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Another DAM Podcast interview with Meredith Reese on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Meredith Reese talk about Digital Asset Management

 

Transcript:

Henrik:   This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I am speaking with Meredith Reese.

Meredith, how are you?

Meredith:   I’m good, thanks for having me.

Henrik:   Meredith, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Meredith:   I’m the Digital Asset Manager for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. I’ve been here for now just about a year. We implemented a brand new DAM right when I started and it’s been fantastic so far.

Henrik:   Meredith, how does one of the world’s top orchestras use Digital Asset Management?

Meredith:   They use it for just about everything you can think of. I personally sit in the archives department where I’m responsible for preserving all LA Phil historical records and serving requests both internally within the association and for outside users. But we also maintain a complete audio and video archive for our orchestra members to review. So we’re currently using our Digital Asset Management system, not just for historical purposes and research of all types of assets, but also for the orchestra themselves, which makes us pretty unique as far as orchestras go. And then we also support all of the affiliate groups that help out the orchestra. And we’re a nonprofit organization, I should mention. So we have a lot of volunteers, but we do have a full-time staff within the association that is responsible for all the administration of the LA Phil, planning the season, executing the season. So we have a full-time production staff who works directly with the orchestra and our music directors.

Meredith:   We have a full artistic planning staff who actually programs the seasons and we have a marketing team within who does both digital and physical marketing. And really all of those groups are constantly creating assets all the time. And they’ve seen all their assets grow just within the last five years. And also as part of the archives, we manage a museum. We managed the Hollywood Bowl Museum at the Hollywood Bowl. The LA Phil has two homes. We have the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, designed by Frank Gehry. And then we have the Hollywood Bowl. There is a lot of history to that performance as well. That’s not just, you know, classical music, but, all the pop programming that we do throughout the year. So we’re responsible for exhibiting in that space. At the Hollywood Bowl Museum and then we have a couple of spaces in the Walt Disney concert hall as well. So all of the assets that are being created by the organization are being used and shared and reused on a regular basis. It’s actually surprising that they didn’t have the Digital Asset Management system until now.

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

Meredith:   In general or here at the Phil[harmonic]?

Henrik:   Either. Or both.

Meredith:   Either? I would say here at the Phil, it’s been, We’re a small nonprofit on team, but we’re still people who work within those silos. That’s actually been quite surprising to me that there’s not more interaction or collaboration the teams, but that’s starting to change the culture. Starting to be more open, more transparent its definitely, our programming is a lot more dynamic. It’s not just your traditional classical shows anymore. There’s constant overlap. When our music director, Gustavo Dudamel performed elsewhere, also conducts other orchestras, but as well as his collaborations that he does here at the Walt Disney concert hall or at the [Hollywood] Bowl. And so it’s really gotten, people into more of the spirit of collaboration, but they still have a hard grasp on their assets. You know, who owns what, who can see what, who can share. And as they start to get more use of digital asset management system and we’re used to being able to search those assets, they realize first of all that metadata is really important.

Meredith:   Making their stuff searchable and, especially information around rights, how they can use these assets, how they can reuse these assets. They’re starting to get more comfortable with that process and the silos are starting to break down little by little. We haven’t definitely a new collaborative spirit around here, but it’s just starting. I think we’re just barely scratching the surface and our DAM tool really does sit as the tool to help that along. So my challenge is really change management challenges, making sure that people are comfortable with the system that’s working for them as well as, how we can innovate later on. That’s I mean innovation is a huge challenge with DAM in general, but it’s something that I believe strongly in, you know, that we have to keep, you know, making this tool better and better and meet the needs, not just why we got the tool in the first place, which was really just to solve the influx of digital assets that are here, the association, but really think about, you know, what are we going to be dealing with in the future?

Meredith:   What type of assets are we going to be seeing from both a technological standpoint and being able to describe them with good metadata and being able just to share them with the best way to share our information. We’re going to be seeing a lot more audio and video content is my guess and we’re going to be seeing a lot more data around that content. That’s going to be really important and we’re also going to have to open our doors to the general public. We’ve got a lot of demand to make audio recordings available to researchers and just music enthusiasts. So we’ll see if we can meet that demand too. That’s on the horizon. Launching a DAM system that the musicians could access as a pretty big success that just happen. So having a team of orchestra, you know, full-time world-class musicians that rarely really interact with the administrative folks and now they’re working in one system is pretty amazing. That definitely has broken down the two biggest silos here in the association and that took a lot of planning just to roll that out, to configure it correctly. I mean, streaming audio from a DAM system. Our DAM is off the shelf. You know we have a software as a service model. So technologically it wasn’t that challenging, but getting people comfortable, training them, making sure that it would meet the needs and that it was compliant with our union contracts and how we treat the musicians. How musicians treat restoration was really, really important. And we’ve got more on the horizon. Another big plan that we’re rolling out is a project management tool to sit within our DAM that will help the marketing group, basically, bring assets in and organize them and share them in a more streamlined way. And it’s also gonna help with scheduling our entire orchestra season.

Meredith:   I come from the entertainment industry and so I’m used to TV seasons and film schedules and tentpole projects. And so working with an orchestra, it’s really all about the concert season for that year. And LA Phil is demanding, we have two seasons, we have the winter season and the summer season at the Bowl. And so being able to schedule that and make sure everybody’s slotted in the right space is a day to day. yeah, it’s just taxing on so many people. So we’re trying to move those processes internally and really associate them to all of the content that people are making along with the performances. Our whole taxonomy, if I can dive into the metadata kind of Geeky side of what I do is based off of performances. We have a hierarchy that’s based on the season. And then the locations that are venues and then the performance dates and then all of the works associated to that date.

Meredith:   And we work directly with our music librarians who actually prepare the music for every single performance that the orchestra does. And then we have guest artists come in and that has its own challenges too. Yeah, it’s all built on the back of how the season is scheduled. So we really needed a system that would address that. And so we’re calling it project management, but really it’s project management and plus scheduling plus asset wrangling plus work in progress collaboration all under one system. It’s going to give our users that one stop shopping experience that I think most people are looking for

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

Meredith:   I would say just get as much experience as you possibly can and don’t be afraid to take risks and don’t be afraid to try new things and all of your failures are going to be just as valuable learning opportunities as your successes. My past experience definitely taught me that. And so I entered in the LA Phil. I was, you know, just about prepared for anything. And so it’s been nice that I haven’t, you know, had to have as many struggles in previous places and the adoption process has been really, really smooth so far, but I would definitely inspire people to keep at it and be persistent and try new things and dive into your metadata and your data models and really understand them. I think the biggest skills I’m seeing for DAM professionals, you know, are really those that match a data scientist, you know, the analyzing and the ability to, you really get down to good, you know, data model building and good taxonomy structures and, you know, really rich metadata and how that’s mapped, how that all fits together. But then being able to, you know, explain that to all your general users. And I think that’s the biggest skill someone can bring to DAM today.

Henrik:   Well thanks, Meredith

Meredith:   Thank you

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

 

 

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Kristine Petermann on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Kristine Petermann talk about 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 Kristine Petermann. Kristine, how are you?

Kristine Petermann:  I’m good. How are you?

Henrik:  Great. Kristine, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Kristine:  So I am currently a digital asset manager with the company called Innocean out in Huntington Beach, California. We work with an auto company called Hyundai and I am in charge of running their asset management site here.

Henrik:  Kristine, how does global marketing communications of an auto company use digital asset management?

Kristine:  So we use it to basically hold our content that we create for our auto campaign. So we create images like still images, photography files, CG assets, CG images, and we have to have a way to store that… those images somewhere. So we create a DAM site to store that content so other users outside of our company can come in and potentially look at those images and see if they want to use it for their part of their campaign.

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

Kristine:  Biggest challenge would probably be usage rights. Making sure that all users understand what they are grabbing, what the usage rights for that particular image is, and if they’re going to use it properly. And I think having a DAM site has succeeded in that. So you have people looking at metadata through the asset management site to see, okay, can we actually use this image for our purposes? Or is this purely for social media only and we can’t use it for something for like a print ad. Success is more people understanding what metadata is and understanding what usage rights of an image is.

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

Kristine:  DAM is very important for any company that creates content. You have so many internal users as well as external users that want to use your content. So you need to have a location, a repository to house that content that you are creating. You need to have a good DAM site to share your content whether it’s a person who is internal or an external user.

Metadata is very important. Knowing what the metadata is, whether it’s still asset or a video asset, knowing who created that asset, knowing what the usage rights is and any particular product information, especially if it’s a vehicle or say a consumer product, you need to know exactly what that product is so internal and external users can actually do keyword searches and search by that on your DAM system.

Henrik:  Great. Well, thanks Kristine.

Kristine:  Thank you.

Henrik:  Visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

 

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

 

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Alex Hauschild on Digital Asset Management

Listen to Alex Hauschild talk about Digital Asset Management

Transcript:

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

Alex: I started out at UCSB Davidson Library working for Salvador Güereña. And he brought me on to do brochures and graphic arts and stuff for him and we hit it off up pretty good and during that time found out that a lot of my imaging experience from previous was what’s going to help him develop what was called a digital library at the time. And we did a couple of pilot projects and went from there and he encouraged me to get the… he tricked me into getting a library and information sciences degree and went from there. I ended up with the UCSB Art Museum doing architecture and design collections.

Worked with California digital library, developing some of their policy and content governance for the California Digital Library and Califas, which is basically a large multicultural archive online. And went from there. Around 2008, ended up going to…moved to Los Angeles, did a little trying to start my own publishing business for a while. They ended up with Motor Trend hot rod trying to save their archive and that was an amazing experience. And from there, just kept going through the entertainment industry, went to Dreamworks and from there Google.

Henrik: Alex, how does a multinational technology company use Digital Asset Management?

Alex: Well, that’s a crazy question. Basically, they use it in multiple different facets. There’s production pipelines. Might have heard the term creative value chains or creative value pipelines and these are basically the production from concept to final assets. And final assets actually can mean several different things. So they’re using Digital Asset Management all the way along the way and sometimes multiple case in multiple ways. They use it in project management and then they use it for distribution. I mean, the short answer is distribution in all cases. That’s what Digital Asset Management is all about. But depending on your user base, it depends on what that distribution is.

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

Alex: That is a question that has two different parts. What are the challenges and successes for me and what are the challenges and successes in the field. For the field, I think what we’re seeing is more of a transition or more of a user-friendly attitude towards content management basically blends brand awareness and brand control with Digital Asset Management. We kind of transitioned into that from content management systems and just being…. seeing the potential for being able to distribute out to multiple users and multiple ways. Especially with… for the web or specifically for the web. For myself, it’s been a long road, so I’ve gone from creating digital library… Digital Asset Management systems before we had a term for them. I used to think of them as digital libraries and then kind of evolving with the industry as it transitioned into, I think basically going into distribution and then getting mixed with legal and I think maybe the challenges and obstacles we faced are now that we’re able to provide organized sets of assets on a massive scale, how can we protect the legal at that point and what kind of interaction with legal and licensing do we want to take? Or we the gatekeepers, are we the organizers? That’s really the fundamentals of the industry right now I think is can we transition as librarians, gatekeepers into a communicative role where we basically are helping users determine whether or not just where something is, but whether or not they can use it, so user control is a big deal now.

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

Alex: I mean, depending on which aspect of the industry they want to go in, there’s a big difference between academic and tech…technology fields where I’m at. I would get to know the marketing production, the process of it from content creation, which is at the producer level, at the project manager level and get to know how that works and how those assets are transferred from concept to creatives to postproduction. There’s so many tie-ins from asset producers who are creating images and handing them off multiple ways. Those handoffs become the critical mass for any assets, like who’s getting it, when they’re getting it and those are the timelines that you were working with. I think that those are really the things I would pay attention to if I was starting out. Now it’s can I get more involved in marketing and can I understand the marketing world because they’re the ones really creating these asset banks, really just get to know marketing agencies and how agencies work. It really becomes more of a people process when you understand why and when things are being made.

Henrik: Well, thanks Alex.

Alex: Thanks for having me.

Henrik: For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please send me an email at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

 

 

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

 

Need a Digital Asset Management Consultant?

Another DAM Consultancy can help. Contact us today.