National Geographic Creative, even though they’re I think they’re no longer licensing. So it’s kind of those like, I think four or five buckets of imagery that we’re kind of pulling in from a global network.

Jennifer Anna 3:39
There’s different sort of like talents and expertise across the network, the DAM team, and also certain production teams across the network, kind of assist with different processes. And that can be helping with the contract process to make sure that we’re getting the right deliverables from our photographers and filmmakers to kind of helping with the editing process when those assets have been delivered, creating B roll packages, and then of course, and then the processes of actually getting them into the hive or which we call our DAM the hive and getting them distributed. So again, it’s a little bit different in that our DAM work actually extends sort of beyond the management of the DAM into said, like contract processes working with photographers and filmmakers, doing edits, and again, like getting them to the system and then getting them distributed. And the way that our DAM is actually used, for the most part, our DAM is accessible by again, our entire network. If you have a WWF employee, you have access to our DAM so we have approximately 4000 users And so, again, our DAM may be a bit different in that it’s not just utilized by marketing and communications teams across a network. Program staff use it. Science staff use it. Our accounting teams probably use it for if they’re working on something. So it’s very far reaching like our DAM definitely serves our users sort of beyond the marketing and tech teams at WWF.

Henrik de Gyor 5:34
Jennifer, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Anna 5:39
So let’s start with successes. I think what I’ve seen in my time in DAM is that we’ve been rethinking DAM as part of a larger marketing technology ecosystem, which I think that’s been a very positive step for the industry. I think we are thinking about DAM more holistically. And understanding they are programs requiring long term management versus standalone platforms or products, which was more the philosophy when I got started, as I said over 10 years ago, I think we understand more now. I think the industry understands more now that it’s a kind of a people first, technology second initiative, and that it can take a village to make these Digital Asset Management platforms run. And I think that’s all very positive.

Jennifer Anna 6:45
That said, DAM program still continue to be undervalued and misunderstood by companies, and therefore, I think they’re still being under resourced. I see large companies, fully resourcing their CMS, their CRM, their social media departments, and other marketing comms tech platforms with teams and budgets. But then they only employ one person to manage all the aspects of the DAM platform. And just to reiterate, these DAM programs take a village to succeed. So I would really like to see the industry help companies set these programs, and the people required to manage them up to succeed.

Henrik de Gyor 7:36
Jennifer, what advice we’d like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Jennifer Anna 7:42
I would say a few things, I would say learn about the larger marketing communications technology ecosystem, and approach DAM holistically as part of a larger system of processes and people. I would also say you need to be prepared to speak to different stakeholders in their own language about DAM. Change management is a big part of making a DAM program succeed.

Jennifer Anna 8:20
That said, I would also say it’s important to set boundaries and expectations. Many DAM jobs, depending on what they are, are actually several jobs in one and you will need to be able to educate your stakeholders about what is possible. Many times when you are coming into a new workplace, you will be the expert. No one else in the organization or company will understand DAM the way that you do. And then I would say the final thing is with that said, know that you don’t need to know everything. Technology changes so fast that we are just really running along with it.

Henrik de Gyor 9:08
Well, thanks, Jennifer.

Jennifer Anna 9:09
Thank you so much. This is really a pleasure.

Henrik de Gyor 9:12
For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.


Questions?

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify, TuneIn, and more

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Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today


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Another DAM Podcast interview with Iqvinder Singh about Digital Asset Management

Listen to Another DAM Podcast interview with Iqvinder Singh about Digital Asset Management

 

Here are the questions asked:

How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

How does a distributor of creative products use Digital Asset Management?

What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor (00:00): This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Iqvinder Singh. How are you?

Iqvinder Singh (00:09): I’m great. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor (00:10): Great. Iqvinder, How are you involved with digital asset management?

Iqvinder Singh (00:14): I’m the DAM Librarian and Taxonomist for one of the country’s largest art supplier. MacPherson’s are based out of Emeryville, California. So my role is to manage all the assets associated with our over hundred thousand products. So our products are distributed through companies like Michaels, Blick Art and thousands of other art retailers across the country. And I basically activate three areas and in the DAM ecosystems. So I manage the day to day asset management. I define the taxonomy. I also manage the eCommerce business that comes out live on sites like Amazon and walmart.com. So that’s kind of what I do digital asset management.

Henrik de Gyor (01:12): Iqvinder, how does a distributor of creative products use digital asset management?

Iqvinder Singh (01:17): We get digital assets from many different sources. The main one is we get the product imagery directly from our manufacturers. So they send us anything and training videos through actual product photography. And then, we take those assets, we bounce it against our brand standards to make sure that it aligns with what we need to publish for our retailers. And at times, we also do our own in house photography and video to make sure that we have the needs for anything that a supplier or our vendors can supply to us. So we take the products and then we send it out to companies like Michaels, they might have needs for their catalogs. They might have needs for their social media. They might have needs for their website. And each one of these thousands of retailers across the country, they might have unique needs, which might be, you know, different in size, you know, some, it’s like a product from one angles. Others like it from a different angle, some prefer videos, you know, some prefer JPEGs and PDFs and TIFs and all kinds of different attributes. In our DAM we have total of, I would say, close to 200 different attributes tied to each product. So anytime a retailer comes back to us and say, Hey, we need the following for this particular product, we can easily automate that process and send them exactly what they need. And so, you know, at one point all of this was done manually, but we have the tools where we can output all this information automatically and we can do it for thousands of items at once.

Henrik de Gyor (03:23): And just to clarify, the attributes you’re speaking of, is that metadata fields?

Iqvinder Singh (03:26): Exactly. It’s a metadata field.

Henrik de Gyor (03:31): What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Iqvinder Singh (03:36): Right now? You know, we, we are in the process of cleaning our DAM libraries, so we have assets that are outdated. You know, we have products that were shot, you know, 20 years ago. And so it’s, it’s somewhat of a manual process to get some of the newer imagery for these product and deactivate some of the old product imagery. And oh, so, you know, when you have over a hundred thousand assets, you know, it’s, it’s hard to identify which ones are new and which one are outdated. We do have a process in place where anything that’s older than five years, we are reaching out to our distributor to validate, to make sure that there’s no newer packaging out there. So getting the product out to the market in a speedy manner is always a challenge. We have to make sure we’re not only getting first in the market, but also we have the latest and greatest product imagery and just, you know, simplifying some of our own internal processes.

Iqvinder Singh (04:52): And, we still have so much, um, metadata sitting in spreadsheets and antiquated old tools and drives. So we’re just trying to flush out our own system too have the latest and greatest in our central hub.

Henrik de Gyor (05:11): And what advice would you like to share with them professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Iqvinder Singh (05:15): I would say anybody who’s coming into or even thinking about becoming a DAM Specialist, I would say is learn. Learn the life cycle of a product. In a lot of organizations nowadays you’re going to end up wearing many different hats. You’re not going to be just strictly a digital asset manager. You’re going to be providing creative feedback, you’re going to be managing, you know, assets for both web and print.

Iqvinder Singh (05:49): So I would recommend learn all the ins and outs of those… how your product’s going to be outputted so you have a better understanding of what you know, what you’re working with. And it will also make you a better communicator when you’re dealing with vendors and internal creative and marketing teams. because it’s, you know, your role as a DAM manager, it’s, it’s not a standalone role, at least not in my world. You’re going to be dealing with merchandising teams and marketing teams and logistics outside third party agencies. So kind of learn the whole ecosystem of where your role sits, learn the ins and outs of marketing and creative. And it will just make you a not only great digital asset management, you know, you’re going to be a librarian and a day to day and you’re sort of the role of a taxonomist and a lot of those companies that I worked with didn’t have that particular role, so I had to quickly speed up myself to kind of understand, uh, how the product is being used and what it means to the internal teams, what it means to people outside of our company that will be using this product and learning the proper terminology to house these products in a hierarchy that’s easy to understand and download by all different parties. There are great tools out there, but the one thing to kind of keep in mind is that, you know, all products have a lifecycle and at some point a new product comes in and we discontinue something else. So a lot of DAM Managers, they make the mistake of fulfilling their hub with all the products, but there’s not a cleaning up. There’s gotta be a process in place for a continuous cleanup of all the different assets we have in our libraries. Just in the last year, we wiped out over 30,000 assets either they were dated or no longer carried by our company. So you get to keep those kinds of things in mind. Otherwise, if the wrong product gets out in the market, that means you have to send retraction letters and could cause some other indirect issues. So just kinda keep that in mind.

Henrik de Gyor (08:30): Good point. There’s a lot of lifecycle management challenges because things keep evolving and it is not a one and done, to your point, in the world of DAM.

Iqvinder Singh (08:39): Exactly.

Henrik de Gyor (08:40): Well, thanks for your advice. Appreciate it.

Iqvinder Singh (08:42): Thank you, Henrik.

Henrik de Gyor (08:42): For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Amazon Alexa, Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Alex Hauschild on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Alex Hauschild talk about Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alex Hauschild. Alex, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Alex: I started out at UCSB Davidson Library working for Salvador Güereña. And he brought me on to do brochures and graphic arts and stuff for him and we hit it off up pretty good and during that time found out that a lot of my imaging experience from previous was what’s going to help him develop what was called a digital library at the time. And we did a couple of pilot projects and went from there and he encouraged me to get the… he tricked me into getting a library and information sciences degree and went from there. I ended up with the UCSB Art Museum doing architecture and design collections.

Worked with California digital library, developing some of their policy and content governance for the California Digital Library and Califas, which is basically a large multicultural archive online. And went from there. Around 2008, ended up going to…moved to Los Angeles, did a little trying to start my own publishing business for a while. They ended up with Motor Trend hot rod trying to save their archive and that was an amazing experience. And from there, just kept going through the entertainment industry, went to Dreamworks and from there Google.

Henrik: Alex, how does a multinational technology company use Digital Asset Management?

Alex: Well, that’s a crazy question. Basically, they use it in multiple different facets. There’s production pipelines. Might have heard the term creative value chains or creative value pipelines and these are basically the production from concept to final assets. And final assets actually can mean several different things. So they’re using Digital Asset Management all the way along the way and sometimes multiple case in multiple ways. They use it in project management and then they use it for distribution. I mean, the short answer is distribution in all cases. That’s what Digital Asset Management is all about. But depending on your user base, it depends on what that distribution is.

Henrik: Alex, What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Alex: That is a question that has two different parts. What are the challenges and successes for me and what are the challenges and successes in the field. For the field, I think what we’re seeing is more of a transition or more of a user-friendly attitude towards content management basically blends brand awareness and brand control with Digital Asset Management. We kind of transitioned into that from content management systems and just being…. seeing the potential for being able to distribute out to multiple users and multiple ways. Especially with… for the web or specifically for the web. For myself, it’s been a long road, so I’ve gone from creating digital library… Digital Asset Management systems before we had a term for them. I used to think of them as digital libraries and then kind of evolving with the industry as it transitioned into, I think basically going into distribution and then getting mixed with legal and I think maybe the challenges and obstacles we faced are now that we’re able to provide organized sets of assets on a massive scale, how can we protect the legal at that point and what kind of interaction with legal and licensing do we want to take? Or we the gatekeepers, are we the organizers? That’s really the fundamentals of the industry right now I think is can we transition as librarians, gatekeepers into a communicative role where we basically are helping users determine whether or not just where something is, but whether or not they can use it, so user control is a big deal now.

Henrik: Alex, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Alex: I mean, depending on which aspect of the industry they want to go in, there’s a big difference between academic and tech…technology fields where I’m at. I would get to know the marketing production, the process of it from content creation, which is at the producer level, at the project manager level and get to know how that works and how those assets are transferred from concept to creatives to postproduction. There’s so many tie-ins from asset producers who are creating images and handing them off multiple ways. Those handoffs become the critical mass for any assets, like who’s getting it, when they’re getting it and those are the timelines that you were working with. I think that those are really the things I would pay attention to if I was starting out. Now it’s can I get more involved in marketing and can I understand the marketing world because they’re the ones really creating these asset banks, really just get to know marketing agencies and how agencies work. It really becomes more of a people process when you understand why and when things are being made.

Henrik: Well, thanks Alex.

Alex: Thanks for having me.

Henrik: For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please send me an email at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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