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.
Listen to Rebecca Schneider talk about Digital Asset Management and Content Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Rebecca Schneider. Rebecca, how are you?
Rebecca: Good. Thanks.
Henrik: Rebecca, How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Rebecca: So I am a Content Strategist. I have a background in library studies and library science and I often am involved in digital asset management projects with my clients.
Rebecca: How do you help organizations understand their content, advocate for realistic solutions and evaluate those implemented solutions over time?
Rebecca: I work with clients to understand their current state through interviews and content audits and understanding where they are currently at. And then I work with them to define their goals for their content in relation to their business and where they want to take the content in the future. I always advocate for practical and realistic approaches to content because not every content solution is perfect. So we have to be practical in our approach to make sure that, you know, the solution is effective and mindful of cost. I try… I strive to help my clients get as much return on investment as possible. And for me, the key is to understand that content is a corporate asset and it needs to pay its way.
Henrik: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Rebecca: A really big challenge that I see is just the sheer number of objects, you know, images, videos, etc. That are now being managed even compared to just five years ago and think about the technology that allows us to create 4K images and videos which will require a great deal of storage. There’s just so much stuff out there. So I really feel that that is a really big challenge just to manage all that information. And a success in some ways is the realization that from organizations that they need the proper tools and processes to manage their content. I think a lot of people are having a bit of a come to Jesus moment, so to speak, when it comes to their content and realizing that they have to manage it. They can’t just put it on a shared server and call it a day. It needs active management and maintenance in order for that content to be useful to the organization.
Henrik: You are going to present at the Insight Exchange Network DAM Summit in New York on January 24 and 25th of 2019. Tell us more about this.
Rebecca: So the presentation that I am giving on the 24th [of January] is focusing on tagging and empathy. So what is that about? So this actually sprung out of a comment that I made at last year’s summit [in 2018] where I said it would be nice to see more tagging, focusing on empathy to help enrich the content experience and that’s a nice thing to say, but what does that really practically mean? I mean, we use empathy to understand and relate to customers and users and to create appealing content interactions and a lot of organizations and brands are using empathy as a tool to encourage user engagement with the brand and imagery and videos. Most certainly played a significant role in that kind of messaging. Right now I’m seeing a lot of, you know, a lot of campaign-related, kind of one-off attempts to create sort of an empathetic marketing focus, but nothing that seems really long-term and for me the primary challenge remains and how do we tag all of this content that we’re dealing with and support empathetic communication across multiple channels.
Rebecca: And as I said before, it’s one thing to add content for a specific campaign. What about entire websites and apps and mailings and all the things you used to reach out to your client or customer base? So, I’m using this session as sort of a launch pad to explore how tagging based on empathy can increase the brand engagement, but also sort of the practical aspects of how we could potentially make this happen, you know, also thinking about the context of the user experience itself, you know, regional, cultural, socio-economic and how we can approach tagging in that regard practically and have it be leveraged in a manner that would really increase the interaction between the brand and the customer or the client, and I certainly don’t have all the answers for this, you know, but I think it’s really worth having the discussion and getting input from the attendees regarding the need, the practical aspects of implementation and how the success of this kind of tagging can be measured. I’m also going to be on the future digital asset management which is earlier in that day and that’s always fun because it’s always really fun to hear about what other people are thinking about where digital asset management is going and what the issues people are grappling with and how do we get there.
Henrik: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Rebecca: One of the first things that I encountered when I became a full-on content strategist with the amount of education that I had to do with clients about what content strategy is, what digital asset management is and the approach to managing content. I think everyone should always be prepared to educate others on why this is, what they do, why this is important and how it can really help the, you know, the organization. Every new client I have, it’s always an education and you know, on both sides, you know, I’m learning about them. They’re learning about me and my company and what we can do for them. But you always have be prepared to talk to people about why it’s important, what you’re doing because digital asset management is not a well… outside the particular field, it’s not particularly well understood to a certain extent, so it’s always important to have that put on your teacher hat role and then one of the other things I would also recommend is that when you work with clients or work with people in your organization that you have to lead them on this journey, but you also have to partner with them on this journey. It’s not like you say, okay, well this is how it needs to be done. You work with people, and incorporate them along the journey as you go figure out what your content management process these are, you know, how you’re going to focus on managing assets and those sorts of things. So they’re part of the journey with you. And then my third recommendation would be to say that metrics is your friend. You must be able to measure how your content is performing, good or bad, you know, success or failure in order to help make strategic decisions regarding the direction of the content. You know, maybe having to do it successful…well, that’s great, let’s do more of this, or you may need to do some course correction. It’s super important to have those KPIs and metrics defined and baselined so you can understand how your content is performing.
Henrik: Great. Thanks, Rebecca
Rebecca: Thank you
Henrik: For more on this, go to anotherdampodcast.com for over 200 interviews like this. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
The DAM Summit was created for Digital Asset Management professionals on topics requested by DAM professionals and created by the Insight Exchange Network. #IENDAM
Listen to Nancy Price talking 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 Nancy Price. Nancy, how are you?
Nancy Price: Great, Henrik, how are you?
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Nancy, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Nancy Price: Well Henrik, I kind of stumbled into Digital Asset Management after working as a cataloging librarian at an academic library. It’s actually pretty funny because when I started I really wasn’t very clear on what I’d be doing other than applying metadata, but it turns out that I really performed that day to day activities that make Digital Asset Management magic happen. So on any typical day, I would upload assets into the system. I applied descriptive metadata so the assets can be discovered by our corporate users. I manage the assets for different stages in their lifecycle. I developed system workflows for onboarding new types of asset. I version assets. I provide user assistance and customer service. I fulfill requests for asset location and delivery. I document system processes and communicate them to users. I develop training materials and provide system training and I work with IT to troubleshoot the system and for upgrades and a UAT testing. So I can typically have a pretty full day and I really liked the variety that might position offers, so I do really enjoy Digital Asset Management.
Henrik de Gyor: Nancy, how does is a premier brand for girls use Digital Asset Management?
Nancy Price: Well, I think we use Digital Asset Management and any other corporation in our industry would. We use it to organize and store digital assets such as images, videos, graphics, and those are all used to support the creation of our content and for our marketing purposes. I’m actually very fortunate that our company were pioneers in Digital Asset Management adopting the system in 2006. At that time, when I started I was charged with gathering assets off the departmental servers and ingest them into our new Digital Asset Management system. The 27,000 files I found on the servers had file names like hair or blue dress and then, there were a duplicate file of the thing image that had totally different file names. So I know for a fact that Digital Asset Management has improved our productivity here and it’s my opinion that a digital file is just that, a file, but once it is entered into a Digital Asset Management system and metadata is applied, it becomes an asset because I believe it’s the metadata that gives it value.
Nancy Price: For example, if you had a system with 400,000 assets, but you didn’t have any metadata, people wouldn’t use the system because they had to page through every asset, define what they need, which isn’t very efficient. So I really do believe that metadata provides the access points to discover the assets, whether it be by brand or category or a year. And it also allows that asset to be discovered for purposes other than for which it was intended. And that will increase the value of the asset. So there’s plenty of reasons to use Digital Asset Management today and I believe that we are using it in a very efficient manner as we use it for workflow and for versioning and for managing other aspects of the system. Like when assets need to be retired or for usage rights, so we use it in a variety of ways and it is been very productive for us.
Henrik de Gyor: Nancy, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Nancy Price: Well, I would say that some of the successes is that when we first went into Digital Asset Management, our system was more of just a repository for digital assets with rudimentary functionality and now it’s really grown into become quite the dynamic graphical database with the ability to search, display, transform, share, download, and link assets within the system. Some of the challenges that we face are integration with other systems. For example, the ability to push assets from your DAM into your content management system or the ability to link your assets in your DAM to Adobe Creative Suite products such as InDesign. We’ve also had some challenges with vendor’s proprietary software limiting our ability to automate certain processes. We also have problems with vendors not really offering some of the features that we would like, like versioning. We had to do customization on our and have the ability to version the assets. It wasn’t something that came with our system, so there are some challenges in features that we’d like to see and have not yet been developed yet.
Henrik de Gyor: What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals to become DAM professionals?
Nancy Price: Well, you know, I have such a unique background. I really do believe that my master’s degree in library science and experience with international bibliographic standards for description access gave me a really solid understanding of the theory behind information organization and management, but I do know that an MLS degree is not very feasible for a lot of people, so my suggestion would be to seek out a course or a workshop in metadata standards for digital collections and learn about the different international metadata standards such as Dublin Core or metadata object description such as mods. The Visual Resource Association Standard, which is the VRA. Library professionals have been developing these standards for decades and we can really learn from the effort that they’ve already expelled in this area. DAM professionals can learn a lot from the metadata standards that exist today. I would also like to offer one other piece of advice is when you get that first Digital Asset Management job, the first thing you should do is locate that one source of truth for accurate data. When I started over 10 years ago, that’s the first thing I did. It took months to find it, but I did end up finding the fountain of truth and that way I know that the information that I am entering into my system is accurate. It’s correct data, and it’s coming from a reliable source. If you don’t have correct metadata in your system, users will give up on it and it ended up compromising your system and its efficiency and how it’s used. So I really, I’m a big stickler for accuracy. I also think that consistency is vital to any Digital Asset Management system. Your metadata should be well documented along with the parameters around how it’s applied. So this maintains consistency on how you will apply metadata throughout the system and throughout the years, and that is extremely helpful and especially when you’re. You try to automate processes. Consistency is key.
Henrik de Gyor: Well, thanks Nancy. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com for 200 other episodes like this. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
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.
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