Feature

posted 8 Nov 2006 in Volume 3 Issue 4

Digital asset management

Bright idea?

The management of digital assets that organisations use to convey their brand image and message to the world is in a mess. It’s time to put that right.

By Jessica Twentyman

Digital asset management (DAM) is a class of software most commonly associated with the broadcasting and publishing industries. But Cleveland, Ohio-based Kichler Lighting belongs to neither sector. In fact, as its name suggests, it is a manufacturer of decorative lighting fixtures, but it is nevertheless mid-way through an ambitious implementation of DAM software that, once complete, is expected to save the company more than $200,000 a year.

That initiative was originally launched earlier this year because, for Kichler, managing digital assets and, in particular, product photography, had become a persistent headache. The company produces a new catalogue every six months, featuring thousands of images of the company’s light fixtures – many of which are of the same product, shot from different angles or in different settings.

In addition to catalogue production, Kichler also needs to provide these photographs to its own sales representatives and to third-party distributors and retailers. Until recently, however, the images were stored on various personal and shared hard drives and folders scattered around the organisation. Finding the right image for the right product was time-consuming and fraught with potential errors, according to Joe Popri, a business-systems analyst in Kichler’s IT group.

To combat the problem, Kichler Lighting has implemented the Artesia Digital Asset Management product from enterprise-content-management (ECM) software vendor Open Text. This has enabled it to create an online database of images, which can be accessed by sales representatives and authorised dealers for download. This self-service approach removes the burden of supplying images from Kichler’s graphics department and eliminates the cost of mailing CD-ROMs around the world.

That project complete, Kichler now plans to start using Artesia’s embedded project management tools to streamline catalogue production, with tools that enable catalogue creators to ‘drag and drop’ images from the DAM software to Quark Xpress page layouts.

And further down the line, Kichler will use Artesia to manage a broader range of content, such as logos, price sheets and invoices. In doing so, it will be joining some major names from outside of the media industries – including white goods manufacturer Whirlpool, brewing company Coors and automotive giant General Motors – that use DAM software to support their marketing and branding activities.

DAM in the mainstream

Like Kichler, many companies struggle to manage the various digital assets – photography, logos and other rich media files – that they use to convey their brand through a number of different outlets, such as web-sites, brochures and catalogues.

Often, these are scattered around the organisation in file servers and on the individual desktops of their employees in sales and marketing. The danger is that these files are not always up-to-date and that can lead to the company presenting an image of itself that is no longer relevant or in keeping with its current brand message. As a result, many companies outside of DAM’s traditional mainstay markets of media organisations are now exploring the technology.

“Digital asset management is very much a mainstream technology now,” confirms Mark Finch, sales director for the Artesia product at Open Text. “Organisations in both the private and public sectors are starting to realise that digital media plays an enormous role in how their brand is perceived in the market, and that they need to have a better handle on digital media if they wish to have better control over their brand.” In fact, he adds, about half of Artesia sales now come from non-media companies.

“In the internet age, all companies are media companies,” says Joshua Duhl, director of research covering content management at analyst group IDC. “Brand image and consistency are constant concerns. Marketing departments find themselves managing many different assets, including multiple media types, spanning both online and offline properties.”

DAM has stepped in to address these needs, he says. “When it comes to supporting marketing, DAM works because it is many things that ECM is not: targeted, flexible and affordable,” says Duhl.

In fact, brand management has emerged as one of the strongest uses of DAM software at the departmental level. These applications are used to facilitate the activities of marketing communications, campaign management, and branding activities. As a result, where it is deployed, DAM quickly becomes a backbone system for connecting associated marketing functions and content across partners, channels, distributors and field employees. It enables core marketing tasks, including distribution of the most current versions of sales tools to the field; updating marketing materials to global partners; supporting new product launches; and finding, re-using and re-purposing previously created branding or marketing materials.

DAM at work

While it has long been considered a subset of the wider content-management software market, DAM software is coming to the forefront because of its ability to aid companies with tasks that are specifically relevant to their brand and marketing.

At a conceptual level, the core function of a DAM system is much the same as that for a content or documentmanagement system, with the distinction that it concentrates on functionality for a wide range of specific content types – generally speaking, final-form video, audio and images.

Designers and photographers typically create such files, and then they are used within a marketing department or creative-services workflow. “DAM is different from traditional content management by virtue of its support for the needs of rich media.

Although a DAM system may rely on a relational database to assist in the management of these assets, DAM software goes beyond traditional database capabilities to address the needs of rich media,” says Duhl. These include:

* Ingestion

DAM software can take different types of media from disparate sources and store it centrally or distribute it to multiple locations. “Such media can come from a wide variety of sources, including authoring software, but also from databases or even physical media, such as removable storage, CDs or DVDs. It can even come from analogue formats such as paper, as long as you see a value in scanning that paper in order to capture its contents as digital assets,” says Jens Lundgaard, CEO of Globusmedia, a software vendor that produces a DAM package called Brandworkz;

* Creation

Most of the content governed by DAM tools will be created using other software tools, such as design and presentation software. However, DAM tools can enable the transformation, recombination or repackaging of these assets. “For instance, marketing staff can update a picture or a paragraph and then simultaneously send the update across multiple web sites and digital brochures,” says David Macey, executive vice president of ECM software supplier Stellent;

* Classification

Assets must be categorised and tagged in order for users to find them. DAM software generally relies on metadata – additional information about the asset – that typically consists of keywords, descriptions and other information associated with a piece of media. Metadata is typically incorporated into an automated tagging system that allows for search and access;

* Access and delivery

Inherent in DAM software is the permission controls and access rights that allow authorised users to quickly and easily find and utilise media assets. “Such controls enable organisations to serve a wide variety of users with different needs, ranging from different levels of internal staff to partners and customers,” says Mark Finch at

Open Text. These features must be backed by appropriate search and retrieval functions that allow access to all types of stored media assets, including audio and video. Finally, DAM software can integrate with various content delivery networks and fulfilment services for smooth delivery of assets;

* Workflow

Features that track and log the flow of data reinforce the role of DAM software. This enables companies to understand the progress so far on a particular job or project – creation, review, printing and so on – and also measure the resulting data usage. These measurements then enable organisations to improve workflow around rich media assets, improving efficiency over time.

* Security and rights management

Security is an ongoing concern, especially when a company’s image and intellectual property are at stake. “DAM software should be backed with facilities for content protection, watermarking, digital rights management and intellectual property rights management,” says Duhl of IDC. These features, he explains, ensure that materials can only be delivered to relevant users without elements being stolen or misused.

Problems solved

“While large-scale content-management solutions have generally provided many of the capabilities needed by marketing departments, they have not been offered in cost-effective or easy-to-use packages,” says Duhl of IDC. “However, marketing departments still need software to help them manage a growing list of tasks around brand management,” he points out.

For example, almost all companies maintain an online presence that includes multiple types of digital assets used for marketing, sales, services and other customer-facing materials, such as printed brochures. “It is not enough just to stay on top of the details surrounding products, pricing and offers,” says Duhl. “Companies must also strive to maintain a consistent look and feel – otherwise known as brand consistency – across all of the online and offline properties.

The choice between ECM and DAM, however, is starting to fade. In recent years, many of the leading ECM suppliers have sought to incorporate DAM capabilities – often through acquisition – into their wider product suites. EMC Documentum, for example, kick-started its DAM efforts back in 2001, with the acquisition of Bulldog. Open Text, meanwhile, bought Artesia in 2003, the same year that Interwoven bought MediaBin and Stellent acquired Ancept.

“We realised that digital assets are content just like everything else that Stellent manages and, although there are some semantic and interface differences, the underlying philosophy of management doesn’t really change,” explains Macey of Stellent.

At the same time, a number of niche vendors continue to focus solely on DAM, among them ClearStory and Brandworkz. Whether DAM is bought ‘standalone’ or as part of a wider ECM package, however, having a full range of DAM functions, as well as a single repository of digital assets, held on a central server in one location is particularly useful to multinational companies, where employees across a range of geographic locations are involved in the production or use of digital assets.

It is also extremely helpful when a number of third parties – advertising agencies and independent graphic artists, for example – work with an enterprise client to achieve the branding it wants for its company and its products. “Digital media assets typically come in the form of big, big files and sending them all round the place is going to put a real strain on networks,” says Lundgaard of Brandworkz.

“It’s also going to lead very quickly to ‘e-mail madness’, where no-one really knows what version of a digital asset they are supposed to be working on or how it fits with other digital assets, such as logos and product descriptions as part of a brochure, flyer, price list and so on.”

Not only that, says Macey, but implemented well, DAM can cut the cost of managing digital assets. “You’re effectively streamlining the production and distribution of core media assets such as product-marketing materials so that they cost your company less. And once you’ve got good control of them in terms of knowing what you’ve got and where to find it, you’ll be able to put them to new uses. Such improvements often help increase revenue by enhancing marketing or creating new business opportunities,” he says.

Whether they consider themselves media companies or not, analysts agree that most organisations today are eventually going to have to address the media-asset issue. An effective DAM strategy will help them manage this complex task.

Duhl of IDC urges some caution, however: “While DAM software has become a must-have for many departments, companies must still exercise due diligence, both in terms of determining their own needs and when evaluating DAM vendors,” he says.

In particular, they should compare vendors on price, capabilities, vertical market expertise, support for standards, partnerships and long-term prospects. “By weighing the relative importance of these factors, organisations should be able to create a matrix that will help them make an educated choice.”

Nevertheless, the market for DAM is maturing, with a number of positive effects: it is driving down prices, while enabling companies to buy more complete, all-in-one products. And new delivery models, including hosted software will be especially attractive to smaller companies that lack the internal IT resources to support a full, in-house DAM implementation.

To contact Jessica Twenyman, please e-mail jtwentyman@ark-group.com

Selecting an appropriate DAM offering

Companies should choose a DAM offering that excels in their particular application domain, but making this determination can be difficult for two reasons:

1. Confusing market

The vendor landscape for DAM addresses multiple overlapping products and markets. Native DAM vendors excel at managing media-rich assets and these vendors will continue to dominate the media and publishing markets. Companies in these categories nearly always implement DAM as a stand-alone application, since they need best-of-breed capabilities to support their core business processes.

However, the functions that support processes of different levels of complexity will mature at different rates. For example, DAM functions supporting content creation in entertainment companies will not start to mature until at least 2007.

Vendors that entered the DAM market from other fields bring different strengths. The general enterprise often views DAM as a component of enterprise content management (ECM) and some ECM software vendors have acquired DAM vendors. ECM vendors do well in their original fields of image and document management. As the use of rich media increases in intranet and internet applications, web content

management software suppliers are also moving to improve their systems’ management of rich-media objects.

However, the DAM application domain is still not mature across its full functional scope. Many of the key technologies continue to evolve, such as metadata standards, voice and image recognition, language translation and federated search and retrieval. Even specialty DAM products are generally optimised for a narrow range of activities, and integrated DAM/ECM platforms will not mature enough to handle the full range of DAM uses until at least 2008.

2. Unique needs

Each company tends to have a unique application domain, which makes it impossible to recommend an implementation strategy that will suit each one. Distributed workgroups, such as production, marketing and finance, will have to touch a rich-media asset in the course of a business process.

In this situation, companies find it difficult to develop integrated workflows for sharing rich-media assets across the life cycle of production, editing, marketing, legal procedures and distribution. Distributed processes and disconnected application silos make handling rich media expensive.

Companies should choose a DAM product (or an ECM suite with DAM functions) that performs well with their content applications, infrastructure and network. The overall performance of the environment counts more than the performance of the DAM product alone. Rich-media objects can be large, even with compression technology. The performance experienced by the individual depends on the system’s ability to retrieve, store and search these objects. Thus, system caching and the network’s capacity to handle rich-media objects are key features.

Source: Gartner