Digital Asset Management System

Training, reporting and analysis are key ingredients to the implementation and ongoing success of digital asset management systems. Widen is helping customers understand four ratios serving as key success metrics to digital asset management adoption. As a DAM Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, Widen is able to collect quantitative usage data from all customer deployments. The data can be applied to help customers compare numbers against historical activity within the same system or against historical activity across the entire customer base. The key ratios are defined below:

Digital Asset Activity Ratio: A comparison between the quantity of files that have been ordered and the amount of files stored in the DAM system. This ratio provides insight into the relationship between download activity and all the assets stored in the digital asset library.

Repurposing Ratio: A comparison between the active digital assets and the quantity of files ordered. This provides insight into the amount of content repurposing that is taking place over a period of time. Repurposing continues to be a key component of digital asset management value.

User Activity Ratio: A comparison between the total number of logins and the quantity of users that have logged in provides information about visitation frequency. This metric also provides insight into how frequently users visit to browse or check back on new branded materials.

Digital Asset Consumption Ratio: Comparing the quantity of files ordered to the users that logged into the system provides information on the amount of data being consumed by each user over a specific time period.

The ratios are further explained in the Business Management article “What Those DAM Statistics Can Tell You.”

Digital Asset Management systems have been around for over a decade now, and before that it was your standard assortment of file folders, CDs and even floppy disks. As the DAM systems evolved many first-movers were able to take advantage of this new technology for the benefit of themselves and their organizations.

But if you don’t have a DAM system yet, are in the process of selecting a vendor or even if you have no idea what this DAM thing is and have been tasked to do some DAM research – don’t worry! Below you’ll find some great research and sources of information to help you make an informed decision.

As a digital asset management systems provider ourselves we are obviously a little bit biased, but we also realize that an enterprise DAM is not for everyone. Below are 3 top reasons, backed up with research and sources, of why people acquire a DAM system:


Reason #1:  It Supports your Marketing Initiatives

The top priorities of the Chief Marketing Officer for 2009, according to a survey from the Verse Group and Jupiter Research, are directly impacted by the deployment of a DAM System. In fact, 3 of the 5 of the top CMO goals translate into the top 3 reasons why companies invest in DAM, according to digital asset management research by the Aberdeen Group.

Top Priorities for CMOs and Senior Marketers in 2009:

1. Achieving measurable ROI on marketing efforts. – Why 46% invest in DAM – to Improve Return on Marketing Investments
2. Developing marketing programs that integrate online and traditional media.
3. Translating brand experience across different touchpoints. –  Why 46% invest in DAM – to manage brand consistency
4. Cutting marketing budgets without cutting performance.  – Why 66% invest in DAM – to improve operational efficiency
5. Optimizing portfolio of brands.

Reason #2:  You’re Wasting Too Much Time

Widen contracted with a third-party research firm this spring to conduct digital asset management research to examine a number of digital media management processes and practices among marketing and creative professionals.  According to the findings:

• 1 to 3 hours (29%)
• 4 to 6 hours (33%)

That’s consistent with Mark’s Digital Asset Management ROI blog last week reporting on GISTICS digital asset management research that creative professionals spend an average of 1 out of every 10 hours of their time on file management, mainly searching.

10% of a 40 hour work week is spent searching for files!  That’s a huge drain on productivity. What else could you accomplish in a day, week or month with 10% more time?

Making the problem worse for most organizations is how they are currently storing their digital assets. According to Widen’s third-party research, 41% had an internally developed system and 26% used an internal network folder. This means that 67% of marketing and creative professionals are searching for digital media stored internally by manually clicking through folder after folder, hoping they can still find it!

According to GISTICS Research, a DAM system will help cut the amount of time searching for assets down by over 85%!

Reason #3:  Lower Your Cost Per Use and Increase Brand Impressions

According to Widen’s third-party research, frequency of use was the #1 driver to the value of a digital asset.

According to GISTICS digital asset management research:

• The average creative person looks for a media file 83 times a week and fails to find it 35% of the time
• Research shows that digital asset management solutions will drop that figure to 5%

DAM systems make it easier to find what you’re looking for, thus increasing the ability to use it more frequently. The more frequently an asset is used, the lower your cost per use of the asset and the more brand impressions. (Plus, if you can find a digital asset, you have more opportunity to repurpose the asset. If you can find it, you don’t need to re-create the asset, thus lowering your cost to produce new assets.)
 

DEAR DR. DAM:  I’m Eddy, the director of corporate marketing with a large engineering, consulting and construction company and I’m working with our I.T. business analyst to find a solution to our current digital image management process—which is doomed.  We’re leading an initiative to find a better digital media management system to manage and share images and marketing collateral.  We have nine different locations throughout the US and we’re in dire need of a more organized approach to share approved imagery with our marketing and engineering folks around the world.  We’re losing a lot of time and money chasing our tails with materials that we don’t even know exactly where they are. 

Our corporate marketing team wants to be able to drive brand consistency while doing a better job of capitalizing on the money spent on purchased images we know exist somewhere, but cannot locate.  Right now, we’re just using a shared network drive and it demands a lot of our designer’s time to fulfill requests for images.  We are also having issues with our marketing collateral containing outdated info and need to develop a more accurate process for customizing brochures with different pieces of information.  We currently use another enterprise software vendor for content management and looked into the DAM plug-in but that would cost us $100K+, which is out of the question.  We want a hosted digital asset management system because we don’t want to deal with our own internal servers anymore.  Please point us in the right direction.

DEAR ENGINEER A NEW DAM EDDY:  Looking toward a hosted DAM is a smart alternative, particularly in these times.  There are no major expenditures on hardware or expensive upgrades/add-ons to purchase.  The Widen hosted digital asset management system provides you with your own branded web portal to drive your corporate branding initiative.  Plus, you’ll get free software upgrades on a quarterly basis for as long as you’re a customer.  Your designers will enjoy more time to concentrate on what they set out to do because your agents will be able to fulfill their own requests.  No more purchased images will fall through the cracks as a new DAM system will greatly help you improve organization and accountability.  The Widen Media Collective includes a project collaboration module to route images and documents for comment and approval tracking.  And, the media building app will help your users produce custom marketing collateral using images and content fit for the situation.  You’ll enjoy the ability to run usage reports and see where your users are and what’s being downloaded.  Get ready for a change because you’ll start realizing an ROI within a few short months.  

As I investigate new possible brands and product avenues for Widen to go down, I inevitably end up studying our current flagship product, the Media Collective Digital Asset Management system, quite a bit. And having come from an enterprise-software sales background my mind is always going down the path of "what is the benefit to the customer, what is in it for them?"

In today's economic conditions most companies demand an ROI. Those projects that have a "this would be nice" benefit or even arguable soft costs are getting buried at the bottom of the stack while products and solutions that can reduce costs or even show an ROI are going straight to the top. And in a time of high unemployment employees have a vested interest in finding solutions to reduce their companies’ costs: the more a company can save, the better they can afford to pay their employees.

While we know there is an ROI associated with time it can be difficult to articulate to customers because there are too many soft costs... How much is your time worth? How much time could you save if you could find images faster? If you could protect your brand better how much is that worth to you?

All great talking points but in a world of black and white numbers sometimes that is not enough. Hard numbers and clear ROI are required.

To that effect, I came across some great statistics on DAM and how DAM can help various organizations reduce costs. The numbers come from GISTICS research, with some highlights below:

• An average of $8,200 per person per year is spent on file management activities which include searching, verification, organization, back-up and security.
• Creative professionals spend an average of 1 out of every 10 hours of their time on file management, mainly searching.
• The average creative person looks for a media file 83 times a week and fails to find it 35% of the time.
• Research shows that digital asset management solutions will drop that figure to 5%.

$8200 per year per person!!  How many people at your firm or organization deal with file management per year? How much does that add up to on a 1-year and 5-year basis?

And those numbers don't take into account the fact that when you are not searching for files/images you can be working on something else, possibly something billable. And the average person fails to find digital media over one-third of the time? How much productivity is lost there? And how much frustration is built up there? And with SaaS, hosted DAM you don't even have to worry about maintenance, servers, etc.

Add to that the fact that with a digital asset management solution you CAN protect your brand, that little thing you've invested thousands and millions into.

Digital Asset Management has always made sense and always had clear benefits and process efficiencies. But as the economy continues to struggle it is also becoming more and more clear that there is ROI to be achieved as well.

DEAR DR. DAM:  I’m Betty, the director of marketing for a division II university.  I just took a position with the U about 2 months ago and I’m leading an initiative to implement a digital asset management system by start of the semester.  It’s one of those summer projects that I didn’t want to let pass me by.  We have hit a wall in managing our institution’s digital assets.  Our photos, logos, videos, and marketing documents are scattered everywhere across the network and the IT department has come down on us to clean it up.  Every department is creating their own stuff when we could be doing a lot better job sharing and re-purposing each other’s work and master assets.  Not to mention how difficult it is to keep the school’s branding and reputation in check.   With more departments, more people in different locations and more channels where our stuff is used… we have a problem.  It was manageable when we just had printed materials, but with the advance of the web and social networking sites, we need a master repository to keep everything together.  This master repository should be the communications hub for marketing, athletics, library, media relations, photography services, crisis communications, event support, webcasting and videography.  Does such a thing exist? 

DEAR BREAK DOWN THE WALL BETTY:  Sure thing!  Widen has helped several other colleges and universities on a very tight budget implement a 100% web-based digital asset management solution.   The Widen DAM solution will allow you to centralize digital content for multiple departments.  Photographers have ability to upload assets and add metadata.  Marketing can store, share and retrieve images and brochures with ease.  The Athletic department can store videos and convert to different formats on-demand.  You can control access levels to keep all departments separate and provide for various roles at each level.  Your top-level admins keep the University’s master assets and insignias in check and delegate administration to each department head to regulate their own digital media system.  Best of all, you can get up-and-running with training in 4-6 weeks – just before homecoming!  It’s no short term solution either; Widen DAM software is scalable to meet unlimited storage size growth.  It’s like comparing apples and oranges when pinned against installed solutions in the same price range.  Best of all, you’ll appreciate their special pricing for educational institutions.

• DAM Library of Photo Archive
• Basic Brand Management
• Multi-Lingual Brand Management
• Marketing Asset Production & Distribution
• Ad Production

• Periodicals Production & Distribution
• Multi-Channel Publishing
• Catalog Production
• Rights-Managed Syndication & Distribution

• E-Learning
• Video Ad Review & Approval
• Short Form Video Production
• Broadcast Video Production

As I field questions from potential customers about adding video to their digital asset management system, I tend to field the same type of question. “I have a QuickTime file. Is that good?” That is really a loaded question. The next statement is….”It is 100 Megabytes. Is that good?”

I will attempt to explain how video bandwidth is the intersection where time length avenue and storage size street cross. Unlike an image file, video is a time-based media. It not only has a resolution, but it has a time length, over which the resolution is maintained. Compression is used to help keep quality up and files size down, but that is for another blog topic.

“Storage” is static….a 100 MB video file sitting in your video asset management system is much like a one gallon bucket of water sitting on a counter. “Bandwidth” has motion to it. If the video is 1 minute long, and you are watching it online, your internet connection (or pipe) will have exactly 60 seconds to pull through 100 MB of data. If we think of the water in the bucket, we will poor that water into the sink. The opening of the drain will need to be wide enough to let exactly 1 gallon of water through its opening in 60 second. Anything less will result in stuttered playback of the video.

Therefore, “bandwidth” is simply storage size divided by the total run time (TRT). For example, let’s say 10 people want to simultaneously watch a 7.5 MB (storage size), 60 second video (TRT). One thing to note is the difference between Megabyte (MB) and Megabit (bit). Storage is usually expressed in Bytes, and bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second (bps). Note the use of lower case and upper case letter “b.” Also, there are 8 bits in one Byte.

Here’s the math for our example:

7.5 MB (total file size) ÷ 60 seconds (TRT) = 0.125 MBps X 8 (there are 8 bits in one Byte) = 1 Mbps (bandwidth)

1 Mbps is the “bandwidth” of the video. If 10 people simultaneously watch the video, you will need 1 Mbps X 10 people = 10 Mbps worth of available bandwidth for all 10 people to watch the video without stuttered playback. If we convert this to water in the sink, we would have 7.5 MB (file size) X 10 = 75 MB worth of water in the sink. The drain opening would need to be sized to allow 10 Mb of water through the drain per second (or 10 Mbps). This would allow all 75 MB worth of water to flow through the drain in exactly 60 seconds.

Your video asset management system may have enough storage to keep every video asset you have, but do you have enough bandwidth to facilitate the number of viewers you may have?

1. Photograph 1 neutral grey apparel sample
2. Digitally create all color swatches according to league approved team colors
3. Apply graphics according to Adidas supplied technical guidelines

 

• Accelerated search and retrieval time
• Increased real-time collaboration of assets and approvals
• Cost savings through the elimination of physical delivery
• Elimination of the cost of lost or misplaced work
• Reduction in time-to-market through digital delivery

While images have historically dominated the make up of digital asset management systems, the trends are showing a growing amount of video and audio files are growing as the dominant asset types.  A more diversified digital asset library means that we’re dealing with much larger file sizes.  Widen is embracing trends by giving customers the scalability they need to use video in their digital asset mix. It’s our job to say no problem and be prepared to handle the video demand.  We’ve thought of the next step because we watch the trends and position the technology to best serve customer needs so that you don’t have to.  Watch the video commentary.
 

A prospective customer and I were discussing their current digital asset management vendor and DAM solution evaluation processes and how those have changed with the recent economic climate.  They pointed to a previous software implementation they had gone through two years prior as a scenario that was one to learn from.  During the evaluation process they had brought in a major consulting firm to help pinpoint their requirements, prepare a formal and lengthy RFP, evaluate responses, and prepare a risk assessment and so on.  They ended up selecting a licensed software solution that cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars after the dust settled.  That included the cost for the solution they purchased as well as the licenses for all of the required hardware and software needed to get it up and running.  They also had to account for ongoing annual maintenance, training and implementation fees.  What was surprising to me was that nearly a quarter of the cost was for the consultants. 

They were never presented with a hosted option though some ASP providers were on the list of early vendors to look at.  He couldn’t immediately recall why none of them were ever included on the list of vendors to receive the RFP though.  I asked him if the consultant was involved in the implementation process at all and he confirmed that they had been.  We got to talking about how DAM SaaS solutions provide the consulting and change management services as part of the package.  Hosted solutions are designed to eliminate most of the heavy lifting and costs associated with licensed software implementations.  Hosted providers typically bundle all of the costs into a single subscription fee of some kind, have fast and easy implementations and because they are working with their own software can make changes, configurations and even customizations fairly easily.
 
Consultants have a right to say that they save the customer countless thousands by ensuring they get a software solution to exactly match their requirements.  They can make a case about hidden costs for hosted solutions and how many customers have no idea how their own businesses are even run and require a steady hand to figure it out.  The prospect I was talking to was implementing another digital asset management system the first go around.  This is in fact why we were speaking in the first place.  They were in the market to replace the solution they had previously purchased with something that will work for them.  The solution they originally chose is still not implemented and is only supporting a handful of administrative users at present, though they planned a rollout to thousands of people.  This time around, they have decided to forego a formal evaluation process and speak directly to the vendors.    
 

• LightSource Colortron 1997 - 2001
  
  • First hand held sub $5000 spectrophotometer ($1500)
  • Used software on a computer for intelligence
• ColorBlind software 1997 - 2000
  
  • First to use 3D modeling so you could see what was happening with gamuts
• Standards Committees
  
  • Dave McDowell, Larry Warter, Mike Rodriguez, Larry Steele worked tirelessly to provide the framework that enabled all of this color management technology. "These guys don't get enough credit. Because without them, this industry would really be in disarray." Dave said.

I have other posts regarding a "Mezzanine" format for video...something that is high enough quality for repurposing, but more compressed than the original to save on storage space in your digital asset management or video asset management system. H.264 is an excellent video format to use as a mezzanine, but with compression, comes "loss." One of the main issues with H.264 is a loss of color saturation. Here are a couple helpful tips to give your video a little "bump" if choosing H.264 as your format.

When rendering or exporting your video, depending on which encoder you use, you should add a couple filters. You can play with the settings to fine tune it, but when rendering, I tend to lower the brightness a couple clicks, up the contrast a couple clicks, and increase the saturation between 10-20. If I am feeling spunky, I will add a level of sharpen to it as well. Below are before and after frame grabs. The first is a straight H.264. The second is the H.264 with the above enhancements. As you can see, it is a much better looking image, which will repurpose better in a video asset management system.

Regular H.264

Multichannel Merchant had an article by Melissa Dowling titled Software Selection Smarts yesterday, which included several good tips about selecting a software vendor.

What to look for when selecting a software vendor?

• Proven success in your niche
• Cultural fit between organizations
• Complete package vs. custom technology
• Future functionality requirements
• Training and user adoption

After reading the article and dissecting the main points I had an “Aha! Moment” recognizing that these are all reasons contributing to the popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS), particularly in this economic climate where it is difficult to justify large capital expenditures on software, hardware and a reallocation of IT resources.

Successful SaaS providers grasp these points and are the reason why they continue to be the answer to software questions in this economic climate...

1. Proven success in your industry and with people in similar roles
2. Cultural fit as an extension of your business and/or functional areas
3. Configurable package options without heavy need for customization
4. Shared transparency of future product roadmap to align with the goals of the customer
5. Widespread user adoption achieved through proper training, marketing support and ongoing tech support

These factors are what drives the ongoing success of a software implementation at any company dealing with restricted budgets, too much on the” to-do list,” increased demand of specialization and fewer resources to focus on the core business.  Whether you’re looking for an enterprise digital asset management system or hosted DAM software for your SMB or agency, consider these factors for any marketing or creative software.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) demand continues to rise thanks to the pairing of great technology providers and decision makers trusting in the SaaS model to help solve their business challenges.  We speak with prospective customers every minute of the day and the shift in demand over the last 3 years has been enlightening.  Isolating the request for proposals (RFP) alone can give you insight into how buyers have changed.

Three years ago we had RFP’s for digital asset management (DAM) because the organizations had challenges managing their collections of digital media (and still do today, just an exponentially greater volume of digital media).  But only a fraction of these DAM RFP’s (appropriate use of acronyms but the irony of the DAM RFP is oh so great)  were requesting how they could better manage their images, audio, and video files because the rest of it was specifying hardware and other I.T. requirements.  As a SaaS provider, it was a simple copy and paste of the words, “Not Applicable, Software-as-a-Service Provider.”

So the SaaS providers would rarely get invited any further in the process, but on occasion would be taken to the final decision to stand against the installed software provider just so the organization could compare apples and oranges.  If you could hear what was being said in the decision room, it might have sounded something like this (with heavy sarcasm for fun):

“We have entertained two different methods of deploying our digital asset management technology.  One method is purchasing software from a digital asset management provider and then using all our available I.T. resources to acquire the necessary hardware that we will never upgrade. 

A few other highlights if we go with the installed DAM software option:
 

• We then deploy the $200,000 software on these devices so that we can determine what customizations we would need to accommodate the original specifications in our RFP. 
   
• Then we could customize it for 5x the cost we paid for the setup solidifying our legacy application status which makes future upgrades from this DAM software provider more difficult (but I am leaving the organization in 12-months for a better job so what do I care). 
   
• Then we get to roll it out to the user base after partnering with one of the integrators that the DAM provider recommends. 
   
• This also gives I.T. the opportunity to purchase more bandwidth because we are going to be transferring massive sized files and with the upcoming demands of marketing including lots of video, we can plan on about 50% of our total bandwidth being consumed by feeding video to our web and channel partners. 
   
• This should all take anywhere between 3 and 36 months.

The other option is DAM SaaS which is having someone else manage the technology and we manage our digital media, which was kinda the original purpose of the RFP process but we’re not sure anymore.

Our recommendation is to purchase the software because we get to own it…not really though because we don’t own the source code… Well, I guess we don’t own it… we just license it… But, we have the perceived sense of owning it so we’ll call it that because it sounds better. 

We recommend the installed option for the following reasons as well: 

• We also get total control over the deployment and our I.T. team will work closely with marketing and creative to meet their schedules and requirements.  I know they haven’t gotten along in the past because their projects keep getting pushed for other I.T. priorities but this time is different. 
   
• I.T. says they should deploy everything anyway because they want to continually purchase new hardware because it is fun looking at new stuff and the hardware suppliers give me tickets to cool events and other gadgets to play with for personal use. 
   
• More importantly, when the DAM provider releases new software they get a chance to debug it on the fly which is a great high pressure situation to help advance their skill set; almost like defusing a bomb. 
   
• That is only after we determine if we can take the upgrade because we might have done so much customization that is will cause too much disruption which means we just won’t upgrade, ever.  But I.T. also thinks that is ok because they would increase their networking opportunities because they could work more closely with the integrators and third party providers that would write the customizations to the original DAM software.

It is obvious that the installed software choice for this digital asset management system is more exciting which is why I am asking for an open purchase order because I am not clear with the total cost related to owning this thing.  Someone asked about scalability earlier as well, but we have opted not to address that because I am leaving the company before that becomes an issue anyway.”

Fond memories... 

Thank goodness nearly every RFP for managing digital media now requires that the service be managed by a software-as-a-service organization so the focus can be on managing and distributing digital media.
 

DEAR DR. DAM:  My name is Patrick, Director of Premedia at a mid-sized marketing agency.  I have an extreme problem providing and controlling access to our digital files.  I have a number of internal departments that require different levels of access and our current method of using an internal shared folder is driving me nuts with all the problems we encounter just trying to keep things organized.  We do a high amount of direct mail pieces and need an efficient way for my team and clients to review the prints.  How can something so basic be so difficult to handle?

DEAR PERPLEXED PATRICK:  You would think that everyone would be utilizing a web-based digital asset management system by now...  just kidding.  Your prescription calls for a central repository with role-based access controls, complete with on-the-fly file transformations and a project collaboration component.  With Widen marketing resource management features, you have the ability to upload proofs for internal and external review and approval tracking.  I caution you of the intense spike in productivity you may experience by cutting out much of the manual labor dealing with content management and structure.

Do you ever get the urge of “I just gotta have it”...  Who doesn’t? ... Whatever “it” is.

Now when it comes to info, video clips and pictures, what do you do when you just gotta have it?

Applications like Facebook and devices like the iPhone have made that so much easier and have trained us to think that way. 

Now, how does this apply to digital asset management software?  The demand for rich media has been on the rise and will only continue to skyrocket.  If you’re responsible for creating, managing and distributing digital assets – the lifeblood driving brand awareness and revenue – you need to have a system that can satisfy the “I gotta have it” need for those that need it most. 

Search – Whether you’re a marketer, designer, web developer or salesperson, when you need a file – you just gotta have it now.  You can’t wait for someone else and you can’t waste time sifting through file folders or legacy systems.  Google has trained us to search by keyword and get the most relevant search results.  It’s expected.  Shouldn’t your rich media be the same way?

Preview – So now you got the file in front of you – print brochure, hi-res image, PowerPoint presentation, audio / video clips – don’t you want to actually see it.  It’s no good to you if all you get is a small thumbnail preview.  You want the whole DAM thing.  The ability to preview files saves you the time of waiting for a file to download, unzip or pull down off an FTP site. 

Transform – After you find the asset you’re looking for, you’re going to need it in different formats.  No marketer is running a single channel anymore.  You’re assets must be available for use in web pages, print pieces, catalogs, emails, blogs and social media.  Moreover, they're being consumed on a whole variety of devices.  You can’t always depend on a designer to convert the files for you or having the right software to handle every single file processing need.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate file transformation services?

Apply that mindset to a whole organization whose team is dependent on the ability to access, share and repurpose your digital assets – they all just gotta have it.  For those that don’t (or shouldn’t), a digital asset library gives you the ability to control rights, access and usage levels.

When it comes to producing and repurposing digital assets, a web-based digital asset management system offering the ability to access what you need, when you need it satisfies the hunger for “I gotta have it.”