On January 24, 2019, Rebecca Schneider of AvenueCX spoke about Empathy and Tagging during the Insight Exchange Network’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) Practitioners Summit in New York City on January 24, 2019.
If you are interested in attending the Insight Exchange Network’s DAM Practitioners Summit on January 30-31, 2020 in New York City, you can find more details here. Use the discount code M131ADC for a 15% discount on registration (applicable to the early bird pricing rates too). #empathy #tagging #iendam
Listen to Meredith Reese talk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I am speaking with Meredith Reese.
Meredith, how are you?
Meredith: I’m good, thanks for having me.
Henrik: Meredith, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Meredith: I’m the Digital Asset Manager for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. I’ve been here for now just about a year. We implemented a brand new DAM right when I started and it’s been fantastic so far.
Henrik: Meredith, how does one of the world’s top orchestras use Digital Asset Management?
Meredith: They use it for just about everything you can think of. I personally sit in the archives department where I’m responsible for preserving all LA Phil historical records and serving requests both internally within the association and for outside users. But we also maintain a complete audio and video archive for our orchestra members to review. So we’re currently using our Digital Asset Management system, not just for historical purposes and research of all types of assets, but also for the orchestra themselves, which makes us pretty unique as far as orchestras go. And then we also support all of the affiliate groups that help out the orchestra. And we’re a nonprofit organization, I should mention. So we have a lot of volunteers, but we do have a full-time staff within the association that is responsible for all the administration of the LA Phil, planning the season, executing the season. So we have a full-time production staff who works directly with the orchestra and our music directors.
Meredith: We have a full artistic planning staff who actually programs the seasons and we have a marketing team within who does both digital and physical marketing. And really all of those groups are constantly creating assets all the time. And they’ve seen all their assets grow just within the last five years. And also as part of the archives, we manage a museum. We managed the Hollywood Bowl Museum at the Hollywood Bowl. The LA Phil has two homes. We have the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, designed by Frank Gehry. And then we have the Hollywood Bowl. There is a lot of history to that performance as well. That’s not just, you know, classical music, but, all the pop programming that we do throughout the year. So we’re responsible for exhibiting in that space. At the Hollywood Bowl Museum and then we have a couple of spaces in the Walt Disney concert hall as well. So all of the assets that are being created by the organization are being used and shared and reused on a regular basis. It’s actually surprising that they didn’t have the Digital Asset Management system until now.
Henrik: Meredith, What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Meredith: In general or here at the Phil[harmonic]?
Henrik: Either. Or both.
Meredith: Either? I would say here at the Phil, it’s been, We’re a small nonprofit on team, but we’re still people who work within those silos. That’s actually been quite surprising to me that there’s not more interaction or collaboration the teams, but that’s starting to change the culture. Starting to be more open, more transparent its definitely, our programming is a lot more dynamic. It’s not just your traditional classical shows anymore. There’s constant overlap. When our music director, Gustavo Dudamel performed elsewhere, also conducts other orchestras, but as well as his collaborations that he does here at the Walt Disney concert hall or at the [Hollywood] Bowl. And so it’s really gotten, people into more of the spirit of collaboration, but they still have a hard grasp on their assets. You know, who owns what, who can see what, who can share. And as they start to get more use of digital asset management system and we’re used to being able to search those assets, they realize first of all that metadata is really important.
Meredith: Making their stuff searchable and, especially information around rights, how they can use these assets, how they can reuse these assets. They’re starting to get more comfortable with that process and the silos are starting to break down little by little. We haven’t definitely a new collaborative spirit around here, but it’s just starting. I think we’re just barely scratching the surface and our DAM tool really does sit as the tool to help that along. So my challenge is really change management challenges, making sure that people are comfortable with the system that’s working for them as well as, how we can innovate later on. That’s I mean innovation is a huge challenge with DAM in general, but it’s something that I believe strongly in, you know, that we have to keep, you know, making this tool better and better and meet the needs, not just why we got the tool in the first place, which was really just to solve the influx of digital assets that are here, the association, but really think about, you know, what are we going to be dealing with in the future?
Meredith: What type of assets are we going to be seeing from both a technological standpoint and being able to describe them with good metadata and being able just to share them with the best way to share our information. We’re going to be seeing a lot more audio and video content is my guess and we’re going to be seeing a lot more data around that content. That’s going to be really important and we’re also going to have to open our doors to the general public. We’ve got a lot of demand to make audio recordings available to researchers and just music enthusiasts. So we’ll see if we can meet that demand too. That’s on the horizon. Launching a DAM system that the musicians could access as a pretty big success that just happen. So having a team of orchestra, you know, full-time world-class musicians that rarely really interact with the administrative folks and now they’re working in one system is pretty amazing. That definitely has broken down the two biggest silos here in the association and that took a lot of planning just to roll that out, to configure it correctly. I mean, streaming audio from a DAM system. Our DAM is off the shelf. You know we have a software as a service model. So technologically it wasn’t that challenging, but getting people comfortable, training them, making sure that it would meet the needs and that it was compliant with our union contracts and how we treat the musicians. How musicians treat restoration was really, really important. And we’ve got more on the horizon. Another big plan that we’re rolling out is a project management tool to sit within our DAM that will help the marketing group, basically, bring assets in and organize them and share them in a more streamlined way. And it’s also gonna help with scheduling our entire orchestra season.
Meredith: I come from the entertainment industry and so I’m used to TV seasons and film schedules and tentpole projects. And so working with an orchestra, it’s really all about the concert season for that year. And LA Phil is demanding, we have two seasons, we have the winter season and the summer season at the Bowl. And so being able to schedule that and make sure everybody’s slotted in the right space is a day to day. yeah, it’s just taxing on so many people. So we’re trying to move those processes internally and really associate them to all of the content that people are making along with the performances. Our whole taxonomy, if I can dive into the metadata kind of Geeky side of what I do is based off of performances. We have a hierarchy that’s based on the season. And then the locations that are venues and then the performance dates and then all of the works associated to that date.
Meredith: And we work directly with our music librarians who actually prepare the music for every single performance that the orchestra does. And then we have guest artists come in and that has its own challenges too. Yeah, it’s all built on the back of how the season is scheduled. So we really needed a system that would address that. And so we’re calling it project management, but really it’s project management and plus scheduling plus asset wrangling plus work in progress collaboration all under one system. It’s going to give our users that one stop shopping experience that I think most people are looking for
Henrik: Meredith, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Meredith: I would say just get as much experience as you possibly can and don’t be afraid to take risks and don’t be afraid to try new things and all of your failures are going to be just as valuable learning opportunities as your successes. My past experience definitely taught me that. And so I entered in the LA Phil. I was, you know, just about prepared for anything. And so it’s been nice that I haven’t, you know, had to have as many struggles in previous places and the adoption process has been really, really smooth so far, but I would definitely inspire people to keep at it and be persistent and try new things and dive into your metadata and your data models and really understand them. I think the biggest skills I’m seeing for DAM professionals, you know, are really those that match a data scientist, you know, the analyzing and the ability to, you really get down to good, you know, data model building and good taxonomy structures and, you know, really rich metadata and how that’s mapped, how that all fits together. But then being able to, you know, explain that to all your general users. And I think that’s the biggest skill someone can bring to DAM today.
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Dan Rosenberg.
Dan, how are you?
Dan Rosenberg: I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you today?
Henrik de Gyor: Dan, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Dan Rosenberg: Well, my first job out of college was I started actually in the tape library at WWE in Stamford, Connecticut. Through some twists and turns, I took on some side projects and ended up digitizing edited shows from tape, wrapping them with metadata, and sending them out to cable and satellite companies for WWE 24/7, which, at the time, was one of the most expensive video on demand [VOD] services. Through the success of that platform, this encouraged WWE to embark on a massive digitization project and make its entire 100,000-hour tape library accessible to hundreds of producers and editors all on a searchable database.
I eventually got to take on the number-two position in WWE’s new Digital Asset Management Department and eventually head my own team, which was in charge of archives and restore operations, digital delivery, disaster recovery, storage management. We eventually ended up supporting and building out a system. We educated the users, we trained them, and this eventually made it possible for WWE to launch its own OTT network, which combined a 24-hour live stream with an incredibly rich on-demand anthology which was accessible through almost any device. The other major win that we got out of that was that every ingested video asset would get a low-res proxy, which could be viewed and edited by the low-res … excuse me, by the live show production teams prior to retrieval. This ability to have full resolution assets restored very quickly from the LTO library and dynamically relinked to sequences was a major leap forward for WWE and the quick-turn demands during the weekly live shows where historical events are constantly referenced and storyline changes occur at the drop of a hat.
A lot of these offerings and workflows are much more commonplace today, but WWE always seemed to be ahead of the curve when it comes to video. I was very fortunate to be there for nine years actually, starting in 2005, working with some of the best mentors and teammates imaginable. We grew the department from two of us to start to nearly 30 by the time I left. This was just an exceptional learning experience which allowed me to be prepared when the opportunity arose to start a team here at Time Inc., where I’ve been since 2014.
Henrik de Gyor: Dan, how does one of the largest media publishers use Digital Asset Management?
Dan Rosenberg: Well, people all over the world are familiar with the Time Inc. titles, or brands as we call them, like Time and People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Essence, to name a few. Time Inc. has really spent the last several years redefining its image and the space it occupies in the mediascape. While we still maintain the outstanding print journalism and photography, which has been the hallmark of the company for nearly a century, we’re seeing the most explosive growth in the video realm. When I was hired three years ago, the brand teams were already turning out content at a breakneck pace, everything from quick news hits to digital features accompanying the articles on our ONO website to long-form documentary series, such as the massively successful Year in Space, which we’ve had many iterations of over the last year. Time Inc. has really been able to serve a varied audience with its varied titles. We have Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Southern Living, People en Espanol. Everywhere there’s an incredible demand for video, the company can be there.
The major challenge that we’ve dealt with as we’re growing faster than the technology in place could keep up … So when I started here, the 80 or so people on the video staff, not all were connected to central storage. The only archives we had were external hard drives of varying sizes, which were mostly stored in producers’ desk drawers, which is not exactly secure. There was no searchability or rich metadata attached to any of these video assets, so there was no way to know what reservoirs of content were being left untapped. We began a process where we would talk to similar-size video outlets with comparable output to see how they were using asset management systems to both store content and standardize workflows across the internal teams and external distribution based on media type.
After some site visits, proof of concepts, and extensive customization, we began to beta test our new video MAM system with some of our most skilled editorial team members and really let them kick the crap out of it. Then we simultaneously began populating our system with as many current and legacy assets as we had the bandwidth at our small team at the time to process, ’cause no one is really going to see the user value of an empty system. So we wanted to have as much available to the users as possible when it came time to do a general onboarding so we could say, “Hey, look at all this great video you can search for and use right away,” which was brand new for everybody here.
So the video staff, which was 80 3 years ago, it’s now over 300. We have 150 editors across about 25 of our flagship brands who are using our man every day. They access it and help us grow the archive. Through that, we’ve been able to support the teams that have gotten the company up to a billion monthly streams across our onsites. Company launched the People TV OTT platform, and just this week, we launched our Sports Illustrated OTT subscription VOD service. We rely heavily on the feedback from everybody, really across the board, to tell us what’s working and what’s not and also to champion the implementation of our metadata schemas, taxonomy, disaster recovery procedures, all these things that people don’t necessarily think about on a daily basis unless you’re in our field. It’s all really a lot of work for all the teams that are involved. It’s also really a lot of fun working with such a diverse group of people and content and for one of the most historically significant media companies around.
Henrik de Gyor: Dan, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Dan Rosenberg: Well, certainly lots of challenges. It can be tough not to feel overwhelmed by the vast quantity of incoming content every day, and all of it needs to be attended to one way or another. Not only is new media coming out of, constantly, from our NYC-based teams but we have producers and studios in every timezone across the country and contributors sending clips from really all over the world. And then we have the seemingly endless set of legacy content in which the metadata is inconsistent at best. Sometimes you get lucky and the producers have been great about standardizing naming conventions and keeping meticulous notes or spreadsheets. A lot of other times, it can just be, “Here, take this. I have no idea what’s on it. Have a good time.”
From a metadata standpoint, when it comes to challenges, you don’t really want to reinvent the wheel where you don’t have to. If you try stick with what’s already in place or what the users are familiar with to help increase adoption of new policy and just really help them feel comfortable. At Time Inc., we have such a vast photo and print archive that we at least had a jumping-off point to work with and some people here who have been here a while to really collaborate with. But so much of what we do in the video space is unique, and we have a branded and native content. We have a TV division that just released the Princess Diana documentary this past summer. So we all just have to work collaboratively and make the best decisions we can with the information available to us.
In terms of video-specific challenges, the technology, the cameras, the formats, it all changes what seems like every day. Producers are always going to want the latest and greatest so their videos look as good as possible. But we might not necessarily have the workflows in place to handle what just came out a week ago. So it’s important to keep the lines of communication with them open, manage their expectations, and have some approved workarounds in place if production demands actually denote using 8K or 16K or whatever is next down the pipe.
So for successes, it really seems like companies of all sizes have jumped into the digital space with two feet. They’re now coming up for air and realizing how seriously they have to take [digital] asset management or they’ll lose everything they’ve spent so much time and money investing in. I think there’s significantly more investment in technology but more importantly, the personnel around Digital Asset Management, and I think the return on investment for implementing comprehensive systems and having them run by motivated and driven people is nearly limitless. I’m also very encouraged with all the camaraderie I’m seeing in terms of digital asset professionals sharing their stories, networking, attending workshops and conferences, and of course, listening to informative podcasts like this. I think just the field is full of people who love what they do and really enjoy helping each other out and brainstorming solutions. It’s really energizing. It makes it fun to not only come to work every day but to be involved in the space.
Henrik de Gyor: Dan, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Dan Rosenberg: I think the most important thing is to understand that there’s no magic product that’s going to solve all your problems. There’s never going to be one solution to anything, so it’s crucial to do your research. One file that goes into our system hits at least six different pieces of technology from six different vendors during its life cycle, and getting everything to play nice isn’t always easy. You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel or do it all yourself to prove how smart you are. Chances are there’s a handful of people out there, whether internally or externally, who have seen a similar challenge and often they’re happy to help you out. So don’t be afraid to reach out to people within your network.
Also, I think it’s important to try to take in as much information as you can, document it, because in Digital Asset Management, we are the record keepers and people expect us to know where all the bodies are buried. So work in collaboration with your content teams, get involved as early as you can in their processes so you can understand them and help guide them. I’ve really found that 20 minutes on the front end of a project can save you days or weeks on the back end of trying to decipher what happened.
Some days it feels overwhelming, but you should have confidence in your methods and understand that everybody makes mistakes but what’s important is to learn and improve and refine. I also think it’s important to think like the clients or users and have their processes in mind. How are they creating things? How are they searching for things? How will they try and game the system if you let them? Everybody should be acting like teammates and working towards the same goals of putting the best products out there, but each segment of the business starts in a different place with different marching orders, so just getting everybody to understand asset management is the hub of where creation, innovation, distribution, and IT all come together. If you take the role seriously and have some fun, the people around you will too.
Henrik de Gyor: Well, thanks Dan. For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
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 Monica Fulvio. Monica, how are you?
Monica Fulvio: [0:09] I’m very good, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: [0:12] Great. Monica, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Monica: [0:15] I’m the senior taxonomist at National Geographic Partners, formerly National Geographic Society, before our merger and reorganization. I worked with other area stakeholders to establish a single taxonomy, a set of topics hierarchically managed, and locations that match our cartographic policies, a list of the people that features our explorers, organizations we’re interested in, events, other topics or concepts that we discuss frequently across our content, regardless of media type, and manage this in a central taxonomy management system.
[0:58] We use Mondeca since we also have some ontological elements that we’re using, we use of these with their auto‑tagging system. This is served to our internal clients through a taxonomy through a business layer API that we’ve built internally, the taxonomy service.
[1:20] This in turn is consumed by a growing number of our content systems. Like a lot of organizations out there, we have a lot of content management systems. We are working on consolidating on our alpha content management system is AEM, but we have a number of other systems that we use and we’ll probably continue to use.
[1:44] This is true, if in an earlier phase with Digital Asset Management and any large number of systems, and less that we’re going to necessarily end up with a particular alpha system, but maybe a smaller pack of them at the end of this and little more consistency between them. I work with various internal clients to help them standardize their metadata.
[2:12] I’m mostly focused on this set of taxonomy field. So I give them a schema, a set of documentation about how to interact with this internal web service. I train users, often producers, many writers, or art editors, whoever is expected to do the tagging or view the tagging. I help train them.
[2:33] I often tag archives of content, especially when we’re doing large migrations. I tune and refine the auto‑tagger. I manage the taxonomy itself. I also work with our digital product team and other people who are planning how our end user facing product may be using this taxonomy.
[2:55] Right now, we are using a text‑only auto‑tagger. We’ve definitely talked about starting to use some kind of an image auto‑tagging service. I will say I’ve long kept an eye on those technologies and been a little skeptical about them, achieving the level of accuracy and granularity that we really need for describing our content. We don’t need to know that it’s a bird. We want to know that it is a snowy owl or a bird paradise. We need a certain level of granularity.
[3:30] I’d say that I’ve suddenly seen leaps and bounds in the accuracy of image auto‑tagging tools over the last year and we are looking around at them. I hope to be able to add that to our suite of metadata enhancement tools here, sometime soon.
Henrik: [3:54] Monica, how do you maintain the taxonomy for one of the largest nonprofit, scientific, and educational institutions in the world?
Monica: [4:02] It’s a lot of work. It’s one totally fair answer. I’m also assisted here by a fairly flexible system. Each node in the taxonomy is not anchored by name, it’s a UUID. That is its core element, where that UUID follows the terms through its lifespan, in all the systems that it’s used in, it stays that if we rename it, if we have to move it within the hierarchy, if we merged terms, things like this.
[5:55] We architect it, our taxonomy system, and the way the client systems interact with it for flexibility. That is one thing that helps us. Also, the system assists us because Mondeca, when it’s processing text will extract suggested terms…candidates. We also allow users in the various client systems to themselves post candidates, post it through the Web services and add it to the candidate queue inside of Mondeca, which I can review and, if appropriate, add to taxonomy or discover that I’ve missed a synonym or any number of suggestions that I can confer.
[5:18] Some of them are junk and some of them are great. I’d say also about the users…I work with internal stakeholders in all of these various topic areas. I’ve invited in a number of other central data owners around the organization to help manage their data sets where relevant in the taxonomy system. I frequently review sections of the taxonomy. I’ll put down in review the travel section with the folks who work on Traveler magazine and our other travel products, and make sure that these terms make sense to them, that I’m talking about what’s important to them, etc.
Henrik: [6:03] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management and taxonomy?
Monica: [6:08] It’s easier to start with the challenges. There are many of them. I think particularly, we wrestle with I think a lot of organizations do, we have a number of different systems. For us, this is the inheritance of a lot of groups making their own individual selections using their own separate workflows.
[6:31] So in the fall of 2015, National Geographic reorganized itself. Previously, there was the [National Geographic] Channel, which was a company that was primarily owned by 21st Century Fox and about a third owned by the National Geographic Society. The magazine, the book publication, the map publishing, all of that was part of the Society as well as what I described as more traditionally, nonprofit activities, giving out grants, running educational programs, running a museum.
[7:03] They struck an expanded partnership with 21st Century Fox, which moved all of the media portions of the organization or consolidated in National Geographic Partners and the National Geographic Society owned a third of interest of that, but otherwise, a free‑standing organization that’s very focused on their nonprofit activities.
[7:27] There’s a lot of change and upheaval, in fact, there always is at the end of any kind of big company reorganization like this. Personally, I’m suddenly interacting a lot with the folks from our Channel and talking to them about how we manage broadcast content, both domestically and around the world. The Channel particularly is directly and…I think it’s forty odd markets.
[7:56] They’re working on consolidating themselves, which is exciting, to see the work that they’re doing. Broadcast media, especially for me, is a whole new world of systems and workflows that I’ve previously really been very deep in the magazine, book side and associated assets, and workflows, and systems, and challenges. It’s a little bit of a personal challenge, but it’s exciting.
[8:22] As I may be alluded to with the Channel stuff, I’m being asked to look more at how do we represent the taxonomy and how do we manage our content in global setting. Personally, this is super exciting, looking at making our taxonomy multi‑lingual, which will help us better serve our readers both in the United States and around the world.
[8:47] This is maybe a little self‑biased, but I’d say that acceptance of the taxonomy has itself been really quite successful. It allowed us to build consistent experiences that had alluded us previously. Things like consistent ad targeting. We’re using it for analytics as well now, dynamic map experiences, and we have some interesting work upcoming using the taxonomy for personalization and using the ontology models for… let us say light linked data to provide experiences.
Henrik: [9:30] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Monica: [9:35] My main piece of advice that I would share, both for taxonomists and aspiring taxonomists, and DAM professionals is to maintain the balance between standards‑based approaches, what is the best practice, how have other people solved this problem, can I lean on external schemas and standards and pragmatism.
[10:00] Particularly, working with ontologies and linked data, there’s this temptation to build this beautiful, complex, perfect model that is ultimately more for you to maintain and, in some cases, can be more than you will really use.
[10:18] This is both a piece of advice and something I’ve struggle with myself, how to best strike that balance of what is actually going to be used, what can we really get people to accurately and consistently apply in terms of metadata, what is the core data that we really need, which really at heart, involves answering the question, “What do we really need to do with this content, with these assets and with this data?”
[10:44] My other piece of advice, and something that is constantly helpful and fruitful for me, especially when I feel like I’m stuck is reach out to other people in the field. Conversely, any of you feel free to reach out to me. I’m always happy to talk to other professionals in the field.
[11:02] I think it’s reassuring that the problems that we’re often wrestling with, which can feel enormous, and maybe are enormous, but very frequently your colleagues in another organization are wrestling with remarkably similar challenges and sometimes coming up with answers that you haven’t thought of. I always find that enormously refreshing.
Henrik: [11:24] Great advice. Thanks, Monica.
Monica: [11:26] Absolutely. Thank you, Henrik. It was great talking on this topic.
Henrik: [11:29] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com.
Another DAM Podcast 