AVP, 253 36th Street, Ste C309, Brooklyn, NY (2026)

07/09/2024

Are people misusing brand assets in your company? If people persistently misuse brand assets or licensed images despite your DAM system’s permissions being configured, check for these issues:

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 It may be that people are getting access to content from file sharing tools (that could be outdated and/or lack metadata about usage rights).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.

06/05/2024

🔊FREE TRAINING🔊

You are kicking off a major digital asset management project.

Maybe you’ve recently purchased a new DAM platform.
Or you are scaling your existing DAM system.
Or you are looking to optimize a struggling solution.

No matter which scenario you find yourself in, you’re nervous.

This is a major project, there is a lot of pressure, and the risk of failure is high.

The good news is, there is an easy way to create a simple and highly effective strategy for your DAM initiative.

And we’re going to teach you how to do it.

In this free training, led by Kara Van Malssen, you’ll learn:

How to prioritize user needs
How to use the DAM Strategy Canvas as a planning tool
How to make your DAM program scalable

Register now: https://bit.ly/4aRt04z

06/04/2024

Your DAM system needs governance.

Proper governance of your DAM system can enable long-term effectiveness and sustainability. How so? The Governance portion of your DAM operational model includes your policies and standards that ensure data quality, create an effective user experience, and mitigate risks. Essentially, it’s a systematic way to maintain the integrity of your DAM system.

The first part of this is establishing policies.

Policies help maintain system health. You should outline your system policies into at least a few categories:

Collection policies: What assets are and aren’t in scope for the DAM? What formats and variations are accepted? What metadata is required upon submission?

Curation policies: Are all assets given equal treatment in terms of processing and metadata? What metadata is required prior to making assets accessible to end users?

Lifecycle management policy: How long are assets retained in the DAM system? What happens to the asset after it’s removed from the system?

Once you have this established, you're on your way to creating a functional system.

05/28/2024

AI tools for working with audio are much fewer and farther between. But there are still methods available that can help you with your digital assets!

💬 Speech-to-text (STT) – Speech-to-text, also called automatic speech recognition, transcribes speech into text. STT is used in applications like automatic caption generation and dictation. Transcripts created with speech-to-text can be sent through text-based processing workflows (like sentiment analysis) for further enrichment.

🎵 Music/speech detection – Speech, music, silence, applause, and other kinds of content detection can tell you which sounds occur at which timestamps in an audio clip.

👫 Speaker identification / diarization – Speaker identification or diarization is the process of identifying the unique speakers in a piece of audio. For example, in a clip of an interview, speaker diarization tools would identify the interviewer and the interviewee as speakers. It would also tell you where in the audio each speaks.

05/22/2024

AI has made managing collections of digital image and video assets easier with:

🖼️ Image classification – Image classification applies labels to images based on their contents. For example, image classification tools will label a picture of a dog with “dog.”

🕵️‍♀️Object detection – Object detection goes one step further than image classification. It both locates and labels particular objects in an image. For example, a model trained to detect dogs could locate a dog in a photo full of other animals. Object detection is also sometimes referred to as image recognition.

👨‍💼Face detection/face recognition – Face detection models can tell whether a human face is present in an image or not. Face recognition goes a step further and identifies whether the face is someone it knows.

🔠 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – OCR is the process of extracting machine-readable text from an image. Imagine the difference between having a Word document and a picture of a printed document–in the latter, you can’t copy/paste or edit the text. OCR turns pictures of text into digital text.

05/15/2024

This is the most common mistake people make when building a DAM program - neglecting taking the time to truly learn about the users, what they need from a system, and what motivates them. Without involving users, you may arrive at a seemingly logical and technically correct solution, but users may not see its relevance.

This risks the DAM program’s future viability. Users are likely to abandon a system that introduces stumbling blocks. Without involving users, you also risk focusing on the wrong problem or building solutions that don’t address their needs.

Invite your users to help you determine the right problem to solve and what adds value to their work. Put humans at the center of your DAM use cases.

05/14/2024

Just because you’ve figured out how to tie DAM to strategic projects and goals doesn’t mean you’re done building your digital asset management business case!

It’s almost a guarantee that leadership will ask you how your system is saving the company time and money. This question is what trips up a lot of DAM managers—there are so many ways to answer it! Ultimately, you want to go beyond saying “DAM increases productivity” or “DAM reduces content spend.” Instead, go deeper with details on how, and try to quantify wherever possible.

Reducing content spend

Creative teams often incur significant expenses licensing content and frequently overlook the reuse of their original, unused footage, leading to unnecessary costs and a growing backlog of potentially valuable assets. Digital Asset Management presents a solution by organizing and repurposing a company's existing content, thereby reducing expenses on stock footage and enhancing the uniqueness and quality of creative projects. Implementing a DAM system not only saves money but also maximizes the return on investment of content creation efforts, aligning with executive expectations for cost-effective and high-quality output.

Boost efficiency and time savings

Implementing a DAM system can significantly streamline content creation processes, saving weeks of work by providing a centralized, easily searchable repository for digital assets. Without proper DAM system, creative teams waste time recreating assets or navigating bureaucratic delays to find or validate them, often compromising on quality or reverting to overused or generic stock options. By understanding the current inefficiencies in asset management from the creative team's perspective, businesses can better quantify the time and cost savings a DAM system offers, while ensuring better governance and use of high-quality, unique content.

The cost of inaction

Framing the importance of a DAM system in terms of the costs of inaction can be a powerful approach to secure investment. Highlighting the potential savings from avoiding unnecessary video reshoots and reducing the risk of costly license violations demonstrates the significant return on investment that DAM offers. This perspective can make the decision to allocate budget towards DAM more compelling, emphasizing the financial wisdom in preemptively solving these costly issues.

05/08/2024

You aren’t getting your DAM budget because you aren’t using the right formula.

Imagine you're standing in your stakeholder's shoes—what's their biggest challenge right now? Start from a place of empathy, align with their goals, and then propose a solution. Here’s a powerful way to frame your pitch:

We understand that achieving [goal] is a top priority for [org name], as highlighted by [the timely primary resources consulted]. We are confident that implementing strategies [x, y, z] will advance this goal by [list specific benefits here].

The right framing can go a long way.

05/07/2024

Have you ever had trouble getting a budget for your DAM initiatives? You’re not alone.

Securing a budget, as with most projects, starts with trying to understand the people (stakeholders) you’re pitching to. Remember, DAM doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a service that delivers value to the organization and furthers its strategic aims. Therefore, to make a compelling case you need to look out, not in. Be able to tell leaders what’s in it for them, while empathizing with the prioritization decisions they have to make.

Start by asking the very basic question: how does the DAM advance my stakeholders’ goals (and what are those things)?

This simple exercise is going to help you consider how the DAM brings value to the people you’re pitching to. Remember, you’re trying to inspire and motivate leaders to support your vision for DAM. To do it, start by understanding theirs.

Look to existing resources to understand the priorities of your organization, division, and/or business unit.

05/01/2024

A great DAM system relies on a great strategy.

A good strategy consists of a diagnosis of the challenge that you are responding to, a guiding policy that describes the approach you will take to responding to the challenge, and a set of coherent actions designed to carry out the guiding policy.

We can adapt this framework to data and digital asset management this way:

The diagnosis is the identification of the problem an organization has with digital asset management, use, and delivery. Specifically, the diagnosis details what impact this issue is having on people (e.g., users waste time looking for assets, assets are misused)

The guiding policy is that a use-case centered approach will be taken to solve these challenges.

The coherent actions are the key areas of investment that you will make to solve the challenge and meet users’ needs.

That’s how great strategy is done.

Comment below how your organization does their DAM strategy!

04/25/2024

Okay, you’ve chosen the wrong digital asset management system but what’s the worst that could happen?

Here’s why a wrong choice can be costly:

1. Unwanted Expenses: Imagine realizing too late that your chosen DAM doesn't fit your needs. You're already deep into software implementation, including configuration and content migration. If you decide to switch systems, not only will you face the direct costs of ending the current contract, but you'll also encounter substantial staffing expenses to start all over again.

2. Broken Trust: A DAM that fails to meet expectations can damage the trust between you and your stakeholders. Once trust is lost, it's tough to rebuild. Stakeholders feeling frustrated may disengage, impacting system adoption and jeopardizing the project's success.

3. Lost Opportunity: The wrong DAM delays your time to value, prolonging the period before you can realize the benefits you sought from the investment. Meanwhile, the issues you aimed to solve—like workflow inefficiencies and content chaos—only worsen, potentially leading to the permanent loss of archival materials.

4. Project Viability: A poor DAM choice can undermine the entire project, affecting careers and leaving a challenging legacy. This risk is especially significant if the DAM implementation is part of a broader technology strategy backed by executive leadership.

Invest wisely in your DAM system—it’s not just about technology, it’s about safeguarding your investment, maintaining stakeholder trust, and enhancing operational efficiency.

04/24/2024

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.

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