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Another DAM Podcast interview with Yaochong Chen on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Yaochong Chen 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 Yaochong Chen. How are you?

Yaochong:  How are you, Henrik? Nice to meet you.

Henrik: You too. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Yaochong:  Well, I was just graduating from King’s College London’s Digital Asset and Media Management Program. In the past one year, I’ve learned a lot about some basic concepts and also some practices used and ideas about how to, if that colleague managed assets. I think this program really helped me to understand how important managing rich media is and also give me a lot of ideas to think critically about how to help more people to better do so.

Henrik:  You started a new Digital Asset Management group. Tell us more about this.

Yaochong:  Okay, well the group I’ve found that is called Digital Asset Management China Connect. I founded this group in May 2018 with two of my friends. The reason why I started this group is because I really want to bring DAM to China. Although we have a lot of Chinese students in this program, actually for them it’s very hard to find a DAM career back to China, which is because most of us [are not] really aware of what DAM is. What I’m going to do is to bring an awareness and also persuade more Chinese companies and organizations to really ponder how to organize and manage their rich media content. In the past one year, what I’ve done is get connected with a lot of DAM experts in the western world and also I’ve held some presentations and meetings with some Chinese students and also some DAM experts. What I’m going to do this year is to do some interviews with some Chinese organizations, especially rich media content intensive companies, to know their conditions about managing rich media and also to think about really implement a digital asset management system or some friends.

Yaochong:  And also maybe do some interviews with some western expert to see if they have some reflections or ideas about the future of DAM’s development in China. So, next year my plan is about to launch a website is DAM China. I hope to use this website to get connected between western experts and the Chinese rich media intensive companies to let China’s companies to now the importance of DAM and at the same time to let in western experts and then maybe vendors and the people to do so to know that China really needs their help to really make their DAM condition better.

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

Yaochong:  I think in my view, I think challenges are at the same time the potential success. And if we see the whole DAM world, I think one of the challenges is to how to face change and unpredictable things because technology is really developing fast these years. On the one hand, technology will bring more challenges to DAM management because they will be more multiple types of rich media contents and there will be more content devices. But at the same time technology can really help DAM to manage content better. But if we have a closer look about DAM in China, I think the biggest challenge will be to think about how to nurture a Chinese organizations awareness about DAM.

Yaochong:  And there are actually three points I really want to cover. I think they are really some reflections. The first one is about society and culture. I think in China, people with more experience get more priority, which means it’s really hard for some creative and the critical young people to raise their ideas. And I can imagine if some young people go to a company and to say like, “can we implement a DAM system? It will help a lot.” Maybe some more experienced leaders, they don’t really take [this seriously]. And the second one I really want to cover is that I know their are many like Librarian Degrees in Western world, but in China there are less, which means that they don’t really take [this seriously] about how to exactly manage their rich media and digital contents. The third one I think is about Chinese people are really concentrating a lot about developing technology like many hot treads like AI, AR, VR and blockchain things so that they don’t really have the energy at the efforts to really think about rich media content and how to manage them. So I think about this challenge, if I mean we can really think about some ways to persuade them to do so then there will be a really potential success and more footprints for them in the whole world.

Henrik:  What advise would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Yaochong:  Well, I think I want to cover two points. One is the problem solving and critical attitudes. And the other is the entrepreneurial attitudes because I mean everything is developing and DAM will also to the future as well. So it’s very important to look forward and to see about the future like to really be open and see the technologies that is going to be developed in the future and to really think about how to solve the problems that are brought by all kinds of technology. I think the entrepreneurial attitude is what I really want to give to those potential DAM management people in China because I mean, we still lack the awareness of DAM at present and it is very important for us to stand up and raise the idea and get the courage to talk about this with all kinds of organizations and really bringing this idea there.

Henrik:  Well, thank you so much for your insights on this.

Yaochong:  Thank you. Thank you too. Nice to talk to you.

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

 

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Erin McElrath on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Erin McEIrath discuss 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 Erin McEIrath. Erin, how are you?

Erin McElrath:  I’m just fine. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor:  Great. Erin, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  I am the Creative Tools Manager at an e-commerce company called Brandless and I manage all of the digital asset management and content that comes in and out of the company, whether it be on the site or on our printed collateral or on our social media.

Henrik de Gyor:  How does an e-commerce company that puts people first use Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  We use it just like any other company would. We do a lot of creative assets internally for marketing purposes. We also use it to store all of our product information, all of our packaging. Anything. Any image that has shown up on our site, we like to house on our DAM, but most recently, we’re starting to use a lot of user-generated content (UGC) from social media. So we’re scraping all social media sites and the images that we like and we would like to use further, ideally, we would like to put that in the DAM, in the, in the next coming months. In addition to the digital asset management, I also do all the post-production workflow. So I’m working with all of our outside agencies as the content is funneled in through the company and then approved and funneled back out.

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

Erin McElrath:  Well, I think the biggest challenge, and I think anybody has been in the industry for awhile can agree that the biggest challenges assessing the need of the company for our positions. We do a job that we’re basically when we’re doing our job, no news is good news and everything is sailing right along and very efficient, but to bring other people on as help and as teammates because this is a very hard job to do by yourself. To show the need and the value of the position can be challenging. When the company would rather spend their money on new creatives or engineering team on new platforms to show that the DAM is actually the brain and the hub of the organization.  When that is running smoothly, everybody can do their jobs. It takes a lot to show that value for successes. I guess on that same note when everything is running smoothly, that is my biggest success. Right now at Brandless, I have implemented three workflows using our current DAM where content has flowed in and out through a system with permissions and approvals. Everybody seems to be really happy with it and everything is working. So I think that to me is the pillar of my big success in any job that I have is making sure that the DAM that the company purchases is used to its full capabilities.

Henrik de Gyor:  Would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Erin McElrath:  I think the biggest one is don’t be afraid to assert yourself. We’re often seen as the people in the corner doing manual data entry work. That’s how we’re viewed by certain members of a team or a company, but we’re really not. We do so many things and most of the time nobody knows what we do. Digital Asset Manager is such a broad term that it could mean anything, so define the role that you want within your organization and what will be most appropriate and try to align yourselves with them, with the people in your company that you know you can help them most. Oftentimes, they don’t know what you do. Go up to them and asked them their pain points and see how you can help.

Another big one, most recently I kind of spoke about it earlier… Learn all you can about user-generated content, which is often called in the industry UGC. This is really big now. A lot of Digital Asset Managers don’t like to put that in the DAM because there’s so much. The liability is very unclear. It changes all the time and oftentimes when we have assets, we have contracts and releases for those assets, but for UGC we do not. Oftentimes, we just have a screenshot that our producers said, “can we use this photo?” And the person said “yes,” and that’s it. I think in my opinion, times are changing and we’re starting to formalize that relationship. Now Brandless, for example, is using a lot of UGC content and our marketing and our social media. We like to have and I like to have those in the DAM so I can track where they’ve been used and who is responsible for that connection. If something goes wrong with that initial user that uploaded that content, we can take it down immediately. I know where it lives on everything, so yeah, just familiarize yourself like technology is changing and we’re right at the forefront of that, so just be on the ball.

Henrik de Gyor:  Well thanks, Erin.

Erin McElrath:  Thank you very much.

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

 

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

 

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Natalie Daller 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 Natalie Daller.

Natalie, how are you?

Natalie Daller:  I’m great. How are you?

Henrik de Gyor:  Great. Natalie, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Natalie Daller:  I thought I’d start with a little bit of background information on myself. I have a photographic background. I started off in analog darkrooms with projectors and mixing chemistry, and from there I transitioned into a digital retouching role, working a lot for many, many years in Photoshop. From there, I moved into an asset management and permissions role at a museum, and today I work as the global administrator of my company’s DAM system.

In my current role, I’ve worked for my employer in some kind of digital assessment management role for a little over six years now. I started off as an image coordinator and recently was promoted to Digital Asset Specialist. The impetus for the new role has a lot to do with the elevated importance of Digital Asset Management within my company’s Martec landscape. While Digital Asset Management started off as an internal process for improved efficiency, it’s evolved into a method for broader brand control and asset delivery to our external partners, which include a body of approximately 40,000 potential end-users.

Henrik de Gyor:  Natalie, how does a multinational, multilevel marketing company use Digital Asset Management?

Natalie Daller:  Well, as you mentioned, we’re multinational. I’m based in Chicago where headquarters is located, but we also have international offices in Canada and Germany. As an internal tool, our DAM system provides easy access to our final brand-approved assets to all of our coworkers, no matter where in the world they’re located. As a direct sales company, our sales force is comprised of, as I mentioned, about 40,000 consultants and our consultants need on-brand assets at their disposal to use to market their businesses, and beginning in 2015, we were able to leverage our DAM to provide curated collections of beautifully photographed and designed marketing assets, aligned to our brand.

Doing this is mutually beneficial. We’re able to have more control over our brand, but we’re also freeing up time for our consultants so that they can focus their energy on activities that are most important to their success. Digital Asset Management enables us to provide and continually improve upon this service by looking at the analytics that we find within the DAM system, measuring the success of our campaigns, and then, in turn, tailoring our strategies and content based on the asset performance.

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

Natalie Daller:  There’s a lot of challenges, I’d say. Keeping up with the volume of assets is definitely a big one. We’re able to produce a lot, but then ensuring that everything’s making it into the DAM system and that we’re also seeing on top of archiving. That’s a big problem, the challenge I would say, so that you’re certain everything that’s available, that’s accessible, is still relevant, and then, of course, being diligent and adding useful metadata, you can upload and upload and upload, but if you don’t take the time to actually add meaningful keywords and your users can’t find the assets, then you’re wasting a lot of time.

I would say also, and this is probably most important, is empathizing with your users and looking for ways to continually make improvements so that you’re ensuring your users are finding what they need with very minimal effort. So it’s important to listen to your users. We like to conduct user testing, stay open-minded, and understand that what worked a few years ago may no longer work today, and needs to be updated.

Lastly, and this is something that I’ve really been focused on last year and again going into 2018, is ROI and demonstrating the value of a Digital Asset Management system, so we came up with a formal KPI, a key performance indicator, in 2017 to evaluate our DAM and ensure that it’s best in class and that we were doing everything needed in order to make it useful to our users, and that KPI that we were measuring was what we called our unaided asset request. That means that our goal is to have 82% of our users find assets without the assistance of myself or my counterpart. And what that meant is that 82% each month of all assets downloaded came from requests made through the DAM system.

We did really, really well. Really, really well. But then we still heard lots of complaints, so though while our users were able to find their assets, it was taking them a very long time to find them, so we were changing our KPI for 2018 and we’re looking to measure the ROI using a search to download conversion ratio. So we’ll look at the number of searches our users’ input before they, in turn, download something. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make improvements with our Digital Asset Management system that will decrease the amount of time that our users need or takes them in order to find what they’re looking for.

Henrik de Gyor:  That’s great. And so the idea is to be more self-service, as far as search is concerned. Searching and finding what they need.

Natalie Daller:  Yeah. We’re not bottlenecks, because obviously if all the requests are coming into us, we can’t immediately turn them around, so we don’t want to be bottlenecks, but then we want people to be able to have a very good user experience whenever they’re looking for their assets.

Henrik de Gyor:  And having them actually find their own assets versus you finding them for them.

Natalie Daller:  Yes.

Henrik de Gyor:  Got it. Yeah, yeah. That should be the goal for most DAM systems, in my opinion.

Natalie Daller:  Yeah. There’s really no point if it’s just a huge cloud storage system for the two asset coordinators to go and pull down assets for everyone.

Henrik de Gyor:  Completely agreed. Yep. And, Natalie, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Natalie Daller:  The first thing that popped into my head when I thought of this question is Digital Asset Management is far more exciting than it sounds on the surface. I know when I first took a job in Digital Asset Management, I don’t think that I was that enthusiastic about the prospects. It just seemed like a natural next step from imagery touching. And that’s what, I think, it was supposed to be was like a middle step before I bounced onto something else. But I’ve completely fallen in love with it and it’s a lot more exciting than it sounds on the surface.

There’s a lot of opportunities to impact user experiences and to think creatively to solve problems, and then it’s important, like I mentioned earlier, to keep an open mind and demonstrate empathy, and to remember that there’s no one size fits all solution.

Henrik de Gyor: Well thanks, Natalie.

Natalie Daller:  Thank you.

Henrik de Gyor:  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.

 

 

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

 

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.