Based on the blog post from Another DAM blog:
Written and read by Henrik de Gyor
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
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George Brown discusses Digital Asset Management
Here are the questions asked:
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 George Brown.
George, how are you?
George Brown: [0:09] Great. Thanks for having me.
Henrik: [0:11] No problem. George, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
George: [0:15] Henrik, I’m a member of our publishing technologies team with
the editorial product development group for Highlights for Children. That team
includes our premedia production, our archiving, our rights management, and
our asset management. We’re currently in the middle of two implementations at
one time. [0:36] We’re doing a new DAM, an upgrade, as well as implementing
an editorial publishing system to help track our workflow as we’re building these
magazines, books, and various other digital products. So in my normal day job,
I manage our assets services team. There’s four of us. There’s a rights management
administrator, our archivist, and a content management specialist. So our
archivist is working with the premedia team in advance of a product to set up
folder structures and file naming conventions.
[1:15] Then that way the files are put into the right setup so that, when it is time
to archive them, we have them ready to go in the right condition that we need
them for archive and reuse. Our rights management administrator is tracking
all of the rights for content that we’re acquiring as well as content that we are
licensing out to various partners. Anytime we reuse content, she helps us check
those rights.
[1:43] Our content management specialist is really working within the DAM, and
right now a couple of other databases, to help our internal users here in the
editorial group as well as our business team in our Columbus, Ohio offices, and
then our various international and domestic licensing partners. Anytime there’s a
request to reuse content, it comes through our group, and our content management
specialist pulls those assets together for that request.
[2:17] Now we archive everything in a nice orderly fashion, but reuse is not
always nice and orderly. They may need a couple of pages from this book, a
couple of pages from this magazine, and maybe a few puzzles from some other
place. So our content management specialist is working with these people
within the DAM pulling those assets out and actually putting them together for
new use purposes. So he does a variety of packaging and repackaging to give
the right assets in the right format to what we call our customers, whether internal
or external.
[2:54] Now, the other part of my job right now is on the DAM implementation.
I’ve been working with our vendor to look at our assets and the metadata we
have, and figure out how we’re getting the assets ingested, and then the metadata
from another system attached to the appropriate assets. We’ve really
been fortunate with our DAM implementation in that our Director of Publishing
Technologies, who is my boss, has a wide experience in the DAM space.
[3:25] He’s done a number of DAM implementations through a few different
organizations. So he’s able to bring to our organization this deep understanding
of what it means to go through a DAM implementation starting with the requirements
gathering, then onto the vendor selection, the contract negotiation and
now, here we are in the heart of the implementation phase.
[3:52] Having Joe, who understands all of these pieces, is really helping us as an
organization hit the ground running with our DAM implementation.
Henrik: [4:01] How does a publisher of children’s magazine stories and activity
books use Digital Asset Management?
George: [4:07] It’s interesting. We’re a 65 year old company, and a lot of us remember
us as a magazine company. “Oh, I remember ‘Highlights’ from when I
was a kid.” We’ve always collected and looked at the importance of asset management
before they were digital assets. It used to be up in our attic, and now
we’ve sent these off to various storage places. [4:33] But we’ve always collected
our backup, our archival materials, photos, and our art. As time progresses, we
went from film to digital in the late ‘90s. We’ve expanded our business to be
more than a magazine with books, activities, partners that are doing different licensing,
and international partners. We’ve had more and more need to get back
into that archive to find our content and reuse it.
[5:05] First off, our Digital Asset Management is for accessing the archive and
gaining those assets that we need for reuse. Also, for research purposes, our
editorial group is very thoughtful about the content they make, and they’re
often looking back at what we’ve done in the past to help them think about
what they might like to make going forward. We also use our asset management
in the current production process, for storing our unpublished assets and being
able to search and find those assets quickly.
[5:45] We’ve been doing this with a FileMaker database and a lightweight DAM.
It’s kind of like you have to go to our FileMaker database to find the metadata,
the record information. Then match that up with a picture of it, from the lightweight
DAM. Our new DAM implementation, with the EnterMedia software, is
going to bring those two pieces together. So it should be one environment for
our users to be able to search and find what they’re looking for.
Henrik: [6:19] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
George: [6:24] It’s fascinating, Henrik. I love the DAM field. I fell into it accidentally.
People I’ve met at various trade shows seem to have come about it the
same way. I was working on a project to create a summer magazine of activities,
stories and puzzles about some fun summer activities for kids. My colleague
and I, as we were working on this, were flipping through printed back issues
of the magazine. [6:55] And started thinking about, “Isn’t there a better way to
find this stuff? Imagine if we could just do like Google and search terms related
to summer to find this content?” That was really what got me started into the
DAM space. The more I get into it the more excited I get about how DAM can
be such a central piece to the publishing process and the content creation. If we
can help our end users, who are varied.
[7:28] They can be in the editorial group, the marketing group, our licensing
partners, or a whole variety of different customers. If we can help them find
our content, they can think of more and better ways to build products that are
meaningful to children, which helps fulfill our mission. As well as helps us continue
to grow as a media brand.
Henrik: [7:55] It’s a very exciting field, indeed. Thank you so much, George.
George: [7:58] Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Henrik: [8:02] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, log
onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom,
iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. 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.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
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 Dave Ginsberg.
Dave, how are you?
Dave Ginsberg: [0:10] I’m doing well, Henrik. Thanks for having me on.
Henrik: [0:12] No problem. Dave, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Dave: [0:17] I work at a studio in Los Angeles, and I oversee all the technology
for our marketing group. Marketing’s interesting in that we’re almost like a mini
case study in production and post workflows. We deal with all the same issues
everyone in media does. Things like limited dry space resources, tight deadlines,
the need to be more efficient, and, most of all, the need to be more cost
effective in how we do things. [0:39] DAMs allow us to take repetitive tasks and
automate them with metadata so we can leverage the assets we create between
the different groups that we service. We can go into our DAM and find assets
we might have forgotten about or just something that we could take one asset,
another asset, and merge the two together.
[0:55] Oftentimes, we find ourselves doing slight changes rather than making
something new whenever our clients need something, and obviously that can be
very cost effective.
[1:03] Our DAM also allows our clients to service themselves directly. If they
need a file type that they didn’t originally request or they need more copies,
they lost their original copy, they can go into our system and create whatever
they need from the master mezzanine file, which is very, very high quality. They
can make anything they need from a web resource all the way out to a HD-type
quality.
[1:25] They just do it right in the system themselves, so we found just a lot of
efficiencies moving into a DAM, and we’re excited to move into the world of file based
workflows.
Henrik: [1:35] You originally started a blog and a podcast about Digital Asset
Management. Can you tell us more about this?
Dave: [1:40] Sure. I started a website called ElegantWorkflow.com. I started
thinking about it a couple years ago. I was researching DAM, so file-based
workflows, getting on the Internet, and looking all around. There really weren’t
a lot of sites out there at the time. I know that there’s a few more now, but still
it’s not something where you go into Google and 40 sites pop up. It still seems
to be a really new technology that people are interested in. [2:11] What I wanted
to do was create a place where I could impart what I have learned in my journey
in this arena, and I work underneath the finance and operations umbrella
where I’m working out. I see things very differently from where a programmer
or an engineer might look at how to build a system. I wanted to be able to pass
along what I had learned as well as interview some of the top industry people
out there.
The site’s really taking off, and it’s also a lot of fun to have a nice relaxing conversation
with somebody that I would normally meet on a floor at NAB
[2:36] and have two minutes or five minutes with them or be in a
meeting where they’re presenting something to me to having a relaxed chat
where we’re talking between 20 minutes and an hour.
[2:55] They can really dig into the meat and potatoes of what they want to talk
about and impart what they’ve learned in what their business or their technology’s
all about.
Henrik: [3:06] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Dave: [3:12] My advice for DAM pros and people aspiring to get into this industry
is to learn as much as you can about everything. If you’re an engineer
or a programmer, learn about finance and production. If you’re a producer, try
to learn about programming and technology. [3:27] I think for everybody, we
all need to learn about library sciences, metadata, and also how users look for
information because I think that there’s a lot of great systems out there, but they
could be even better if people really took the time to figure out how does the
average user look for something? What’s the different between how an editor
would be searching for something based on his or her needs versus someone
who’s a producer, an associate producer, or a researcher?
[3:56] The more you can see things from other people’s perspective, the better
you can build the systems and most of all the better metadata structures we can
all build because it still is a relatively new technology, a relatively new arena for
everybody. There’s so much we can all learn from each other. I think the more
you can just see through another person’s eyes, the better all these systems can
be and the better we can all do our work.
[4:22] Most of all, I think the goal for everybody is getting home and having a
home life and not sitting in the office looking for a file for three days when you
should just be able to go into a DAM and pull it up within three seconds.
Henrik: [4:35] Great advice. Make sure you get out of your specialty, and make
sure you get out of your comfort zone.
Dave: [4:40] Exactly, and just really embrace technology. There’s a lot of amazing
things people are doing out there. Through websites like your website,
Elegant Workflow there are a number of these sites starting up you can really
get a feel for what everybody else is doing, and most of all I love when people
tell me about what they would have done differently. [5:01] In every interview, I
always like to ask, “If you were doing this all over again knowing what you know
now, what would you do differently?” Some of the answers you get are not even
close to what you would expect. Sometimes it’s really basic small things that
people got so excited to go build a DAM and they didn’t think about how it was
going to be used all the way to crazy metadata structures that people want to
employ that I don’t even think we have the technology yet for.
Henrik: [5:28] Great points. Thanks, Dave. [5:29] For more on this and
other Digital Asset Management topics, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com.
Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom, iTunes and the Tech Podcast
Network. 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.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Based on the blog post from Another DAM blog:
Written and read by Henrik de Gyor
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Another DAM Podcast