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Another DAM Podcast interview with Alex Wolff on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does a global beauty company use Digital Asset Management?
  • How has Digital Asset Management been able to save you time and money?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Alex Wolff. Alex,
how are you?
Alex Wolff: [0:10] I’m doing excellent. How about yourself?
Henrik: [0:12] Great. Alex, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Alex: [0:17] I’m the Manager of Sales Technology for Coty Beauty. That’s actually
in the sales side, not on the technology side. I was tasked with finding a
solution for delivering images from our New York office to our field sales, which
are spread throughout the US, and also to customers, and occasionally to third
party vendors. [0:43] I had to go through the whole process of selecting a DAM
vendor and implementing that solution here, finding the right parties internally
to eventually own it, and in terms of moving the images from place to place
and distributing to the field. It was an exercise in replacing the manual effort of
burning disks, shipping them everyplace, and tracking those requests. It was a
lot of work being done here, a lot of manual stuff.
Henrik: [1:21] Sounds like it. How does a global beauty company use Digital
Asset Management?
Alex: [1:25] We use it a couple of different ways. There are various tools. The
very basis, everything starts with the idea for a graphic or an image. From the
time that image is developed and then eventually either shot, if it’s photography,
or created in Photoshop, or illustrated, the whole request and concept
needs to be tracked from person to person and approved as it goes from creative
to marketing to sales back to creative. [2:01] The Digital Asset Management
system helps keep the notifications moving. The next person in line in the workflow
has to be notified because the prior person approved it. That’s the basics.
Then it’s got to track where the images are stored in the file system so that
when a request comes in, it could be shipped out.
[2:24] The next piece is a library function, storing all of the images internally.
Then we needed a tool that was going to help us identify the images that were
ready, what we call our final, retouched images which is a small portion of the
thousands of images that we create. We make them available to the sales team
so they can provide them to customers for advertising or doing presentations at
sales meetings.
Henrik: [2:53] Excellent. Alex, how has Digital Asset Management been able to
save you time and money?
Alex: [2:59] My role is to find efficiencies for the sales team. Sales team had a
two to three, sometimes four, week wait for images, even if they were already
shot because we didn’t have a way of finding them and delivering them quickly.
I had to find a solution, and from there I back off except for procedurally and
user type administration. [3:22] It’s amazing, we’re using a company called
Widen as Software as a Service. Our people, now, go in, find all the images
that they’re looking for, provided they’ve been shot, and get them back in their
hands in 10 to 15 minutes no matter where they are in the world.
[3:40] One consultant estimated that it cut out about a half a million dollars in
waste in terms of efficiency because of how much time we spent tracking. A lot
of people forget that most of the time surrounding all this, it doesn’t take long
to burn a disk. It doesn’t take long to ship a disk. But you could take two or
three hours’ worth of phone calls tracking over the life cycle of a request.
[4:03] First, it’s cut out the time to market which is it used to take us two to three,
maybe even four, weeks to get images out to our sales team from New York.
That cost would be 60 people overnight shipment. You’d have $15 for an overnight
shipment times 60 people. So each set of requests might save us $900.
[4:29] Additionally, there the time that’s spent burning disks, the time wrapping
them and shipping them. The efficiencies that we’ve received by going to an
outside vendor really paid off.
Henrik: [4:41] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to be DAM professionals?
Alex: [4:47] I would start off with having a good foundation in library sciences.
They need to be somewhat technical, be familiar with Windows or the Mac
Operating Systems and the file systems. [5:04] The key to success is being able
to not store an image, it’s to be able to find an image. Categorization and
hierarchies are all things that people that are involved in DAM need to be able
to do very well to recognize what’s going to be effective or more to the point,
what’s not going to be effective.
[5:25] That will allow the end user who is not a librarian, to be able to quickly get
the assets in a timely fashion and delivered very quickly to the final destination.
Henrik: [5:42] Great. Thanks Alex.
Alex: [5:45] You’re so welcome.
Henrik: [5:47] For more on Digital Asset Management log on to
AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is now available on Audioboo,
Blubrry, iTunes, and the Tech Podcast Network. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Romney Whitehead on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does a broadcast media organization use Digital Asset Management?
  • You are going to be a graduate of the MADAM program at King’s College of London. Is this Master’s Program preparing you for the working world of Digital Asset Management?
  • What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

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 Romney Whitehead.
Romney, how are you?
Romney Whitehead: [0:10] I’m very well, thank you, and thank you for
inviting me.
Henrik: [0:12] No problem. Romney, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Romney: [0:17] I began in Digital Asset Management about 10 years ago at
BBC Worldwide. Within there, I was working in the magazines division, focused
on brand management and distribution of magazines globally. My team was
involved in uploading of the assets, rights management, metadata management,
and then distribution of the assets within BBC Worldwide itself, and then
globally out to 53 territories to our licensees and syndication partners. [0:48]
Recently, in the last month, in fact, I’ve joined NET-A-PORTER GROUP. That’s
made up of NET-A-PORTER , MR PORTER , and THE OUTNET. They’re an online
luxury fashion retailer. We’re at the stage there where we’re choosing a solution,
at the moment, to manage a very extensive range of assets, from product photography
to video to print and online magazines, and TV outputs as well. Very
interesting times.
Henrik: [1:22] Excellent. How does a broadcast media organization use Digital
Asset Management?
Romney: [1:29] In my experience, probably looking at it in two ways, one from
the comment workflows, and then probably from a preservation point of view.
From the workflow perspective, what a DAM solution offers a media company
is the ability to manage the content from the point that it’s created to the point
where it goes out to the consumer. [1:55] You could have the ingestion of content
immediately into a system. You could have multiple editing suites dealing
with that content. You can then have the input of the photography unit, if they’re
sending out stills or they’re sending out merchandise related to a particular
show or a product. Then moving through the life cycle through to the points
where that content goes out to a third party broadcaster or to a consumer.
[2:23] Then from the preservation point of view, especially from the point of view
of public broadcasting, what DAM offers is the ability to preserve their content
but also go back through their archives, perhaps finding a back catalogue of
content there. Some of it may be in technology which is obsolete if it’s been
produced over a very, very long period of time.
[2:50] If they’ve got a DAM system, then they’ve got the ability to go back and
retrieve that content. Preserve it at the same time, and then offer new outputs
to consumers. And also, historical value, massive historical value, especially for
broadcasters that have been running for 60 or 70 years.
[3:12] I think a DAM solution, in that sense, means that they never need to lose
material ever again. Whereas in the past it’s, obviously, been stored in dusty
cupboards and left to really not be looked after, unfortunately.
Henrik: [3:27] Romney, you were going to be a graduate of the MADAM
Program, if I understand correctly, at King’s College of London. Is this Master’s
program helping you to prepare for the working world of Digital Asset
Management?
Romney: [3:40] I have to say I’m keeping my fingers crossed that everything
goes well for September when I finish my dissertation. Working in the world
of DAM for so many years, you could almost have that thought, “What else is
there to learn?” [3:55] But I’m a great believer in that there’s always something to
learn, especially if you’re approaching a subject from a particular point of view. If
you’re in the commercial world or if you’re in preservation or library or cultural or
heritage, there’s always something to learn from another area.
[4:12] Where this course has been very beneficial, I have to say, is I’ve come
from a commercial background. What I’ve learned from it is the best practices
that certain other areas have, areas like archive or societies, are really very, very
useful for the commercial world.
[4:31] Things like having extremely in-depth metadata, something which isn’t just
focused on your business but is actually focused on a larger scale to allow an
interoperability between what you have and what other libraries have, or what
other institutions have. Things like Linked Data for, first of all, the semantic web,
which has been a long time coming but is really starting to accelerate now.
[4:57] Preservation strategies, which in the commercial world, I feel preservation
is a bit of an afterthought. But actually, it can prove hugely valuable because
you may have content which is sitting in your archives, or sitting in your DAM
system. Nobody knows what somebody is going to want in 20 or 30 years’ time.
Henrik: [5:20] True.
Romney: [5:21] Rather than just ignoring it, as I feel some commercial institutions
may well do, because it’s costly to keep all that data and to manage all
that data, there needs to be some kind of preservation strategy there which will
allow that content to be opened up in the future if it needs to be, if somebody
wants it. [5:42] I think during the degree, I’ve been very reassured that with every
class and module that I’ve taken, there really was a direct link with what I did on
a day-to-day basis, and what I do on a day-to-day basis. It’s certainly refreshed
my view of the DAM world, and it’s given me some good ideas to take forward.
[6:02] It’s very nice also to have a recognized qualification within DAM, because
I’ve not really seen something out there. You can have people who’ve worked in
this field for a long time, and I can say to people what I do when they look at me
as though I have two heads.
Henrik: [chuckles] [6:17]
Romney: [6:19] So, it’s nice to be able to say, “Oh, there is this here.” But the
fact that my mother will tease me for being a MADAM, and perhaps I will be at
the end. And that’s perhaps illegal in some countries.
Henrik: [laughs] [6:30]
Romney: [6:32] But I would most certainly recommend the course, and the
college and the staff have been wonderful. I think it’s really opened my eyes, I’d
have to say. It’s been very, very good.
Henrik: [6:43] Excellent. And, just to clarify, we’re speaking of the MADAM
program, which stands for the Master in the Arts of Digital Asset Management
Program at King’s College of London, correct?
Romney: [6:50] Yes. [laughs] That’s great, please.
Henrik: [6:55] Not any other madams, necessarily.
Romney: [6:56] Yes, it doesn’t lead to anything else.
Henrik: [laughs] [6:58] Best of luck with that.
Romney: [7:01] Thank you.
Henrik: [7:02] Let me ask you the last question, of course. What advice would
you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM
professionals?
Romney: [7:10] Well, one would hope that current DAM professionals know
what they’re doing, so I would not profess to be so omnipotent to be able to
give advice to them. But I think people who want to get into the field perhaps
don’t understand what it’s about. It’s a great field to be in, because it involves
a massive range of knowledge and lots of challenges as well. [7:34] As a DAM
manager, I think you need to know what every department in the company
that you’re working in is doing, because DAM will touch every department in
some way. Maybe extensively, it may be very small. Because of that, I think
the key part of DAM is not necessarily the technical solution, but the ability to
communicate.
[7:57] You need to empathize with people. You need to be able to sit down with
an individual and ask them what their pain points are, and understand them. Be
able to reassure them that you know what they’re talking about, and that whatever
solution you’re putting in place is actually going to help them.
[8:15] You have to give people something tangible, because every individual will
use a system differently. So you can’t build a system for one set of users, and
you cannot focus on one set of users, either. You’re not building the system for
just a CEO who wants to save money, or for the clerk who wants to save time in
filing things. You’re building it for everybody in between as well.
[8:38] So, I think the ability to manage people and their expectations, their fear
of change, what their daily stresses are, will make you a good Digital Asset
Manager. The ability to communicate, I think that’s what you need to always
keep in mind, always.
Henrik: [8:53] Excellent. Did you want to share your blog that you have as well?
Romney: [laughs] [8:58] My blog, which I’ve been very remiss at keeping up, but
it’s damitall.WordPress.com
Henrik: [9:08] Excellent. There’s a link to that on my blog at
AnotherDAMblog.com. Thank you so much, Romney.
Romney: [9:15] Thank you very much.
Henrik: [9:16] For more on Digital Asset Management, you can log onto
AnotherDAMblog.com.

Another DAM Podcast is now available on Audioboom,
Blubrry, iTunes, and the Tech Podcast Network. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Julie Maher on Digital Asset Management

Julie Maher discusses Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • Why does a jewelry company use a DAM?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?

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 Julie Maher. Julie,
how are you?
Julie Maher: [0:09] Doing great, how are you doing?
Henrik: [0:13] Good. Julie, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Julie: [0:15] I’ve been involved with Digital Asset Management for over 10 years.
I first started at Ralph Lauren. A little bit of background, I’ve always been very
interested in photography and the preservation of those types of assets. Digital
Asset Management happened to be something that I naturally fell into. It was
the natural next step for me. [0:39] At Ralph Lauren, they have an extremely
extensive collection of photographic assets, video assets and they were at the
point where everyone in the art department was keeping the same types of
images on different servers. It was really clogging up their space. It got to a
point where we really just needed to clean everything out and put it into one
system that the entire company could access.
Henrik: [1:10] Makes sense.
Julie: [1:14] Yeah, we started building this DAM system. It was highly customizable.
A company like Ralph Lauren is not going to have anything straightforward.
They’re very lifestyle driven, so you can’t just search for photographs by a
photographer. It has to be by thoroughbred, Nantucket, things like that as well
as searching as by location, photographer, model, season, year, that type of
thing. [1:42] It was extra special, because that’s really their whole thing. And also,
at Ralph Lauren, as in fashion in general, is very cyclical. A collection from the
80s will return and be very popular, and you need to pull those assets again as
inspiration for a new collection.
[2:00] It’s a huge, huge database. They had about 750,000 assets when I left in
2006. They were adding approximately 60,000 assets a year. It’s massive. I was
in the corporate archives department. My boss and I, Pat Christman, who had
been with the company since the very beginning, she was more like the company
historian, we worked with this team for this.
[2:30] We had a very rigorous schedule. We’d meet weekly. We really built up a
beautiful, beautiful system. I love it. To this day people always comment about
it. Anybody who has interacted with that system knows that it’s very fine tuned
and it works really well.
[2:49] Yeah, that was my entre into the Digital Asset Management world. From
there, I’ve worked with the NFL. I worked with them last year for their youth division.
They needed to organize their assets. It seems to be a problem in these
art departments where people download these high res assets and keep them
on their individual servers or desktops. It starts clogging up the system again.
[3:23] Companies are starting to realize that they need one place for these
assets to stay so they’re easily accessible but, again, not everywhere all over the
company. You know things start to happen. Was this the final approved one? Is
it cropped correctly? You don’t have that information in a simple file sitting on
your desktop. Do you know what I mean? It hasn’t gone through all the stages
of approval.
Henrik: [3:48] So, there’s centralization basically?
Julie: [3:51] Yeah, definitely. I basically work with luxury brands. My other job
that I do is I produce fashion videos. Now I’m starting to work with those clients
who have all these video assets and photographic assets, and they have no idea
what to do with them. [4:11] It just amazes me, maybe because I’ve been doing
this for 10 years it’s not shocking, but it just really surprises me that people don’t
have things more in order. They’re starting to catch on and realize that this is a
very vital part of their business, which is good. This area with the fashion sector,
luxury brands, it’s really totally booming right now.
Henrik: [4:42] Julie, why would a jewelry company, for example, use a DAM?
Julie: [4:47] Currently I am consulting at the second largest jewelry company
in the country, not the world actually. A jewelry company is like any other company
that has assets. In this particular case there is a jewelry designer for this
company that is pushing this project. [5:12] She herself realizes how valuable it
is to have her assets organized and located in one place. They’re preserved.
They’re getting digitized at very high resolution. They’re going to be preserved.
Everything is going to go to cold storage. Her actual physical assets are going
to be protected.
[5:32] I really saw the jewelry company as any company like a Ralph Lauren or
a NFL. It’s not even about the industry. It’s about preserving your assets and
making sure everything is taken care of. I could do this in any industry.
[5:50] I tell people all the time, “Yes, I work in a luxury brand sector, but I could
be doing this for anyone who has that need.” It’s a major, major need. This is
a great project that I’m working on now, because the company is 100 percent
behind it.
[6:09] We have a very nice budget, which you also often don’t get with these
projects because it’s so new on the scene, it seems. Again, as with Ralph Lauren,
the team I’m managing, we have a very rigorous schedule.
[6:29] We meet every Wednesday, and on Thursdays we action everything that
we talked about on Wednesday so it gives the team that is actually building out
the system five days to get it going. It’s a very, very strict schedule. Everybody is
totally committed to it.
[6:46] I think that’s what makes it work and makes a DAM system really effective,
if you’ve got a team that’s just as passionate as you are, knows the end goal,
knows what it’s going to look like and can see what it’s going to look like.
[7:00] Again, it’s highly customizable. We can just bring this right into the PR
department and use it for exactly what we need. What’s very exciting about this
project is that there are other modules that have already been developed within
the company, but they did it backwards.
[7:19] They uploaded photos first, and then they attached some data and everything
else. We’re doing it like the old school way. We are building it up nice and
slowly, very clean. Then we’re going to add assets. This is now going to serve as
the model for the rest of the company going forward.
[7:35] They have a very, very nice, clean system. It’s going to work perfectly. It’s
going to totally be across the company. It’s going to be one large system with
all these different modules, and it’s very, very nice.
Henrik: [7:52] Julie, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals or
people aspiring to become a DAM professional?
Julie: [8:00] I thought about this a little bit. I said I worked in fashion for a long
time, luxury brands. I feel that the DAM community is very inviting. I don’t feel
like it’s a very competitive group. People are always sharing ideas and going to
each other. [8:18] I think that’s really key in this industry, not to be afraid to contact
your colleagues and talk about things. Chances are they’ve already been
through it, and they can give you some pointers. I go to these Meetups, and I
meet these fantastic people.
[8:36] You keep in touch, and you come across some situation, like I met someone
last week and I’m going to contact them about these video assets I’m working
on for this current collection. I just think you should be really open and not
be very competitive about that type of thing.
[8:53] I know a lot of industries are competitive, but I feel like this is a knowledge
sharing group, and it’s just natural to want to talk about, discuss, and
share information. Do you know what I mean? It’s one of those industries that
work that way.
[9:06] For the aspiring professional, I just feel like you should go to these meetups.
Go to these networking events. I hear so many people say they don’t want
to go. They’re shy or whatever. But it’s like this is one group of people who are
so passionate about what they do that somebody is going to talk to you.
[9:30] That fear of social anxiety that people experience when going to these
events, people shouldn’t even worry about that. I find that younger people I run
into don’t want to do these things. I’m like, “It’s the best thing going. Are you
kidding me? I meet people every time I go. I meet wonderful people.” You just
expand your network.
Henrik: [9:51] Thanks, Julie.
Julie: [9:53] You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.
Henrik: [9:54] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto
AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.

Related Articles

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with David Lipsey on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • You are the Conference Chair to Henry Stewart DAM Conferences. How have you seen Digital Asset Management change in the past several years?
  • What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with David Lipsey. David, how are you?

David Lipsey: [0:11] Good, Henrik. Thanks for asking and thanks for the opportunity to join you.

Henrik: [0:14] David, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

David: [0:19] I had the chance to be involved in Digital Asset Management
before the phrase even existed. I was able to become a part of one of the foundational software companies, Artesia Technologies, which grew out of work that I was doing with many other people at its precursor company at Thomson, the publisher. [0:47] We were looking at what now seems like the quaint and carriage trade idea of repurposing editorial assets to go from textbooks or the technical reference materials from Thomson into CDs which could be distributed largely for reference publishing.
Of course, out of this…Let’s call it something…Out of this spaghetti grew the
DNA of the concept of create once and use many. We weren’t able to grab the words “content management.” They had become used for web-facing applications. But we did come up with, in some sort of aggregation and a bit asystematic [1:33] with the phrase “Digital Asset Management.”
[1:37] The first companies I had the chance to with, Henrik, that were involved with this were a company that’s local to you and I, “The Washington Post,” as well as General Motors, one of the largest corporations in the world that
has an extraordinary archive of images and thousands of hours of video that they were looking to put to better work for GM and reduce the cost of finding that material.
[2:01] I’ve continued through my career, back from this early wandering into what was then an uncharted map of, “Let’s become Digital Asset Management,” through several years with Artesia, which was acquisitioned by OpenText. In subsequent roles as an industry principle for media and entertainment for SAP, then with FTI Consulting, also in the media and entertainment practice.
[2:31] My concerns go across the entire spectrum of the content industries,
whether it’s for text or image, for audio, for video, or for other kinds of files
where, again, creating once and using again can bring value to organizations, to companies, to universities, museums, etc.

Henrik: [2:54] You’re the conference chair of Henry Stewart DAM conferences, how have you seen Digital Asset Management change in the past several years?

David: [3:03] It would be interesting to plot this and do word maps or kind of idea clusters. They are fun to reflect on. I think as you and I have talked about, and as you’ve been good about presenting it at Henry Stewart, there are now actually job descriptions about, jobs which are entitled Digital Asset Manager.
[3:29] I think that, in and of itself, indicates how DAM is becoming much more of an enterprise application. I believe there’s a large transition that we’re seeing occurring right now, where we have… There’s some kind of almost sweet irony in that this application, which collapses silos between content types, a PowerPoint, a Word document, an image, a video, an audio file, has been siloed itself into many departmental applications in the businesses or organizations where DAM had been deployed.
[4:09] I think, Henrik, that we’re seeing a recognition that DAM is an enterprise resource application, much the way that payroll is. Payroll could vary if there are exempt or nonexempt employees. Payroll could certainly vary if they’re union or non-union employees, with the complexities of the workflows of that very specialized compensation methodologies that have to be deployed.
[4:36] DAM itself, I think, is moving from something that happened in various departments, which had the original budgets for this, to an enterprise application.
To tie this to your question, I think we’re seeing that in the caliber of Digital
Asset Management installations that many companies are kind enough to share at the Henry Stewart Conferences.
[5:03] For example, we now will have, this year, the third or fourth maturing presentation of the application that goes across Warner Brothers and its allied organizations at Turner and CNN, which supports not only across business lines, across asset types. But now, I don’t know how many millions of assets are managed
in that application. That’s a statement we just simply could not have made
earlier on in several years of Henry Stewart Conferences.
[5:36] I think the fact that there are emerging models for what disposition means and HR policies for hiring. There is a recognition that DAM needs to be a centralized application and that we now see, across lines of business, repositories that number in the millions of assets and are just a part of everyday life indicates some of the maturing of this field.

Henrik: [6:01] That’s true. What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

David: [6:07] I think attending the conferences that are available is a great idea. I think the chance to understand that we’re only still, in so many ways, at the beginning of this field. Yes, the more mature vendors have been around for a dozen years or so, from the late ‘90s to here we are in late 2010. That the demands on the content and the fundability of content are something that we’re still seeing very early on. [6:43] I was in a meeting last week where I heard one of the large repurposers of content in the sports industry talk about that they currently service 106 separate digital handheld devices. This is October of 2010 when there’s only the iPad and only a nominal amount of Android smartphones.
[7:08] Just imagine, Henrik, a year from now the demand on content. And not only from industries where publishing is both a noun and a verb our friends in the book business or the movie business or TV and magazine publishing. But imagine a year from now that the demand on content from CPG [Consumer Package Goods] companies and from other manufacturers that have marketing initiatives will have exquisite tablet devices that their content can be used on.
[7:39] I’m saying this as a note to encourage them to become involved in the Digital Asset Management space and understanding that it’s a very wide-open field for someone who wants to become a DAM professional.
[7:57] I also think that someone wanting to get involved in digital liquidity within the company that they’re applying for may encounter some resistance in more entrenched departmental behaviors or operations. Nothing unusual. It’s just that the VPs or department managers may have been working with certain workflows for a long time and someone coming into the field, especially someone who is…
[8:31] There’s Schwinn Bicycle involved in iPhone and digital wheels, if you will, is going to be, maybe, much more comfortable than the people that are working for in terms of content sharing, content liquidity, and content repurposing.
[8:50] I guess that would be something that probably both of us would give as a word of caution to someone entering the field, that someone’s comfort with living in the connected world may be encountering a department that’s not as digitally integrated and not as connected within its own organization. Some education, some patience, and some very private eye-rolling may be a good approach to encountering that.
[9:20] Does that make sense?


Henrik: [9:21] Yes, and there’s likely many of those.

David: [9:23] Yeah, I think so. I think it’s one of the things that it’s both exciting.
It can also be very frustrating for…I don’t want to say a generation before.
Newer employees who are used to just lightning-fast content sharing and have not encountered the fact that it took, what was it, 20 years to clear the DVD of the first season of “Saturday Night Live” because of the complexities of the rights situation. [9:57] I think that another one of the challenges is that it makes, with the technology that provides for rapid worldwide ease of access to assets, that the distance rights systems and governance systems have not nearly kept pace with this.
[10:15] Rights clearance and rights permissioning, and, in addition, the pricing models are far from mature about this. We’re sitting here in this conversation on the cusp of “The New York Times” having an interesting transition coming up with paywall with metered access to free content. Magazines, finding a new wealth of opportunity on subscription-based and display advertising-based revenue from tablets that didn’t exist a year ago.

Henrik: [10:51] Like “Wired”…

David: [10:54] Absolutely. We’re only seeing a handful of tablet-based magazines to talk about. It could be easy to come into a job and just assume everything’s been figured out about the economics of digital content and the rights that are “the crazy aunt in the basement,” [laughs] use that phrase or “the crazy uncle in the basement.” [11:22] We have a long ways to go on the econometrics of digital contentment and on the ease with which rights are, at this point, permitted because much more maturity is occurring in the negotiation stage than previously.

Henrik: [11:39] Thank you, David.

David: [11:40] Henrik, it’s always a delight to spend time with you and appreciate your contributions to maturing the field. Look forward to talking to you again.

Henrik: [11:49] For more on Digital Asset Management, log on to
anotherdamblog.com. Thanks again.

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