Insights from the Henry Stewart DAM LA Conference 2024

The Henry Stewart DAM LA conference brings together industry professionals to discuss the latest trends, challenges, and innovations in Digital Asset Management (DAM). This year’s conference showcased a vibrant atmosphere filled with networking opportunities, insightful presentations, and engaging discussions. Here’s a look at the key themes and takeaways from the event.

Day One Highlights: The Buzz of Excitement

As the conference kicked off, there was an unmistakable buzz in the air. Attendees from around the world were ready to dive into the rich content and networking opportunities that the conference offered.

Emerging Themes and Trends

Christine Le Couilliard from Henry Stewart shared insights about the evolving landscape of DAM. She noted a significant focus on global expansion, with DAM serving as a catalyst for growth within organizations. The personalization of content outreach was highlighted as a key agenda item, alongside the rise of AI and generative AI technologies.

Attendees expressed a keen interest in how DAM systems can facilitate not just content management but also strategic planning across larger enterprises. This focus on enterprise-wide integration reflects a growing recognition of DAM’s central role in organizational success.

Voices from the Floor: Attendee Insights

The conference featured a variety of perspectives from attendees. Here’s what some of them had to say about their expectations and excitement for the sessions ahead.

Amy Rudersdorf’s Insights

Amy Rudersdorf, Director of Consulting Operations at AP, shared her enthusiasm for learning how major brands are managing licensed content efficiently. She emphasized the importance of automating rights management to streamline operations and reduce the reliance on manual processes.

Matt Kuruvilla on Rights Management

Matt Kuruvilla from FADEL expressed excitement about the ongoing discussions surrounding licensed content and how brands handle rights management. He highlighted that the growing complexity of content creation necessitates effective automation solutions.

Yonah Levenson’s Perspective

Yonah Levenson, co-academic director of the Rutgers DAM Certificate Program, reflected on the evolution of DAM discussions over the years. He noted that early conversations revolved around basic concepts, while current dialogues focus on integration with other systems and the advanced capabilities of DAM platforms.

New Innovations in AI and Automation

AI and automation were hot topics, with many participants eager to explore how these technologies can enhance DAM workflows. The potential for AI to expedite tagging processes and improve metadata management was a particular area of interest.

Nina Damavandi on AI Applications

Nina Damavandi from USC shared her excitement about leveraging AI and machine learning to expedite tagging processes, a challenge that many organizations face. She highlighted the need for efficient data management to enhance asset utilization.

Leslie Eames on Automation

Leslie Eames from the Maryland Center for History and Culture discussed her interest in automating metadata processes. She emphasized the importance of ethical considerations in using AI tools to ensure equitable benefits from shared data.

Networking and Community Building

Networking opportunities were abundant, with attendees sharing stories, challenges, and successes. The conference fostered a sense of community, reminding participants that they are not alone in their struggles.

Billy Hinshaw on the Value of Networking

Billy Hinshaw from Bissell Homecare emphasized the value of meeting peers and hearing their stories. He noted that these connections are crucial for professional growth and learning from one another’s experiences.

Key Takeaways from Day Two

As the conference progressed into its second day, several themes emerged that encapsulated the evolving nature of DAM.

The DAM Ecosystem

Emily Somach from National Geographic highlighted that DAM systems are central to a broader ecosystem. She stressed the need for seamless integration with various other systems used within organizations, ensuring that all components work harmoniously together.

Christina Aguilera on Community and Collaboration

Christina Aguilera, Vice President of Product for Crunchyroll, shared her multifaceted career journey and the importance of community in professional development. She underscored how the relationships formed at conferences like Henry Stewart can open doors to new opportunities.

Technology Providers’ Perspectives

The conference also featured insights from various DAM platform providers. Each shared their unique offerings and how they differentiate themselves in a competitive landscape.

Orange Logic’s Cortex Platform

Christopher Morgan-Wilson from Orange Logic introduced Cortex, an enterprise-level asset management software that adapts to user needs. He explained how this flexibility allows organizations to consolidate multiple DAM solutions into a single source of truth.

FADEL’s Innovative Solutions

Matt Kuruvilla highlighted FADEL’s focus on automating content rights management, emphasizing the necessity for brands to manage licensed content efficiently.

Bynder’s Usability Focus

Brian Kavanaugh from Bynder discussed the platform’s emphasis on usability and configurability, ensuring that organizations can maximize their DAM investments.

Looking Ahead: The Future of DAM

As the conference drew to a close, discussions turned to the future of DAM. The concept of DAM 5.0 was debated, with attendees speculating on how the landscape might evolve.

AI’s Role in the Future

Participants expressed varying opinions on the role of AI in DAM. While many were optimistic about its potential, there were also concerns about the limitations of current technologies, particularly in terms of metadata entry and contextual understanding.

Content Authenticity and Security Concerns

One topic that received less attention than anticipated was content authenticity. With the rise of generative AI and deep fakes, the need for robust security measures is becoming increasingly critical.

Final Thoughts

The Henry Stewart DAM LA conference not only provided valuable insights into current trends but also fostered a sense of community among professionals in the field. As the industry continues to evolve, the conversations sparked at this event will undoubtedly shape the future of DAM.

For those looking to stay updated on the latest in DAM, it’s essential to engage with this community and share experiences, challenges, and solutions. The power of collaboration and knowledge sharing is the key to navigating the complexities of digital asset management.

Thank you for joining us in this recap of the Henry Stewart DAM LA conference. We look forward to seeing how these discussions will influence the future of DAM in the coming years.

Transcript

CHRIS LACINAK

So here I am at home about to leave for Henry Stewart DAM LA. I’m excited although there’s two to three feet of snow on the ground here. I have to say it’s a gorgeous day and I wouldn’t otherwise want to leave but for Henry Stewart DAM LA I’m down. Let’s go. Henry Stewart DAM LA here comes the AVP and the DAM Right Podcast.

[Music]

All right here we are day one of the Henry Stewart conference. Let’s go in and let’s talk to some people. I’m here with Christine Le Couillard from Henry Stewart. Christine how’s the conference going so far?CHRISTINE LE COUILLIARD: 01:15

Oh Chris it’s great. There’s a real buzz, a real buzz about the place. We’ve seen folks coming from all over, not just the US but overseas and they’re just hungry for content, hungry for networking, hungry to see what’s next on the agenda.CHRIS LACINAK: 01:33

Yeah and you’ve got such unique insights because you help put the program together for Henry Stewart every year. So are there topics or themes that you think are emerging this year that are new?CHRISTINE LE COUILLIARD: 01:42

Great question. I think we’re looking at global expansion. How DAM is that helpful catalyst within an organization to help companies grow and expand and with a whole personalization of content, outreach and so on. That is certainly high up on the agenda. Connected to that is AI, generative AI. Where’s that leading? It’s scary but there’s an opportunity there too to make it work for you.CHRIS LACINAK: 02:13

I’m here with Amy Rudersdorf, Director of Consulting Operations at AVP and we’re starting the day, day one of the Henry Stewart DAM LA Conference and Amy, love to hear what what are you excited to hear about at this conference?AMY RUDERSDORF: 02:27

I’m really excited to see what the Maple Leafs are doing with their DAM. They are talking about moving from implementation and moving a million objects into their DAM in a short period of time and then bringing their strategic plan to the larger organization. So bringing it enterprise-wide all while the Maple Leafs are playing and they’re adding new assets all the time. So it’ll be exciting to see what they’re doing.CHRIS LACINAK: 02:56

I’m here with Matt Kuruvilla from FADEL. Matt, what are you most excited about hearing about at this conference this year?MATT KURUVILLA: 03:03

Well, I’m tempted to say spending time with you, Chris, because this has already been so much fun. But I am really excited to see how brands are handling all their licensed content and managing those rights and making sure that’s easy and automating that because I just feel like that’s a bigger part of how content’s being made nowadays. So you got to have a way to solve it that doesn’t require a whole lot of humans. So I’m excited to hear how people are doing that today.CHRIS LACINAK: 03:28

I’m here with Yonah Levenson. Yonah, can you tell us a little about who you are first?YONAH LEVENSON: 03:32

Sure, I am the Co-Academic Director of the Rutgers DAM Certificate Program, State University of New Jersey, and along with David Lipsey is the other Co-Academic Director. And I’m also a metadata and taxonomy strategy consultant.CHRIS LACINAK: 03:48

Great, great. And you’ve been coming to Henry Stewart for a long time now.YONAH LEVENSON: 03:53

This is true.CHRIS LACINAK: 03:54

What would you say, what are you seeing as some of the themes or trends over these years and kind of where we are today?YONAH LEVENSON: 04:01

So way back when at the beginning it was what’s a DAM? And then it was how do I update my DAM? And then it was how do I replace my DAM? And then it’s become how do I integrate my DAM with other systems? And now it’s how do I get my DAM not just to integrate with other systems but also to push the envelope and how much can I do within and across my DAM? And there’s also been I think a much bigger interest in metadata and taxonomy because it’s being recognized that you have to have a way to have commonalities and normalize language across multiple systems if you’re going to do it right. So that this way when senior management says, “Hey, can you get me a report on this?” You’re not going to like necessarily 15 different places and then having to figure out does this really mean that?CHRIS LACINAK: 04:57

Right, right. Okay, great. Well, thank you for that insight. I appreciate it.YONAH LEVENSON: 05:01

You’re welcome.CHRIS LACINAK: 05:02

All right, I’m here with Phil Seibel from Aldis. Phil, what are you most excited about at this conference this year?PHIL SEIBEL: 05:08

Yeah, honestly I’m just really excited to see what people are doing, what’s new in the industry, how things are trending. It always feels like at this conference that people are both looking to share everything they’ve learned and find new things and it’s really interesting to see where people have made up ground and where they’re still looking to make up ground in the industry and I really like to feel the pulse of things here so that’s what I’m looking forward to.CHRIS LACINAK: 05:29

Awesome, all right, here to feel the pulse. Sounds good. Thank you, Phil.

I’m here with Nina Damavandi from USC, Digital Asset Manager. And Nina, I’d love to hear what are you most excited about, any particular topics or sessions or anything at the conference this year?NINA DAMAVANDI: 05:43

Yeah, I think the main thing I’m excited about is how companies are using AI and machine learning in their DAM workflows to expedite the tagging process. That’s kind of one of our biggest struggles at USC is getting enough data on our assets and so if there is a way to make that faster and I look at our assets they share so much in common like there should be a way to make this easier without so much human labor needed.CHRIS LACINAK: 06:09

Yeah, and we’re about halfway through the first day so have you gotten any nuggets yet?NINA DAMAVANDI: 06:15

Yeah, there were a couple of good sessions this morning on the topic of AI like Netflix gave a great presentation so I think they are much further ahead with it than we are but it’s really cool to see what the potential is.CHRIS LACINAK: 06:27

All right, I’m here with Billy Hinshaw, BISSELL Homecare. Billy, what are you most excited about at the conference this year?BILLY HINSHAW: 06:32

Just the continuing networking opportunities, meeting so many people, hearing their stories, hearing about what they do and seeing where there’s similarities in terms of the accomplishments and the struggles that they deal with. I think the biggest benefit of attending these conferences is that we realize we’re not alone. We might be on an island, you know, at our particular companies but that’s not the reality as far as our industry is concerned nor should it ever be.CHRIS LACINAK: 06:59

Yeah, well that’s that’s fantastic summary of the value of Henry Stewart for sure. Now you’re a past presenter at Henry Stewart and you’re presenting this year, popular sessions. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re presenting on tomorrow?BILLY HINSHAW: 07:11

I’m presenting on the different responsibilities that DAM professionals have to balance and how to best manage that without losing losing your mind basically. Yeah, that’s important to keep your mind intact.CHRIS LACINAK: 07:26

Awesome, well thank you Billy, I appreciate it.BILLY HINSHAW: 07:28

Yep, thank you Chris.CHRIS LACINAK: 07:29

I’m here with Leslie Eames. Leslie, can you tell us who you are?LESLIE EAMES: 07:33

Yeah, I’m Leslie. I’m the Director of Digital Collections and Initiatives at the Maryland Center for History and Culture.CHRIS LACINAK: 07:38

Great, and is there any particular topics or sessions or anything that you’re most excited about this year at the conference?LESLIE EAMES: 07:45

Yes, I’m really looking for ways to automate our metadata processes so we can ingest more of our data into our DAM. So looking at machine learning and AI tools that can help us and then also exploring some of the ethical implications behind those, knowing that, you know, we want to be deliberate about who’s benefiting from the data we’re sharing when we use those tools.CHRIS LACINAK: 08:11

Yeah, the ethics part of that is a very important part of that conversation. That makes sense. We’re about halfway through the first day so far, so have you have you gotten what you’re looking for yet or are you hopeful to find it in the coming day and a half?LESLIE EAMES: 08:25

I feel like it’s coming together slowly. I’m getting pieces here and there from a lot of different sources, so I’ve learned a lot and hoping to learn more and make connections with others that continue to grow my knowledge.CHRIS LACINAK: 08:39

All right, so I’m here with Emily Somach from National Geographic. Emily, thanks for talking to me. I appreciate it. So we’re nearing the end of the conference on day two. Are there any particular themes or takeaways that you found interesting this year?EMILY SOMACH: 08:53

Yeah, definitely. I think the biggest takeaway and theme too is that the DAMs is really at the center of an ecosystem. We all have other systems that are integrating with it and communicating with it and just always keeping that in mind when you’re working in the DAMs or changing things in the DAMs or building a DAMs. Just knowing that eventually it’s going to be connecting and talking to all these other systems that either you or your coworkers or other teams in your organization are using. So I think that’s just an important thing to keep in mind. And then I guess some other, I guess, yeah, always thinking about the next step and the future and what you can do to set yourself up for success. Migration is just a big part of our world, so always knowing that you might be having to migrate down the road or bringing stuff in from another system eventually and kind of keeping that in mind and making sure everything works together and is standardized.CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 09:43

I am Christina Aguilera and I have multiple jobs. So we’ll start off with my most recent. So I am currently, I just joined Crunchyroll. So I’m the Vice President of Product for Enterprise Technology and Enterprise Technology to Crunchyroll is basically the entire studio workflow. So it is amazing the way that we incorporate asset management into the operations of getting content published to a platform. So that’s an incredible opportunity. I’m also the president of Women in Technology Hollywood Foundation. So as part of Women in Technology Hollywood Foundation, that is my nonprofit where I get to spend all my passion. So we do a lot of professional development opportunities. We’ve got mentorship programs. We do live events in the spring and the fall. The spring is technology focused, the fall is leadership focused. So it’s a great combination and a great network. And then also I am launching a new business with some incredible women out there. So in March on International Women’s Day we launched the brand and it’s called Enough. And it’s basically we are going out there to all of those women leaders globally and making sure they know they are enough. So this is a professional development platform as well as a community and that platform launches April 17th. So that is our brand reveal, our brand launch that’s happening in April. And it’s really really exciting. I think it’s going to change the world.CHRIS LACINAK: 11:11

Wow.CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 11:12

Yeah.CHRIS LACINAK: 11:12

Wow. Wow. So you’re a powerhouse.CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 11:14

I love it.CHRIS LACINAK: 11:15

You’re doing all kinds of things. That’s amazing.CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 11:17

I’m about this close to publishing a book too.CHRIS LACINAK: 11:19

Fantastic. That’s amazing. You’ll have to tell us how you do all these things at some point.CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 11:23

Very little sleep.CHRIS LACINAK: 11:24

And what so what do you think the value of coming to the Henry Stewart Conference is?CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 11:29

You know I’ve been involved with the Henry Stewart Conference for probably over 20 years now. I’ve known them throughout my entire career and the biggest value to me is the people and the people you meet and the people that you grow to connect with and you build the relationships with. You don’t know when you’re first meeting somebody if they’re gonna open that future door for you.CHRIS LACINAK: 11:55

Yeah.CHRISTINA AGUILERA: 11:55

So my career has taken so many different paths and the people that I’ve met at Henry Stewart have opened many of those doors. So it’s an incredible community of people. It’s a great place to come and connect on like ideas and like concepts and it doesn’t matter what industry we’re in or what our job title is because we all have similar problems in the workplace and we come here to commiserate and build relationships and help each other evolve in our careers.CHRIS LACINAK: 12:24

Thanks for listening to the DAM Right podcast. If you have people you want to hear from, topics you’d like to see us talk about, or events you want to see us cover, please send us an email at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. Speaking of feedback, please go to your platform of choice and give us a rating. We would absolutely appreciate it. While you’re at it, go ahead and follow or subscribe to make sure you don’t miss an episode. You can also stay up to date with me and the DAM Right podcast by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. And finally, go and find some really amazing and free resources focused just on DAM at weareavp.com/free-resources. That’s weareavp.com/free-resources. You’ll find things there like our DAM Strategy Canvas, our DAM Health Score Card, and the Get Your DAM Budget slide deck template. Each one of those also has a free accompanying guide to help you put it to use. So go get them now.

Let’s turn to the DAM platforms in the room now. I’m gonna ask them each a series of questions and I’m gonna edit it so that you can hear their answers side by side. Before we get into the questions, I’ll introduce you to each of them. Christopher Morgan-Wilson from Orange Logic. Shannon DeLoach from Censhare. Melanie Chalupa from Frontify. John Bateman from Tenovus. Brian Kavanaugh from Bynder. Bróna O’Connor from MediaValet. Jake Athey from Acquia. Tell us about your platform and what differentiates you from the other platforms in the room today.CHRISTOPHER MORGAN-WILSON: 14:01

Orange Logic has created Cortex. Cortex is an enterprise-level asset management software that’s actually able to adapt the way it presents itself depending on the user. So if you think a lot of companies out there, they’ll buy multiple DAM solutions. Like their teams and departments will kind of go rogue and buy different software. But now there’s a big push for companies to consolidate all that into one central source of truth and that’s where Orange Logic comes in with Cortex.SHANNON DELOACH: 14:28

Censhare is an omni-channel DAM, PIM, and CMS platform. What differentiates us is it’s fully integrated out of the box. So there’s no outside integrations needed to get that full functionality. Those three functionalities, DAM, PIM, and CMS, are built on a common structure. So it’s very flexible. Really where we stand out is if you need DAM and PIM, our niche is where you can buy one platform and have them both. So that’s what we’re very proud of.MELANIE CHALUPA: 14:57

Frontify is a brand-centered solution that’s focused on all facets of your brand. So of course looking at a critical element of your brand is going to be the DAM itself, but on top of that we also have the ability to digitize all of your guidelines. And a lot of our clients will also include a multi-portal setup. So looking at your corporate brand, the assets that are associated with that, as well as the guidelines, sometimes campaign toolkits, but also being able to support product brands, employer brand, really every facet of your brand. So that’s kind of our unique differentiator.JOHN BATEMAN: 15:24

Tenovos is about a five-year-old company, so relatively young in the company of a lot of legacy DAM providers. So we like to think that we’re differentiated because of the architecture of our platform built on microservices, APIs, and very flexible modern technology, very scalable. So that sets us apart. It really means that we can fit in into different ecosystems in people’s MarTech stacks. So very easy to connect with other platforms, other technologies. So I think that’s one of the key differentiators.BRIAN KAVANAUGH: 16:11

Bynder is a leading digital asset management platform according to Forrester, as well as our G2 customer reviews. And I would say what sets us apart is first and foremost use cases in the enterprise, but when you look at Bynder, it’s really usability and configurability of the platform, the most integrations, and the biggest marketplace in terms of plugging into other platforms, and then a leading AI strategy centered around search as well as generative AI. So those are three things that come to mind, Chris, but there’s certainly more as well.BRÓNA O’CONNOR: 16:40

MediaValet is a Canadian DAM. We are a digital asset management vendor. We are built on Microsoft Azure, so we are the only platform built exclusively on Microsoft Azure. We help customers across a variety of industries, so whether they are higher ed, non-profit, manufacturing, media and entertainment of all sizes, from SMB through to enterprise, and we work with those organizations to deliver content at scale. So very much a core DAM platform that delivers seamlessly through integration so that your users can work in the systems that they love, but have a great DAM platform at its base. And in terms of setting us aside, I think we’re very proudly rated the highest security vendor for DAM, so the highest security rating, we’ve got a 99% rating there, so we’re exclusively a league of our own in that area.JAKE ATHEY: 17:28

Acquia is the open digital experience platform, and we provide content management, digital asset management, product information management, and customer data management solutions, and Acquia acquired Widen in 2021, which is where I come from as one of the early pioneers in the DAM space, and I’ve been in this space for 20 years. Let’s focus on some of our strengths. Our strengths in flexibility and adaptability, really leaning into that open promise of Acquia, and the fact that we integrate with anything, and that’s really key among our roadmap priorities as well, and then having a scalable performance and governance model, and being one of the few combined DAM and PIM platforms on the market.CHRIS LACINAK: 18:12

For this next question, taking AI off the table, what in your roadmap is your company most focused on or most excited about?CHRISTOPHER MORGAN-WILSON: 18:20

Orange Logic. One of the big things right now is different file formats. Last year was a huge push for MAM, so media asset management, or I guess multimedia asset management, so video. We’re seeing a lot of requests for working with 3D files, project files, resource management, so like not only being able to handle the assets, but the people working on those assets, their time, the budget. Again, it’s that central source of truth where everything regarding the asset, from ideation to creation, all the way to final approval, like pushing out to other platforms, all that is handled within the DAM.SHANNON DELOACH: 18:55

Censhare. We’re most focused on our cloud initiative, right? So we’re going cloud native. It’s going to offer much more flexibility and faster speed to deployment for our customers. So that’s really the aim, to get our customers a usable system more quickly. We’re going cloud native.MELANIE CHALUPA: 19:13

Frontify. So something we’ve been focused a lot on lately is templates. So we do have a template offering within our portal, or our brand portal solution, is of course templating and being able to scale production across several channels is such a critical part of leveraging and getting the most out of your assets, but also being brand compliant. So something that we’re looking to do right now is to further enhance that tool and be able to include things like video templates and being able to manipulate templates for each channel in one go. So I think that’s something that has been really resonating with our clients and we’re looking forward to offering more in that realm.JOHN BATEMAN: 19:46

Tenovos. When the company set about developing a DAM platform, in the back of our minds was how can people get value from the assets and how do you derive the most value? Previously you couldn’t really see how things were performing out in the wild once it left the DAM. So our ideas really from the start, I think from the inception of Tenovos, have been around that smarter use of the assets and smarter use of your resources being guided by the data that you’re pulling back from the assets through all your different channels, whether it’s your social, through your e-commerce, etc. So I think that for us it’s a big focus at the moment.BRIAN KAVANAUGH: 20:36

Bynder. Composable architecture and just using a best-in-breed approach for sure.CHRIS LACINAK: 20:42

Okay, that’s a lot of big words. Can you break that down for us a little bit?BRIAN KAVANAUGH: 20:47

What we’re most excited about is organizations taking what we call a best-in-breed approach to their MarTech stack, not being dependent on a single suite provider or single platform. More identifying needs and capabilities for DAM but also adjacent technologies around CMS, marketing automation, what-have-you, and using the best vendor for each and integrating their platforms using APIs. And another big theme that is right tied into that is delivery of assets. So being more intelligent, more automated, more sophisticated of how assets get delivered out of the DAM to downstream platforms that the customer touches.BRÓNA O’CONNOR: 21:24

MediaValet. We’ve got an exciting roadmap ahead of us this year which we are finalizing and building at the different components but something that’s coming up very soon that I think you’re going to hear from us is about templating. So we’re working with a great partner called Mark and we will be releasing a templating solution in Q2 which will really enable our marketing customers to really drive better impact by enabling their teams to work efficiently with their campaign materials, drive more campaigns out the door, and then leverage your other resources on more strategic initiatives. So it’s really empowering your team to do more which of the time we’re in that is really important for our marketing organizations to drive that efficiency.JAKE ATHEY: 22:03

Acquia. Top non-AI priorities of 2024. We have the priority of integrated workflows. We want more native integrations and more partnerships to really help our customers optimize their content operations as well as to connect assets and metadata across the digital experience. We also have new insights analytics and reporting capabilities with new data visualizations and more analytics API endpoints coming so that customers can work with their DAM data, their DAM reports within whatever business analytics tools that they use. And we also have a new search experience coming with enhanced usability, accessibility, and some added features. And of course we’re advancing our PIM and DAM combination with added PIM and added syndication capabilities that we’re very excited about for our customers that are makers and marketers of products.CHRIS LACINAK: 22:57

Putting AI back on the table, which of the following are you most focused on in the application of AI? Content generation, search, or tagging and description?CHRISTOPHER MORGAN-WILSON: 23:07

Orange Logic. So it’s a good mix of everything. Right from the get-go we’ve always focused heavily on the search because there’s really no point in having a DAM if people can’t find what you’re looking for. And I used to be an asset manager on Disney’s AFV for about seven years so I was the one doing the tagging and it’s so hard to know what people are gonna search for. So if you use the AI for the tagging and the searching that kind of gives you a level up on you know surfacing those assets. And then the third one we are now starting to focus on content generation whether that’s actual physical images based off of other assets in your DAM, document creation like being able to create a brief before you kick off that project. So you’ve cheated and said all three I asked you to pick one. Oh I’m sorry. That’s okay that’s fine. I think we’ll assume that. Searching is the most important. Search, okay all right fair enough.SHANNON DELOACH: 23:57

Censhare. Oh content generation for sure. Okay and can you tell us at all about where how you’re focused on content generation? Yeah so generative AI right so creating product descriptions right so you have a great product and you want to quickly create those descriptions we want to generate that for you. Generating images even videos the whole concept of you know create once use many but now let’s just do it with AI so you can do it faster. And actually using AI to find specific areas within content that you may want to reuse. So I said a mouthful there but really it’s really it’s a lot of our clients are using it for yeah creating those those quick you know give me three bullets on my new product right so boom we can generate it now that’s in the DAM now you can use that and push that out to you know your online channel or whatever other platform or whatever, so.MELANIE CHALUPA: 24:54

Frontify. Probably search at the moment so we’ve recently rolled out our brand AI assistant so that’s going to be able to help our clients have their end users enter their portal and search for assets and through their guidelines and kind of chat to this bot to be able to find what they need and also have that bot generate answers for them that might not even involve them going into the system further so really looking at improving that kind of speed to search timeline as well. We do have some other exciting things around the other elements that you mentioned. Okay tell us tell us about it. Okay yeah so we’re also rolling out a plug-in with open AI where you can generate images within the DAM so on that kind of generative image topic that’s what we’re doing there and we already have AI tagging which has been really great and helping our clients to cast that wide net so that whatever their end-user search for has you know the most likely hood of producing results for them.JOHN BATEMAN: 25:43

Tenovos. Content creation I think and you know really you know the generative stuff is very interesting at the moment but things like localization of assets is it seems to be very prevalent on some of the big global brands that we’re we’re working with that’s a big thing at the moment and then things like you know some of the the cropping and creating different derivatives of assets for different different formats and that sort of thing so yeah I’d say probably the latter two you know search and tagging I think we feel have been done you know for a number of years and work you know it’s kind of matured but I think the content creation side of us seems to be evolving at a sort of exciting pace now particularly around the generative stuff you know.BRIAN KAVANAUGH: 26:35

Bynder. So I think when it comes to tangible applications and what our customers are getting ROI out of like every single day and discovering new use cases for I would start with search because it’s this whole philosophy of a great place to start with AI in your organization is maximizing existing data and what is existing data for a DAM? Well it’s usually the volume of assets you’ve built up over time where if you can apply AI to it there’s just a added level of discoverability and an added level of efficiency you’re going to get which every organization right now is focused on when it comes to efficiency or getting more out of what they’ve already created. So I know generative is exciting and I know that there’s probably a lot to unlock from here on out but if I think of the here and now, it’s really search I think represents the most efficiency.BRÓNA O’CONNOR: 27:23

MediaValet. I would say you’re gonna hear more from us on search very soon with us developing that area. Tagging is a huge one, especially for our customers that have huge libraries, right? So they’re ingesting a ton of content into the DAM and that automatic tagging with AI has been essential for them to get through utilizing their catalogs. Something related to that that we’re very excited about and I was speaking with our customer here about is the Jane Goodall Institute leverage video intelligence. So that’s another AI capability that they’re leveraging and really it’s about extracting that content from their video and then for reuse. So leveraging content, using AI to generate transcripts and social quotes and everything has been really important for that customer and a great story we talked about yesterday as Henry Stewart DAM LA.JAKE ATHEY: 28:07

Acquia. I want to say all three because we have all three among our roadmap priorities for the next year: smart tags is one of those roadmap priorities, smart tagging and search. Effectively, search is the desired outcome. We also have this concept of automatic video transcription and automatic video generation and templates, and so we are excited about the generation capabilities there. But I’m gonna go search if I have to pick just one because that’s really fundamental to DAM. Should I say funDAMmental is if I will, yeah.CHRIS LACINAK: 28:41

Got to get the DAM pun in.JAKE ATHEY: 28:43

Indeed, never gets old.CHRIS LACINAK: 28:44

Now there’s a few providers in the room that are not DAM platforms. They’re add-ons, they’re partners, they’re technologies that work alongside DAM, and I’d like to ask them some questions. They’re a bit different, so I’m gonna approach this one a little bit differently and just talk to each one for a few minutes. Reinhard Holzner from Smint.io, we see that you are not a DAM, so can you tell us what you are?REINHARD HOLZNER: 29:11

Hey Chris, yeah, so we are not a DAM but we work with your DAM. Imagine you have your favorite DAM and you want to give it different experiences for different audiences. We say the DAM is not the right place for everybody to for every audience, for example. So if you want to reach other audiences like partners or the press or your employees, you might need a different experience, and that’s what we do with our content portals. You can build a brand portal, you can build a media center, you can build a download area, you can build all those different experiences on top of your DAM that you can’t do with your DAM alone.CHRIS LACINAK: 29:47

Could you give us an example of a, I mean I don’t know if you’re allowed to use client names or not, but maybe not, if you can just anonymize it, give us an example of how one of your clients uses Smint?REINHARD HOLZNER: 29:56

So we have several clients that we can name, for example, we have in Europe we have Ferrero Group, which is one of the largest retailers in Europe. They use this, for example, for the internal product portal or product imagery portal, so all the employees can access the imagery that is required through easy to use, simple, mobile-enabled interface and they don’t need to go to the DAM, which is very complicated, for example. Or we have two of the largest sports organizations in the world as our clients where I cannot name them, but I can tell the story. So they reach the press and the media through our portals because, for example, the DAM that they use is not really mobile-enabled, it’s not properly printed, and stuff, and so they put the content from the DAM in front of the media when there’s tournaments and when there’s events that they need to cover. Or we have guys like Somfy, which is a big manufacturer of home automation devices, they’re doing partner portals and providing all the content to their partners, to their resellers like product imagery, data sheets, and so on and so on. So we have a beverages vendor from the US who is using that as a product information portal, bringing together, for example, content from the DAM together with content from their Salsify PIM in this case, and really displaying that data or providing that data to their departments. For example, to see which marketing material is missing for which market. So a lot of different use cases and you see a lot of different audiences that have different requirements that not necessarily can be covered with the DAM alone.CHRIS LACINAK: 31:34

Great, and can I ask what are you particularly excited about in DAM in 2024 or at Henry Stewart DAM LA or anything that’s caught your attention or that you’re particularly focused on?REINHARD HOLZNER: 31:47

Hmm, good question. So what happens in DAM, I think, is that everything professionalizes, everything grows a lot. We see also transactions in the marketplace, going on mergers, companies taking up other companies. I hope that in the future, this will be even going into a more interesting direction that we see larger players in the marketplace that have more influence. The thing is we have a very fragmented DAM marketplace right now with, I think, over 220 vendors out there competing in the marketplace, and it will be very interesting to see if this consolidates because that would probably make things easier for the clients because they have a more complete offering for all those different units that are out there.CHRIS LACINAK: 32:37

David Sultan from OneTeg. David, thanks for agreeing to talk to me.DAVID SULTAN: 32:41

Nice to see you.CHRIS LACINAK: 32:42

Could we start off by you just telling me about OneTeg and what you guys do?DAVID SULTAN: 32:46

Sure, so OneTeg is the integration platform as a service, and what we do is we connect any system to any system, kind of like Zapier, but our focus is on digital asset management, product information, and e-commerce. So we’re able to make integration a lot easier, a lot faster, easy to maintain, easy to deal with upgrades, and just making the level of effort to your customers a lot easier to manage. So instead of having big projects, it’s a lot smaller projects, and you can predict a little bit more that.CHRIS LACINAK: 33:17

That sounds like a good goal, so it sounds like kind of creating more predictability and efficiency around the integration process, which can be unwieldy and a lot of risk as far as costs and time. That’s great.

Could you give us an example of maybe how, and you don’t have to use names, it’s okay if you want to anonymize it, but just how like a customer has used OneTeg, give us an example of that.DAVID SULTAN: 33:43

So we have a customer who uses OpenText as their DAM and using Syndigo as their syndication engine. So whenever he needs to go to Amazon or to any of those other marketplaces they sell beverages, so we had to connect their assets from their DAM to their they had a separate PIM which is it’s like in a separate PIM system, it was an in-house PIM, and we had to syndicate it to Syndigo. So we basically are marrying all of that information, a very complicated flow, and ensuring all of the information is married up between the product, the images, into the website, into the marketplaces.CHRIS LACINAK: 34:21

Okay, all right, that’s great. Thank you, that’s helpful. And what’s one of the features that’s on your product roadmap that you’re most excited about?DAVID SULTAN: 34:29

So when we first launched it a couple of years ago, it was really about just being kind of more of a generic iPaaS solution focusing on DAM and PIM, and we still are, but what we’ve realized is that a lot of our customers, what they really want is a quick way to get into a project. So we start building a lot of templates, so a template, so we call it a recipe, so a template or recipe, so say for example you want to connect inriver to MediaValet, a DAM and a PIM, we can very easily spin up a recipe that already has done the, already has all of the hooks between those two systems, and then we can, you can use a template to expand to your own flow that you need to build in your environment. So that’s like a big thing we’re doing as well, and we also, this is not short term, but long term, we also trying to look for an AI in order to help the developers or whoever is actually building the flows to use AI to generate the flow for it by putting prompts. That’s kind of a little bit longer in the roadmap.CHRIS LACINAK: 35:27

Okay, interesting. Yeah, that’s an interesting use of AI. It makes sense; it’s going to be different than how the platforms are using it. So that’s interesting to hear. Eric Wengrowski, CEO of Steg AI. Eric, can you tell us a little bit about Steg AI and what you do?ERIC WENGROWSKI: 35:41

Yeah, sure. So Steg is a state-of-the-art watermarking company. So we do watermarks for a variety of use cases, everything from leak protection to identifying generative AI, deep fakes, things like that, and we do it all with state-of-the-art watermarking technology that we’ve developed in-house and we’ve patented. We work with many of the DAMs here at Henry Stewart to bring our tech to customers.CHRIS LACINAK: 36:06

Great, and can you tell me, in your roadmap, what are you most excited about that’s on the horizon that you can talk about?ERIC WENGROWSKI: 36:17

Yeah, sure. So, you know, the benefit that Steg brings to our customers is primarily around security, and so, you know, with the explosion of deep fakes and generative AI, seeing is no longer believing. I mean, like, I’ve been working in this field and developing AI algorithms, you know, for 10 years now.CHRIS LACINAK: 36:38

Okay.ERIC WENGROWSKI: 36:39

And a lot of the times I can’t tell the difference between something that came out of a camera and something that came out of an algorithm. So, it’s getting to the point where, you know, even relying on people better than me, forensic experts, aren’t going to be able to tell the difference, and just given the sheer volume of content that people consume over social media and things like that, we really need tools to help understand what’s real, what’s trustworthy, what’s synthetic, what’s organic without labeling something as like, you know, just good or bad, just telling us more about the provenance. So, you know, we’re working right now, we’ve created tools to help identify the origin of content, what’s trustworthy. This is for everybody from generative AI companies to federal governments who are wanting to ensure that there’s a sort of a clean communication channel between them and their nationals.CHRIS LACINAK: 37:31

Great. Yeah. And maybe could you help us wrap our heads around it a bit more, maybe but give us in a case study, and you don’t have to name names if you need to anonymize it, or but just help us understand how some of your customers are putting your technology to use.ERIC WENGROWSKI: 37:46

Yeah, sure. So a couple of years ago, we were approached by a company that was experiencing million-dollar on average leaks for every one of their products that had launched for the past three years, and they were having multiple launches a year that were all leaking ahead of time. This is a consumer electronics company. So they were working with a DAM who we decided to partner with that was great, but, you know, the problem was they really couldn’t tell where these leaks were coming from. Is this stuff that was internal, people on their own team, was it any of their vendors, partners, anything like that. So we integrated Steg’s watermarking technology with their DAM, so automatically in the background whenever they were sharing assets out or any step with the creation process, we were applying new watermarks every time. So if anything leaked out, we could always go back and identify the source. And when leaks happened, and they’ve happened many times, we’ve always been able to trace back and identify the source of the leaks and help the customer plug this extremely costly problem.CHRIS LACINAK: 38:47

And last but not least, what’s the last song you added to your favorites playlist?CHRISTOPHER MORGAN-WILSON: 38:52

Orange Logic. Dance, Dance by Ryan Prewett.SHANNON DELOACH: 38:55

Censhare. An oldie but a goodie, it was Public Enemy and then the Hour of Chaos. So for some reason, I just had a hankering for that song, I added it to my playlist.MELANIE CHALUPA: 39:05

Frontify. Do What I Want by Kid Cudi somehow wasn’t in my playlist before today, and now it is.JOHN BATEMAN: 39:11

Tenovos. Iron Maiden, Run to the Hills, that’s one you probably haven’t gotten.BRIAN KAVANAUGH: 39:16

Bynder. Square One by none other than Tom Petty, and so I’m a big Tom Petty fan but that’s not one that I’d heard, and so I added it this past weekend.BRÓNA O’CONNOR: 39:25

MediaValet. Billie Eilish, What Was I Made For, and that was because I saw her perform it at the Oscars a week ago, so that was that.CHRIS LACINAK: 39:33

You were at the Oscars yourself?BRÓNA O’CONNOR: 39:35

No. I wish.CHRIS LACINAK: 39:36

Let’s just say you were. Let’s just say you were.BRÓNA O’CONNOR: 39:39

Yeah, I was there.JAKE ATHEY: 39:40

Acquia. I’m a girl dad, so I’m gonna go with Taylor Swift, and one that really gets me revved up is Ready For It, and that’s from the Reputation album.REINHARD HOLZNER: 39:47

Smint. It’s that Elton John, Dua Lipa song.CHRIS LACINAK: 39:51

Okay, all right, all right, great, wouldn’t have guessed.DAVID SULTAN: 39:55

OneTeg. So I like John Prine, I know he’s, I think he died a few years ago, but I love his music, it’s country music, and I think the song, it’s called That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round.ERIC WENGROWSKI: 40:09

Steg AI. All right, so I didn’t add it to my favorites playlist, but I took, so my wife and I just had a baby a few months ago, as a present while she was still pregnant, I took her to see Taylor Swift here in LA.CHRIS LACINAK: 40:27

Best husband award of the year.ERIC WENGROWSKI: 40:29

Yeah, I’ll take that for this one. So, you know, I’m, I would not describe myself as a Swiftie, I’m definitely not a hater, but you know, my wife is a real Swiftie, and so I was like, hey, you know, I’ll go, it’ll be fun. Best concert I’ve ever been to, hands down. Yeah, SoFi, it was awesome.CHRIS LACINAK: 40:47

All right, so give me a favorite Taylor Swift song.ERIC WENGROWSKI: 40:51

Oh, I like Colors.CHRIS LACINAK: 40:52

Now, there’s a fun session that happens at every Henry Stewart I’ve been to at least called Stump the DAM Consultant. It’s hosted by Jarrod Gingras from the Real Story Group. A number of brave consultants get on stage, the audience asks a bunch of questions in an app, Jarrod Gingras looks at the upvotes to see what are the highest priority questions or the ones that have been voted on the most, and asks those of the consultants. Now, all the consultants put on headphones with music so they can’t hear the other consultants answering, and at one at a time, they answer, and then the audience votes on who has the best answer. And because I don’t have the approval of all the consultants on the stage or Jarrod, I’m going to include just answers from Kara Van Malssen from AVP in this one to give you a little taste of what that looks like and sounds like; it’s a fun event. So, a little bonus for you here.

If we’re currently in DAM 4.0, what will DAM 5.0 be?KARA VAN MALSSEN: 41:53

Okay, so my answer is, I don’t think that there will be a DAM 5.0. I just, I luckily, I did my homework and I went to Jarrod’s session earlier, and it got me thinking about this exact question because as he was describing it, it just seemed more and more to be not DAM anymore, as kind of a content convergence and, you know, we have these beautiful and massive content orchestration engines. It seems like the concept of DAM as we know it today, DAM or MAM, as this kind of it just, that idea makes it a silo in and of itself, and I think that puts it into this corner which I just don’t see the future being. So, I just don’t know if there is a DAM 5.0. I think it’s an evolution. If you have a kid that has a Pokemon and you know how the Pokemon work, they go from like the basic Pokemon to evolution 1, 2. And I think by the time you get to evolution VMAX, you know, it’s not even the same character anymore, and that’s the reality.CHRIS LACINAK: 43:02

When will AI tagging actually work right?KARA VAN MALSSEN: 43:08

Okay, so my question is, who’s your DAM vendor? Because it should already be working. So if you don’t have it working, you come see me and we help you find a new one. Just kidding. Okay, in all honesty, I think where we are in that space, the maturity is pretty good for specific types of use cases. So, I think you have to get specific on what you want it to do. So if you’re trying to do things that are more visual, object recognition, computer vision, what’s in the photo, what colors are in this photo, what’s that object, things like that. There’s pretty good capabilities there now that are readily available. I think the harder part and maybe I’m not sure this is what you’re trying to get at is when we’ll be able to not have humans do any kind of metadata entry. I don’t know if we’ll ever be quite there. There’s certain metadata, contextual information, provenance information, information about what campaign was this part of, what project was this a part of, what are the rights to this image, what’s the credit line, should it credit the AI that created it. You know what, all of those kinds of things, I don’t think we’re necessarily ever gonna be there. So there’s just a certain amount that I think that the AI tagging can and can’t do. But I think there’s a level of maturity that is pretty solid right now for certain use cases. So, I’ll just say it’s limited but it’s evolving.CHRIS LACINAK: 44:39

What’s the easiest AI win for a DAM when your boss is forcing a quick AI answer?KARA VAN MALSSEN: 44:44

The quickest AI win right now… Okay, well it’s, I think it’s kind of similar to the last question, which was some of that tagging. But I actually think the very easiest one you can unlock pretty fast is speech to text for video and audio. So that’s pretty good. You know, you might have to do some editing. What’s so funny back there? Okay, vote for Kara. So, speech to text is pretty, you know, that’s an easy one. And you can just get all of that transcription of your audio and video, and then you have so much searchable text. Boom. Easy way. Go for it. Do it tomorrow.CHRIS LACINAK: 45:30

If you had to use a song to describe a DAM, what song would you pick?KARA VAN MALSSEN: 45:37

The first word of this song title is a curse word, but it’s “b” with those, you know, special characters, better have my money. It’s expensive, right?CHRIS LACINAK: 45:51

So here we are at the end of the Henry Stewart DAM LA conference. It’s been a great conference. What are some of the takeaways and themes from this year? One is that a lot of people were talking about portals. Last year, that was a word that was being used, but we mostly saw it on the DAM and technology provider side. This year, I heard a lot about it from users. People that were talking about real use cases wanting to create seamless user experiences on both the download and the upload side. Speaking to very specific audiences both internal and external to their organization, and it felt like a thing that was new in a new practical way. Speaking of practical, another thing that was that felt new this year was we heard a lot about AI. Last year felt a bit more wide-eyed than it did this year. This year, people had clearly put it to use. They had grappled with the issues more. There was skepticism but helped mix with healthy enthusiasm, and we just heard a lot about real-world AI applications, conversations that were happening in organizations, proof of concepts, and then day-to-day use. We still heard a mix of perspectives but it felt like a new mix, a healthy mix, and something that I think represents the progress of how organizations are using AI. That was interesting and fun to hear about. Lastly, I’ll just say that the vibe in general was really good. It felt like there was more energy this year than last year, and not to say last year was bad, but there was just something this year, there was a momentum. There was a lot of great engagement. I think the content and the program was really good this year compared to last year, and not to say it was bad, but just this year felt exceptionally good. It felt cohesive. It had people talking in the coffee breaks, at the lunches, you know, there was a lot of conversation around the program, which just meant to me that they nailed it on the authenticity of the topics, and that it was resonating with people, so that’s great. Whoever did the programming did a great job. I will say one thing that was missing, and there was one company that was representing this, actually, there were a few companies that were representing this, but it just wasn’t a topic that came up much, which was content authenticity. I heard about it in one session that I attended. There was one vendor, Steg AI, that had a booth. FADEL was here, and then there was one other company I think they were called Verify that was here in the audience. They were focused on rights management and one or two use cases for content authenticity, but I was surprised that there wasn’t more there. Now, it’s not a super sexy topic, you know, security is not the most fun thing to talk about, but it’s been bubbling up so much this year, and with the massive amounts of content generation that’s happening, with the questions around content authenticity, you know, calling real things fake and calling fake things real, and the meaning and potential impact that has to DAMs and archives is huge. So, I was just surprised that there wasn’t more about that, but I bet that that, you know, will be a conversation that we’ll hear a lot more about next year. That’s going to be a prediction for next year, so we’ll see. Anyway, it’s been a great time. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the content around the Henry Stewart DAM LA recap, and remember, DAM right because it’s too important to get wrong.

Thanks for listening to the DAM Right podcast. If you have people you want to hear from, topics you’d like to see us talk about, or events you want to see us cover, please send us an email at [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. Speaking of feedback, please go to your platform of choice and give us a rating. We would absolutely appreciate it. While you’re at it, go ahead and follow or subscribe to make sure you don’t miss an episode. You can also stay up to date with me and the DAM Right podcast by following me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. And finally, go and find some really amazing and free resources focused just on DAM at weareavp.com/free-resources. That’s weareavp.com/free-resources. You’ll find things there like our DAM Strategy Canvas, our DAM Health Score Card, and the Get Your DAM Budget slide deck template. Each one of those also has a free accompanying guide to help you put it to use. So go get them now.

DAM system struggles? Don’t rush to blame the platform.

No one could find anything. People were squirreling away photos and graphics on their personal Dropbox. Videos were on dozens of hard drives. People were misusing assets, violating license terms and brand guidelines. It was time to invest in a DAM system.

You tackled the tough implementation tasks, migrated assets, tagged them, configured the system with your DAM vendor’s help, and trained the users.

(Congratulations for getting this far, I know that was a lot of work).

Despite these effots, people still can’t find anything. They are still squirreling away graphics and video. They are still misusing assets.

Some people are blaming the DAM tool. But don’t give up on your technology investment just yet.

Here are 5 reasons why you aren’t getting the most from your DAM solution, and what to do about them.

1. People can’t find anything.

If users are having trouble finding assets in the DAM system (and coming to you to help them find stuff they should be able to get on their own), this may point to an underlying information architecture and/or metadata problem.

Consider the different ways people navigate a digital asset management system: keyword search, filters, curated collections, folder hierarchy. Examine each.

Start by talking to your users about how they search and browse (check out our 3-part series on designing a great search experience to learn more). Ask for real-life examples.

Next, take a look at the underlying data structures that enable search and discovery. Are there issues with metadata quality? Do people want to see different filters than the ones available? Are the curated collections meaningful and relevant? Does the folder structure make sense to them? Are you managing versions correctly?

Find what’s not working and prioritize improvements. Minor adjustments can sometimes significantly enhance users’ ability to find what they need.

2. People are misusing assets.

If people persistently misuse brand assets or licensed images despite your DAM system’s permissions being configured, consider these possibilities:

• Test the system permissions – are people able to access and download things they shouldn’t? If they can, update the user groups and/or system permissions.

• Clarify asset usage rights within the metadata if not already doing so. Lack of clear information may lead users to incorrect assumptions about permissible actions with the content.

• Are all assets stored in the DAM? It may be that people are getting access to content from file sharing tools (that could be outdated and/or lack metadata about usage rights). Sometimes enforcing compliance requires leadership intervention, including support with policies and/or sunsetting legacy systems.

3. People complain the DAM system is not easy to use.

DAM admins have likely configured the system as a great tool for themselves, but not for end users.

Look more closely at users’ needs and available system capabilities.

If the system was implemented without engaging users early in the process to understand their needs, configured to meet those needs, and/or it was not tested with users prior to launch, there may have been some missed opportunities. 

It’s not too late to engage with your users to understand their complete workflows, identify their ideal processes, and see how the DAM can integrate into these.

At minimum, you can hopefully modify permissions and layouts to create a more streamlined user experience. It may be possible using the features of your digital asset management system to create tailored storefronts or portals for different user groups that greatly simplify their experience and only provide them the assets they need. 

Addressing these findings might start with simple configuration adjustments, then proceed to leveraging existing out of the box integrations, then move to consideration of custom integrations.

4. The DAM system is a mess.

If your DAM has become a repository for indiscriminate file dumping, it’s time to establish governance. 

Allowing digital asset creators to upload content without adherence to standards or quality checks can quickly lead to disorder. Each contributor ends up with their own little silo within the system, organizing, labeling, and describing things differently.

Start by collaborating with key stakeholders to define clear DAM roles and responsibilities. Designate a product owner to establish asset organization and description guidelines. Educate contributors on DAM best practices, highlighting the benefits to their work.

Enforce quality control through guidelines for metadata entry and use of controlled vocabularies, complemented by automated and manual reviews.

5. No one uses it.

If you build a DAM, will they come?

Not necessarily.

It’s often too easy for people to stick with old habits, even after the new system has been launched. If you have checked all of the items listed above and the new system is still not getting traction, look closely at how you are managing the transformation.

Successful adoption hinges on change management, requiring both top-down communication from leadership and bottom-up user enablement.

It is critical that leadership communicates the purpose behind the DAM system—what problem it solves, what benefits it will bring to the organization.

But understanding the broader impact isn’t enough. You need to bring users into the conversation so they can understand not just the benefits to the company, but to them personally. They will need to clearly understand the process changes asked of them and the reasons behind these changes. And they will require support as they adjust to new practices.

Still stuck?

It may be time to elevate your DAM solution. At AVP we offer a rapid diagnostic service to pinpoint actionable interventions for DAM success.

Or maybe it really is time to evaluate whether you need a new DAM system.

Either way, we can help. Schedule a call.

Crafting a Winning DAM Strategy

In today’s digital landscape, managing digital assets effectively is crucial for organizations of all sizes. A well-defined Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategy not only ensures that assets are organized and accessible but also aligns with broader organizational goals. This blog will explore the essence of DAM strategy, its components, and how to create a winning strategy that maximizes the value of your digital assets.

Understanding DAM Strategy

DAM strategy is often misunderstood. It is more than just a collection of goals or a response to problems. A successful DAM strategy is actionable, providing a clear roadmap for how to manage digital assets in a way that supports organizational objectives.

Many organizations fall into the trap of stating ambitions without a concrete plan. For instance, saying “we want to maximize the value of our digital assets” is not a strategy. It’s essential to differentiate between aspirations and actionable strategies.

The Importance of a Clear Strategy

A clear DAM strategy helps organizations avoid common pitfalls such as resource misallocation and misalignment with business objectives. Without a focused strategy, organizations may struggle to harness the full potential of their digital assets.

One of the key tools in developing a DAM strategy is the DAM Strategy Canvas, which helps organizations articulate and execute their strategies effectively. This tool guides users in identifying challenges, defining use cases, and outlining action steps to achieve their goals.

Components of a Successful DAM Strategy

To create a winning DAM strategy, organizations should focus on several key components:

• Identify the Challenge: Understand the specific problems that need to be addressed. This could range from issues with asset accessibility to challenges in user satisfaction.
• Define Use Cases: High-level use cases should be identified to understand who will use the digital assets and for what purpose. This is crucial to ensure that the strategy aligns with actual user needs.
• Prioritize Use Cases: Not all use cases can be addressed at once. Prioritize them based on the organization’s goals and the resources available.
• Outline Action Steps: Determine the actions needed to enable the prioritized use cases. This may include technology investments, process improvements, or governance enhancements.
• Define Success Metrics: Clearly articulate what success looks like for each use case. This will help track progress and adjust strategies as needed.

The Role of Stakeholders

Engaging stakeholders throughout the DAM strategy development process is vital. This includes senior leadership, technology partners, and end-users who will benefit from the DAM system. Their insights and feedback can provide valuable perspectives that shape the strategy and ensure buy-in.

For instance, senior leadership can provide guidance on organizational goals, while technology partners can offer insights on feasible solutions. Involving end-users helps ensure the strategy addresses their actual needs, increasing the likelihood of successful adoption.

Implementing the DAM Strategy

Once the strategy is defined, the next step is implementation. This involves translating the strategy into actionable plans, setting timelines, and assigning responsibilities. Regular communication with stakeholders is essential to keep everyone informed and engaged throughout the implementation process.

It’s also crucial to monitor progress and make adjustments as needed. This could involve conducting regular check-ins, gathering feedback from users, and analyzing performance metrics to ensure the DAM strategy remains aligned with organizational goals.

Evaluating Success and Continuous Improvement

After implementing the DAM strategy, organizations should continuously evaluate its effectiveness. This involves measuring success against the defined metrics and gathering feedback from users to identify areas for improvement.

Continuous improvement is key to maintaining an effective DAM strategy. Organizations should be agile, adapting their strategies as the digital landscape evolves and new challenges arise.

Conclusion

Crafting a winning DAM strategy is essential for organizations looking to maximize the value of their digital assets. By focusing on actionable plans, engaging stakeholders, and committing to continuous improvement, organizations can create a robust framework that supports their broader objectives and drives success.

For those interested in diving deeper into DAM strategy, consider leveraging the DAM Strategy Canvas as a practical tool to guide your planning and execution.

Transcript

Hello, welcome to “DAM Right, Winning at Digital Asset Management.” I’m your host, Chris Lacinak, CEO of digital asset management consulting firm, AVP. The topic of focus in today’s episode is DAM strategy. It’s almost easier to talk about what strategy is not than to talk about what it is. Strategy is not hopes and ambitions. For instance, it is not a strategy to say that we want to maximize the value of our digital assets. Strategy is not simply the opposite of a problem statement. For instance, it is not a strategy to diagnose the problem as no one being able to find the assets they need, and then to simply say that your strategy is to ensure that people will be able to find the digital assets they need. Strategy is not an observation or a statement, such as our organization will be the premier example of what effective digital asset management looks like. Strategy is not a priority. It’s not a strategy to say that user satisfaction is your main focus over the next 12 months. And strategy is not a goal or result. It’s not a strategy to say that we will have 10,000 users or 1 million assets in the DAM by such and such a date. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of these statements, of course. They all have a place in the process and messaging. It’s just that none of them are strategies. But statements just like these get used as strategic language all the time. And the outcome of having a bad strategy, or even no strategy, is that it leaves the organization unable to harness its power in a focused and cohesive way in order to achieve goals, dreams, and overcome challenges so that it can thrive and succeed. So what is a strategy, you might be asking? And more specifically, what is a digital asset management strategy? I’m so glad to have Kara Van Malsen with me here today to help answer that question. Kara is someone that thinks deeply about digital asset management and the organization that surrounds the practice. Kara is a thought leader, an expert practitioner, and an amazing communicator. She’s the creator of the DAM Operational Model, which we use in our work at AVP routinely, and which is available for free to anyone who wants to put it to use for themselves. And most recently, Kara has created the DAM Strategy Canvas, along with a guide on how to put it to use. This most recent piece is why I’ve invited Kara to join us today, so that we can better understand why a DAM strategy is important, what a DAM strategy is, and to help you create your own. Kara has been working in digital asset management since 2006, and is one of the leading thinkers and practitioners in this space. Of course, I’m biased, because Kara is also a partner and managing director at AVP, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You’ll hear it for yourself in this episode. Kara is driven by a passion for helping organizations build impactful DAM programs with deep expertise in systems thinking, user experience design, library science, and business analysis with extensive DAM experience. Her portfolio ranges from Fortune 500 powerhouses to esteemed cultural heritage institutions and transformative nonprofits. Beyond her consulting role, Kara frequently shares her insights at conferences and workshops around the globe. She has taught at NYU and Pratt, and has been involved as a trainer in a number of amazing global initiatives, including ICROM. Also, she’s just simply an awesome person, and I’m thrilled to have her launch the inaugural episode of DAM Right with me. Let’s jump in, and remember, DAM right, because it’s too important to get wrong. (upbeat music) Kara Van Malsen, welcome to the DAM Right podcast. I’m so excited to have you here today to talk about a topic that is near and dear to your heart, digital asset management strategy. You’ve just written a piece on this that we’re gonna dive into in depth, but one of the reasons that I’m so excited to talk to you about this today is because I think in the conference circuit, surprisingly, strategy is a topic that doesn’t get talked about much. So I think it’s really important, and I’m glad that we have someone like yourself who is a thought leader in this realm and is an expert practitioner to talk to us today. So thanks for joining me, I appreciate it.

Chris Lacinak: 04:03

Yeah, thanks, Chris. I’m excited to be here, and looking forward to talking about DAM strategy.

Kara Van Malssen: 04:07

Before we dive in, I’d love for you to just tell me a bit about yourself. What’s your background? What’s your history? How did you get into digital asset management? And to give us some insight into what your approach is today.

Chris Lacinak: 04:19

So my background is in archives and specifically moving image archives. So I have a master’s degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. And so my intention was to go into film and television preservation archiving. This was in the early 2000s, so this was really pre-YouTube, pre-internet video, but kind of started in the digital space early on. And so I was working in that kind of around 2005, 2006. And, you know, it’s fast forward some years that we were kind of working on, how do we get all these things into digital form? What’s gonna happen when everything’s shot digitally and file-based media? Few years later that happened. So everything was digital. And it was, you know, kind of, it was no longer the case that there was such an enormous difference between the needs of video content versus other kinds of content. It was just going into big pools and buckets of content in general. And so that all needed to be cared for in a way so that it could be leveraged by organizations to help them kind of fulfill their mission or whatever they needed to do with it. And so it just evolved from there. It was just like, well, it’s all digital now, let’s figure out what to do with this stuff. So that’s kind of how I got into it and I’m still into it today.

Kara Van Malssen: 05:42

Do you think that that background gives you a different perspective than maybe folks that have come at it from a different angle? Do you think that that gives you any particular, you know, unique insights?

Chris Lacinak: 05:54

I think there are several places that people come from that are in this field. So it could be that they have an archive or library science background like me. Some people come to it from the production side, the creative operations side, and they sort of realize, you know, this could all be done so much better if we just had a better handle on these assets. I do think those two perspectives are very different. Those of us who have library science type backgrounds are kind of standards driven. We’re very much about, you know, just making sure that the librarian side of things is all right. Whereas the other people coming from a creative background are gonna see it from the perspective of the creative team and the kind of the operations and sort of the end product of the marketing collateral that you can produce from these assets or kind of other product related collateral. So I think we come at it from different perspectives. And as you evolve into the career, you start to broaden your understanding of, you know, the perspective. So at a certain point, I don’t know, it all blends together. I think I have other interests that I bring to this space. But things like user experience design is something I’m very interested in and passionate about kind of just in strategic thinking in general, which is I think how I ended up landing on let’s do something about DAM strategy. So.

Kara Van Malssen: 07:20

Yeah, it’s interesting. Anybody that knows you knows that you are always creating and thinking and trying to improve on things that are done. And interestingly, things like operational models and user experience design and strategy are almost certainly not in film studies or archival programs or digital asset management programs. So you’ve shown that you’re bringing your interests to the table outside of your background and kind of formal studies, which is great. So let’s talk about the digital asset management strategy canvas. You’ve created this piece. It’s a kind of one page piece and it’s got an accompanying guide that explains like how to use it. So, you know, I’d like to focus on it as a way to talk about strategy at large, like what strategy looks like and how people should approach it. So could you tell us to start, could you just give us an overview of what the canvas is all about and kind of how it came to be?

Chris Lacinak: 08:24

Yeah, so the canvas is kind of, it’s a nod to those great canvas creators out there, like the folks that created the business model, the Business Model Canvas, the folks at Strategizer and things like that. So I sort of love those types of simple visual kind of thinking and idea generation tools. So I’m really drawn to that sort of thing. So that’s, first of all, where some of the inspiration came from. But in general, the idea behind the canvas is just to have a tool that’s going to guide you in thinking about your DAM strategy and kind of give you a place to jot down and kind of generate ideas about what should be in your strategy. So it’s not like the strategy is the canvas, it’s more of a thinking tool to help you plan, ideate and kind of have conversation around the creation of a strategy for digital asset management. So it’s just a way of organizing your thoughts and ideas and kind of being able to work with those in a way that’s sort of flexible and fluid in a visual sort of form. You can use it in person, if you were to kind of be in a meeting, you might have it in a larger form printout or people could have their own copies, but it’s also nice, something you can throw in a virtual whiteboard in a Zoom session and throw sticky notes on it and things like that. So that’s kind of what it is at its heart. It’s a planning tool and a thinking tool.

Kara Van Malssen: 09:55

Thinking about using it as a tool, should someone who’s putting it to use think about the steps that you lay out on the canvas as a way to arrive at a strategy itself is these individual components are not the strategy, they’re helping you arrive at your strategy. Is that the right way to think about it?

Chris Lacinak: 10:15

Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. I think what you’ll ultimately come up with and document in that canvas will amount to a strategy, but a strategy and the success of a strategy comes down to how it’s articulated, how it’s communicated, how it’s shared, how you’re kind of managing conversation around it. So I don’t think you can just say, we made a canvas, we’re done, we have a strategy, let’s go. So ultimately you’ll have to synthesize what you have there, get it in a form that’s meaningful to your stakeholders in order to generate buy-in and support and trust and things like that. So just to help everybody align, but it’s a great conversation starter. So if you’re working with stakeholders as you’re generating a strategy, it’s a way to kind of help guide that conversation. It’s really what it’s for. But the totality of the things you’ll capture in the canvas should make up the DAM strategy. These are the things you really need to think about and be concerned with making decisions on as you’re creating a DAM strategy.

Kara Van Malssen: 11:16

For people who don’t have the DAM strategy canvas in front of them, haven’t seen it yet, could you walk us through kind of what, and this might be too big of an ask, but kind of what some of the salient steps are, how someone would work their way through it, like what are the components of the canvas?

Chris Lacinak: 11:33

Yeah, I’ll try to do that kind of succinctly since yeah, I could go on and on, but it starts with the question of what is the challenge that we’re addressing here? So if you think about strategy in general and kind of go back to like this strategy, kind of big thinkers, strategy comes out of military originally, and then in the late 20th century, mid to late 20th century is kind of adapted to corporate strategy and business strategy. And both of those cases, the question is how do we win? So if we’re in a military context, we’re thinking like how do we win this battle, this war? In a corporate strategy, it’s like how do we win this category or how do we differentiate in this market? And so people now apply strategy kind of at different layers of an organization, but the ultimate thing is it comes down to identification of a problem that you need to overcome or a challenge or an opportunity that you’re presented with, how you’re gonna go about overcoming that, and then what are the action steps you’re gonna take? And so that is how, that is kind of the root of the Digital Asset Management Strategy C anvas is kind of thinking about it that way. So if the first thing you need to think about is what is the challenge or problem we wanna overcome? That’s the first question you would work through on the canvas and try to get alignment around what really is that problem. The next set of things that we recommend that you work on, and this is all laid out in the guide that accompanies the canvas, but I would say the next step in my suggestion would be to think about the use cases. So that’s kind of the heart of this DAM Strategy Canvas. If you think about a strategy being a response to it, a particular challenge, diagnosis of a challenge, a guiding policy, and then a set of actions, what we’re arguing with this DAM Strategy Canvas and this approach is that the guiding policy piece is the use cases you’re going to be addressing. So that’s a really critical part of it, which use cases, and this is, in this case, we’re talking about high level use cases. And that’s important. It’s like not who needs to do what with digital asset management technology. That’s not the question you should be asking. It’s more about the assets and what they need to do with them. And then the accompanying piece of that is which assets and which metadata allow them to answer the questions they need to use those assets effectively. So that’s kind of the second step is thinking about those use cases. And then we get into the prioritization of those use cases. And then finally, the next question is, is to enable those use cases, what are the actions we’re going to need to take? And so the canvas has a bunch of prompts to get you thinking about the different things you’re going to have to be thinking about in order to deliver on those use cases. So that’s like, do we need technology? Do we need in process improvement? Do we need data quality improvement? Do we need governance? See things like that. So it’s kind of guiding your thinking around which actions are going to be important to deliver on those use cases. And then the final step is what does success look like? And I think that you could do that early, but I like to think about that kind of coming at the end once you’ve gone full circle from this challenge you’re addressing to, okay, what does success look like? What does it look like if we win, if we achieve our goal? So that’s the overview of the strategy canvas in the nutshell.

Kara Van Malssen: 15:07

That’s fantastic, thank you. That’s a great description. And it strikes me as you’re talking, I wonder if you would agree with this statement or not. It seems to me that that success, what does success look like, might for many people be the only thing that their strategy is, right? We want to be able to have assets in the hands of the right people at the right time, whenever they need it with the right information, right? That’s kind of what success looks like maybe, or we want to leverage our digital assets to increase revenue, something like that. But I love that you, before you get there, you’re actually kind of laying out this process that says, how are we gonna get there, those actions and broken into categories. Does that sound right? Am I thinking about that right?

Chris Lacinak: 15:57

Absolutely, and actually, my thinking on strategy in general derives a lot from Richard Rumelt and his book, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters.” And he criticizes a lot of what he calls a social contagion of the way strategy has been deployed in our society today, which really is just a set of ambitions. Like exactly like you said, it’s just those success things. It’s just, we want to do X. And so he, that idea of the strategy is a diagnosis of the problem, a guiding policy and a set of actions to get you to that goal. It’s a lot more concrete and tangible. It’s not just, we want to reach this goal. We have this set of ambitions. And also what can tend to happen is people get very lofty about those ambitions and the action steps to get there are lost. And they’re not part of, if they’re not part of that conversation, it becomes really hard to see what it’s gonna take to achieve those. And so forcing yourself to think through this in a more kind of diligent step-by-step way to some extent will kind of help, I think drive the success of actually reaching some of those ambitions, rather than just being kind of out there as lofty goals that we keep trying for and not somehow not hitting. I think that’s the risk.

Kara Van Malssen: 17:21

I love that it’s rooted in action. That’s fantastic. So I wonder if you could tell us why now, why did you create the DAM Strategy Canvas now? What was the need that you saw or the impetus for making it happen?

Chris Lacinak: 17:35

It comes from our experience with our clients. So on the one hand, we have certain clients who will come to us and say, “Can you help us with the digital asset management strategy?” And so that’s kind of forced my thinking around this topic. But then we also have some organizations we work with that come to us that just say, “Can you help us implement this tool?” And there’s not a lot of strategic thinking around it, a lot of prioritization that’s going into it. And so in those cases, we almost have to force the conversation around strategy. So if we, and again, we kind of come back to the core of what strategy is and what it does, it helps you scope, it helps you figure out how to use limited resources, and it kind of helps you figure out how to set priorities so that you can achieve goals. So we have to do some of that thinking with our clients, even if they’re not thinking about it. And so that just is a recurring theme in the work that we’ve been doing over the years. And so I wanted to kind of create a succinct and repeatable method that we could use in our work with our clients to help kind of guide these conversations, as well as provide that as a tool for anyone else who’d like to use it. So that’s the sort of why now is like building over time as we just continue to run into the same issues over and over again. Again, lofty set of ambitions, very short timeframes to reach them, which were quite unrealistic in many cases with some of those implementation projects that we were doing. And so we would need to start and say, well, what use cases are we solving for? And what is this end state we’re trying to reach now? And see if we can set some priorities within those parameters to help make it more tangible and achievable.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:30

Yeah, that makes sense. So again, it’s rooted in kind of your own work, very pragmatic and practical. So you’ve been putting these concepts to use for a while before creating the canvas.

Chris Lacinak: 19:42

Yeah, absolutely. I think we’ve been using some version of this for a while. So this was the codified edition of the work that we’ve been doing.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:51

When I look out at the landscape of organizations that are procuring and implementing digital asset management systems, for many of them, the implementation of that digital asset management system, they may think of as the end point, that that is the achievement of a strategy or their goal, as opposed to wrapping a strategy around the actual utilization and operation of that digital asset management program. In your work with organizations, how many do you think come to the table with a digital asset management strategy versus not having a strategy at all?

Chris Lacinak: 20:30

I mean, if we take the idea of strategy as, there’s formal strategy, like big S strategy and little S strategy. So if I’m looking at it from either perspective, I’d say a very small percentage have really thought about it in either a big way or a small way. And so what will tend to happen is, there is some problem. That’s why they decided to invest in digital asset management. And maybe it’s a problem with an existing DAM solution that needs to scale, or that needs to be expanded to, beyond one team to a larger group or to the enterprise, or we need to consolidate multiple siloed asset management system. Whenever there’s a major initiative around digital asset management, I think that’s when strategy for that work tends to become important. So it’s not like the day-to-day work needs its own strategy, it’s kind of the major initiative. So at that point, you’re investing resources, time, money, everything. You’re going to make an investment in some kind of initiative. It’s a response to a problem, but it’s not DAM for DAM sake. There’s some other kind of end state or goal you’re trying to reach. So it depends on where you are, I think in a hierarchy of DAM outcomes. So the very first level is, let’s just create a single source of truth. We need all this stuff to be in one place. It’s all over the place, it’s scattered around different file sharing systems and siloed systems and people’s personal Dropbox, and it’s on people’s desktops or videos all over hard drives. And so that’s usually the first kind of goal is let’s just get a single source of truth. So just even acknowledging like, that’s what we’re trying to do here is kind of an initial step in that strategic thinking. So it’s not just implement the DAM by X date, ’cause that doesn’t connect to the outcome. So I think making that connection is really important. And then I also want to draw the distinction between a strategy and a roadmap or a kind of a detailed implementation plan. So if your strategy is kind of guiding the decisions that are gonna drive the implementation plan, the implementation plan is like you said, it’s just get the thing launched. That is part of the plan. That’s a milestone that you need to hit in order to kind of work toward that bigger goal of single source of truth or whatever it is. But yeah, I think you need to kind of approach this as in a way that again, sequences, how you’re gonna focus on that and try not to do too much at once. I think organizations that are especially new to DAM don’t realize how much investment is gonna be, how much it’s gonna take to get to success. And I think they kind of end up getting stuck sometimes if they just go, let’s get to launch by this date, then we’ll have succeeded.

Kara Van Malssen: 23:34

Let me recap a little bit. And I’m wondering if you can expand on it a bit more, but for someone who’s listening who thinks, why do I need a DAM strategy? Some of the things I’ve heard you say so far are, it sounds like it solves a problem. That’s kind of the, it sounds like that’s where you start, right? What’s the problem we’re solving for? So it’s gonna solve some pain points. It’s gonna help you overcome some challenges. It also sounds like a part of the why would be to enable action as you’ve outlined it. It gives you some concrete steps that you can take and by you, an individual, a team, folks within an operation, DAM operation, folks outside of. What are, are there other whys that you can answer about like why should an organization implement a DAM strategy that I haven’t touched on or does that summarize it?

Chris Lacinak: 24:30

Those are, I think those are the main, those are the key points. So I think we could flip that question on its head and say what could happen if you don’t have some form of a strategy. If you’re undertaking a major initiative with regard to digital asset management, there can be a lot of, a lot can go wrong if you are not aligned with, the stakeholders aren’t aligned on what it’s supposed to solve for. And this is also change management theory 101. It’s like what problem is the change trying to solve? So that’s kind of the same core question. And then, so if you’re not kind of aligned on that, it’s easy to take on way too much. It’s easy to kind of lose time, lose money, go way off track and start to lose the buy-in and support of the stakeholders. So it’s kind of why should you do it? Well, why shouldn’t you is because there’s a lot of risk involved in this type of investment and you wanna get it right. So you’ve got to kind of get that buy-in. And the other, the end result of this is often some form of organizational change. You’re gonna ask people to change their behavior at the end of the day. Once you have this thing kind of implemented, launched or evolved to whatever state it’s gonna be. And those people need to be brought along in that process. And so that strategy is also really important for thinking about how are we gonna communicate what this is for, what’s the benefit to the organization, what’s the benefit to the individual and what should they expect when? Because that’s another thing is if you don’t have a strategy that’s guiding the prioritization and the sequencing of the work, ’cause that’s really what it comes down to, people are gonna have lofty expectations about what it means to them, when they’re gonna get some benefit from it. And if you can’t deliver on those assumptions, they’re gonna start to lose their support for it. And so this is when the tides start to turn and people kind of, they’re not gonna support the thing once it does come around, ’cause I’ve been expecting this or that and you’re not delivering that. It can generate a lot of frustration. So it helps you be clear with the organization and the stakeholders too.

Kara Van Malssen: 26:58

So it sounds like it gets people to work cohesively in alignment to overcome problems, to get return on investment, that return being probably different for each organization depending on what the value is. Thinking here about, obviously in most, if not all organizations, digital asset management is one department, one operation, one thing out of many within a larger organization, right? You might have marketing, you’ve got sales, you’ve got production or operations, other operations, you’ve got executive, an overarching company strategy. How have you seen or how do you think about a DAM strategy kind of working with, integrating with other strategies throughout a company?

Chris Lacinak: 27:48

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think a DAM strategy has to align with the broader strategy that it sits within. So that could be that the DAM strategy aligns with just the departmental or business unit or org strategy that you’re in. So if it’s marketing, kind of the DAM strategy is aligning with the marketing strategy. But if it’s, let’s say it’s an enterprise DAM, then you are looking at the full business strategy. And what is this organization kind of trying to achieve? What’s its goals and what is it that this particular initiative around digital asset management is going to do to enable or support those goals? So there’s a strong connection between those things. So there’s some, like I said before, there’s some ambition or dream outcome for this DAM, that is what’s gonna have that connection to this broader strategy. So if it’s, so let’s take like an apparel company that is shifting to digital product creation. So they’re gonna use 3D modeling in order to kind of create, have faster time to market, reduce their carbon footprint by moving away from physical samples that are typically the way that products in that space are done, shipping them all over the world between providers in Asia, US or wherever, to kind of this 3D model. And there’s a, so that is maybe a kind of more corporate level strategy. We’re gonna shift to digital product creation in order to improve our time to market, reduce our carbon footprint, and create tailored experiences for our customers. So if you think about that bigger picture strategy, and then you step back and say, well, where does DAM fit into that? It has a huge role to play because it’s, all the files that are gonna go into that process of creating the apparel now are gonna be digital. They’re gonna need to be organized. They’re gonna need to be put into a data pipeline that allows for that information to kind of flow through the production process down to marketing and sales and kind of ultimately e-commerce and end user experience. So it’s incredibly closely connected. And I think you can take a similar type of example. Let’s take a museum. So a museum wants to, you know, their broader strategic goal is we wanna reach new audiences, engage with them in new ways, both in-person and online. So that’s like a, you know, a kind of the big picture ambition. So how does digital asset management fit into that? Again, it has a huge role to play because the museum’s digital assets are its collections, you know, images of those collections, and it’s how are we going to reach our audiences, connect with our audiences. We’re gonna need those assets in order to achieve that bigger picture goal and the data that accompanies them. And again, it’s getting these digital assets, they’re just a form of data into a data pipeline that kind of allows this bigger picture strategic vision that the broader organization has. So, and you can kind of take that down levels as well if you’re, you know, you’re the marketing department, it’s the marketing DAM, and the marketing’s overall strategy is to, you know, increase the, you know, targeting of campaigns. We need to measure the impact of our campaign and kind of hype, we need high performing, and we need more kind of feedback loops and insights and measurement as we go. So the DAM is again, a piece of data in that pipeline. It’s gonna help you with kind of getting that content out in an efficient manner. It’s gonna help with capturing data and insights about performance kind of on the other side and allow for more insightful and kind of smarter production moving forward. So there’s just a lot of ways it all connects, I think.

Kara Van Malssen: 31:42

Thanks for painting such a great picture in different contexts there. It’s interesting as you’re talking, you know, you’re talking about kind of problems of, I mean, goals and problems of an enterprise, of different departments. And thinking about the person who sits down with the canvas and we’ve said, you know, start with the problem. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? And from what you’ve just said, it makes me wonder, you know, the person who sits down, and you kind of pointed to this earlier ’cause you said, you know, it’s about not what can you do with the DAM, it’s what can you do with the digital assets? The DAM is like a means to an end. And the problem, I guess it makes, this is a question, I’m just thinking out loud here. The problem that the person who sits down with the strategy canvas might aim at is not the problem of the DAM operation, but rather the problem of the company vision or strategy that they can help overcome. Is that the right way to think about that? Or have I got that wrong?

Chris Lacinak: 32:48

No, I think you’re right. The problem in this case, it does relate to the digital assets. So digital asset management is a solution. It’s not the problem. I mean, maybe you’d say, oh, this DAM sucks and it’s a problem. Okay, maybe that’s true. And we can kind of go down that path. But the problem you’re trying to focus in on and identify is the one of the digital assets themselves and their use in kind of delivering on some bigger goal or success criteria. So that’s generally the starting point. And so, again, that’s why I said earlier as well, like when you’re thinking about use cases, it’s not use cases for a DAM system, it’s use cases for digital assets. Who needs them and what do they need to do with them? That’s where the thinking should kind of live because you can get stuck in thinking about, again, it’s sort of like looking inward at DAM as the problem or as the solution or as the thing. And it’s all kind of inwardly focused. But if you’re not connecting the digital asset management solution to the business needs, I don’t think you’re doing it right. And so that’s why this canvas is trying to guide the thinking around that. What problem are we really talking about here? Which use cases are we really talking about here? So that you can, again, prioritize and make sure that you’re kind of solving the right thing.

Kara Van Malssen: 34:20

Again, just thinking pragmatically about the person who goes and downloads those DAM strategy canvas to create their own strategy. What do you think they need? Let’s say it’s the DAM Manager or the Director of Creative Operations or something that goes and does this. They sit down. Who else do they need at the table for this? What other information do they want to be sure to have in order to be able to create something that’s going to be useful and meaningful? What should folks be thinking about kind of as the prerequisites or preparedness that they need to come to the table with? You might be listening to this episode and thinking this sounds awesome, but how can I do this for myself? Lucky for you, you can download AVP’s DAM Strategy Canvas for free at weareavp.com/free-resources. That’s weareavp.com/free-resources. The DAM Strategy Canvas is your roadmap to creating the perfect DAM strategy all on one page. If you’re enjoying the DAM Right podcast, please rate, like, follow, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. And stay up to date with me and the DAM Right podcast on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. That’s linkedin.com/in/clacinak. Again, just thinking pragmatically about the person who goes and downloads this DAM Strategy Canvas to create their own strategy. What do you think they need? Let’s say it’s the DAM Manager or the Director of Creative Operations or something that goes and does this. They sit down. Who else do they need at the table for this? What other information do they wanna be sure to have in order to be able to create something that’s gonna be useful and meaningful? What should folks be thinking about kind of as the prerequisites or preparedness that they need to come to the table with?

Chris Lacinak: 36:20

Yeah, so I think if you’re a lone DAM strategist, more power to you, but you’re gonna wanna talk to other stakeholders. At minimum, if not fully engage them in the process. But sometimes you don’t wanna go overboard with the formalities of this. Like we’re doing a DAM strategy and you’re all invited and come to my workshop. That could be great, but it may just be, you’re gonna need to talk to people, interview them, learn about them, ask the right questions to understand how they’re thinking about it. If you’re tasked with, and let’s assume that the person we’re talking about here is tasked with some kind of digital asset management initiative. They’re leading it, they’re supposed to kind of see it through. There’s some other people that are aware of that or that kind of made a decision to invest in that. So those people you need to talk to or bring them to the table. Those are kind of critical thinkers in this space. So that’s probably the sponsors of this, whoever kind of made that decision or gave the green light to do something about it. Maybe you don’t have a green light yet, but they’re the ones that are concerned with it. So somebody in the kind of more senior leadership picture at whatever level that makes sense, that’s critical ’cause you need to get their alignment and buy-in. And then also, because we’re talking about data, we’re talking about assets at large volumes, usually that have to be stored and use technology to manage them. You’re probably gonna need your technology partners in the room too. So somebody in IT, whoever your business liaison is there to your group is gonna be important. They also don’t like it when you make major investments in technology without their input. So they’re the ones that are gonna have to deal with the technical debt down the road. So please involve your technology partners. And then I think the other group to make sure you include is the stakeholders who are the beneficiaries or those impacted by the DAM initiative. So those are probably the users or the people who are gonna be creating or contributing the assets or the ones that are gonna be downstream using it. So representatives of those who this is for, they need to have a voice in kind of setting priorities, making sure we’re clearly aligned on the challenge we’re trying to solve for and what a success looks like. So I’d say those are the three main groups, senior leadership, technology, and your major kind of stakeholder partners that are gonna be affected by it.

Kara Van Malssen: 39:01

The picture you painted for us earlier makes clear that digital asset management exists in all types of forms and fashions within organizations. It can be multiple DAMs and multiple departments. It could be an enterprise DAM. It could be no DAM Manager or kind of centralized operations around the DAM. It’s a distributed team that shares ownership or it could be a DAM operations that serves as like a centralized service to the rest of the organization. Are there models that you have seen which tend to lend themselves to being more successful at creating and executing on strategy rather than less?

Chris Lacinak: 39:42

Yes, this is a fun topic that I enjoy very much. What does the DAM literal operational optimal model look like? I think that the best model has some element of a clear sponsor or sponsors or like tightly aligned if it’s more than one person, some knowledgeable experienced kind of product owner of this system. And ideally in some, maybe it’s the same person but somebody who’s creating the rules, the guidelines, the standards and all that stuff. So at some level, a central set of thinking and kind of guideline and guardrail creation for the system. That works best when it’s like a small team, at least like a minimum. And then again, it depends on the scale. But so I think hub and spoke models can work really well. So you’ve got that central DAM team who are kind of like making the major decisions around the system and its evolution and how people should use it and what’s available to them and taking input from users around feature requests. And they’re the ones that interface with the vendor, et cetera, et cetera. And then maybe there’s for, if this is a large enterprise kind of model, let’s say, there’s individual teams or business units who are sort of tenants of that system or users of it. And they probably have a point of contact that’s kind of the lead on their side. And that person is the liaison with the central team. I really liked that model for a very large organization. So at a very small level, if you’re just kind of in a working group and like the DAM is just for like a very small, creative team, I think you can get away with a shared kind of contributor model where, everyone who’s gonna be adding assets sort of collectively manages it, but that falls apart really fast. If nobody’s sort of mining the store and kind of, so if you took your like grocery store and you just let all the vendors and suppliers just put whatever they want on the shelves, however they want, and maybe they forgot to put the price tag on some stuff and like hook it up to the register, it would be chaos pretty quickly. So I don’t love it. I know it’s the reality in a lot of cases where you just need to have, nobody has the time to sort of be the oversight person and it’s just a small DAM and you’re not a very big team. I think you can get away with that for a little while. But as it grows, as it scales, and these things tend to do as we’re kind of more in the space where audio, video, image, is the predominant form of content over text, and that’s kind of what our organizations are producing as well, then we’re only gonna need to kind of increase the kind of operation around these assets. And so some kind of smart expert thinking to guide people in how to use the system I think is always gonna be critical.

Kara Van Malssen: 43:06

For folks that are in that less than ideal scenario that you painted, it sounds like mitigation of the risk that comes along with that could be in the form of thorough documentation. I mean, it points right at the heart, really your whole response points right at governance, it sounds like. Does that sound right?

Chris Lacinak: 43:25

Yeah, that’s true.

Kara Van Malssen: 43:26

For folks that are in that situation and they can’t change tomorrow, like what would be the words of wisdom that you would give to them about how to help ensure that it doesn’t lead to disastrous outcomes?

Chris Lacinak: 43:39

If they’re in that situation of sort of a shared contributor model and they’re thinking about it, that means congratulations, like you’re the one that’s gonna get stuck with the DAM problem, but that’s okay ’cause you care. So you’ve identified this isn’t gonna work. I’m talking to you like this person that you just talked about, ’cause you had that insight and you realize it’s not working and you’re kind of gonna push for some change now. Doesn’t mean you’re gonna get stuck with it forever, but you’re the one who as a user, as a beneficiary of the tool are saying, raising the flag of, hey, this isn’t working, this is not right, we need to do something different. We really need somebody who’s in charge of this thing because it’s a big mess, no one can find anything. It’s not working, it’s not fulfilling the goals we set out for this. People are still misusing assets or whatever it is. So as that kind of whistleblower, you’re gonna be the person that’s gonna have to advocate for something different, but I think you also know best what the problems are and what’s happening as a result of that not working. And it’s probably just, what’s happening is you’re ending up in the same place you were before you had the tool. People are still squirreling away their assets on their personal DropBox and then on hard drives and whatever, they’re not contributing to the DAM and they are misusing them and they’re not complying with brand guidelines and they’re not using licensed assets appropriately and they are reshooting things that you already have footage of. So yeah, I think, raise that alarm, beat the drum and try to paint the bigger picture of what’s at stake, what’s the impact. Again, if you put on that strategist hat, think about what is it we’re trying to achieve as an organization, what does success look like and how we’re not gonna get there if we leave this as a status quo. We need to do something different. So hopefully you can kind of inspire your kind of leadership, connect with what’s their concern, what are they thinking about, what’s keeping them up at night, what are their, again, that bigger picture strategy they’re trying to work toward. That’s the best way. I think if you try to, if you just kind of whine and complain, I say this to my son all the time, stop whining and complaining. It’s not effective in getting me to give you what you want, but I guess sometimes it is ’cause he does it a lot. Anyway, don’t just do, kind of complain about what’s not working, try to figure out what does, provide the kind of constructive ideas and input and what could success look like. So yeah, if you’re that person, it sounds like you’re, you got stuck with that job and you’ve got to be the one to be the loud voice for change.

Kara Van Malssen: 46:37

So whining and complaining is one tool in the toolbox, but not the most effective.

Chris Lacinak: 46:42

I don’t think so.

Kara Van Malssen: 46:43

The other thing that the focus in on governance makes me think about is you have another creation, the DAM Operational Model. And I wonder, there will be people who look at the canvas and the model, could you tell us how to think about those things as, how would you plug those together? How do they work together?

Chris Lacinak: 47:03

So the DAM Operational Model is kind of what we came up with that it’s all the things that you need to have a successful DAM operation. So it covers technology, of course, but also you have people, which people, stakeholders do you need, which are important, which processes or governance, of course, around things like decision-making, standard setting, policy creation, processes, I think I said, measurement, and of course, like goal setting and tracking in general. So, and then there’s the centerpiece, which is like the why of all this, that’s where the strategy lives. So the DAM strategy kind of sits in the, in our model it’s a circle with these seven competencies and like there’s one right in the middle. And that’s the strategy, ’cause it’s, the operational model can be used at any kind of stage of development or maturity. So you can use it one way, if you’re just starting out, you can use it another way, if you’re kind of on a business as usual path, you can use it another way if you’re on a scaling path. So, but the center part of that is always going to orient where your focus is, where your prioritization is, and sort of in that goal setting category, which guides everything, it all leads it from the strategy. So once we’ve decided our strategy, we can then create a roadmap, we can track toward it, we can measure against it, we can report on it, and we can enable and optimize all the other things around, you know, the people, the processes, the governance, the technology to deliver on that strategy. So they fit together, I guess I would say that. Strategy is the center of the entire thing that guides all of the rest.

Kara Van Malssen: 48:56

So I imagine that some people might take the DAM Operational Model, and there’s like a self-assessment or a DAM health score sheet that we have, and they might score their health on it and say, “Okay, I’m not doing so great on governance “and technology and processes.” I could imagine that someone might take that then and say, “Well, where do I need to improve in those areas? “How do I need to improve?” And think that that is my strategy. That’s, you know, if I can answer those questions, how do I do better at governance? How do I do better at technology and the areas that I’m not strong in in the DAM Operational Model? That that would be my action items towards achieving my outcomes. Is that, what would you say to that? Does, what would you say to that being, you know, how does that play off those action items in the DAM Operational Model to improve your health play off of the action items in the strategy?

Chris Lacinak: 49:51

Yeah, I mean, it’s not wrong, and there’s action items and then there’s action items. I think when I think of the strategy, it’s not action items like this task, this task, this task. I think that’s the, again, the implementation roadmap. And if you’re identifying problems with, you know, the process or the governance, and you want to fine tune them, that goes in the roadmap. And, but the initiative or in the investment in those areas is what’s going to show up in the strategy. So in the canvas, we call them key initiatives and actions. So it’s not necessarily an action item list, but it’s a set of key actions that like, or initiatives that are going to be, they’re going to enable the strategy to work. So again, it’s at a different level of granularity. So if you want to, if you’re fine tuning, what’s already there, I think that’s, again, it’s important. You want to optimize, you want to continue to, you know, continuously do that. And that’s why in the operational model, we kind of call one of those areas continuous improvement. And that’s sort of our ongoing optimization. That should be in your roadmap, but you probably have a bigger picture thing in your strategy that’s all of those fine tuning actions are working towards. So it’s just kind of, again, like it’s a different level of granularity and thinking. So the strategy itself doesn’t have, you know, individual dates necessarily for each action. It’s more like we want to achieve X and we’re going to invest in Y to do that. And so that’s really what that looks like.

Kara Van Malssen: 51:33

The analogy that comes to mind for me as you’re talking about the DAM Operational Model versus the canvas is if we think about like a car, your car running and how well it runs, who’s like, it might be the DAM Operational Model, you know, is the engine running well? Has the oil been changed? Is your windshield wiper is good? And the strategy is more about, do you know where you’re going? Can you get to your destination? Does the, you know, are you steering the vehicle in the right direction? Is that a way to think about it that works?

Chris Lacinak: 52:05

Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah, I think I had not thought of that analogy, but yeah, totally makes sense. Yeah, the car and it’s kind of inner workings is one thing. It’s trying to get you somewhere, but yeah, the strategy is more like, where are you trying to go? And what are the steps you’re going to need to take to get there? Like, we’re going to have to get on the interstate and we’re going to have to, you know, take a left here and this and that kind of thing. So I think that works. Yeah, I like that analogy actually.

Kara Van Malssen: 52:32

I wanted to touch on one thing that’s in the, what I’ll call the guide that accompanies the strategy canvas. You use a statistic in there that comes from brand folder and demand metric that says, “77% of study participants were satisfied with their digital asset management solution when deployment was completed quickly.” And there’s other stats in there that say about how many people were basically dissatisfied when it took longer than six months. I’m wondering, why do you think that is? What’s going on there? Why do you think deployment time is such a strong determining factor of success and user satisfaction?

Chris Lacinak: 53:13

Well, I think it kind of goes back to something we were saying earlier around managing expectations and kind of getting that goodwill and support and buy-in. And when it takes too long, there’s probably multiple things at play. One is, well, you probably didn’t have really a well thought out strategy, the scope wasn’t clear, the action items weren’t clear, and most likely you took on too much. So the time to value is way too long. And I think that’s the key with something like this is when the success hinges on adoption, time to value is absolutely critical because you need those people to adopt it, to buy into it, and have to kind of be in sync with what it’s for, what’s expected of them, and by when. And if you keep kind of pushing that can down the road and kind of muddling that communication and expectation, I think people just start to get fed up and lose trust in the whole initiative. I think that’s my guess as to what’s going on. So you’re kind of poorly communicating, the execution’s kind of getting all over the place, you’re trying to do too much, you’re not having any, the short-term wins aren’t there, like the transformation that was proposed is not coming through. I think people just kind of get fed up and they just lose their faith in the entire thing and its ability to deliver on what it was supposed to. And I think that can have pretty severe long-term implications to the success. It’s hard to right that ship once you’ve gone in that direction.

Kara Van Malssen: 55:10

So time is important as a factor, but I’m also reading into what you just said that the duration when it lags or it takes an exceptionally long time could also be a symptom of a larger problem, it sounds like.

Chris Lacinak: 55:25

– Yeah, I think it is a symptom of a larger problem. The problem is you didn’t have a strategy.

Kara Van Malssen: 55:30

Right.

Chris Lacinak: 55:31

So you didn’t have kind of a clear point of focus, clear use cases you’re prioritizing, ’cause that’s the key point is, what use cases are you gonna solve for in what order? It doesn’t mean solve for all of them at once. If we have five main use cases, and these are pretty high level, they can be pretty big, doesn’t mean do them all at once. It means they’re sequenced in a way. So you start to deliver benefits and value to those use cases in a sequence, in an order, and they should be sequenced in such a way that each one lays a foundation for the next. So each subsequent one you solve for isn’t like starting from zero. You’ve already got with the first use case, you’ve created a layer. And by the time you get to the end of all those use cases, you’ve solved for 80% of the needs that that particular strategy is solving for. What tends to happen in cases where it takes way too long, some cases, they just really don’t know what goes into setting up, implementing, and making decisions around the DAM. And so that can just stall things. But even if you are more aware and you kind of do understand what’s gonna go into that, that’s the case where I just see people taking on way too much.

Kara Van Malssen: 56:49

Well, Kara, I wanna thank you so much for joining me today. I think I’m really excited about people hearing this and putting the canvas to use. I wanna end with one final question that I ask all of the guests on the DAM Right podcast. And it’s totally different than having to do with the strategy conversation. And that is, what is the last song that you added to your favorites playlist or liked?

Chris Lacinak: 57:17

Well, I’m gonna have to say that there is a difference between my like songs and my favorites because my son who’s eight years old rules the like songs playlist. That is his playlist. So I won’t tell you what the last song that was added to that. My personal playlist of favorites, well, it’s been a little while since I added a song, but kind of maybe earlier, a little mid to last year was the last time I put a song onto it, sadly. But it was “Kandy” by Fever Ray. And they’re a Swedish pop electro artist that used to be part of the duo, The Knife, in the earlier 2000s. And this is their solo act as Fever Ray. And the song “Kandy”, that was like the last song that really kind of got under my skin and I couldn’t stop listening to. So that’s the last one on the playlist.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:14

All right, so listeners go find it and pump it up while you start working on your DAM Strategy Canvas. It’ll be a good soundtrack to it.

Chris Lacinak: 58:23

No, don’t think that’s the right sound.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:25

Okay, well, what, all right.

Chris Lacinak: 58:27

If it works for you, don’t worry.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:28

Here’s a question. Give us a soundtrack, a song that would be good for filling out the DAM Strategy Canvas.

Chris Lacinak: 58:35

All right, good question. When I was making it, I was listening to a lot of The Isley Brothers and things like that. So maybe give you some good energy, good vibes.

Kara Van Malssen: 58:48

All right, interesting. Sounds good. Awesome, well, thank you so much for joining me today, Kara. It’s been super fun and I’m really excited about folks being able to hear this. Thank you so much, really appreciate it.

Chris Lacinak: 58:59

Yeah, thanks for having me. And if folks have any questions or feedback about the DAM Strategy Canvas, then reach out, let us know.

Kara Van Malssen: 59:06

Great, I’ll put that contact info in the show notes. All right, talk to you soon, bye-bye.

Chris Lacinak: 59:12

Okay.

Kara Van Malssen: 59:15

You might be listening to this episode and thinking this sounds awesome, but how can I do this for myself? Lucky for you, you can download AVP’s DAM Strategy Canvas for free at weareavp.com/free-resources. That’s weareavp.com/free-resources. The DAM Strategy Canvas is your roadmap to creating the perfect DAM strategy all on one page. If you’re enjoying the DAM Right podcast, please rate, like, follow, subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. And stay up to date with me and the DAM Right podcast on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/clacinak. That’s linkedin.com/in/clacinak. (upbeat music) [ Silence ]