Digital Asset Management Solutions

I work in a small marketing team of about five. We have a designer, a product manager, a brand manager, a marketing assistant and an online marketer. We work closely with the sales and customer success management teams. We often collaborate with the account executives and project services teams on projects. Basically, anyone with a customer-facing role depends on Marketing and Marketing depends on them.

Like many organizations, our marketing communications programs include online marketing, public relations, brand management, event marketing, etc. We produce a number of digital assets that are put to use promote our brand, sell products and services and assist with customer relationship management objectives. These digital assets are owned and created by a number of different people across multiple departments inside the organization and externally. Each department has their own shared folder on the network and many employees also have their own folder as well. It’s easier for each department to work separately and for each employee to keep their work on their desktop. When we have a new project, we just start fresh in creating new materials. It’s just easier to re-create something than go digging through some archive somewhere or turn to someone else.

If for some reason, someone needs something that someone else has worked on, we’ll just email it or post it to the FTP. Sometimes, the materials get too large for email so we’ll just use web-based delivery programs like YouSendIt or something like that. There are all sorts of tools or methods we can turn to… no need to settle on one. If someone needs a logo or letterhead, they can always email our designer and she can stop what she’s working on and send them whatever it is they need. Sometimes it might take a few emails to get it right, but that’s ok she’s paid by the hour.

It’s common for teams to email a project file back and forth a dozen times and still see mistakes in the end. “She said this” and “he said that” and the project file morphs into something totally different than expectations called for. They should have given better directions and should have done a better job keeping track of changes. Version 1… version 2… version 7… Who cares what was done to which version and where they’re at? That’s just part of internal communication breakdowns that all businesses have. Why should Marketing care?

It doesn’t really matter to Marketing that different departments have their own libraries of materials and guidelines that they follow—we don’t have that strong of a brand presence anyway. Inconsistency is just part of business and “brand consistency” is a made up marketing term anyway… it has no financial impact. If companies would just spend more time selling and less time on branding then they’d be more successful, right?

Although it’s a pain in the neck, working with agencies or other partners is another part of marketing. If we work with an agency on a brochure, video or website we’ll just assume they’re keeping all of the original files, master assets and anything else they produced. If we need it later, we’ll just email the agency and wait for them to send a CD with the final files. Hopefully, they’ve kept all the files even though it’s been a couple years since the project. Why should we be care what happened to the files or if we have them later? ...Chances are we’ll never use them again.

If only Sales could do their job. It’s not Marketing’s problem to look after the crap sales teams put together. If our sales teams put together poor-quality presentations and lose a deal, then that’s their fault… they should have done a better job. They deal directly with our customers, they should get it right. If they’re putting together presentations on the road or working after five, then it’s not Marketing’s problem if there’s no one at the office to track down and send them the files they need. They should be better prepared.

Why should Marketing care what materials are accessed by whomever, used wherever and what impacts they had. All we want to do is create content and move on. If that old logo was used for the new proposal, that’s not Marketing’s fault. If that image for the new campaign was used before it was to be available for general use, that’s not Marketing’s problem. Why should we care what materials were used the most or had the greatest impact? We know what’s best because we’ve always done it that way. That’s Marketing for you… the department that doesn’t require accountability or intelligence.

We don’t need a digital asset management system. Or do we?

This is the thirteenth video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. After 21 years, Widen has never let Edge down. Edge thinks of Widen as a partner in providing digital asset management solutions and services. Cheryl explains that there is not another company that can provide the capabilities and service levels that Widen provides to the Edge catalog publishing workflow. Widen has delivered DAM tools and services that provide a huge impact to the catalog production process. Widen has helped Edge cut page production timelines down by 20-30 minutes per page. Edge has been able to reduce freelance time while increasing efficiency with their internal staff. Watch the video to learn more about why Edge has stayed with Widen through 21 years of working together.

This is the twelfth video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. At the start, Edge did not have a lot of IT resources. They needed to figure out a system to make up time and be better prepared and “always on.” The Widen SaaS structure ensures Edge will always have their images and other digital assets available. As a DAM software as a service provider, Widen provides Edge with business continuity and disaster recovery. Watch the video to learn about the extraordinary example of service Widen brings to a partner in need.

This is the eleventh video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. There isn’t a challenge relating to the catalog production and digital asset management workflow that hasn’t been looked at. Cheryl is amazed that Widen is a company that doesn’t stop coming up with new ideas. “Widen is a color house that doesn’t stop coming up with new ideas.” Watch the video to learn more about meeting client challenges with DAM services.

This is the tenth video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. A partner is someone that will let you know when there is good news or bad news. They let you know when there’s a problem. They let you know when there’s a solution. They let you know when there are better ways to do things. The relationship between Edge and Widen is more like a partnership than a vendor-client relationship. All employees are working together for a common goal. Watch the video to learn more about working with Widen as a partner.

This is the seventh video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. The most recent addition Widen has provided to Edge is the Project Collaboration application. This application has helped provide a soft proofing workflow to create efficiencies in the collaboration processes and speed up catalog production. Watch the video to learn more about the soft proofing impact of digital asset management.

This is the sixth video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. It’s done in steps. The step by step process allows Edge to be more careful. Edge has very strict deadlines that they must adhere to with their catalog production output. Widen has helped Edge rollout new features and advancements in their digital asset management implementation with a phased approach without biting off more than they could chew. Watch the video to learn more about taking steps in the digital asset management implementation.

This is the forth video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. Edge has tried lots of things with Widen to streamline the catalog production process. Edge has over 600 vendors that they deal with in their catalogs. That’s a lot of copy and information to go with all of the products. Before DAM, all of that data was kept with the copy writers. In the early 1990’s, Widen and Edge went beyond the catalog production process to develop a database that became the start of Widen Digital Asset Management and Catalog Production systems. Now, all of their catalog data is in a central location where the correct information can go in the appropriate catalog. All images, logos, charts and product information is part of the Widen digital asset management and catalog publishing system. With the help of Widen digital assets management and catalog production technologies, Edge is saving about 75% of the time involved with their catalog production processes from 10 years ago. Watch the video to learn more about the evolution of digital asset management between Edge and Widen.

This is the third video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. Widen has helped Edge save money in a number of different areas, but primarily by creating efficiencies in their processes by being more streamlined in the catalog production timelines. Widen has been able to create efficiencies that has allowed Edge to realize both cost savings and time savings. Edge has been able to maximize their employee productivity by recognizing efficiencies with the help of Widen DAM asset management and premedia production technologies. Watch the video to learn more about saving money with DAM and premedia technologies.

This is the second video in the series of Widen customer interviews with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. Watch as Cheryl explains the how the first objective with catalog production is accuracy. The main goal is to get the best product information in the catalog for the dealers and to always keep their deadlines. Edge has been able to produce their catalogs in the same amount of time over the last several years while adding more vendors and more pages to each catalog. Essentially, they have done more work (more output) in the same amount of time by creating efficiencies with the help of Widen digital asset management and catalog production technologies and services. Watch the video to learn more about achieving catalog production objectives with Widen DAM software and catalog production services.

This series of posts features a video interview with Cheryl Rugland, Agency Director for Edge Advertising. Edge Advertising is the in-house agency for the Le Mans Corporation, a distributor of powers sports products—products related to motorcycles, all terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, and jet skies—with brands including Parts Unlimited and Drag Specialties. Edge is one of Widen’s longest-standing customers and uses Widen for a number of services from catalog production to digital asset management. With the help of Widen services and technologies, Edge produces over 10,000 catalog pages per year. Watch the video for an overview of Edge Advertising.

This quick tutorial will show you how to make a film like edge on your selection / mask in photoshop. Film has an inherent grain, and if your trying to do some masking or digital asset retouching, a simple blur on a selection line won't cut it.

For our example I'm using a simple textile selection.



Here you can see a quick mask view of the selection, where green denotes the areas selected.



Next I applied a Gaussian blur, radius' of usually 5-10 pixles works well, depending on the size of the transition needed.



Hitting the "tilde"key, you will get a black and white representation of your quick mask selection.



Next we're going to apply the "film" effect to the selection.
Goto Filter/Brush Strokes/Spatter



A setting I have foud that works well is a Spray Radius of 4 and a smoothness of 1.
If your image has less/more grain/transition needed, feel free to tweak the radius value in conjuction with the prior gaussian blur.



Here is the resulting effect on our blurred selection.



Our next step is to take the edge off the grain, and create a subtle and more realstic film grain. Unless your initial image is overly sharpened, you'll want to soften the grain selection edges to match. Here I have used a value of .3 gaussian blur to take the hard edge off.



Lastly, hit Q for quick mask again, this will show the "crawling ants" selection, and proceed to save your alpha / mask.




Keywords: Digital, Asset, Retouching, Film, Selections, Images, Matt, Anderson, Spatter, Gaussian, Blur, Selection, Soften, Photoshop, CS4, Filter, Effects, Workflow, Digital Asset Management Workflow, Image Asset Management

As the Brand Development Manager here at Widen I’m constantly looking forward. Where are the markets going? What are the latest trends? What is the next Big Thing in rich media management that we need to be a part of?


So it was kind of a fun “looking back at looking forward” exercise I went through when Newsweek re-published an article that they had originally published in 1995 titled The Internet? Bah!.

In it, Clifford Stoll, the journalist who is unfortunately linked to his couldn’t-be-more-wrong predictions for life, laments against the value of the internet and how it will never be a big life-changer everyone wants it to be.

While I could pick nearly any sentence out of the article and show how Clifford was wrong (e.g. “The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper” – tell that to the newspapers of today!) the more interesting aspect was what Clifford got right by getting it all wrong. You see he came to those conclusions by considering the tools that were available at the time and to illustrate that he started it off with “Consider today’s online world.” That was his first mistake. If the online world stayed how it was in 1995 (think text based usenet groups and 2400 baud modems – a 30k image would easily take 30 minutes to download!).

If you consider the future based on the tools we have available today then the future will always look impossible. What he wasn’t considering was that cell phones of today would have 100x the power as the computers of 1995. Or that downloading a full movie today would take 5 minutes, when downloading a simple JPEG image in 1995 takes 30 minutes!

But in uncovering all these problems Clifford was uncovering opportunities – unfortunately he just didn’t know it or didn’t care to act on it. In the article he talks about the lack of social communities in 1995 – hello Facebook, MySpace, etc. He calls the internet a “wasteland of unedited data” – hello Google! And his rant against the future of ecommerce because of a lack of secure online purchasing (PayPal, Google Checkout, SSL, etc.) and lack of social feedback (Amazon rating system, review sites).

The point is that every single one of the problems he mentioned later became billion-dollar industries and, in many cases, companies in their own right. So Clifford was so right by being so wrong!

How does this all relate to DAM Asset Management? Well, just like Clifford I’m not sure yet.

We as a company and an industry have become comfortable with the markets we serve and the use cases from those markets. For example here at Widen we started off serving primarily the manufacturing and retail industries (via their Marketing departments), though more recently DAM software is catching on with Healthcare, Government, Education and other sectors.

We make some assumptions that our product is not the right fit for, say, an individual. Or a sole-proprietor. For all the reasons you might think and agree with—it’s too complicated. Individuals don’t need all those features. People prefer storing their images locally for speed reasons.

But after seeing Clifford’s 1995 example I have to challenge you and myself on these – how many of these are legitimate roadblocks, and how many are glowing opportunities waiting to be solved by the next Bill Gates?

I’d be willing to be bet that the 2025 version of us will kick ourselves for not acting on these ideas sooner.

“IT wants our Digital Asset Management solution installed at our location.” … I’m sorry to remind you Marketing but are you sure IT knows what is best for you? Does IT do everything else you want? Do they provide the timeliness in response you need? Have they ever dropped the ball on a project before? Do you ever get the feeling like you’re left on an island? I don’t mean to bring IT down or even make reference that you’re IT department is lacking in support for marketing, but we’ve seen it time and time again… IT has way too many other business critical responsibilities and projects going on to give little ole marketing the attention it needs. Marketing requires immediacy in action and a certain degree of understanding of your processes.

Marketing, remember to consider your DAM needs first. You have the right to work with a team that understands creative and marketing workflows. You have the right to a timely and guided DAM software implementation. You have the right to have your administrators and DAM users receive the proper training they deserve. You have the right to have a help desk with DAM specialists that can help when you and your users have questions. You have the right to receive regular upgrades with new features and innovations in DAM and marketing technology. You have the right to contribute ideas and feature requests. You have the right to have a system that is scalable to grow with your needs. You have the right to have a DAM system that can work with other systems. You have the right to a responsive team that can restore digital assets that are accidentally deleted. You have the right to have the peace of mind to know your digital assets will always be accessible. You have the right to know what you’re paying for and only pay for what you use. You have the right to know that your digital asset management programs will be a success.

Why is it that IT departments want Digital Asset Management solutions that are installed on-site? Is it because they own it? Is it because they can customize it? Is it because they want their assets behind their firewall? These are all valid questions. DAM SaaS providers and SaaS adopters deal with these questions all of the time. There are answers to these questions, but the DAM project owners should ask these questions back to their IT managers as well.

The truth is you don’t own the installed software. You only own it if it’s a home grown solution and many large companies are finding that their home grown solutions, after years of development, do not compare to modern-day DAM solutions. Many home grown solutions don’t embrace the feature set, ease of use, and scalability of today’s enterprise-class DAM solutions. If you’re thinking an installed solution belongs to you, you’re not entirely correct. You don’t own the code. If you want to customize it, you must ensure the parts to customize fit with what your needs are and that you have the competency to customize it.

You’re still subject to the release cycles, support and professional services offered by the installed provider. There’s a certain level of expertise it takes to implement and maintain DAM software and many IT departments are not staffed with “DAM experts.” Consider the competencies of IT and the competencies required for a DAM implementation, ongoing maintenance and expansion. In most organizations, the IT team’s time is filled in maintaining the other business critical systems. Does DAM carry that high of a priority with IT?

Installed or SaaS, You Still Own Your Digital Assets

Whether you deploy an installed solution or work with a hosted provider, you still own the assets. It’s just a matter of where they live. Of course with an installed solution, they live behind your firewall. With a SaaS solution, your assets live in the hosted provider’s secure data center or the cloud. This is much like banking… you keep your money in a bank because you trust they can do a better job managing it than you can. Certainly, there are good reasons to have asset libraries on the client site. That’s why Widen introduced the Appliance. With the Widen Appliance, companies have replicated assets on-site to support internal creative operations and business continuity planning in the event of catastrophe causing the internet to go down.

One of the many reasons companies – big, medium and small – choose to work with a SaaS provider is because the hosted DAM provider has a better infrastructure to support a widespread network of internal and external users. A hosted provider can often offer greater scalability of the infrastructure. This includes scalability to scale resources up as the demand increases and scale the resources down when so much storage and bandwidth is not required. Scalable SaaS DAM deployments can be more cost-effective as they support a true pay for what you use model.

We had a prospective client share their DAM story with us last week and their needs matched up very closely with what Widen could provide in a hosted Digital Asset Management solution. They needed a central repository for images and videos, easy to use, easy to find assets, multiple levels of control and access, and asset tracking and usage reporting.

However, after learning the Widen online digital asset management solution matched up very well to the needs of this particular client, they came back to us saying that their IT department would only consider solutions installed on-site. Regrettably, Widen is a 100% DAM SaaS provider and delivers web-based DAM solutions where the asset libraries are hosted in Widen’s data center.

Do they want the internet installed too?

I thought it was interesting that this particular client’s IT team would only consider an installed solution since they’ve been unable to maintain the current system. This is something we hear all of the time. Ironically, most of their digital assets – images and videos – end up online. Do they want the internet installed too? If the destination for your digital assets is to be online, then wouldn’t it make sense for the digital asset management solution to be online as well?

A recent Forrester ECM (Enterprise Content Management) report by analyst Stephen Powers shows that more interest was seen in SaaS products (than on-premise or open source), with 43% of the respondents expressing interest in SaaS WCM and 39% in SaaS DAM. “Because content stored in these systems are often public-facing, organizations were less concerned with sharing the content outside the firewall,” reports Powers.

Consider the use and destination of your digital assets in defining your goals and needs with a DAM system. In a large organization with multiple divisions in multiple locations, an installed solution isn’t always the best option. Consider all internal and external users? Will the installed solution be the single point of reference for everyone in the organization? Will everyone adopt the solution or will people still work in the same siloed environments their used to? One of the main goals for deploying a DAM solution should be making it easy for users to access the system, enjoy using it and make it easy to get want they need so they will come back again.

Everyone wants to know about best practices in digital asset management. Best practices with digital assets metadata and taxonomy development, categorization, etc. As a DAM SaaS provider, Widen takes digital asset management best practices to another level by leveraging the collections of digital asset usage data to help clients compare against past usage and performance within their DAM system and with other Widen clients. Watch the video to learn more about Widen’s ratios referred to as “Digital Asset Management Success Metrics.”

What Digital Asset Management technology is going to fit the needs of your company? How often are upgrades provided? How are upgrades determined? Watch the video interview to find out more about how Widen goes about involving clients and delivering DAM software upgrades.

Awhile back, we participated in a RFP for a digital asset management system at a large enterprise. In working through the RFP, we put together several video responses to the different sections. In the videos that follow, I'll talk about Widen’s qualifications, experience, practices and approach to providing digital asset management solutions as a service provider.

Watch the video to learn about why Widen understands digital asset management software and, more importantly, what goes in a DAM system.