Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

Category Archives: Photography

photography


by Leave a comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Dan Piro on 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 Dan Piro. Dan, how are you?

Dan Piro: Good. How are you?

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

Dan Piro: I’m the Director of Digital Asset Archive with the National Hockey League. I oversee a team that’s responsible for ingesting video, digitization projects, metadata application, metadata integrity, and we work alongside of the post-production team here, NHL Studios to support their media needs and also the NHL Network and work together, solve problems, and help them create compelling content.

Henrik de Gyor: Dan, how does a professional ice hockey league use Digital Asset Management?

Dan Piro: Primarily we use it to send and receive media and to archive it. We have coming in from 30 arenas around the continent every game and you can have up to 15 a night. You get three feeds of the game from the time they press record, you’re talking four or five hours which can add up to 250-300 hours in a single night. So, you have all that material coming in and where you used to have to wait for tapes to come in by FedEx and that type of thing, now we have all the previous night’s games available for the start of the next work day. Our broadcast partners, our internal departments can use it. We get our photos coming in from photographers around the league and just bringing all this material together and having it at our fingertips in a very short timeframe allows us to like I said earlier, create compelling content, create it sooner and get it out the door.

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

Dan Piro: Well, the biggest challenge I was cast with when I came aboard here at the NHL a little over two years ago was to digitize all the physical archives ahead of our centennial anniversary. If there’s any hockey fans listening, they would know that we got the NHL 100 branding all over the league this year. And to prepare for that, we had a very short timeframe to digitize 150,000 or so videotapes, a half a million still images, slides, negatives prints, over a million documents that our PR department had and that’s game sheets which are the scorecards that the official scorer keeps in the arenas. That dates back to the second season, so we’re talking as far back as 1918.

And statistics records back to the very beginning of the league. Back then, they kept these huge ledgers throughout the season and every goal was marked down, every assist was marked down in these huge ledgers and we had to get all that content scanned and have it all ready to go so that we could celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the league. So as you can imagine, just the logistics of moving all that physical material around from various locations to various vendors; that’s a nightmare in and of itself. But we have a great team, our archive manager is the most organized guy I think I’ve ever met in my life and his system to track all this stuff and make sure we got everything back really saved the day for us.

I had a team of 15 people working to ingest this content, QC it, verify that we’re getting a file back for everything that went out the door. It was just a massive, massive undertaking which at the same time that we were doing all this work, we were setting up a new DAM system. With the new DAM, we’re bringing all this content into the new DAM trying to dig into all of our legacy databases from our videotape database, to our scoring database and pull as much of the information that we can from there and map it to the data fields in the new DAM. Just a massive, massive project to get this thing stood up and ready to go and bring in future and current content at the same time. It was a huge challenge and I’m happy to say that from physical archive perspective, it was very successful, but going forward, there’s always new challenges and new things to tackle when you set up a system like that.

One of the other things we had to deal with in bringing all this content in, these half million images that was scanned, much of it had no data associated with it as far as who the players were, who the teams were that were pictured in these photos. This team of 15 hockey experts, subject matter experts came in and were able to look at these phots one by one and when you might not be able to tell just by looking at something, who these players are, these guys did incredible research to … if a player was shown taking a shot and he’s half-turned and you can see that his jersey number ends with either a three or an eight and his name ends with E-R, and it’s a blue jersey, who is he? And what year is it? And judging from the equipment the guy is wearing, whether they’re left-handed or right-handed, the advertisements on the boards in the background, all these things went into researching who these guys are and tagging them and giving those photos values. When you’re setting up these systems there’s no point if you don’t apply the proper metadata along with that. Kind of all one project but all these different spokes to the project were really the challenges that we faced and at the same time, some of the success that we had.

Henrik de Gyor: What advice would you like to share with young professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Dan Piro: I think we talked about this a little bit, a couple years ago when we did the podcast, and in the digital world that we’re living in now, I think everybody’s kind of a media manager. I sort of equated it to managing an iTunes library back in the day. And now with your DVR and backing up your phone and having an iCloud and all of these things that are part of everyday life and becoming more and more ubiquitous are really just a small scale of what media managers do professionally. You just have to scale that up to what the needs are in a multi-billion dollar corporation.

In terms of advice, if you’re organized with your personal media and you understand how to handle those practices, you can start to apply that at the entry level and then learn how larger companies do this type of thing. I think the interesting thing that’s happening in the DAM industry is that people are now coming out of school having studied to do this kind of work where historically, I think people from the era when I got into it were people that were industry professionals and they fell into it. Whether you were running a tape, library, or you’re a production manager and you fell into this asset management world, now these people are coming up studying how to do it. That’s great but I think that people that come in with that type of background are probably going to be very stuck in their ways a little bit. “This is how I was taught it should be done, this is how we need to apply these procedures”.

I would say that they should reach out to the many departments and people that they’ll be interacting with and learn how they work because in most cases, a DAM is a supporting role much like a supporting actor is trying to help the lead shine. That’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re finding ways to help the company shine and generate revenue off of what we’re doing. But we’re not necessarily the revenue generator. I think you need to keep that in mind and understand that you’re part of a larger team and it’s not just about the best way for you to manage assets, but the best way for the assets that you manage to serve the company that you work for.

Finally, the one thing that I beat like a dead horse to all of the more entry level people that I work with is network and don’t burn bridges. Your network is what helps you succeed in the industry. That’s how you get jobs, that’s how you meet people, that’s how you make the contacts for the job that you want. It’s very important to have your Linkedin account set up and have it up to date and make sure that you’re constantly keeping in touch with all of the people that you interacted with professionally. It’s very easy today to contact people that you’ve worked with in the past without being a pain in their butt.

I remember when I was getting in making phone calls to people that I’d run into and they just don’t have the time of day to take calls and do that type of thing. But you can easily send a message that they can get back to you at their convenience. The current era is the easiest era to network ever because you just have to search people, and use that to your advantage. Networking is really the key factor that I’ve had in my success I think.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Well, thanks Dan.

Dan Piro: Thanks.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdampodcast.com where you’ll find another 190 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 Another DAM Podcast on Apple iTunes, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play,  RadioPublic, RSS or TuneIn


by Leave a comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Felix Cisneros on Digital Asset Management

 

 

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  [00:00] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Felix Cisneros.

Felix, how are you?

Felix Cisneros:  [00:13] Hi, Henrik. Fine, thank you. Nice to be here.

Henrik:  [00:16] Felix, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Felix:  [00:14] I’ve spent actually my entire career in Digital Asset Management, starting at Paramount Pictures as Director of production information. Even before we called it metadata, it was just production information. I was responsible for tracking the development assets before they agreed with the film. We had over 200 projects in active development.

[00:35] They realized that the dissemination of the information throughout the company was important. So, I created the production information department specifically to track these assets, which existed at that point really in script form, treatment form. These were not obviously film or video assets, but really the basis for which films would be made.

[00:58] I have also spent about 10 years implementing digital library systems for companies around the world, whether it’s to track video, audio, photography, or other digital content and of course, all the associated metadata with it.

[01:12] In my current role, I’m responsible for the distribution of television content, metadata, key art, and all the content identifiers for multiple national cable networks sent to all the various platforms such as online, SVOD, TV Everywhere, electronic cell through, and of course the regular linear services.

[01:30] We utilize multiple Digital Asset Management systems to source this content. In each of these roles, it’s really been a key tool for everything that each company has been trying to accomplish.

Henrik:  [01:42] Felix, how does an American entertainment company use Digital Asset Management?

Felix:  [01:46] In my experience, it’s on multiple areas. One that gets a lot of attention, of course, is the main program or film and its various iterations, or versions. You’ll usually see some tolerable duplication of those assets in other systems for specific platforms, or distribution partners.

[02:05] Others, are in the key art and photography areas which are becoming more important each day, as the distribution platforms compete with each other for retaining viewers. They want more and more key art to showcase the content, so the challenge is of tracking every iteration, size, the rights associated with it, metadata, and the approvals are extremely important.

[02:27] Lastly, the purely digital content, which may not necessarily be released commercially, but is used as supplemental material for online purposes or PR. Those are some of the primary areas that you’ll see an entertainment company use DAM. In my experience, these areas have traditionally been separate Digital Asset Management systems, with separate taxonomies and metadata schemas. At least in my experience, that’s been the case.

Henrik:  [02:53] Felix, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Felix:  [02:58] Referring to the previous answer, I’d say that utilizing common content identifiers across the multiple areas of the content repositories is key. It is really a challenge. I think the success comes with being able to really tie those various areas together.

[03:18] The distribution and the rights management are becoming much more complicated. The ability to use content identifiers across these multiple asset management systems for identifying rights, integrating into programming or scheduling systems, what we consider the holy grail, orchestrating the gathering transformation and distribution of the finished product via an orchestration type of system.

[03:46] I think the biggest challenge would lead to the biggest success, in that the ability to actually tie these disparate systems together in order to gain real efficiencies in the packaging and distribution of that, is really where I think some major effort needs to be put to.

Henrik:  [04:04] Felix, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Felix:  [04:09] I always say, think about where the business is going. Whatever your business is, if it’s in retail, museums, television, film, how are your customers, your visitors, your users ultimately going to consume your assets? Then apply that thinking to how you design and implement your DAM system and the workflows associated with it.

[04:32] Secondly, I would say get out in the world. Talk to people. Attend the conferences. Talk to your colleagues at other companies. Listen to podcasts such as these, and keep your skills sharp. Make sure you know how other companies including those I would say not in your immediate field, are addressing and solving these issues.

[04:52] That to me is extremely important. It’s talking and understanding what other people are doing, and using that, and using how your end user or customer is going to utilize these assets, it’s all kind of one and the same.

Henrik:  [05:08] Thanks, Felix.

Felix:  [05:10] Thanks, Henrik. Good to be here.

Henrik:  [05:12] For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com.

For this and 180 other podcast episodes, 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 Apple iTunes, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play, RadioPublic, RSS or TuneIn


by Leave a comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Jennifer Veiga and Theresa Honig on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Jennifer Veiga and Theresa Honig. Thanks for joining me. How are you?

Jennifer Veiga:  [0:10] Good, how are you today Henrik?

Henrik:  [0:12] Great. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer:  [0:15] We are involved in various ways and various capacities. We work for a media company, and we implement the standards in which the agencies and photographers and all of our contractors provide assets to us.

[0:35] We probably use Digital Asset [Management] in a very different way than most companies do, in terms of we also use it to a degree as a news feed. We have pretty much written the standards for how the photographers and agencies insert their material into our system, in terms of captioning, keywording, metadata so forth and so on. It’s what we require, what our standards are.

Henrik:  [1:06] How does an organization focused on celebrity media as well as health and fitness media use Digital Asset Management?

Theresa Honig:  [1:13] I think part of our way is getting on our news feed, getting information from the photographers and mainly these agencies. We have to catalogue our information as far as past projects that we’ve done, and also pictures that were used by getting different pictures into our database. We also have to get them out to our designers.

Jennifer:  [1:32] We have an enterprise digital asset management system as well as workflow, so there’s other software tied into it. It’s kind of a complex system in regards to that because there’s so many users.

Theresa:  [1:45] Also, programs have to be linked together to our database…

Jennifer: [1:50] …to support the DAM.

Jennifer:  [1:51] We use it differently in terms of from the celebrity and the health portion of it. Everybody has their own library and we give access to certain people. For example, some of the builders can’t go into some of the other titles’ libraries due to copyright and embargoes and permissions and certain things like that.

[2:19] In terms of the celebrity portion of it, the greatest challenge with that is being that we are such a huge company, and we work at iconic print brands, there’s a lot of photographers and agencies and so forth that want to contribute. It makes it difficult in the sense that the more you store, the more it’s going to cost you.

[2:43] When you implement the system, you only buy a certain amount of storage. It’s not just endless. That presents a problem. Sometimes, we have to be selective on who we allow to contribute. They have to go through a process, in terms of being allowed. I guess you could say like a membership to get username and password into our FTP. Some agencies stream. In that respect, it’s different.

[3:10] Obviously, it’s just different businesses. The entertainment, the celebrity brands, don’t get people working out, and the fitness titles do. In the same realm, we’ve implemented a library that’s for internal use, and it’s a free library we’d like to dole out.

[3:30] It’s basically stock images, product shots, generic things that everybody can use, though we try to repurpose that. In that way, every title doesn’t have to go out and do the same photo shoot for generic shots.

Theresa:  [3:45] We also have to have a bigger library for the celebrity end of it because there’s a lot more material coming in and out. The celebrities are out every day, whereas, the health and fitness end of it is a lot more photoshoots and freelance art and stock art.

Jennifer:  [3:59] A lot more tailored.

Henrik:  [4:00] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer:  [4:05] Well, I think the biggest challenge really is having an active commitment from the top to support our efforts. A lot of times at the top, they don’t really get all the techie stuff about it. They just think they’re going to buy a system, and that’s it. They pay one time, and it’s all over. That’s not obviously the case.

[4:27] I’ve tried not to sugarcoat the reality that you have to maintain it, update it, and care for it. That essentially is going to cost money and time. At the end of the year, a lot of times, for us, we’ve reached our limit quickly because so many people, every single day, are putting materials into our DAM.

[4:48] For example, when there’s award shows, in a matter of eight hours, you’ll get 75,000 images. It’s a lot for the system to handle, and it’s a lot for everybody to go through. For us to handle too, because at some point, there’s no need for 10,000 pictures of Jennifer Lopez smiling in the same dress.

[5:09] That’s what you run into. It’s hard to get to what you need because you have to dig through all of the award shows stuff. It gets, kind of hairy and complicated and annoying at times. Basically, on those days, we’re all working overtime because we have to go in, basically clean and edit.

[5:29] A lot of times, like photographers and agencies, and stuff like that…It seems cheap and easy to just shoot a bunch of pictures, but you don’t need all of those pictures. I think a lot of times, people just need to learn how to edit. That’s really important for any system because you get backlogged.

Theresa:  [5:48] It gets too big, and then you have to…

Jennifer: [5:50] It slows the system down. It slows everything down.

Theresa: [5:54] You have to get it empty enough that it will take more on. You need to do the maintenance. At that point, empty some things out. Also, make sure it’s properly backed up is another issue we see. A lot of times things aren’t properly backed up and then we have to change servers, then we lose a mountain of information. We have to get it all back in again. It makes a whole, huge effort that was unnecessary.

Jennifer: [6:19] Another challenge that we have is making sure that everybody’s software, programs, technology is compatible. For example, ‑‑ what was it? ‑‑ today we had a problem where somebody’s Photoshop didn’t match up, wasn’t being properly ingested into our system. It wasn’t reading it.

[6:37] We get glitches like that and things like that come up. It’s frustrating because a lot of times it’s not the end user, so we not only cater to the end users here, but we have to support outside efforts as well. That sometimes gets to be difficult and stressful. I’m not sitting at whoever’s desk in California, so I don’t know what’s on their computer.

[7:03] And successes… I’d say our most successful implementation was SCC Media Grid, which is a digital asset management system that is basically created for the publishing industry. For our purposes, it is by far superior, I think, than most in term of  You can see everything immediately.

[7:25] You can do time searches. You can do looped-in searches. You can do Boolean searches. It is multi‑faceted, and it is extremely quick. It’s really easy to maintain. When people drop things in, it has pretty much ranks in most meta data.

[7:40] Once we’ve given them our style guides and standard guides, if they properly adhere to them, then it creates a nice workflow. It makes our job a lot easier.

Theresa: [7:53] It can handle a lot of information. There aren’t as many system crashes.

Henrik:  [7:57] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Jennifer: [8:03] First and foremost, make sure you have commitment from the top. Make sure that they know that every person that you visit, that’s a license fee. Everybody can’t share the same username and password. You can’t do that. That’s stealing people’s technology, and that isn’t right.

[8:20] Develop a strategy and customize it to your business needs. Talk to as many people as you can because it’s so imperative. Employees in different departments, everybody has data in their head. Data is essentially knowledge, so everybody is knowledgeable in some degree or another.

[8:42] We try to have an open door policy in terms of, we encourage people to come and speak to us with all kinds of questions, comments, concerns, ways to improve anything. It’s a work in progress. It’s not perfect now, but that obviously is our goal.

Theresa: [9:00] To really help, you have to know the ins and outs to the company you’re helping and know what the employees need and what they need to do their job and get it done efficiently. Also, like we said before, plan for the future. Make sure there is enough room in that database so that you have a plan after that. That you have a bigger system you can move onto.

Jennifer: [9:19] Obviously, you’ll need controlled vocabularies and your keywords. And I think sometimes with digital asset management people think the more metadata and the more keywords and the more this is better. I personally don’t necessarily agree with that.

[9:32] I think that there’s something to be said for simplicity. I think it needs to be straightforward… real people speak. Some people get a little too smart with their keywords. If it’s a picture of an island, just write “island”. You don’t have to have some crazy… I mean obviously you should [say] what island and where it is, and stuff like that is important, but sometimes people just get too literal about it.

[9:57] That’s happened here where they’ll write, “This is West Indies,” but it doesn’t say “island” and a lot of people are sometimes looking for an island. Develop a strategy and talk to as many people as you can because that’s where you will get ideas and solutions. And basically, that’s what we are usually trying to do. Find a solution to something.

Theresa: [10:20] Yeah. Talk to other professionals is great because everyone is running into a different situation. You might have a situation that somebody conquered last year.

Jennifer: [10:30] Glitches and things like that. Sometimes one person is able to pull up something on the other person like, “Well, I just typed that in, and it’s not coming up on mine.” For the most part, that is usually a user error. I have seen instances where things haven’t shown up, and I still don’t have the answers to those.

Theresa: [10:48] Stay on top of your software. Make sure you don’t forget to schedule your updates and things like that. There’s a lot of times where we have to work really closely with IT. I mean, IT is probably who we work closest with because they support our efforts as well.

Henrik:  [11:03] Thank you.

Jennifer:  [11:03] Sure.

Henrik:  [11:04] For more on this and other digital asset management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. For this podcast and 160 other podcast episodes including transcripts of every interview, go to anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, email me at anotherDAMblog@Gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple iTunes, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play, RadioPublic, RSS or TuneIn


by Leave a comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Kenneth Wilson on Digital Asset Management

 

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with 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.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple iTunes, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play, RadioPublic, RSS or TuneIn


by 1 Comment

Another DAM Podcast interview with Fred Robertson on Digital Asset Management

 

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor:  [0:01] This Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Fred Robertson. Fred, how are you?

Fred Robertson:  [0:10] Good, thanks.

Henrik:  [0:12] Fred, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Fred:  [0:14] I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for about 10 years now. My current role as Digital Asset Manager is about two years old. My main role is to manage photography assets from the beginning of the creative process all the way through to disseminating them out to a global community of creatives. This means when a photo shoot is finished, a hard drive will come to me and I’ll transfer files onto one of our server volumes. Then art directors do their part making selections and preparing files for me then to move out to a color correction house for retouching and color correction.

[0:52] Then files come back to me when they’re complete so I can properly name them, tag them properly, and post the final assets into an image library that we maintain. I’m also in charge of managing the version control and file names where all the product groups and different models of products and series versions, which can get complicated. We really have to have a good system of naming in place.

[1:15] I also interact with the global partners so that whenever they need assets, and whenever new assets are posted, they’re constantly being updated about new activity and new imagery that’s available. Finally, managing the storage space on all of our working volumes. It’s a pretty involved role.

Henrik:  [1:34] Fred, how does a well known audio technology developer and product manufacturer use Digital Asset Management?

Fred:  [1:41] We use DAM in many different ways. Primarily, from an image standpoint, still photography is the main focus of our DAM work currently. We maintain this image library and storage system for all of our product assets, advertising, photography. We also use it as a creative workflow so that our creative can produce all the layout creative work that they need to by linking to those high res assets that have gone through that process that I explained earlier.

[2:10] Our creative group is able to produce layouts and different presentations without having to duplicate assets. It’s an all‑encompassing system where we have different volumes on our server for creative files, layouts, logos, raw photography, final color corrected imagery, even outtakes. It’s a highly managed system, but it also allows for more fluid workflow.

Henrik:  [2:34] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Fred:  [2:38] I would say the challenges are many. First and foremost, just educating people about the system we have and giving users a degree of confidence in using it. A lot of folks tend to be a bit daunted by or confused by an interface. Some DAM interface is just not as user friendly as most people expect after going on the web and, say, using stock sites. I find that if you hold someone’s hand just the tiniest bit, it goes a long way to helping them become independent in their use of it.

[3:06] One of the bigger challenges is getting all to these stakeholders, internal clients, corporate interests, some legal concerns, and anyone that needs to access it how to be on the same page about how we’re coordinating management and organization of those assets. Those challenges are ongoing. We don’t really manage digital assets. The digital group seems to manage their own. The video group seems to manage those on their own as well. I’m helping in both of those areas, but it’s not under one umbrella, which makes it tricky. It gives us something, a goal to shoot for as well, which is to get everything in one place.

[3:44] Successes are just that we have a tool in place. It’s surprisingly still unique to see large companies using a DAM tool in ways other than just small internal groups using it. We’re trying to use it on a global marketing scale is ambitious, and it’s great that we can continue to improve upon it from there.

[4:04] It helps us coordinate product launches. Just having a Digital Asset Manager in house is a new role here. I think it’s made a big, big difference in productivity in the group.

Henrik:  [4:15] Fred, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Fred:  [4:20] I think, first and foremost, just having a clear and focused approach is most important, something that emphasizes the value in having a process in place that everyone needs to adhere to, but that you can as a Digital Asset Manager, you can help facilitate that process and really step in at every point along the way so that you can interact with many different groups of people who might not often interact with the group that I work in. I really enjoy being a greater part of the whole process so I can really answer questions at any point along the way.

[4:54] I think if you aspire to become a DAM professional…My background’s photography and I came at it from that perspective, as a person who was just immersed in having a visual education. The way I look at imagery is organizationally different than most folks that come at if from a library science perspective, which I often wish I had, but I also feel like I bring something unique to the process as sort of a self‑taught DAM professional in a way.

[5:26] I just think emerging yourself in imagery and processes can only help get you to that place where really allowing yourself a chance to view lots of imagery and think about ways in which that they’re organized and interact with photographers and artists, it can give you a much more rounded perspective.

Henrik:  [5:45] Well, thanks, Fred.

Fred:  [5:46] All right.

Henrik:  [5:46] For more on this, and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to AnotherDAMblog.com. For this podcast episode, as well as 150 other podcast episodes, including transcripts of every interview, go to AnotherDAMpodcast.com.

[6:01] 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 Apple iTunes, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Play, RadioPublic, RSS or TuneIn