Theresa Regli - Digital and Marketing Asset Management: The Real Story about DAM Technology and Practices

DIGITAL REALITY CHECKS

THE REAL STORY ABOUT DAM TECHNOLOGY AND PRACTICE

Digital Reality Checks is a Rosenfeld Media imprint developed in partnership with Real Story Group.

Digital and Marketing Asset Management

The Real Story About DAM Technology and Practice

By Theresa Regli

Rosenfeld Media, LLC

457 Third Street, #4R

Brooklyn, New York

11215 USA

On the Web: www.digitalrealitychecks.com

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Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld

Managing Editor: Marta Justak

Developmental Editor: Tony Byrne

Copy Editor: Chuck Hutchinson

Production Editor: Lyza Morss

Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster

Cover Design: The Heads of State

Indexer: Sharon Shock

Proofreader: Sue Boshers

2016 Real Story Group

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 1-933820-72-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-72-9

LCCN: 2016939701

Printed and bound in the United States of America

To Maria Carusi (19571999), who coached me in the art of speechwriting and public speaking, and Clif Garboden (19482011), my first boss, who trained me in the craft of truth-crusading journalism

Digital and Marketing Asset Management: The Real Story About DAM Technology and Practice is based on extensive research involving both vendors who provide DAM technology, as well as the people and organizations that use the technology.

It is an extremely thorough book. And it needs to be. Youre going to be making some important decisions on behalf of your department, marketing team, or perhaps your entire enterprise, and my goal is to provide you with as much relevant detail as possible. However, you may not have time to read the book cover-to-cover. Heres a quick guide to maximize the time you spend.

Depending on your role in the enterprise, you may want to start at different places in the book and then backfill your knowledge as necessary. Consider the following shortcuts.

DAM newbie: If youre new to DAM and are just looking to get the basics, you should start at the beginning and read the chapters sequentially.

Executive sponsor or project champion: Start with as youre likely to play a key role in driving adoption and change management.

Project manager: You might want to begin by getting familiar with the technology through

Project engineer: Refer to to keep in mind the reasons youre implementing DAM.

Consultant/integrator: How you use this book depends on what you need to provide for your clients. Each chapter can provide useful analysis.

The book is broken down as follows:

looks at key concepts in digital, marketing, and media asset management.

covers the costs as well as the business justification for investing in DAM and MAM.

can help you identify how mature your organizations DAM capabilities are across four categories: people, information, systems, and processes. Its also a key piece for justifying further investment in a DAM system.

defines the different potential hosting and deployment models for your DAM.

, examines all the nontechnical considerations you should think about when investing in not just DAM technology, but also the vendor.

identifies 14 universal DAM scenarios to help you place your own needs in the market. They are grouped in four broad categories: image and brand management, publishing, corporate time-based media management, and broadcast media management.

looks at where DAM fits in as part of the larger enterprise ecosystem and how to craft the right mix of ingredients for digital marketing success.

This books companion website (www.digitalrealitychecks.com/books/digital-and-marketing-asset-management ) contains a blog and additional content. The books diagrams and other illustrations are available under a Creative Commons license (when possible) for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/ .

As a marketing technology professional, I am honored to write the foreword to Theresas book: it is a great time in the industry for the digital asset management discipline, as DAM has emerged out of the dark basements where arcane taxonomists and unsocial librarians have been cataloging reference images, to finally achieving a prominent place on the center stage of the marketing technology landscape.

Multichannel/multidevice communication, planning, and executionwhich is really the only type of communication you should put in place today for your brandrequires near real-time adaptation and distribution of content and its reuse across channels. Of course, many try to go at it with pieces of their content universe distributed across different components of their marketing tech landscape, but the limitations are self-evident: inability to reapply content that works across channels, cul-de-sacs where content is left to rot, inability to draw conclusions on multichannel performance of the content, manual work and rework to keep systems in sync, just to name a few.

In this context, the smart marketers and technologists who have understood the power of a centralized operational single source of visual records/digital assets use their DAMs in a much-refreshed and strategic way:

1. DAMs that are able via APIs to distribute the assets to the various points of consumer fruition (e.g., a WebCMS, a social publishing solution, an e-commerce mobile application), transforming them as needed, and keeping the cross-references whole as much as possible.

2. Tracking performance of assets, going back to the source and the producers for continuous improvement, sometimes using performance-based compensation.

3. Investing in very practical taxonomies, which are not designed for obscure archiving and compliance purposes, but aim to tame the complexity of the outside channels and use cases to maximize automation, increasing findability and introducing efficiencies (content types, channels, content strategies, etc.).

DAMs will also be key for the upcoming wave of intelligent, programmatic content, where we need to be able to rapidly assemble various content constituents to produce original content, to enable a granular personalization for specific consumer segments, in a very specific context.

This book will take you through a journey where you can easily rework your marketing technology strategy and landscape in a more DAM-centric way. It will provide you valuable insights on how to combine marketing technology capabilities in a mix that makes sense for you and your business objectives.

Filippo Catalano, Chief Digital
Operations Officer, Nestl

Digital mediaphotos, audio files, video clips, games, advertising, consumer package designs, streaming television programs, the thousands of music files on your mobile devicesare a significant part of your everyday experience. Both your everyday consumer interactions and the way that organizations market to you are driven by mostly nontextual media. The digital world is more visual, more auditory, and more experiential than its ever been.