Listen to Kristine Petermann talk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Kristine Petermann. Kristine, how are you?
Kristine Petermann: I’m good. How are you?
Henrik: Great. Kristine, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Kristine: So I am currently a digital asset manager with the company called Innocean out in Huntington Beach, California. We work with an auto company called Hyundai and I am in charge of running their asset management site here.
Henrik: Kristine, how does global marketing communications of an auto company use digital asset management?
Kristine: So we use it to basically hold our content that we create for our auto campaign. So we create images like still images, photography files, CG assets, CG images, and we have to have a way to store that… those images somewhere. So we create a DAM site to store that content so other users outside of our company can come in and potentially look at those images and see if they want to use it for their part of their campaign.
Henrik: Kristine, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with digital asset management?
Kristine: Biggest challenge would probably be usage rights. Making sure that all users understand what they are grabbing, what the usage rights for that particular image is, and if they’re going to use it properly. And I think having a DAM site has succeeded in that. So you have people looking at metadata through the asset management site to see, okay, can we actually use this image for our purposes? Or is this purely for social media only and we can’t use it for something for like a print ad. Success is more people understanding what metadata is and understanding what usage rights of an image is.
Henrik: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Kristine: DAM is very important for any company that creates content. You have so many internal users as well as external users that want to use your content. So you need to have a location, a repository to house that content that you are creating. You need to have a good DAM site to share your content whether it’s a person who is internal or an external user.
Metadata is very important. Knowing what the metadata is, whether it’s still asset or a video asset, knowing who created that asset, knowing what the usage rights is and any particular product information, especially if it’s a vehicle or say a consumer product, you need to know exactly what that product is so internal and external users can actually do keyword searches and search by that on your DAM system.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Margie Foster.
Margie, how are you?
Margie Foster: [0:09] I’m good. Thank you. How are you?
Henrik: [0:11] Great! Margie, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Margie: [0:16] I work as a Digital Asset Management Librarian for a global semiconductor company. My position is within the Marketing Department. I’m responsible for all the rich media that is involved with the marketing collateral. I have everything from large banners that hang at events over our booth, to video files, to print collateral, to anything that goes out on dot com.
Henrik: [0:49] Why does a global semiconductor company use Digital Asset Management?
Margie: [0:54] A semiconductor company, especially a global one, is no different from any other global company in the sense that it needs to reach as many of its customers as possible. Such is possible in a Digital Asset Management system is a key, keys in…Certainly, the marketing group being able to reach out to their customers.
Henrik: [1:19] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Margie: [1:24] As far as challenges go, initially, I started with Digital Asset Management back in the day when it was just beginning. What I’ve seen over the years is that Digital Asset Management system themselves are becoming more and more accepted as something that is integral to a marketing function. We need to be able to access whatever, whenever we need to buy, whomever needs to see it.
[1:51] Certainly, the systems do that. Where I’m seeing the challenge, it continues to be in the positions that work with the systems, specifically something like my own Digital Asset Management Librarian. There is a constant challenge to prove the works where we tend to be victims of our own success, and that we make it look easy. Looks like the information just falls into place, all the files are where they’re supposed to be.
[2:24] And sure enough, some cost‑conscious manager is going to start asking herself, “Do I really need a professional person to do this? Can I get my admin to do this? Or better yet, can I get the users of this system to just update things as they go along?” The answer, of course, is no because they won’t, as far as the users go.
[2:49] What they will do is the best they can, when they can. Frankly, they have full‑time positions that don’t require the management, the care and feeding of the system.
[3:02] One of the biggest challenges then becomes how to defend the position, having at least one person with the overview that may help maintain consistency. Frankly, I think the consistency should be spread across the company. Anybody that’s responsible for metadata, or tagging, or any kind of SEO, there needs to be a comprehensive, cross‑functional team there in place.
[3:36] So that the person with the Digital Asset Management system is speaking with the people that are keywording some of the graphics under the website or something. Because that position is also about training, and access, and speed, you wouldn’t think that the proving the worth of the position is that much of a challenge, but it really, really is.
[4:02] I like to think that it’s a part of a slow process of acceptance. It took a while for people to get their heads around the idea of a Digital Asset Management system. Now, more and more, that’s becoming accepted. We’re dealing with whether or not we really need someone dedicated, at least one person, dedicated to the maintenance of that system.
[4:32] As far as successes go, it’s good to…What I’ve seen, as far as successes go, is I have been able to empower users to find what they’re looking for when they need it. I have prolific users that I rarely hear from, unless they have some sort of issue that hasn’t come up before, which is great. I consider that a major success, the people I don’t hear from.
[4:59] I consider it a success whenever I get budget allocated for the upgrades when I need them. My system happens to be proprietary and third‑party, so there’s always an issue of renewing licenses, and expanding functionality, and so on, and so forth. Every time I get to do that, that’s definitely a success.
[5:20] The other factor that I would consider a success is when I get people coming to me and saying, “Hey, so and so, told me about this.” That happens because I work for a very large company, where we have thousands of employees. I depend a lot on word of mouth, in addition to whatever promotional exercises I can take to put out the word that the system is there to help you, and so on, and so forth.
[5:49] In addition to regular users who do that marketing collateral, I also hear from PowerPoint users that are making presentations, they may or may not be part of marketing. They may be part of one of the business units to do presentations to whomever. When word gets around to people I wouldn’t normally deal with and they’re coming to me and saying, “Hey, I’ve heard you got this.” That’s a success.
Henrik: [6:16] Margie, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Margie: [6:21] I would strongly recommend that anybody looking to get into Digital Asset Management, is first, they need to consider whether or not they’re going into a for‑profit environment, or a nonprofit environment. They really are two very different worlds. There’s a lot of opportunity in the nonprofit environment.
[6:43] My experience, however, is with the for‑profit, and that’s what I’d like to speak to. I would say, for those in place, always start with the users, go back to the users. They’re going to be the key to really making the system a success. It’s basic questions. You want to do an inventory of your users. You want to know what they need. You want to know, “Can the users, themselves, be categorized?”
[7:12] Of course, that helps when you’re setting up your system because you’re going to have some power users with more privileges than the occasional user, and so on, and so forth. Also, it’s going to help in terms of helping them come up with essential keywords. Words that they… how they think. How they use the system.
[7:34] I’ve learned, especially when I came over to marketing, that most of the different departments within a corporation have their own lingo for the products, essentially. Whether or not that spreads at the company, almost doesn’t matter, because If you’re considering a certain business group and you need to factor it in the system to keyword accordingly, they use different terms.
[8:02] You need to make sure that, that user group their terminology, how they’re thinking. For example, I have one user group that likes to use the internal code word for products before those are actually launched. They become something else once they’re launched, their official name. I make it my practice when I’m keywording anything related to them, to also include those internal, sort of informal references.
[8:30] It all goes back to the user. As long as someone, either within the field, or just starting in the field, or looking in the field, remembers that. I think, they’ll be fine. The other strong, strong piece of advice I recommend is there’s two groups in particular, the for‑profit environment that you want to partner with. That’s the IT group and the legal group.
[8:54] They’re essential because there’s so much information out there, especially with IT, that even if you’re coming to the position with a relatively strong background in IT, unless that’s your major function to stay abreast of the latest things, you’re going to need all the information you could get.
[9:19] These folks, the folks in IT for example, know what works best with the existing systems and they often know what’s the planned systems. They’re in the best position to be able to assist. It’s like, you want to always be on the good side of your car mechanic, right?
[9:40] This is not somebody you want messing with your car, your engine, or whatever. You always want to stay on the good side of IT. It also helps to stay on the good side of legal, because you want to be very conscientious about rights and permissions, especially if you’re dealing with any kind of stacked imagery, or any sort of restricted material.
[10:05] You want to make sure that you’re doing exactly what legal is telling you to do. Another factor that I have found to be very helpful that I would strongly recommend is to whether or not your manager asks for it, have your dollar value reports ready and current at a moment’s notice, because you’ll never know when you’re going to need to turn around and say, “Oh, yeah. Well, this month, I saved for our group X amount, and by the way this is how I factored that.”
[10:38] A lot of times, there’s folks that just hear those dollar values. It’s important to remember that. It’s impassioned as you may be about the need for Digital Asset Management that all has to be backed up in the for‑profit environment with why it as a cost-saving, or what is the value, how is this going to pay off in the immediate term, and also going forward in the long term.
Henrik: [11:08] Thanks, Margie.
Margie: [11:09] My pleasure. Thank you.
Henrik: [11:10] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to AnotherDAMblog.com. For this podcast and 170 other episodes, go to AnotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Mikako Ito.
Mikako, how are you?
Mikako Ito: [0:09] Good, how are you?
Henrik: [0:10] Great. Mikako, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Mikako: [0:14] I think I’m a little bit unique in this profession. A lot of people who manage the digital assets, may be dedicated their time 100 percent to managing their assets or creating the assets. I’m a Art Director at simplehuman.
[0:32] Then when I was appointed by CEO to investigate the DAM system, I actually didn’t know anything about the DAM system. As a designer, I wasn’t sure how this system is going to be helpful to our company.
[0:50] But now that we implemented the system, I can see that the DAM system is really useful to, not only the company like us, but design and then produce the product by design agency, or any other design related company. Actually, our company is pretty small, so the graphic design department is small.
[1:15] Then what we were doing was, we are putting everything into our company server. But as company starts to grow, we realize that, if we don’t organize these digital assets eventually it’s going to get really messy.
[1:31] One day, our CEO was the one who recognized the company was growing and so was our assets. He put me in charge of finding the solution. I did research, and then I found is there asset management system out there. Then, eventually I pick one of them, and then I implemented it.
Henrik: [1:55] How does a designer and manufacture of kitchen, bath and beauty tools use Digital Asset Management?
Mikako: [2:02] All the designers use the asset management system to work on their projects. Once we have the asset which is whether it’s photography that we shot, or rendering that we created, it goes to the retouchers.
[2:20] Then clean up the images and stuff, and then eventually goes up to the asset management system. Once it get in there, designer can pull any of the assets whenever we need it for whatever we need it. Marketing and the sales team also use the assets, the ones which are available to them.
[2:42] Before [DAM System], the graphic team would get constant requests from the sales and the marketing, and we were the department within the organization to send them a file. Since all the assets was in the server, and then only designer, and if you worked on that project, knows where images were, and then what the final assets are.
[3:08] Then every time sales or marketing team needed those assets, we get requests. We have to spend the time to search the image, reformat the image and then send it back to them. We are actually spending a lot of time on organizing the assets, and distributing assets.
[3:29] But once we implemented the DAM system, marketing and then sales can find the image, and then download it in any of the format that they want for themselves. Then the designer doesn’t have to spend the time to do that job for them. That was really helpful.
[3:51] The designers and then other departments of our company, use the system to find assets or archive the assets. When we are thinking of implementing the DAM system, we were wondering if we can use the system to organize, and then archive, and then transferring the files to the factory for the design files. The actual product design files.
[4:21] But design file consists of different parts, so that we found that organizing all the different parts become the one product. It’s not just a file that it creates so that they way that the DAM system organize the files, it was challenging to organize the files that make sense to using for the…to keeping, and then archiving the CAD file.
[4:52] We don’t use the DAM system for the product design file, the CAD file, but we use it for everything else.
Henrik: [5:00] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Mikako: [5:04] The biggest challenge was how to structure the system, so how many catalogs we should have, and then who should have the access to which catalogs. Because of the amount of the assets we have, and then some of them are not really meant to use outside of the company usage, so that we have to create a structure that really works to the different departments.
[5:37] Then certain departments need certain assets only. So that way, accidentally the important assets [don’t] go outside of the company. By the time we implemented the system, we had already a lot of these digital assets without knowing it. To organize those, and then putting into the system the first time, was really challenging.
[6:06] The success part of it overlaps with the answer that I gave to the second question. It helped the whole company to flow, and the design department the time that we used to spend to prepare, and then create all those assets to the different departments that got really reduced.
[6:30] For example, the sales person also creates the file… it’s called planogram. It’s basically what the product will look like on the shelf. Before we were getting similar request so that every time we get these requests we have to resize all the products into the correct scale and then put next to each other on a four foot shelf.
[6:59] Then all our products how that look like on this four foot shelf, so that kind of thing was taking a lot of time for the design department. But now we created this catalog that has every SKU that are available to the sales in the correct scale.
[7:18] All they have to do is to pull all those images, and then just put it into the shelf. That thing really helped the time part of it. Another success is that we always have the most updated assets available to everybody.
[7:39] Before, different designers working in their projects, for example, one designer created this icon, and then during the process of finish that project, the designer Mike, fixed the icon. But the icon didn’t go up to the DAM system and then just lived in this person’s hard drive.
[8:04] Then other designers trying to use the icon, they might not have the most updated icon and..they might use it in a wrong way, or but now that we have system, so one designer fix something and then updated assets go uploaded to DAM system, so that always the most updated assets available to the other designers to use it.
[8:28] That really helped designers to actually could have used the wrong asset or wrong icons and stuff for the project. The number one benefit that we did get from this system was that we were be able to spend the more time to actually designing it than try to organize the assets for other people or other departments.
[8:55] Asset is always available to us, and then I was saying all the available asset is always updated the most current one. That reduced the mistake part of it too.
Henrik: [9:10] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to DAM professionals?
Mikako: [9:14] The organization is really powerful. If your digital files aren’t organized, you’re wasting so much time looking for that right file, or your team through all the assets are wasting time searching, and sending the files out, like our graphic department was used to doing.
[9:37] With DAM it helps you save the time and your company is saving money, because you’re able to be more productive. For us, it was really good time saving, and then…time is money so the more the time is saved and then everybody works efficient.
[10:03] I think that was really helpful. If someone who’s thinking about implementing DAM system or not, I think in the long run if everything is organized, and I think eventually that will make much more efficient the whole system.
[10:22] Also ,I do use the system everyday, but at the same time, I’m a designer as well. Then I feel like I’m still not…I don’t consider myself DAM professional. I feel like if you 100 percent, you do is to organize, and then manage the system, then I feel like that person might have better advice but…
Henrik: [10:48] Thank you, Mikako.
Mikako: [10:51] Thank you, and I’m sorry. I don’t know if I helped a lot but I just wanted to say that having the DAM system really helped our company. Hopefully, this would help someone who listens I guess.
Henrik: [11:08] For more and this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. For this and 160 other podcasts episodes, go to anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
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.
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