Another DAM Podcast

Audio about Digital Asset Management

Tag Archives: #reDAM


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Jennifer Terbosic on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Jenn Terbosic. Jenn, how are you?

Jennifer Terbosic: Good, thanks. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Henrik de Gyor: Good. Jenn, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Terbosic: I’m getting ready to approach my second full season with the Philadelphia Eagles and with that, I’m responsible for managing our media asset management. With that, I help my team organize their content that comes in on a daily basis by creating metadata fields and values for those fields that makes sense to everyone on our team to improve our search and our organization of our assets.

I also coordinate day-to-day MAM activities just like normal MAM needs and maybe some support issues that arise. I just kind of handle and coordinate that stuff as each day goes on.

Henrik de Gyor: Jenn, how does one of the most storied sports franchises in history use Digital Asset Management?

Jennifer Terbosic: We use our MAM and stuff in several aspects. For example, on game day we have a lot of moving pieces, a lot of different content is being produced… photos, videos and our goal with Reach Engine was to streamline and automate how that content got into our MAM. On game day, our replay operators are constantly creating clips and sending them off to a hot folder.

That hot folder then pulls those clips directly into Reach Engine and from there we have our loggers kind of waiting, watching and reviewing that content as it comes in and they immediately start logging and tagging that content. Then, it’s easily and readily available for all of our editors as they need to start creating their pieces on game day. It helps move and speed that process along a little bit.

Another area I think we’ve been really successful in is automation and workflows. I work really closely with our integrators at Chesapeake Systems and we take our manual processes and automate them as much as we possibly can. We found that automating these processes really saved time and improved efficiency. It helps improve delivery time to our social channels as well as our affiliates. A big part that I’ve seen with creating workflows is it’s really, to be successful in it is really understanding and learning the manual process inside and out.

After that process is created, the automation goes smoothly and you really see the benefit of automating some of those manual processes. We’re also in the process of bringing on our design team content and on-boarding their team as well as going through our entire physical archive. We have tons and tons of historic photos, negatives, slides that all need to be looked at and kind of surveyed and then we actually have to go through and come up with processes and get that stuff digitized and bring that content into our MAM as well.

Those are some of the three key areas that we’re starting to kind of really use our MAM for and just keep going with those projects. As you talk to people in your department, you come up with, “Hey, maybe this idea … Maybe this stuff can go in the MAM.” It kind of just becomes that niche application. I think as you expose it to your, not just your internal team that is maybe your creative team, but letting everybody else know that it’s available.

Then I think that’s really how you can make your media asset management system a niche application that’s looked upon as almost definitely necessary to have.

Our loggers, as I said on game day, they kind of come in. They just are watching the content flow in on game day and they basically are reviewing the content and adding the metadata that’s requires for each asset. If there’s a play that happened, they’ll tag that play. If there’s a player, they’ll tag all the key players seen in that clip. They basically just kind of go through and add all the appropriate metadata to each asset that comes into the system.

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

Jennifer Terbosic: A big challenge for me this time around was learning a new system and just becoming more familiar with video content. I previously worked more with photos and PDF documents and that was a huge challenge for me. Another challenge I think a lot of digital asset managers may experience is just making sure that every user is comfortable using the system.

It’s something that I just find is important and it’s a challenge and you have to have continued patience and kind of just be able to go with the flow and maybe … Some users might pick up a system right away and some you might have to sit with a little bit longer. I think that is a huge challenge for us is just kind of the continuation of training and just knowledge sharing.

I think too some of our other challenges we had work were kind of more maybe pre-MAM or DAM, more of our content was stored on drives and then it was unorganized and it wasn’t easily shared. You had to walk that drive physically over to somebody. It was not easy to search for it. Those things I think are all being addressed with our MAM and we still come across small challenges day-to-day, They are usually more less like, UI or functionality-based challenges. We just work through those and continue to move forward.

Our successes are largely based on the workflows and automations that I mentioned earlier. I should also mention that our content is now managed. It’s protected and easily searchable. Like I mentioned in one of our challenges was in the past that wasn’t there.

Having all your content in one centralized location I think is key and getting there is a success in itself. I think for us, just kind of finally beginning to have all that content in one location is a huge success. I think as we bring on other teams and make that content available for other end users, it’s just going to continue to be successful.

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

Jennifer Terbosic: I would say attend as many conferences as you can. I like to attend the Henry Stewart DAM Conference every year. I think it’s a great conference. It’s a great place to network and meet other digital asset managers and digital asset managers I think tend to usually be pretty nice and friendly people and willing to share information. I think once you get us talking about these topics, we’re excited to talk to other people that are interested in it. I think conferences is a really great place to start that networking.

I also really enjoy the Mod Librarian site. She lists 10 DAM things to check out every Thursday, I think it is. It’s one of my favorite websites. I look forward to checking out this list weekly. It’s a great resource and I think if you’re already tasked with managing your assets, you have to continue to talk to your team and learn and understand their current processes.

I would also suggest holding meetings with them, explain metadata, have metadata discussions, understand and make sure everybody’s on the same page with those definitions and their values. I also think it’s important to keep your team involved and listen to their ideas as well. A lot of times they are the experts in the content that you’re actually going to be managing and organizing, so I think it’s important to hear what they have to say too and listen to their ideas.

Just remember too that metadata is organic and it changes with every project that’s coming in as things change in your company so just remember that you may have to go back and revisit it every once in a while. Other than that, I think that’s all I have.

Henrik de Gyor: Great. Well thanks, Jenn.

Jennifer Terbosic: Yeah, Thanks.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com. For 185 other episodes, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please 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


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Liana Cave on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about digital asset management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Liana Cave. Liana, how are you?

Liana Cave: I’m great. How are you today?

Henrik: Good. Liana, how are you involved with digital asset management?

Liana: I work for KFC global in the marketing department. I am in charge of our digital assets. I’ve been in this role for almost 2 years.

Henrik: How does the world’s largest restaurant company use digital asset management?

Liana: [01:00] That’s a great question. I can only speak to KFC and our journey. Currently, we’re in the middle of implementation. We are about a month out from Go Live. This is going to be our first global digital asset management system. This will serve as the single global resource for all of our offices. I want to give you a little bit of a scope for some people who might not know KFC outside of the US, because a lot of time that seems to be quite a big surprise is that we have over 19,000 stores, and that we are in 125 countries. Like I said, we are in the middle of implementation. I’m really excited about it. I wanted to share the name with you, because it just got approved, which is “The Bucket.”

Henrik: Liana, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with digital asset management?

Liana: I think one of our biggest challenges has been managing the project. Luckily, we’ve had immense executive support, and a lot of the different functions are really wanting to get involved. Just the manage expectations has been a big challenge, and also to not try to do everything all at once. I really try to develop the scope in phases. I think that’s going to be what is going to lead to our success, is just taking the elephant one bite at a time, as they say.

We have had such immense support and excitement from the world. I think that often times that you’re implementing a DAM, you are faced with a challenge of the change. Right now, I have felt nothing but the outpouring of support from all of our markets excited for this, which just leads to me being excited myself.

Henrik: [02:00] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Liana: I think the DAM journey is a different one for each individual. I’ve always joked that it’s my accidental career. You know, when I first started in this, I didn’t know what I was doing. Here I am, 15 years later, and still working digital asset management. I think that we all just got here a different way. I think each way that each person got here is just as well respected in the community that we have. I think that it’s an exciting profession to be in. I think it’s great to always connect through podcasts, through conferences, and all these different ways that I think it’s so helpful to not be isolated, because a lot of us are often the only person who are doing it in the company. I think the DAM community is a strong one. I suggest being involved in it.

Henrik: Well, thanks Liana.

Liana: Well, thank you.

Henrik: [03:00] For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com. For this and 185 podcast episodes, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple 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


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with David Iscove on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about digital asset management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with David Iscove. David, how are you?

David Iscove: I’m good, thanks, Henrik. How are you?

Henrik: Great. David, how are you involved with digital asset management?

David: I started in the video game industry, organizing undervalued audio assets of original master recordings for the Guitar Hero franchise. From there, I moved over to direct and reorganized the physical archives of a major music label. Then started focusing my efforts on optimizing digitally born content through production process for that same label, with the ultimate goal being discoverability and accessibility of all assets through the archives phase.

Henrik: How does a global music leader use digital asset management?

David: [01:00] The financial backbone of any creative organization is the exploitation of its intellectual property. Similar to a manufacturing facility in the most respectful way possible, the organization needs to produce content at a rapid rate in order to compete and keep up with market demand. In the case of the global enterprise with multiple subsidiaries, visibility of the products output by various groups is essential for the overall efficiency and cost savings of the parent. You can’t work in a siloed environment without incurring some form of redundancy or unnecessary expense.

[02:00] With an enterprise level DAM, we can partition the workflow of each subsidiary to satisfy the privacy that each demands while also assuring accountability for all assets as a whole and serving up select assets to other groups as required. Also, by incorporating a DAM with production capabilities, the goal is to utilize it as the repository as early on in the production process. Not only after the active market life cycle of an asset. If this is embraced, there’s an ease of flow between the front line creative production teams and the long term archiving of that asset, which is usually managed by a separate group.

Henrik: David, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with digital asset management?

David: [03:00] Challenges: getting people to dedicate the time to shift their focus over to a new platform. Unfortunately a lot of production is handled via offline or disconnected communication tools, either via email or file transfer applications or even personal storage accounts. There’s so much risk associated with working this way but the processes have been established over time and so people are comfortable operating within that chaos. Adoption requires fully embracing the use of new systems. There’s definitely a period of transition in where people feel uncomfortable and confused by the new workflow, but I can’t stress enough, it’s temporary. The deeper you dive, the easier it becomes. This is true for any system or new workflow. It’s just about convincing creatives to find the time to shift their thinking. Once you get through that growth period, you never look back. You can clearly see the holes in the old way of working, and you find efficiencies come quickly.

Henrik: David, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

David: Try to stay system agnostic as much as possible. If you can, technology will be adopted more readily. There’s something really interesting about the DAM space. Maybe this applies to software and hardware in general. People are so passionate about one platform over the other. They get emotionally tied to a particular brand or company. The client needs to make a selection. So much in fighting and pride can delay the eventual roll out. Most modern DAM systems offer very similar features. Instead of pushing one particular platform because it has certain bells and whistles, really listen to the needs of the organization and cater your recommendations to satisfy those needs. Don’t try to sell something outside of a client’s workflow.

[04:00] In general, do try to make recommendations of tools that consolidate assets over their entire life cycle in order to avoid migration or transfers to additional platforms. Any movement of an asset introduces risks, whether that be compatibility of fidelity or meta data. Obviously some risk can’t be avoided. Assets are meant to be experienced and consumed, so they need to move and be shared, even if it’s only with the eventual Martian overlords that intercolonize Earth in 200 years.

Henrik: Well, thanks David.

David: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Henrik: For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. For 180 other podcast episodes, visit anotherdampodcast.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


by

Another DAM Podcast interview with Lisa Grimm on Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about digital asset management (DAM). I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Lisa Grimm. Lisa, how are you?

Lisa Grimm: I’m very well thank you, how are you?

Henrik de Gyor: Good. Lisa, how are you involved with digital asset management?

Lisa Grimm: It’s a great question. I’ve been in the field with a few exceptions here on and off about twelve years. Before that I started off as a web developer back before we had any kind of real either web content management or digital asset management and as my career sort of grew and evolved it got more and more towards the digital asset management side of things. I started off as an end user of a lot of different sort of we’ll call them early stage digital asset management systems and then as things progressed I got more into building some homegrown ones especially when working in nonprofit and academia world where you don’t necessarily have a lot of resources to go out and buy the most amazing system on the planet. That sort of came around full circle where I then worked with some very large enterprise systems a little bit later in my career.

[01:00] Not in my current role but in my previous one, I led all global digital asset management initiatives for GlaxoSmithKline, GSK, working with an interesting system. We can talk a little bit more about there and now I work for Amazon. I’m part of AWS where digital asset management is one part of what I do along with a sort of broader range of knowledge management. I think as we’ll see in my world a lot of the things tie very closely together and I’m also on the board of the DAM Foundation since I’m really interested in driving some global standards and having a lot more consistency in the world of digital asset management. That’s a reason I like to sit on the board.

Henrik de Gyor: Lisa, how does a company focused on cloud computing use digital asset management?

Lisa Grimm: [02:00] It’s an interesting question and I think people will know that Amazon is quite secretive so can’t give away the secret sauce for what we do specifically, but I will say there is a great need with any company whether you’re a company at a large scale or a small scale. Once you start creating those assets whether those are images, whether those are audio, video and I think especially when you’re working with we’ll say more technical people they realize very quickly you need to manage those just because they quickly scale down what you can do on someone’s desktop.

The other exciting thing we do I think is that kind of that’s what we do and more with a lot of our customers do is there are a lot of cloud-based DAM vendors now as I’m sure everyone’s well aware, that are doing some really interesting things sitting on the platform and sort of enabling what they’re doing. It has been really interesting to watch and I think that’s been one of the most interesting evolutions in the field. I think for a while it was a little bit slow to embrace the cloud and I don’t think that was because of lack of innovation in the DAM field itself but more some of those really large enterprises that have invested a lot in their DAM solutions had really kind of invested in that on-premise kind of solution or maybe had some security sort of fears around that.

[03:00] I think we’ve evolved beyond that a little bit now. We’re seeing more happen in the cloud especially you think about some of the major media organizations or things like sports broadcasting where they have to scale so quickly and they have so many hours of video that they get added every day, every week that there’s not really a good way to do that unless you’re in the cloud. Again it doesn’t have to be us specifically I think that other cloud vendors are the same and other cloud DAM solutions can sort of latch onto that.

I think as we’ve seen just the scale of what’s out there and what people are consuming and what the people who are creators and managers of those are helping them to consume as those things get bigger and bigger and kind of more and more difficult to describe, I think we’re going to see a further evolution into the cloud and hopefully some more innovation in that space too.

Henrik de Gyor: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with digital asset management?

Lisa Grimm: [04:00] I think one of the biggest challenges you come across in a lot of organizations is just it’s actually sort of two-fold. There’s choosing the right system and the adoption of that system. Sometimes even if it’s the right one it can be difficult to get people to start using it because it can be a big shift in terms of the sort of change management within that ecosystem especially the larger company. That’s certainly something I encountered a lot of working at GSK was that it was such a shift to go from having all of your assets either again managed on people’s desktops or managed by an agency to having those in one place even though that sounds to us in the DAM world like an obvious win, it can be a big shift to people who have not been working that way especially when you’ve been working in a system where there hasn’t been a lot of change.

That can really be difficult to one, not only pick the right system but then too, make sure that people are really happy with that system, really feel comfortable with that system and that you can actually go out and be an advocate for the system.

Of course, when you’re an advocate for the system you’re also advocating for your users. You want to make sure that they feel comfortable, they feel like they’re able to speak up like their feedback is being taken on board. If there’s something they don’t like, you want to make it better. I think it’s interesting that when you have those sort of challenges you have to really walk this fine line of being essentially a product manager for your DAM as well as making sure you’re the gatekeeper for what’s coming in and out and that you’ve got all your ducks in a row just from sort of technical and metadata perspective.

[05:00] You really have to make sure that your users are right there at the forefront of it too. On the flip side of that then you can see a lot of success when you’re really working closely with your users, when you have some really good standards about what’s coming in, how you’re describing it, that people are actually able to find what they want. I think you see especially a lot of success now with some of the industries that embraced DAM early on certainly a lot of the creative agencies. I would point to a lot of the innovation we’ve seen in coming out of academia with museums, digital humanities where they’ve been really embracing what DAM can do and starting off thinking about things like digital collections that used to be online. I’ve had some really good experiences working with those in the past but I think we’ve seen a lot of innovation there where they really said, “Hey this could really be a great outreach mechanism for us not only with organizing our things but making sure that people can find them outside of our system.”

[06:00] It’s really been a good way for organizations like that to open the door to a wider audience and let people in. A good example of that is I worked at the Drexel University College of Medicine in their Legacy Center their archives and they have an amazing digital collection that’s in what’s essentially a homegrown DAM but because it’s in there now they’ve been able to use that to really … They have really great control over their things now. They can get them out in the wider world and I’ve seen individual pictures now that had previously just been sitting in a box say ten years ago. They’re digitized, they’re well described and they’re being picked up really by things that you wouldn’t even expect.

There’s things like a Mighty Girl on Facebook or a lot of these other organizations that have kind of reached out and say, “Oh wow there’s this amazing corpus of historical material we can get in there and get to,” and I think a lot of the innovation we have seen in the DAM field is coming from those museums, those archives who realize it’s a way to not only get good control over their collections but to get them out there.

[07:00] I think it’s interesting to tie back to that when a lot of the focus you see in where is DAM going in the next five to ten years is very much focused on how can it support my marketing work or how can it really help drive my sales organization forward. While those are important, certainly working in the e-commerce or if you’re in advertising it certainly makes sense, but there are all these other use cases that I think have really driven things forward. I think certainly some of those marketing and e-commerce sites have been a beneficiary of some of the work done before by folks using DAM in academia and in museums.

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

Lisa Grimm: I think for people who are already in the field, I’d say buckle up. I think it’s going to get even more exciting. I think we’re at sort of a tipping point where in the past few years we’ve gone from people saying, “Oh how can I get buy-in to get a DAM? How can I make the business case to sort of having one being that it’s working,” and then now thinking about, “Okay now we can actually go beyond what we have. We can get a little more exciting here. We can really start.”

[08:00] Again I think innovation is going to be one of the key things we’re going to be seeing. I think we were slightly stagnant for a little while where it was more just about having something that worked but now I think people are starting to push the boundaries a little bit more both on the vendor side and on the user side to say, “Hey wouldn’t it be great if …,” then we can see if that’s going to go together. I think especially as we think about not just video but I think we’re also going to reach a point where the DAM is going to be your single source of truth for almost any kind of digital object where at the moment we still think of it quite often not exclusively but quite often in terms of the DAM is where we’re storing our images, our audio/video, having one place to go to get to really define anything we need not just those things that we think of in the traditional DAM.

[09:00] As far as people who want to become DAM professionals, this is an area I’m really passionate about. It’s reaching out to people who have the skills but may not know that those are the skills they have especially librarians, archivists and certainly I have a bias towards that. I come from that world even though I started off as a developer. I then went back to librarian school mid-career and came back out again the other side doing more DAM specific things. Even here at Amazon I found some other people who have followed a similar path. I think just reaching back out to people who are either in school now or who are early career in those fields who often are not being paid very well to reach out and say, “Hey there are other alternatives. There’s this great career you probably don’t even know exists. You’ve got the skills for it whether it’s in having a great understanding of taxonomy and metadata or having a lot of really kind of scrappy technical skills where you just kind of go in and get things done.

I think that’s something that really only helps DAM drive forward as a field where you’ve got these people who really want to make a difference and who have these really key skill sets when it comes to describing things, finding things. That’s kind of what we do but I think that’s a really important thing is making sure that those people know that this field exists and that we’re doing a good job of promoting the field to whether that’s … I think we certainly like to all talk at conferences and I don’t think it’s insular. I think we do a good job of outreach but I always think we can do more and just publicize it a little bit more.

[10:00] One thing I’m actually trying to do in the next year or so is to work with some folks here to try to get a panel at Society for American Archivists next year and saying, “Hey this is an alternative career for people who have the skills you have but we’d love to get you in here and love to teach you a little bit more about the field.” I do think it’s incumbent upon those of us already in the field to make sure we’re making sure that the ladder doesn’t end with us. We can reach back down and reach back out and say to people, “Hey, come on in, water’s fine and there’s a lot of work to do yet, come join us.”

Henrik de Gyor: Well thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Grimm: Thank you very much.

Henrik de Gyor: For more on this, visit anotherdamblog.com. If you’d like to listen to another 185 other episodes of Another DAM Podcast, 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.

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today