Listen to Madeline Velez 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 Madeline Velez. Madeline, how are you?
Madeline: I am good thank you. How are you?
Henrik: Great. Madeline, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Madeline: My career in Digital Asset Management started over 15 years ago with the Yankee Candle Company organizing their digital merchandise assets. I then worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb with digital pharmaceutical assets and now I’m the digital assets specialist for the marketing and communications department at Shriners Hospitals for Children Headquarters in Tampa. In my new position, I played a key role in the implementation of a brand new Digital Asset Management system and I made recommendations on how the system would best fit our needs and that was HIPAA Compliant and that offered the right tools for our organization.
Henrik: Madeline, how does a hospital focusing on innovative pediatric specialty care, world-class research and outstanding medical education use Digital Asset Management?
Madeline: Here at Shriner’s Hospital Headquarters, we use the Digital Asset Management system to organize all of our marketing materials. That includes our historic photos and videos, our photography for print and social media, our patient videos, commercials, and our consent forms. It’s also used to share files with our designers, our internal departments and externally with our 22 locations, the Shriners temples and our vendors.
Henrik: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Madeline: One of the challenges in the medical field was finding a system that was HIPAA Compliant and that would safely store and protect our patient data. Another challenge is the change in processes and workflows within a department. When implementing a system, you have to help your users understand the value that the digital asset management system brings to the organization and the cost savings in the reuse of your assets. Over time, users will establish their own workflows and change can be troublesome for some. So it’s very important to offer continuous training either in groups or 1 on 1 so that they can adapt to the new workflow and become comfortable with using the new system.
Madeline: For our successes, I would say when a user adapts to the new system and you receive positive feedback from your users on how easy it was to locate and share files and how the system helped them reduce time in locating them, and the delivery process. Successes are also streamlining the processes and brand consistency. So we no longer receive requests that are manual and the work requests become automated. That’s definitely a success. It really changes the way teams work in a very positive way.
Henrik: And what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Madeline: My advice would be to keep up with the industry changes and how they benefit the organization that you work for. So continue to learn, take classes, join discussion groups and search the Internet. There’s a lot of very helpful information out there and ask a lot of questions. Even though I’d been working in this field for quite some time, I’m always learning from other DAM professionals. I can then take those learnings and apply them in my organization. So always take time to speak with your colleagues about their work and how the DAM system can help them.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Bryan Cohen. Bryan, how are you?
Bryan Cohen: [0:10] I’m great, thanks. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. I appreciate the invite.
Henrik: [0:14] Bryan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Bryan: [0:17] I’m the Digital Platform Lead for Pfizer. My main role is overseeing the digital platform that we use for review and approval of all of our pharmaceutical promotional materials. That’s a global system that has about 5,000 users.
Henrik: [0:33] How does a leading research based biopharmaceutical company use Digital Asset Management?
Bryan: [0:39] We use it in a couple of different ways. Our key is because we are so highly regulated with what we can actually show to consumers and what we can actually show to our healthcare providers. Our main focus with Digital Asset Management is to review and approval process for all the materials that we create.
[0:57] A lot of people don’t realize…much like a magazine, or a newspaper, even an online website…the amount of review that goes into every little PC you see, whether it’s in a doctor’s office, or commercial TV, or even a radio ad. It goes through a very intense review and approval process.
[1:16] Not just from an editorial standpoint, but also from a medical, legal, and regulatory standpoint, before even gets submitted to the FDA. That is our main focus. There are tons of different rules and regulations. United States is the most highly regulated. There are certain rules in Canada, Latin America, Africa, Middle East and even in the European Union there are about 15 or 20 different regulatory bodies that all have different rules and tweaks, and things that they require.
[1:46] Our review and approval system is almost like one global system that manages a hundred different newspapers with different languages. We have that complexity as well. On top of that, what we are trying to really get our hands around with the rapid pace that we have with acquisitions with companies that we’re either merging with, or smaller pharmaceutical companies that we recently purchased.
[2:10] We’re trying to get our hands around, not only their review and approval system but also their asset management. The pure thing when you think of DAM, normally images, videos, sound files, all of that stuff of course it’s different everywhere.
[2:24] It’s something that we’re even internally at Pfizer trying to get our hands around. With all of this electronic content that we’ve created, with these huge transitions you’re going all digital from a cost perspective and efficiency, and even in efficacy perspective with our advertising.
[2:40] We’re trying to really get our hands around and control all of that intellectual property. We use it at its core for review and approval. The larger picture is figuring out how to get our hands around these assets so we can drive more towards a custom, maybe not necessarily custom, but omni channel marketing and more targeted marketing flexibility with our assets.
Henrik: [3:05] Bryan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Bryan: [3:10] The biggest challenge for us is trying to convince folks at Pfizer, and even within all our pharmaceutical, the key to really have their hands on an intellectual property. A lot of pharma companies have outsourced the creation of that content. We have all kinds of things that we’ve purchased at agencies, and buried in their storage.
[3:32] The only thing we might see are the two or three photos that we might have used in a particular piece. The challenge is really a perception challenge. We don’t make money out of this digital content that we create.
[3:44] It helps to drive sales, but we’re not Huffington Post. We’re not AOL. A lot of these companies that make content and then make money directly from that content, either through subscription or advertising on their website.
[3:58] Convincing internal executives, and convincing just people in general at Pfizer of the need to focus on access. I don’t necessarily want to say control, but access of understanding of those digital assets is a huge challenge.
[4:16] As you would imagine, they’re focused on producing medicine. They’re focused on producing pharmaceuticals or consumer medicines, and getting those things to market. They’re focused on marketing as a whole and as a platform. Not necessarily worried about the nitty-gritty of how we manage metadata within the Digital Asset Management system.
[4:35] It’s not as sexy to them, and it’s not a focus because they don’t make money directly out of it. However they’re also starting to struggle with understanding what everything is. In order to create all these apps, and websites, and advertisements. The increasingly frustrated, the marketing teams are, with understanding what they already have out there so they can get market quicker.
[4:57] That is our biggest challenge. Our biggest success, I would have to say, over the last few years, at least for us, is going to more of a global mindset with what we create and being able to share this content from region to region or country to country and then fine‑tuning it.
[5:12] That obviously saves cost, but more than anything it gives teams the ability to leverage the things have been created in other places and are effective in other places, and customize that for a local market.
[5:23] We can get to the market quicker if, say, a drug is approved in another country, which happens all the time. It might be approved in the United Sates. A month or two later, it’s approved in Brazil. We need to be able to deploy materials quickly. We can’t recreate all these materials, all the time.
[5:40] Our global platform is a huge success and a big step forward in being able to accomplish that.
Henrik: [5:46] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Bryan: [5:51] That’s a really good question. I have to say from a personal experience I never aspired to become a [laughs] Digital Asset Management professional. Really these two questions here are…one leads into another.
[6:05] In a sense that I got into this industry, maybe 20 years ago, totally by accident I started as a graphic designer, and then realized that I really didn’t have the talent [laughs] to be a very good graphic designer.
[6:20] I also realized it’s difficult to make a very good living as a graphic designer. More than anything I noticed that I was way more into the background, the functioning of the applications. I was in desktop publishing and I used to use PageMaker, Quark, and then InDesign.
[6:37] I found that I really like the technical aspect of it more than artistic side of it. Even if I was an art director for a little while at The Wall Street Journal, and even though I did that, I designed pages and special sections, I found that I was much better using an artistic eye than I was creating the art myself.
[6:58] That really transferred into Digital Asset Management working on these large workflow systems and giving a little bit more into how these systems actually connect and make things happen.
[7:11] Becoming at Digital Asset Management professional, I would say that my biggest advice would be to get some experience in how these systems are used. It’s difficult to step right into a Digital Asset Management project and have expertise, because the large ones may only happen a few times right in your professional career.
[7:30] Rather may be better to gain some experience as a user. What we say is on the business side and not focus as much on the technical side. If you do that, then you get a much better understanding of your users and you’re able to transition that into the setup, the configuration, and get an understanding of really what the workflow needs.
[7:50] If you do that, it comes across in your language as you’re addressing your user community and addressing their concerns when you’re trying to roll out these big systems. You tend to give an increased buy‑in when that happens.
[8:03] The final thing that I would really say was first people aspiring to become a Digital Asset Management professional is that as I look back, I see that everything drove to really me being in this profession, but when I was making those decisions to go from role to role, it was never with a…I want to be a Digital Asset Management person and professional as the end game.
[8:29] Rather it was, accepting challenges along the career path that brought into my experience. That’s probably the best advice that I can give. It’s to not turn down opportunities on projects or even new jobs just because they don’t fit tightly within a little box.
[8:47] Use your experience, and then grow.
Henrik: [8:48] Great advice. Thanks, Bryan.
Bryan: [8:50] Anytime. I love talking about Digital Asset Management. I’d say this is really a piece of technology that people don’t realize how much it has to do with what they see on their phones, or televisions, or anything, and as we become so digital in our daily lives, be able to manage digital assets and manage that data, and really respond to marketing needs and trends.
[9:15] It’s more critical now than it was 20 years ago when we were pre‑TV, radio, and that was about it. The flexibility that the web has given us…has made our profession just as important as a software engineer or anyone of those program creators, because we have the ability to really the entire horizon when it comes to these things that we’re driving out to our customers.
Henrik: [9:39] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. For this and 170 other podcast episodes, go to anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email anotherdamblog@gmail.com.
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jade Jourdan.
Jade, how are you?
Jade Jourdan: [0:11] I’m doing well, thank you. How are you?
Henrik: [0:13] Good. Jade, how are involved with Digital Asset Management?
Jade: [0:17] I work at Edwards Lifesciences, and we’re a medical device company. I’m a Senior Digital Asset Specialist, and every day is focused on our Digital Asset Management. I’m responsible for the DAM structure and ensuring we are collecting all the necessary metadata for searching and making sure that everyone gets assets that they need for their projects.
Henrik: [0:40] How does a medical equipment company specializing in artificial heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring use Digital Asset Management?
Jade: [0:48] Our DAM system must primarily archive our marketing assets, product images, and corporate images. Once projects go through our regulatory approval process, they are uploaded by our creative vendors globally into our DAM system and then assets are processed, metadata tags added for searching, etc.
[1:10] Our DAM system is accessed globally by our regional employees and vendors and once our main creative is completed, our projects are repurposed locally and globally. Each region translates the project into their language, processes it to their regulatory, and then produces it for their marketplace.
Henrik: [1:31] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Jade: [1:35] Well, we are very successful at having our library organized by individual product groups and functional areas so that images and source files are easily located for individual projects and repurposing existing designs.
[1:49] The challenge is working with a high volume of projects and making sure we receive all of our source files from the many agencies we utilize. So working with their marketing departments which are very busy and getting them to retrieve all of our projects from the agencies that we work with, making sure we have everything in our library.
Henrik: [2:12] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Jade: [2:15] Well, I think DAM is an exciting and growing industry. I’m relatively new to it, four years in, and have learned a lot about it and I think the technology is constantly improving with innovative new ways to accommodate and efficiently store large data assets.
[2:34] Most companies have major digital components that need to be managed and organized for productive workflow and I would encourage people with an interest in becoming a DAM professional to absolutely go for it. It’s an exciting field to get involved in.
Henrik: [2:48] Well, thanks, Jade.
Jade: [2:49] Thank you.
Henrik: [2:49] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherDAMblog.com. For this and 170 other podcast episodes, go to anotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Adolfo Chavez and Francisco Vergaray discuss Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Adolfo Chavez and Francisco Vergaray. How are you guys?
Adolfo Chavez: [0:12] Doing good.
Francisco Vergaray: [0:13] Doing well, thank you.
Henrik: [0:15] Great. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Francisco: [0:17] Well, I think I’ll go first. This is Francisco. Basically, I am the system administrator for the digital asset management system that we have here in the institution. We have a system of 24 catalogs and over a million digital assets that are served throughout the institution.
[0:36] We have several clients that use the system including doctors and our regular staff. We have anything from patient images to images that I use for diagnostics, and also stock art that we use.
Adolfo: [0:53] I’m Adolfo. I’m in a different department from Francisco. I work in Communications, and I basically manage four catalogs within our digital asset management system, which is Cumulus.
[1:04] All total, I believe, we have about 200,000 images, mainly editorial in nature, again, I’m in Communications, so a lot of images are for publications. I don’t keep any clinically relevant images in there.
[1:16] A lot of portraits of doctors, doctors and patients, and stuff for marketing and communications purposes. I call myself a dummy user of Cumulus, where Francisco is more on the administration side.
Henrik: [1:28] How does a comprehensive cancer center use Digital Asset Management?
Francisco: [1:32] Cumulus that we use is actually a fairly robust system. Unfortunately, we only use the work group edition. We do not have the full enterprise version of the system.
[1:43] We cannot take full advantage of the capabilities of this system, however, we are pushing the system to it’s limit right now trying to get more catalogs and more digital assets into the system while we transition to possibly a future more robust system.
[2:02] At this point, we have been using Cumulus for over 10 years, and it’s come to the attention of the higher ups here in the institution. They are looking for a more robust system to replace Cumulus.
[2:16] Basically, it is used for many things. We have people for example in the skin center, they use it for comparing melanoma patients. They can look at skin lesions, making sure that there are differences between appointments. We have people that use it for just general stock photography or editorial. That’s basically there for run of how we’re using it.
[2:40] We have an Internet client, and we have several desktop clients. The desktop clients are actually what allow you to add visual assets today to the system.
Adolfo: [2:50] We’re having the DAM in place and actually using the DAM, because the DAM has been in place of a while. But, when I came on board about three and a half years ago, it was in place and there were assets in there, but there was no metadata attached to any of the images, so image retrieval was still kind of a chore.
[3:09] Now, since I’ve been there, I’ve kind of taken on the task of adding in that metadata so that when any media outlet calls and say, “When you have a photo of doctor so and so,” enter in doctor so and so, we have a whole treasure trove of images.
Henrik: [3:25] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Adolfo: [3:29] The biggest success we’ve had is image retrieval, essentially. Previously, which I’m sure many of your listeners are probably familiar with. When images are kept on someone else’s computer, usually the designer, whoever was working on the project.
[3:44] If somebody had an image request, went to one person who is like, “Oh, I think that person worked on it.” Then it went to that person, who happen to be out that day. So then it had to wait for the next day. When they got in, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, let me go back and look at that project.” So an image request took a day, two days. That was kind of ridiculous.
[4:02] Now, image requests take two minutes, literally. It actually takes two seconds, but because we vet each of the images, some of the images have patients in them. We have to make sure that we have patients that have been consented properly. That we have permission to use the image. That the employees depicted in photos are still working here, stuff like that. So yeah, that’s been a huge success.
[4:25] The biggest challenge, at least on my end, has been getting people to use it, which I think is universal challenge to everyone in digital asset management. I get emails everyday, “Hey do we have an image of doctor so and so?” “Yeah, it’s in Cumulus. You just got to search for it. That’s all you got to do.” [laughs] That’s the most difficult part, obviously.
Francisco: [4:48] Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges that we had when we initiated this project years ago was coming up with a naming convention for our digital assets. I think that was what really we had to go around several times until we came up with something solid that at the time, we couldn’t search for metadata when we first started with this.
[5:11] We were looking at searching by the names of the files, but now we were able to add metadata to the file so the naming convention is not…We’re still using the naming convention, but it is not as important as adding the metadata. Still, we use both of them as just as a backup to double check, make sure things are named correctly.
[5:32] That’s what’s been also one of the biggest successes for us because we were able to locate patient images. For example, they’re going into the electronic medical record, and when the doctor comes in and looks at the medical record, they can pull their patient’s images that comes from our Cumulus system.
Henrik: [5:52] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people who aspired to become DAM professionals?
Adolfo: [5:57] I think this is something Francisco eluded to when we first started talking, is that really fully invest in the proper software. One of the big challenges that we’ve had is that we’re trying to…
Francisco: [6:10] We’re using a work group version of the system, rather than the enterprise version which we can’t really take full advantage of the capability of this system. It’s just having the proper budget.
Adolfo: [6:22] We have over 20,000 employees at this institution. Digital asset management is becoming more and more important everyday. There are new people calling for catalogs and they wanted catalog images, they want to do this, and it’s taxing on this particular version of the software we’re running.
[6:39] As far as, that’s for DAM professionals, as far as for people aspiring to become DAM professionals, I have a book called The Accidental Taxonomist which is the book that I got to do a little bit of research on digital asset management when I got into the position.
[6:53] That’s really the way I feel. I don’t feel I can actually give advice to anyone who’s trying to become a digital asset management person, but I’m accidentally fell into this position by nature of what it is that I do, which is photography and content creation, essentially.
Francisco: [7:09] I think one suggestion that I would give is you need to have…You heard of it, the phrase ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’?
Henrik: [7:17] Mm‑hmm.
Francisco: [7:18] You need to make sure that you have a specific group of people assigned to add digital images or digital assets to the catalog. That way, you keep consistency throughout your naming conventions, throughout the way things are organized in the catalog.
[7:32] The other thing I would suggest is make sure that you have people that have very good attention to detail. Just minimal things such as a space, or a comma, or just a period in the wrong place, what would throw things off. Just people that understand how complicated this can be and frustrating sometimes.
Adolfo: [7:55] It takes a special kind of person, I guess. Digital Asset Management, it’s a tedious gig. It takes a certain mind, I guess.
Francisco: [8:03] Yes.
Henrik: [8:04] That’s great advice. I would strongly recommend having a gatekeeper to your point.
Francisco: [8:08] We actually have a, at least from the photography people, we have several gatekeepers, we have about two or three of them.
[8:14] You go for one person, the photographer, they will need their files. Then they go to the manager, who double checks them. Then they go to the person that actually catalogs them, so there’s three people that actually make sure that these images, especially the ones that go into the patient chart, are named properly.
Adolfo: [8:32] I’m the only one in communications. There’s me, then I have an assistant now. That means that I get to make sure everything is cool, but I also get blamed for all the problems.
Francisco: [8:45] But nobody is perfect, so even three people can miss something.
Henrik: [8:49] That happens. Thank you, guys.
Francisco: [8:52] Thank you.
Adolfo: [8:52] Thank you.
Henrik: [8:53] For more on this and other digital asset management topics, go to AnotherDAMblog.com. For this and 160 other podcast episodes, go to AnotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments of questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com.
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