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 Putting Content In Context
Digital asset management (DAM) software stores and organizes images,
audio, video and other digital objects, making them easier to find,
transform and reuse. And many companies are using DAM to provide a
centralized way for employees and partners to locate and manipulate
content-a big time-saver for all.
By Sari Kalin
July 15, 2002 - CIO Magazine - COCA-COLA is using it to bottle up
116 years of brand history, including its hippie-era ad classic, "I'd like
to buy the world a Coke." DaimlerChrysler is using it as a virtual parking
lot for vehicle images. The National Football League is using it to hand off
game photos and head shots of some 3,000 players and coaches.
Advertisers
Those companies are among a growing number of organizations deploying
digital asset management systems-software that stores and organizes images,
audio, video and other digital objects, making them easier to find,
transform and reuse. Digital asset management (DAM) found an early niche in
the media, entertainment and advertising industries, with pioneers such as
CNN and Discovery Communications using it to get a high-tech handle on their
vast video libraries. But the market is poised for rapid growth during the
coming years, analysts say, as mainstream companies realize that they too
are awash in rich and varied forms of content-PowerPoint presentations,
product photographs, training videos-and that they desperately need a
centralized, speedy way for employees and partners to locate such content
and manipulate it.
"Most CIOs find themselves in the unhappy circumstance of having all of
these islands of stuff that are not federated in any way," says Michael
Moon, president and CEO of Gistics, a Larkspur, Calif.-based research
company. "So they can't say, How many reusable objects do I have in my
enterprise?"
Not being able to ask or answer that question can prove costly.
DaimlerChrysler, for example, works with multiple ad agencies in the United
States. Car images and other marketing-related media have typically been
stored in separate databases, some at agencies, some in-house, says Bill
Whedon, director of e-commerce and dealership technologies in Auburn Hills,
Mich. "We would end up with redundant [photo] shoots, but oftentimes we
didn't realize [it]," Whedon says. And each photo shoot could cost tens if
not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now, with DAM software from Artesia, Whedon says, the automaker will be
able to centrally store and manage data, graphics and images used in the
company's websites, electronic kiosks and traditional print-marketing
pieces; it'll be able to store video for use in a variety of mediums. Whedon
hopes that the DAM system, scheduled to roll out by July, will help
eliminate wasteful duplication and encourage designers to transform and
reuse existing materials. Say a promotional piece needs to show a yellow
2002 Jeep Wrangler Sport in a rugged landscape, and the DAM system already
holds an image of a white Wrangler Sport thundering across the Mojave. "It's
much easier to repurpose the image-to change the color-rather than going out
and reshooting it because you need the car in a different color," Whedon
says.
The DAM Difference General-purpose relational databases have long been
able to store and retrieve unstructured information as "blobs," or binary
large objects. Yet there's a difference between simply storing and
retrieving digital riches, and doing something useful with them. Companies
want to be able to attach descriptive information, or meta-data, to their
images, audio and video to make them easier to find. They want to keep track
of versions and set up workflows, control access and manage digital rights.
They also want to be able to convert or "transcode" their media into
different formats, depending on its use.
Five years ago, Coca-Cola couldn't find any suitable commercially
available software to digitize and organize images There's a difference
between simply storing and retrieving digital riches, and doing something
useful with them. from its archives. So Coke's IS department built an image
repository that had a strong search capability and made it available on the
company's intranet, with reasonable success, says Phil Mooney, director of
Coke's archives department in Atlanta. But two years ago, Coke began looking
at setting up parallel systems for archiving textual information (press
releases, executive memos, articles written about the company) and moving
images (TV commercials, company-sponsored films, videos of executive
presentations). "We were creating these silos of information," Mooney says.
"We said, We've got to find a digital asset management system that will be a
one-stop shopping place."
Coke found what it needed from another global giant, IBM, in a product
called Content Manager (formerly called Digital Library). Mooney says he was
drawn to IBM by more than just system features and scalability. "We were
convinced that IBM was going to be here in five years, whereas a lot of
those other folks, we just didn't know about," he notes.
New DAM vendors will no doubt enter the market, says Framingham,
Mass.-based IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher), even as consolidation
continues. IDC forecasts that spending on software for "rich media asset
management" will grow from $117 million in 2000 to $1.8 billion in 2005.
Adding to the confusion: Vendors that offer Web content management,
enterprise content management, document management and brand resource
management are adding features that overlap with those offered by DAM
vendors.
But for now, a dearth of off-the-shelf systems remains, and DAM prices
are all over the map. Canto, for example, sells a single-user version of
Cumulus, its DAM product, aimed at individual photographers and graphic
designers, for $99.95, but it also offers enterprise packages that start at
$35,000 for 20 licenses. Artesia says most of its deployments start at
$100,000. Meanwhile, IBM DAM projects call for software and services that
typically range from $250,000 to $5 million. "It's a highly fractured
market," says Joshua Duhl, a contributing analyst at IDC.
Digitizing the World For some companies, a digital asset management
effort begins with analog assets that need to be converted into digital
form: movies, photographic negatives, printed reports, audio tapes. The
conversion task can be time-consuming and expensive, forcing most companies
to be selective about what they digitize. Coca-Cola has more than a million
items in its archives, for instance. Mooney first moved to digitize those
items that were likely to get the most use, such as Coke's first-ever
newspaper ad that ran in 1886, its Norman Rockwell calendar art from the
1930s or that 1971 TV commercial that showed all those hippies singing on a
hill.
Once a company picks what to put online, it has to decide how to describe
its assets. "The hardest part is finding out Disappearing DAM? Digital asset
management (DAM) products may be a hot topic now, but a January report by
Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group predicts that by 2004 or 2005, such tools
will likely evolve into nothing more than a set of features inside more
complete enterprise content management tools.
What you have, identifying it and describing it properly in the system so
it can be found later," says Andy Shenkler, director of the digital services
group for EMI Recorded Music in Woodland Hills, Calif., which is using DAM
software from Bulldog (a company acquired late last year by Documentum). The
recording giant has populated a DAM system with its entire current audio
catalog-some 10,000 recordings, ranging from Beethoven's 5th to the Beatles'
Abbey Road. Shenkler's group can enter basic meta-data elements-album name,
artist, release date. But "there's no way for my group to know who was the
fourth artist on a particular track," Shenkler says; that information has to
come from the individual record label overseers. "Then there's the rights
info-it changes track by track, and that has to be cleared by business
affairs and legal."
Another major decision companies must make is who will access the digital
assets and how. Given the current economic climate, some companies decide to
start out with a fairly small, department-level project. Other companies
vary DAM access based on their comfort with the user audience. The NFL, for
example, makes game photographs and player head shots available to
registered press members via a website, maintained by WebWare. WebWare is
also building a B2B system for NFL licensees, who will be able to search for
and download high-resolution images. The software generates a usage report,
and then the NFL sends out a usage contract and a bill. Another NFL site
being built for consumers, however, won't allow access to high-resolution
photos; consumers will be able to search for images and then order
photographic prints by mail.
IT resource constraints can also shape DAM deployment decisions. At
Coca-Cola, Mooney wanted to offer high-resolution images and video for
downloading, but the IS department balked, saying it would bog down the
corporate network. Instead, Analysts see new markets for DAM in everything
from corporate training to public safety.
The DAM system serves as more of a catalog. "We use the system to
identify what we want and then use a third-party supplier to provide it on a
Zip drive or CD," Mooney says. "Then we send it via a more traditional way
to our offices around the world." That may sound a bit Sneakernet-ish, but
Mooney says it's an improvement. Anyone who needed access to the archives
used to have to fly to Atlanta every time they wanted to scope out some
vintage calendar art for a new T-shirt-or rely on Mooney to pick something
suitable for them.
During the coming years, the IT infrastructure needed to support access
to these digital assets will improve, IDC's Duhl says. When that happens,
look for DAM systems to deliver natural language and other nifty forms of
searching, such as matching an image or a few bars of a song (most systems
today rely on keyword searches, he says, which have their limits). Digital
rights management will also be an increasingly important feature for DAM
customers, as they look to share content across the firewall. "There really
aren't any standards there yet," says Garth Landers, a research analyst at
Gartner in Stamford, Conn.
Analysts see new markets for DAM in everything from corporate training to
public safety (how else will law enforcement agencies manage and analyze the
thousands of hours of surveillance videos collected as part of the post-9/11
homeland security drive? Landers asks). "Rich media is the last bastion of
unmanaged information," Duhl says. It's also a fast-growing bastion of
unmanaged information-all the more reason for CIOs to start paying attention
to the DAM market. |
