Listen to Chris DiNenna 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 Chris DiNenna. Chris, how are you?
Chris: I am doing well. How are you doing?
Henrik: Great. Chris, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Chris: I came into the orbit of Digital Asset Management through my work with photographers and with stock photography agencies. I began the career about 20 years ago as a photo researcher. Kind of morphed that into photo editing. And at the time about around the recession, that was when a lot of the companies were starting to scale back and that’s when I had to find a way to reinvent myself in this industry. I think some opportunities came up that involve Digital Asset Management and it was a good move for me to go into at that time.
Henrik: Chris, how does the world’s leading river cruise line company use Digital Asset Management?
Chris: The company has been growing incredibly quickly and they decided that instead of keeping all of their assets on internal servers, they needed to bring in someone to kind of manage the whole process of all the images coming in, all the maps, all the different logos that they’ve been storing in different folders here and there. And so I was hired to come in and kind of corral all of the image assets into one big database. When I was hired, they didn’t have a DAM in place, but when I came in they acquired an Adobe product and I worked with the developers to kind of customize this database to fit the needs of the company. And so I took about 70,000 images, maps, such and kind of gave everything I kind of a standard file name so that a lot of the assets would be searchable, included a lot of metadata just so that the images would be found when someone was searching for something such as like a German castle of sort. So the company uses the DAM right now basically with a lot of their digital products, with a lot of the print materials, the content that we use online on the websites. Everything is a lot easier to find for people in the company and it’s easy for me to kind of know where the assets are living at the time.
Henrik: Chris, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Chris: Well, I think the successes I’ve had with the DAM is that it’s more manageable. It’s easier to find. We have a lot of wholly owned content that we can share out with our third parties, with our travel agents here and there. But when it gets tricky is when we have the stock photography that we licensed from different agencies and a lot of the licenses aren’t applicable to a lot of projects that we do here and there. And so instead of having a lot of these images open for anyone and everyone to use, I’m kind of the gatekeeper. And so I kind of work with people to kind of get an idea of how they’re using the images, where the image is going to end up using, the end use of course. And then, I either agree to the terms of those people to use the image or I tell them to go back in and search for another asset so that asset can be used in their final context.
Chris: The biggest challenges I’ve had though with using the Digital Asset Management is that I’m kind of a one-man show. I’ve kind of worked with a lot of different IT folks within the company over the last three years. And that’s been the toughest challenge for me is they actually have someone who is very savvy with the tech talk, with knowing the bones and the meat of the whole database and working to help me kinda work out the bugs and the challenges of kind of building out the DAM so that everyone can use this. But also to kind of make sure that the machine is running, you know, without any issues. Keep it kind of streamline. When I was hired, I think I should have made sure that there was a tech person to kind of be there to kind of work in unison with, to kind of keep this program running without any issues.
Henrik: Chris, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Chris: That’s a great question. I’ve kind of haphazardly kind of ended up in this industry just through my expertise, working with photographers and with image licensing and rights representation. If people are really set on being archivists, being librarians, of course, it’s great to get the schooling behind that since this is like a brave new world where technology is kind of leading the forefront of imagery and how images are being used in the final context, but also experience also helps. And to find a company or a mentor to kind of help you along the way is something that I think people should learn to aspire for and kind of hunt out those people out there who have the experience, who have worked with either these databases or have worked with imagery just to kind of know of the pitfalls and the and success stories that are out there so that people can learn and grow from it and be able to kind of add more wealth into the DAM business.
Henrik: Great. Well, thanks Chris.
Chris: Thank you.
Henrik: For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com for 200 other episodes like this and transcripts. If you have any comments or questions, send them to 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 Jonathan Phillips. Jonathan, how are you?
Jonathan Phillips: Pretty good.
Henrik de Gyor: Jonathan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jonathan Phillips: Well, I currently run two separate Digital Asset Management systems. My former company, that I worked for fifteen years at, we merged with a larger corporation and so currently I’m running the old Digital Asset Management system as well as taking on the newer Digital Asset Management system and I’m running part of the integration of the two systems, which is quite an undertaking I must say. It’s been a year so far and we’re about a third of the way through.
I came into Digital Asset Management probably about sixteen years ago. I actually came to it through graphic design and actually more precisely Photoshop. I was hired as a production and graphic artist and when I was there I quickly moved over to retouching the portfolio of hotel images that we had. And as you can imagine that’s probably one of our key marketing assets of the actual different properties and it was being underutilized greatly at that time in 2002.
So through the photography work, I then actually took on the role of art directing different shoots at different properties and that became a photography program for the properties. This led, actually at the same exact time, into an existing DAM system that they had, which was very rudimentary. It had some photos, a couple of logos in it and that was really where I first got my toes wet. And within three years we kept on growing, doing photo shoots and in about three years it took us to really develop into an actual Digital Asset Management system with metadata tagging, data trees, light boxes, you know, all the things that we know about Digital Asset Management at this time.
Within five years of me coming on, we really bulked out and made the photography program into a completely international project that we managed the photo shoots across the globe. In my career, I actually see the creation of digital assets and the management and distribution as part of a single workflow. So in my mind, it’s actually all one and the same. We kept on building on the system and resolving problems as they came up, creating more tools, we built a big web-to-print system, which we would actually change four times since then. And that’s where we’re really going on twelve years now and we’re still going strong.
So I’d have to say Digital Asset Management comes to people in very strange ways, and it can offer so many opportunities and it really has over the last sixteen years.
Henrik de Gyor: Jonathan, how does a leading global hospitality company use Digital Asset Management?
Jonathan Phillips: That’s a really good question. I’m not going to talk about the current strategy that we’re still developing. It’s still in the very beginning phases but I can talk about the last sixteen years of my life and building on that. I’d have to say, like I just said, we had a very holistic approach to the creation of assets, the managing of assets and then the distribution. We saw it as really, all in one, the same thing. Digital Asset Management that, as a single, unified creative and production department, where I was.
So as an example, I ran the photography photo shoots and then my team ran the submission process of getting them retouched and into the system. And then the same team managed all of the assets that the tagging, the usage rights, the user groups and accessibility. And then we also ran the distribution out into all of the GDS and OTAs as well as all of our partners. So, and that’s the entire travel agency industry, actually.
So it’s really been a massive undertaking. We also are in the same group creating logos, floor plans, meetings and guestroom floor plans, templates to be used, so all of those assets were really created in the same exact team that was managing the Digital Asset Management system and distributing them.
The creative teams, the Digital Asset Management, the distribution to websites, travel sites, marketing teams, they all worked as one large team with a single overall strategy. And I think this really helped us over the years identifying problems and coming up with the best possible solution that we could come up with in a very fluid way.
We saw Digital Asset Management and the marketing materials that we house as kind of an ongoing part of the creative process itself. So the managing tools that facilitated that creation was also the same as housing and the overall use of the asset itself. It’s quality, consistency, and distribution. It’s all one and the same. So for a company that’s selling any types of goods or services and the hotel business is actually doing both at the same time, it’s the market assets are the lifeblood of the company.
There’s nothing more precious than how the world will perceive us and the brand so I’ve spent a lot of time balancing the smallest, little tiny technical details and balancing that with the larger strategy of the hotel business as a whole. So we are always working across the international enterprise to streamline, to make changes, to meet the needs in a rapidly changing marketing world. And I just wake up at night and I just hope that the tools that we’re putting into place are going to hold up in the long run or as long as it possibly can. So it does keep me up at night.
Managing the Digital Asset Management system itself; there’s a lot of time that I spend talking to the customers, helping the customers, resolving problems with the customers and constantly making notes to make sure that the tools are working optimally and meeting the needs of the customers, which is the marketing and the different properties, the ownerships and our partners.
We use a range of really tech savvy managers out in a field, as well as people at the properties that rarely even get on a computer. So we’re always kind of bouncing ideas and the tools themselves off of that very diverse audience and the tool has to work for everybody. So that’s really, kind of the cornerstone of what we do here. I mean, there’s a lot of tools out there, and wow, it’s amazing that the technology that’s out these days. It’s matured in the last few years even, in incredible ways.
I mean, there’s just unbelievable things that are just really science fiction out there, from a few years ago. And finding the solutions that actually meet the goals of our company is really where this skill set comes in. I mean, we could look at out of the box solutions. We have constant debates over configuration versus customization. That’s, oh my god, I could go on for hours just about that.
And I found that the overall systems that we’re using, they really do need a lot more customization. I find that a really strong marketing team has really strong and clear needs and they have a great idea in their minds of what they’re looking for and a good system is going to match those needs and really customize and configure to be exactly what they need.
So I’m actually a big proponent here of boutique solutions. Because our routines have such high standards that that’s all they’re going to accept so I put a lot of thought into this as you can tell. There’s a lot of balancing of the client’s needs and getting those needs meet with the technology that’s available and then customizing it in a very specific way. And then of course, there’s always costs that comes down to just about every single project.
Henrik de Gyor: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Jonathan Phillips: Over a large and very diverse enterprise, we’re in 83 countries, we’ve got thousands of hotels and a lot of those are franchise models with properties and ownerships. I see in my world, it’s the creating of consistent quality assets that go into the system that’s always one of the great challenges that we constantly have. I know that’s not a straightforward Digital Asset Management problem but I think that’s a huge issue with any system that comes online. It’s really what goes in, comes out.
There’s the old saying that, garbage in, garbage out. The Digital Asset Management industry, it’s really, that’s the core, is if you get good assets, a semi-good system could survive it. If you got bad assets, nothing’s going to survive. It’s really not going to be useful to the users. So there’s a huge aspect of quality control in everything that we do here and that goes into the system itself making sure that we build a great system and then all the assets that go in are just as good.
More from a Digital Asset Management technology standpoint, I’d say the ongoing battle with that is that things get complicated and they get too complicated too quickly. So constantly keeping it simple. And that’s kind of a mantra we’re always thinking about is keeping it simple. Complexity is going to creep into any system with a large number of assets in it. Once you start tagging you got translations, you have all the categories, you’ve got APIs and distribution. So we try to keep the base data and file structure as simple as we possibly can.
Every time we want to add something simple like, just another asset type, we know the ramifications of that can be massive. So we have a lot of arguments about those sorts of base structure changes and they’re really crucial decisions to us and we do agonize over them. Maybe a little bit too much, but we do. We see that as kind of the philosophical statement of Digital Asset Management is keep it simple because complexity is going to come in by the very nature of managing assets and the number of assets you have to manage.
But you know, another big challenge that I see, that I’m pretty passionate about now that you mention it, is UX: user experience. Any DAM system is just a tool. It’s got users, and the success and failure of the system is the success or failure of the users themselves. The best-programed system, it can be completely a huge failure if the user experience is not taken into account. The UX is a big thing in apps and web design these days. But I think it applies to Digital Asset Management. Personally, I think it applies everywhere. It’s just, it comes down to good design and I think good design can make or break just about anything.
We do a lot of user testing, as much as anybody can. I’ve had some great inspirations working in a department where I’m right next to the creatives. So I’m within earshot of the web designers and the app designers so I do get a lot of influence from them and I steal a lot from them as well honestly, and they know it and they’re proud of it. So really taking an interface and really agonizing over the details of the interface, of where every little detail, every little button, the user experience of what happens when they hit a button, we put as much thought of that into that as we do just about any structural change we do on the back end in the programming.
Programmers don’t always see eye to eye but I’ve always believed that the system really has to act in the way it’s supposed to act and behave in a way that is intuitive.
Henrik de Gyor: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jonathan Phillips: That’s a tough question. Actually, I love mentoring and I think mentoring comes naturally in a situation to situation basis for me. But overall, thinking about it, let’s see. First I’d say always balance a very clear vision of what you want to accomplish and adaptability. You can have great ideas and you can be great at what you do but you have to adapt. You’ve got clients, you’ve got a lot of people who have a lot of opinions and you have to go with the flow. Specifically Digital Asset Management, I try to advise people on my team that you have to know the business that you’re in, that you can know the technology, you can know Digital Asset Management, you can know content management, you can know library science and that’s all great. But if you don’t understand your clients and their needs, you’re really in a hole and you got to dig out of that.
So listen to your clients’ needs. Always coming back to the plan that best meets the needs of your clients and coming up with really creative, streamlined solutions to their needs is where really great Digital Asset Management system and manager come in. So I guess it comes down to being a creative problem solver. That’s probably the second piece of good advice.
You know, I didn’t come into Digital Asset Management in a straight way, and I don’t think most people do. I think most people come to Digital Asset Management from someplace else, be it IT, marketing, or like maybe from a creative background. Yeah, I think everybody who’s in the business feels like they came into it the hardest way possible.
When I got into it in 2002, there really weren’t any resources like there are now. I mean, it’s amazing how much stuff you can just look up and read and keep up on it. But I think I was successful because I listened to my clients and I came up with creative solutions. I really looked at every detail and I made sure that it really worked well. In that way, I think my Bachelor of Science in the Fine Arts with an emphasis on technical illustration by the way, it really came in handy in Digital Asset Management. Coming up with really interesting solutions and I thought that way. And it never hurts that I always tried to go above and beyond. I always tried to meet the expectations and then how do I go beyond that and delight my client. And that’s always been a kind of, internal mantra of mine.
Advice, yeah. It always comes down to creative solutions. I think that’s a good one as well. There’s so much great technology out there and I think it can be really seductive seeing bells and whistles and artificial intelligence and predictive modeling and all this whiz-bang. And you just got to remember that it comes down to users and how do users see the system and how to best meet those goals, before any of the great, amazing technology that’s out there.
And actually speaking about technology, I think the best technology for coming up with ideas is a pencil and paper. I still use a mechanical pencil and a piece of paper whenever I have to think through a problem. I love paper prototyping. I think it’s the fastest way; it’s the best way to come up with really great ideas, is just doodle and scribble down all of your ideas. I doodle up entire pages and then I take post-it notes and I rip them up and I cover different pieces and I put different buttons and I can do it so fast and it’s so intuitive doing it with a pencil. I recommend everybody try to problem solve with just doodling it out on a napkin or a piece of paper. It really is, it might sound old school but I just don’t think there’s a better solution out there for just thinking things through.
And again last thing, going back to the last thing I said in the last question was user experience. It basically trumps everything else, being submitting images or managing or searching a system. It’s how it works and how people react to it. There’s so many resources out there to learn how to really make an interface that is really human and is just intuitive. And that’s another thing, is Digital Asset Management, read up on user experience. It will really, really help you out in the long run. I guess that’s kind of me going back to my artistic roots though and that never goes away. So, there you go.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Kenneth Wilson. Kenneth, how are you?
Kenneth Wilson: [0:10] I’m good today. How are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Great. Kenneth, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Kenneth: [0:15] I orchestrate the operation of Kohler companies’ digital supply chain, the center of which is the company’s DAM system, and I’ve also recently taken ownership of the communications resource library. That’s how I’m involved in Digital Asset Management.
Henrik: [0:33] How does an American manufacturing company use Digital Asset Management?
Kenneth: [0:36] Kohler is a multinational manufacturing company. We have a very diversified group of businesses that are part of the Kohler company, that make up the company. Most people know very well in the plumbing, kitchen, and bath businesses.
[0:52] We also have a hospitality group that has The American Club, which is a five‑diamond hotel, that is in Kohler Wisconsin, along with many golf courses that make up Destination Kohler, along with golf courses in Kohler… Whistling Straits, Blackwolf Run… along with a golf course in Scotland, the Old Course hotel. That makes up the hospitality group.
[1:17] We also have an interior section headquartered out of Chicago, where we have furniture businesses… Baker, McGuire. A custom tile manufacturing company called Ann Sacks in Portland, along with… can’t forget our global power group, who has a number of companies they operate throughout the world.
[1:38] All those companies make up the Kohler businesses and we handle a lot of the communications for all of those different businesses. Right now, we use our DAM system to store a lot of the final marketing images, and the graphic layouts for most of our North American businesses.
[1:56] The global businesses also use the system to some extent. A lot of the products are US SKUs that are also sold in other places but some of our global businesses have SKUs that are specific to them. We’re actually trying to work to encourage them to supply our system with those unique‑to‑their‑location assets.
[2:21] The DAM system that I manage will house the packaging images, the web images that are used for the catalog, as well as the layouts for printed literature, catalogs, the sell sheets that go to our showrooms and also archives digital imagery that serves to document the history and happenings of the company. This documentary and archived footage is mainly captured digitally now.
[2:51] We’ve begun efforts to digitize years’ worth of the history that was not digital, both still and video, and that will all make its way into the system as well. At the digital supply chain, if we look at it as a whole, the front end of it we’ve got a lot of different content creators. We have our own photo studio.
[3:14] We’ve got photographers, who create content, and at the front end of that supply chain, you’re not trying to shape the standards for file formats and making sure things are consistent there. While we have our own staff photographers for the different businesses, globally, we’ll use a variety of photographers, so trying to make sure everything comes in in a consistent form.
[3:37] On the back end, assets from our DAM system are syndicated to a content delivery network (CDN), so that they can be published to our websites and to the web catalogs, and also manage that practice.
Henrik: [3:52] Kenneth, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with DAM?
Kenneth: [3:58] Personally, one of the biggest current pain points that I have comes around tracking renditions of assets that are headed for both digital and print destinations. It’s tricky to figure out what should be a version when changes are made, or what should really turn into a derivative asset. That’s probably one of the biggest pain points that I currently have.
[4:24] It’s really about educating the art directors on what it means when they version something versus what it means when they create a brand new asset. With all those businesses, we’ve got a lot of printed stuff that we still do, but there’s also a really big focus on digital, of course, using the web. A lot of our businesses are starting to do website redesigns, so that’ll continue to frustrate me this next year.
[4:53] That’s one of our biggest challenges right now. It’s trying to make sure that we don’t have a lot of duplicate content that varies so slightly that people couldn’t really do a search and be confident in the results they find within the DAM, and not really have to sort through, oh, this one’s slightly brighter, this one’s slightly darker.
[5:18] One of the biggest successes that I’ve seen in DAM lately is starting to overcome the notion of simply being a storage repository for the organizations that adopt it, more than a search tool to find things that already exist.
[5:34] One way we’re trying to get over that is the reuse of things we’ve already shot. An image that was shot for our hospitality businesses could be reused in marketing materials for the power businesses.
[5:50] So, that return on investment there. One of the bigger successes is DAM’s ability to shape workflows. One of my major initiatives this year is to implement a review on an approval workflow that we call creative review. In a digital form, it’s something that our creative groups already do, and it’s largely on paper. Trying to move that into a digital space is the big win.
[6:22] One of the major benefits we can get out of it is being able to inform content creators, our photographers, how successful they are shooting to a shot list, by having those discussions by art directors around the images and content they’re creating.
[6:41] Having some sort of record and being able to say, “It’s done, this set of images, you can do this slightly differently and these images will be able to serve a wider range of uses.”
[6:55] That’s one benefit of that workflow type of creative review and approvals implementations.
Henrik: [7:02] These are very common issues that many organizations have. Getting collaborative tools to your point, and also getting the tools to not only deduplicate, and control renderings, and version control, but also to know what the single source of truth is for brand consistency.
Kenneth: [7:18] Absolutely. That single source of truth is another pain point. I attend conferences, and a lot of the organizations that are attending may be in search of just starting the DAM process, as far as finding which software to use and how to set it up, how to govern it, and that’s always a battle with whoever holds the purse strings.
[7:41] I think one of the things I may have to be an advocate for within Kohler may be a greater emphasis on a PIM system, product information management tool, and how it integrates with a DAM system, because we use our DAM to drive that syndication of assets out to our web catalog. All those images have to marry to information about whatever’s pictured.
[8:05] Those catalog images, the data from that should come from a PIM. Right now we’re taking that information and inserting it into our system, manually, per asset. We have an opportunity there to automate that more by establishing a single source of truth for that product information.
[8:32] When product information changes, if something gets discontinued, all that information will flow automatically into the DAM system, and so that metadata is more dynamic, living, breathing kind of metadata.
Henrik: [8:47] That’s a very popular and hot topic in DAM, is to get to product information management to your point, tying with DAM so you don’t have to reproduce the data from one system to another, and have the master record of your information, your catalog items, and all the SKUs, product codes, et cetera, in your PIM, and sync up with the DAM.
[9:06] Your master record is your PIM and the repository of all the imagery that may or may not be active, to your point, is in your DAM.
[9:14] There are several vendors who are very interested in making that easier for companies. You’re not the only organization out there that has this issue, which is great to hear.
[9:24] Kenneth, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Kenneth: [9:29] That’s a good question. I can share a little bit of how I got there. Maybe that helps those aspiring to becoming DAM professionals and even inspires those who are. There’s a lot of talk about convergence. One of the topics at a recent DAM conference was, “Are we all becoming each other?” In a way, the convergence helps us push past some of the boundaries we run into.
[10:00] The breadth of knowledge has definitely been a factor in the success that I’ve had with DAM here at Kohler. Before being in this role, I was pursuing a career doing photography professionally.
[10:13] I’ve got an understanding of what the photographers, who are delivering creative content to be stored in this repository, a frame of reference to what they’re thinking or doing. In addition before that, I studied at the University of Michigan.
[10:29] I studied industrial product design, and I was in a school of art and design, and was able to take all the photography requirements as well in my time there.
[10:41] The industrial design thinking, the problem solving, the creative problem solving, those have really been helpful in coming into Kohler, a place that already had an established DAM system, and being able to see what was already happening, and trying to come up with new, more efficient ways to do some of the things they were doing.
[11:06] Our studio’s been digital for probably the last 10 to 12, maybe 15 years. There was a lot of existent content when I got here, but we’re creating more and more images each year than before.
[11:20] The design thinking has really helped to push the boundaries and to come up with creative, new ways of looking at solving the workflow problems, or how content comes into the supply chain, how it moves around and really completes a circle for the asset life cycle, I like to call it, where it may go out to a vendor, but it’s got to come back and it lives in the system. How does that asset end up becoming an archive that we reference back, historically.
[11:49] This year, I’ll be collaborating a lot more with our corporate archivist, as she digitizes a lot of the historical content that she has in her archives. Our history is increasingly becoming captured digitally. We’ll still have physical artifacts in archives in the future.
[12:09] A lot of the speeches that may have been written 60 years ago, that we have a paper‑printed copy, they won’t have a digital equivalent. Trying to preserve some of these things so that they are useful, working assets now, but turn into archives later, that design background has really helped me there. Even before that, I started off pursuing an engineering degree.
[12:37] Coding, computer science, writing code, is also a really good set of skills to have when implementing a system, working with IT to resolve and troubleshoot issues. I think that convergence is something that will really help shape and push the boundaries of the industry. That’s what I would share.
Henrik: [13:01] Great. Thanks, Kenneth.
Kenneth: [13:03] Thank you.
Henrik: [13:04] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast has over 150 podcast episodes for you to listen to, including this one. Visit AnotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a cruise line company use Digital Asset Management?
What were the biggest challenges and successes 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: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with John George.
How are you? John George: [0:09] I’m really good. Thanks. Henrik: [0:11] John, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? John: [0:13] Guess I’m right in the heart of it. I spend my days working between
business and the users and IT to keep our program running efficiently. [0:25]
Making sure that images, I work mostly with photographs that are used for
marketing, make sure those are easy to use and clearly labeled with the information
about usage. That they’re up to date and nothing that’s expired is available.
Managing the user base to make sure that they all have permissions to the right
images, the images they’re supposed to have access to. Henrik: [0:48] How does a cruise line company use Digital Asset Management? John: [0:52] Well, as I mentioned, it’s all marketing photographs, so 25,000
images of beautiful people in beautiful places. Then a few cruise ships, as well.
It’s used by the graphic design department. I actually sit in the graphic design
department, so I’m sitting with a good deal of the users. [1:06] The PR department
has access, other people in marketing. Then, some of the outside vendors
also have access to all these images, and they’re used for the website and for
any number of print materials, direct mail pieces, catalogs.
[1:22] On board ships, we have images of shore excursions that people, the staff
on the ship actually share with the passengers to try to entice them to jump on,
or jump off the ship [laughs] at the right spot and go enjoy the culture of the
country that they’re visiting there. Henrik: [1:40] So they’re shared internally with the groups that need
to see them. John: [1:43] That’s correct. Henrik: [1:44] Excellent. John: [1:45] Different groups have access to different groups of images, so
that’s one of the fun challenges of the whole thing. We separate the images,
basically, by folders. Then we have permissions to each of those folders, so the
PR department has kind of their own little folder that only they have access to.
Then the marketing department has access to a whole other slew of images that
are more about lifestyle and branding for the company. Henrik: [2:13] What are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset
Management? John: [2:18] I’ll start with successes. I’ve been at the company for just over a
year now. When I came in, we were migrating to a new software system. We
were on kind of a homegrown asset management system. We’ve moved to
MediaBin last year. MediaBin’s been through about five owners. I think it was
Virage, Interwoven and then Autonomy, and now it’s an HP company. Service is
improving with HP. [2:48] They’ve been into the project of migrating for at least
a year when I came on board, though. There was a lot of challenges that we had
had with the metadata and getting that migrated, set up correctly, and getting
the images moved over.
[3:04] Understanding how to get some of the tasks, like the downloading tasks,
and the ways that this system translates the images. You can put in a PSD file,
and then you can download it as a TIFF. But you have to set up the tasks in specific
ways so that that gets done correctly, or you lose information. John: [3:26] For instance, I downloaded a PSD as a TIFF the other day and the
ship that’s in the middle of the picture is missing, which is the white spot there.
I found out that was due to the way it was uploaded. That PSD files have to be
uploaded with a certain kind of something has to be enabled. Maximum compatibility
has to be enabled, so it’s a little tiny checkbox about 3 menus deep
when you’re in Photoshop. If it isn’t enabled, then you can’t convert it to a TIFF
correctly.
[3:57] Now, I’ve got about 3,000 PSDs that I need to check and see if they have
maximum compatibility or not. That’s going to be fun. That’s going to be one of
my challenges.
[4:07] But really, going back to what the success was, it was really just getting
MediaBin running and making it user friendly, making it easy for people to
search for things, to filter things, and making search as intuitive as possible.
That’s been a lot of fun.
[4:22] The challenges, I kind of think of it as three parts of educating people.
One of them, part of that is just the technical aspects of the program, because
MediaBin’s kind of quirky, like there’s a two stage download. You hit the download
button and it actually sends it to another server. Then you have to download
it again onto your hard drive, which isn’t totally uncommon. But users don’t
pick that up right away. You have to walk them through and teach them those
kinds of things.
[4:49] Also, we use Internet Explorer 8 at our company, system wide, and that
happens to be one that has the most bugs with MediaBin. So people are always
having problems with the different bands not showing up. I have to go in and
teach them, you’ve just got to log out and log back in. Simple things, but still,
it’s one of the kind of day-to-day challenges of working with MediaBin and
being a Digital Asset Manager.
[5:15] Then, search strategies, because in this day and age, everybody really
expects every search to work as smoothly and quickly as Google does. That’s
not the case. Somebody was looking for panoramas, big wide pictures, and they
use the word “vista” to search for it.
[5:31] If you have a big search synonym library that would work OK. But one the
challenges we have there, is that we have a whole class of ship called “Vista
class.” [laughs] If somebody is looking for “vist” as “vista”, it’s going to return all
the Vista class ships, and not pretty landscape shots. That gets frustrating with
people, and you have to show them some of the ways around it and how the
keywords are going to work best for them.
[5:56] It’s a pretty small database. We have about 250, and it’s probably growing
to 300 or so now. So it’s not unwieldy to try teach people how to use the
keywords and what keywords work best in that situation. Then I guess, the third
biggest challenge, and it’s really a growing challenge, is just the legal aspects of
all the images, and how we’re allowed to use them. Because we’ve got models
in the pictures and we have photographers’ rights. Those things all affect how
and where we can use images. John: [6:33] We have some images that we can use worldwide, some images we
can only use in North America, some we can use only in print and some online.
Online now takes a new meaning, because they want to control how they’re
used in social media, not just on our website or in ads. That world keeps evolving,
and you have to keep up with some of the changes within that, and then be
able to share those changes effectively with the users so that they are using the
images correctly. Henrik: [7:04] A lot of challenges. John: [7:05] Yeah. It keeps things fun. Henrik: [7:08] Definitely. What else would you like to share with DAM professionals
and people aspiring to become DAM professionals? John: [7:14] My main advice would be to be creative, be flexible, and be aggressive.
I never expected to be working for a cruise ship company as a Digital Asset
Manager. I went to school to do this kind of work. Librarianship is in my blood.
My mom was a children’s librarian and my sister’s a children’s librarian, both in
Wallawalla, Washington. [7:34] I’m more on to the digital side, of course. I’ve
always been more to work in academia, or with special collections in a public
library, something more humanities based resources than marketing. But this
has been a great opportunity. I finished school just as I was offered this job, so
it’s been a great first step and a great amount of experience.
[7:56] But I had to take the flexibility and say, “OK. I have to work in a corporate
environment instead of the nonprofit world, because I’m going to be doing exactly
what I want to be doing.” But then on that, this is stuff I’m sure everyone’s
heard 100 times once you’re in the company, you still have to find your duty to
justify your place.
[8:17] People don’t understand how librarianship fits into managing a photo
database and why you need to understand what the value is of having a good
metadata schema so that you can find the cities on the states and the countries
that pictures are taken in. That just is all second nature. People think it
just happens. Henrik: [laughs] [8:39] John: [laughs] The users all think, “Why can’t we just do that?” because
[laughs] [8:40] there’s a lot of background information that has to happen. These
aren’t just the people typing in keywords. It’s the business side who want
those things to just happen by magic. [8:58] You should teach them not only is
your job tougher than they think, but they can benefit by using Digital Asset
Management, at least the theories, to work for their day-to-day challenges.
Whether it’s managing, where they store their documents, or if they have their
own assets, images, videos, or audio files, what have you, that they need to be
more ordered with than they are, and make them easier to find. Henrik: [9:29] Thanks, John. John: [9:31] Yeah. I appreciated the opportunity. Henrik: [9:33] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom
and iTunes. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me
at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Another DAM Podcast 