Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Erin McElrath on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Erin McEIrath discuss 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 Erin McEIrath. Erin, how are you?

Erin McElrath:  I’m just fine. How are you?

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

Erin McElrath:  I am the Creative Tools Manager at an e-commerce company called Brandless and I manage all of the digital asset management and content that comes in and out of the company, whether it be on the site or on our printed collateral or on our social media.

Henrik de Gyor:  How does an e-commerce company that puts people first use Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  We use it just like any other company would. We do a lot of creative assets internally for marketing purposes. We also use it to store all of our product information, all of our packaging. Anything. Any image that has shown up on our site, we like to house on our DAM, but most recently, we’re starting to use a lot of user-generated content (UGC) from social media. So we’re scraping all social media sites and the images that we like and we would like to use further, ideally, we would like to put that in the DAM, in the, in the next coming months. In addition to the digital asset management, I also do all the post-production workflow. So I’m working with all of our outside agencies as the content is funneled in through the company and then approved and funneled back out.

Henrik de Gyor:  What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Erin McElrath:  Well, I think the biggest challenge, and I think anybody has been in the industry for awhile can agree that the biggest challenges assessing the need of the company for our positions. We do a job that we’re basically when we’re doing our job, no news is good news and everything is sailing right along and very efficient, but to bring other people on as help and as teammates because this is a very hard job to do by yourself. To show the need and the value of the position can be challenging. When the company would rather spend their money on new creatives or engineering team on new platforms to show that the DAM is actually the brain and the hub of the organization.  When that is running smoothly, everybody can do their jobs. It takes a lot to show that value for successes. I guess on that same note when everything is running smoothly, that is my biggest success. Right now at Brandless, I have implemented three workflows using our current DAM where content has flowed in and out through a system with permissions and approvals. Everybody seems to be really happy with it and everything is working. So I think that to me is the pillar of my big success in any job that I have is making sure that the DAM that the company purchases is used to its full capabilities.

Henrik de Gyor:  Would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Erin McElrath:  I think the biggest one is don’t be afraid to assert yourself. We’re often seen as the people in the corner doing manual data entry work. That’s how we’re viewed by certain members of a team or a company, but we’re really not. We do so many things and most of the time nobody knows what we do. Digital Asset Manager is such a broad term that it could mean anything, so define the role that you want within your organization and what will be most appropriate and try to align yourselves with them, with the people in your company that you know you can help them most. Oftentimes, they don’t know what you do. Go up to them and asked them their pain points and see how you can help.

Another big one, most recently I kind of spoke about it earlier… Learn all you can about user-generated content, which is often called in the industry UGC. This is really big now. A lot of Digital Asset Managers don’t like to put that in the DAM because there’s so much. The liability is very unclear. It changes all the time and oftentimes when we have assets, we have contracts and releases for those assets, but for UGC we do not. Oftentimes, we just have a screenshot that our producers said, “can we use this photo?” And the person said “yes,” and that’s it. I think in my opinion, times are changing and we’re starting to formalize that relationship. Now Brandless, for example, is using a lot of UGC content and our marketing and our social media. We like to have and I like to have those in the DAM so I can track where they’ve been used and who is responsible for that connection. If something goes wrong with that initial user that uploaded that content, we can take it down immediately. I know where it lives on everything, so yeah, just familiarize yourself like technology is changing and we’re right at the forefront of that, so just be on the ball.

Henrik de Gyor:  Well thanks, Erin.

Erin McElrath:  Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor:  For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. You have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

 

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Victor LeBon 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 Victor LeBon. Victor, how are you?

Victor LeBon:  [0:10] I’m very well, Henrik, how are you?

Henrik:  [0:11] Good. Victor, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Victor:  [0:15] Henrik, I’m the Director of Marketing Technology at a company called ICP.

ICP is a company that started in advertising production which is we still do today. That’s my background and why I joined the company.

[0:28] Advertising production relies on the key principle of reusing and repurposing contents. In essence that its core business, but doing so in a way that is compliant and it complies with legal, regulatory, and brand guidelines as well. That’s the key principle of Digital Asset Management as well.

[0:46] I started working on the advertising production side. My first opportunity with DAM, was helping a client with their migration they wanted to have from one system to another. Then, I worked as a Business Director for Unilever ‑‑ one of our key clients in this area ‑‑ supporting their asset management solution.

[1:02] These days, I look after all of our clients here at ICP and any services supporting marketing technology, of course, of which DAM is a central part. My day-to-day role these days focuses around digital transformation. How to integrate asset management effectively within the wider digital transformation ecosystem.

Henrik:  [1:21] How does a marketing communications production company use Digital Asset Management?

Victor:  [1:26] That’s a great question. We use DAM in all aspects of our business, both the advertising production and marketing technology services. For the marketing communications and production side of things it’s essential for the work that we do. We have to ensure we reuse and repurpose the content for our clients. Effectively reuse their assets.

[1:47] We have to be compliant. We have to provide our clients with visibility and transparency both on the creative process, the review and approval process, as well as the final output.

[1:58] Touch points with DAM, is restricting master creatives, downloading those key assets, the whole MRM aspect which is approval and work flow, as well as uploading the adaptations, which we ourselves produce. Then of course, distributing it to the end points.

[2:14] ICP took a slightly different strategic direction from other marketing communication production companies in the sense that we don’t develop our own software. We very much wanted to remain agnostic and ensure we use whatever solutions best suited for our client needs.

Victor:  [2:30] If a client has a solution, a DAM solution which they themselves have chosen, that’s best suited to their needs in our production areas we can also make use of that. We have a solution that we use in‑house but we are not wedded to it. We can make sure that whatever we chose and recommended is aligned to our client needs.

[2:46] For example, for one of our clients Diageo, we offer both production services and marketing technology services. That works really well because we have an overall understanding of the end‑to‑end process for the assets that we work with for our clients and both the creation thereof and the management thereof in the systems as well.

Henrik:  [3:05] Victor, how do you see the role of Digital Asset Management in correlation with digital transformation?

Victor:  [3:10] I think this is something that’s changed very much in recent times where digital transformation initiatives are happening everywhere we see. Prior to digital transformation, asset management was happening. It was really about finding ROI and finding efficiencies in the clients process. The key change now is that DAM, or Digital Asset Management is now no longer really optional.

[3:38] If a company wants to go through a digital transformation program, they really have to have DAM as part of their core pillar of their capabilities. You need to look at the end‑to‑end states, with digital transformation.

[3:50] You have to start off with sometimes what might be a very mature DAM system. Or if you’re starting at this from scratch, you might need to go on and start an new DAM system or consolidate, but you can’t have services that operate in silos. You can’t have technology that operates in silos, as well.

[4:06] No matter what your technology or supplier landscape in, digital transformation is really about bringing those together and providing a consolidated ecosystem, both of services, and technology, and capabilities to offer that seamless experience for the clients and customers.

Henrik:  [4:23] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Victor:  [4:28] I’ll try not to be too controversial here. One of the biggest challenges that we’ve seen and I think this is probably the same thing for many companies like ourselves, is internal stakeholders at our clients, and working with lots of different parties. Indeed, they all have their different priorities, their different agendas, their different KPIs and the key things they need to try and achieve.

[4:51] That brings different requirements to the party, and different perspectives, I say, as on what is critical for success. I think the bigger the solution, first of all, the more stakeholders you have to involve to ensure success. That brings in itself its own challenges in getting those individual stakeholders to align. Of course, looking at the reward at the end of that is the bigger the solution, the more the stakeholders, the greater the potential benefit.

[5:16] One other key challenge which we’ve seen as well is technology never moves as quickly as the requirements. Everyone wants something and they want it now. By the time it’s available, they want something different. Looking at change, how technology is implemented, and how support around that technology is implemented, that will stand the test of time.

[5:37] Providing support to the business, and to the various department who uses this technology whilst at the same time continually improving the solution is a big challenge which I think we’ve got a lot of experience in doing. We’re quite excited about delivering that.

[5:52] In terms of successes, again, I’ll be slightly controversial and say that for me the biggest success is when we can get clients to the stage when we can step back and a lot of our core services are no longer required. We will have achieved our goal of embedding that solutions part to business as usual processes.

[6:12] We’ve helped work with software developers and business to make the system more refined or work towards making data gathering process much more efficient. We’re really starting to see success now as when that DAM system achieves a certain level of maturity, that it can really be integrated effectively, within the wider ecosystem.

[6:35] It’s like a well‑oiled machine that operates very effectively on its own sometimes and very independently from us. We’re happy to embrace that because we work almost sometimes to develop ourselves and the services we have into obsolescence because we want to deliver value for our clients at every stage. We know if we deliver value there and demonstrate that to the clients, then they’ll find something else for us to do.

[6:57] That’s something we are quite excited to work in partnership with our clients to deliver.

Henrik:  [7:02] Victor, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Victor:  [7:08] First of all, I’d like to say that this is a really exciting industry. I’m massively passionate about this. I get to quite excited thinking about working in this area. So much is happening in this space and this is going to be so fundamental to the growth and success of organizations everywhere.

[7:24] My advice would be have a passion for what you do and for delivering value and quality. Start by delivering value in your role in your job, in your company or whatever. Whatever area of the DAM industry that you work in, whether you’re on the client side, or the software vendor side, or the services side as we are.

[7:42] Then the opportunities grow. I think taking that approach of doing the job you’re been asked to do. Doing it really well and passionately, then the opportunities come to you because clients and partners can recognize you’ve got a really good investment in getting it right. Then after, you can grow it from there.

[8:03] The other piece of advice I would say is never stop learning. Never stop asking questions and being curious about the world around you. The technologies change, organizations change, the relationship between marketing and customers has fundamentally changed.

[8:19] Big organizations are getting this now, that they need to embrace change and making it part of their day‑to‑day. Embracing change all together, with all the different parties working together and being OK, with that makes for a really exciting journey that we can go on.

Henrik:  [8:34] Excellent, well thanks Victor.

Victor:  [8:36] Thank you Henrik.

Henrik:  [8:38] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. For this and 180 other podcast episodes, go to 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 Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Frank DeCarlo on Digital Asset Management

Frank DeCarlo discusses 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 Frank DeCarlo.

Frank, how are you?

Frank DeCarlo:  [0:09] I’m doing well. Henrik, how are you?

Henrik:  [0:10] Great. Frank, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Frank:  [0:14] I was a client of the company and now work for RPR Graphics before actually Digital Asset Management was coined as DAM. It was their answer to having hundreds of identical images, shuffling through their studio every week when they realized there had to be a better way.

[0:29] Years later, the term Digital Asset Management arrived and shortly thereafter, the opportunity to access and distribute images and any asset became available over the Internet.

[0:40] That’s when RPR realized what a viable service DAM could be not only for themselves, but for their clients, to spare our clients the capital expense and bring its 20 plus years of DAM experience as just another service.

Henrik:  [0:53] Frank, how does an organization focused on pre‑media use Digital Asset Management?

Frank:  [0:57] That’s a fair question, Henrik. I know pre‑media isn’t common.

[1:00] Wikipedia states that it has its processes and procedures that occur between the conception of original artwork and the manufacturing of final output channel. It’s a little extreme of explanation, but what we do is we handle everything before it goes to press.

[1:17] Everything before it gets on the web, and anything that needs organization and retouching, imaging manipulation, and trafficking for any marketing and advertising’s needs in distribution.

[1:32] It’s a staple with every one of our clients whether our clients right off the bat come to us wanting a DAM initiative to launch for themselves, or they’re in the early stages of working with us and understanding how we manage and distribute files between us, and the client.

[1:48] We know ultimately that everything we do and working with our clients is showing them the basic foundation of organizing taxonomy and coming up with metadata, whether it would only be a small percentage of their library initially, we continue to provide the service.

[2:02] Our experience with DAM not only benefits them in the end, we know that would pay off even more so down the road.

[2:08] The simple concept we all understand in DAM community is how easily an asset can then be found and distributed. We practice with every one of our clients just as, again we do business and it’s our service. We are the central hub and repository for their assets and that for RPR starts with our end user in pre‑media, the marketing, and advertising professionals.

[2:32] We act as an extension of their production departments and by doing so, again we introduce our 60 years of experience in helping streamline maybe their workflows not just with DAM, but saving them time and money in a variety of ways to help improve their time to market.

[2:49] DAM quickly becomes a relatively easier return on investment, once they start using it and evident when working with us, because it’s a vital part of how we been operating our day‑to‑day for over 20 years.

Henrik:  [3:01] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Frank:  [3:05] It’s an interesting segue in so far as one of the bigger challenge is and has been showing ROI before instituting a DAM. It’s easier now for certain. DAM is becoming a more common phrase, but ten years ago and even older than that, the eyebrows were raised, and it was more inherent when speaking about DAM and its benefits.

[3:28] It hasn’t completely disappeared and we’re still hear, “Well, we just used Dropbox” or “We’re OK with how we’ve always done it”.

[3:35] The other challenge is once it clicks, and a light bulb goes off and everyone is on board, it’s the act of teaching and implementing the governance necessary toward this growing organism.

[3:48] Metadata alone is a living and breathing thing and constantly changing based on the growth of the organization and how their assets relate to their business. Extraneous changes are happening every day within our industry, thus the metatagging is always changing and evolving.

[4:05] An example you take somebody like Donald Trump. A name you don’t hear every day. Years ago his metadata might have been real estate, business, The Art of the Deal, mogul, Atlantic City, Ivanka, those types of things and then what was added was beauty pageants, The Apprentice, television, NBC, blah, blah, blah.

[4:27] Today, [laughs] GOP, presidential candidate, Mexican border… you get the idea. It’s ever changing and it’s added too.

[4:37] Successes that I’ve seen in DAM is when it starts out small and we always start our clients out in baby steps, get them introduced to the basics and show them how it benefits the way they’re already working.

[4:50] Then you start to see it grow and starts to explode, all of a sudden I’m hearing, Frank, well we need another user group, we need to convert images on the fly for our web team or the packaging department, and our company wants to know how we’re flipping the logos over them so quickly, and if we can help them with organizing and distributing between their agencies.

[5:12] Or Frank, my phone is up for ringing anymore, there’s no more CD request and I need to send via FedEx because people are now going in on their own and findings things that they need and putting the owners on the people that need those files rather than having a distribution source.

[5:29] It’s all great stuff for me. That’s the payoff, helping an organization streamline their workflows and improving efficiency, that’s what RPR has been doing for many, many years.

Henrik:  [5:38] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Frank:  [5:43] It’s an exciting time in DAM. Where I see the most growth is with the digital archivists. We at RPR have RPR cybrarian. We’re finding more and more that our clients not only want us to take control of their digital library, but also be responsible, to understand how everything needs to be meta‑tagged.

[6:02] Basically, giving them an entire service, asking us to practice the governance needing to be sure their library stays current, and everything needing can be found based on search requirements relevant to their assets.

[6:16] It only makes sense. Libraries are growing every day, every hour, and how we keep track of them. What we’re spending on those digital assets in some cases could be a great deal of money, which creates these assets. They need to be at your fingertips and if you can’t find them or have to recreate them, it’s a great loss in many ways and sometimes not just monetarily.

[6:39] The more you can contribute helping organize libraries and help cut down on any search is critical, and once you do that, make sure you have a disaster recovery plan in place that make sense for your business.

[6:49] You can spend all the time on the world building a library and DAM that benefits everyone and is working properly, but if it goes down or disappears completely and doesn’t come back up and enough time, that doesn’t cause you a great deal of pain in the process or worse, where are you? I think disaster recovery is becoming more and more critical with our DAM and our extending libraries.

Henrik:  [7:12] Thanks, Frank.

Frank:  [7:13] Absolutely, Henrik. Thank you for the opportunity and I really enjoyed being here today.

Henrik:  [7:16] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to AnotherDAMblog.com. For the other podcast episodes, go to 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 Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jade Jourdan on Digital Asset Management

Jade Jourdan discusses 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 Jade Jourdan.

Jade, how are you?

Jade Jourdan:  [0:11] I’m doing well, thank you. How are you?

Henrik:  [0:13] Good. Jade, how are involved with Digital Asset Management?

Jade:  [0:17] I work at Edwards Lifesciences, and we’re a medical device company. I’m a Senior Digital Asset Specialist, and every day is focused on our Digital Asset Management. I’m responsible for the DAM structure and ensuring we are collecting all the necessary metadata for searching and making sure that everyone gets assets that they need for their projects.

Henrik:  [0:40] How does a medical equipment company specializing in artificial heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring use Digital Asset Management?

Jade:  [0:48] Our DAM system must primarily archive our marketing assets, product images, and corporate images. Once projects go through our regulatory approval process, they are uploaded by our creative vendors globally into our DAM system and then assets are processed, metadata tags added for searching, etc.

[1:10] Our DAM system is accessed globally by our regional employees and vendors and once our main creative is completed, our projects are repurposed locally and globally. Each region translates the project into their language, processes it to their regulatory, and then produces it for their marketplace.

Henrik:  [1:31] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Jade:  [1:35] Well, we are very successful at having our library organized by individual product groups and functional areas so that images and source files are easily located for individual projects and repurposing existing designs.

[1:49] The challenge is working with a high volume of projects and making sure we receive all of our source files from the many agencies we utilize. So working with their marketing departments which are very busy and getting them to retrieve all of our projects from the agencies that we work with, making sure we have everything in our library.

Henrik:  [2:12] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Jade:  [2:15] Well, I think DAM is an exciting and growing industry. I’m relatively new to it, four years in, and have learned a lot about it and I think the technology is constantly improving with innovative new ways to accommodate and efficiently store large data assets.

[2:34] Most companies have major digital components that need to be managed and organized for productive workflow and I would encourage people with an interest in becoming a DAM professional to absolutely go for it. It’s an exciting field to get involved in.

Henrik:  [2:48] Well, thanks, Jade.

Jade:  [2:49] Thank you.

Henrik:  [2:49] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherDAMblog.com. For this and 170 other podcast episodes, go to anotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today