Archive for October, 2009

MM: With respect to the Henry Stuart DAM Symposia… I take it you’ve been there before.

BG: Yes. To the New York one last year, and to the LA one in November.

MM: What was your experience of being there as an industry peer?

BG: New York, I really went to observe, listen and meet people. So I got a lot out of the New York show. I thought it was great. I met some really interesting people from MRMLogiQ, which is a marketing resource management company over in Europe.

The LA show, I came in just to speak on Andrew Salop’s panel. I think my whole energy was just focused on being on that panel and getting out. But I did hear the LA show was really interesting and went well, from friends of mine that had attended and had booths there.

MM: What would’ve been a couple of takeaway, “Ah-ha” insights that you would’ve gotten from either of the shows?

BG: Well, I am not very technical. That New York conference on DAM was heavily weighted in the technical realm of building a DAM. So I’ve met companies that have explained more about the technology of DAM and not as much about how you go about getting one started.

There were a few sessions I attended where they were actually too technical and I didn’t understand. And a few sessions where they discussed a little how they got their DAM systems off the ground. I took away a few tools to use to get mine off the ground, and to do it under the radar. Those are my biggest “A-has.”

In this stage of the Solution Lifecycle, most customers have a successfully deployed, stable DAM system. Before they can move, they must “work through” several essential questions:

Essential ROI benchmarks
What are the essential benchmarks that validate return on investment?

• Reduction in duplicate purchasing of assets. More repurposing
• Improved accessibility to assets
• Improved time to market
• Reduction in production and distribution costs
• Improved quality i.e., deliver the right asset the first time
• Conformity to brand standards – keeping more executions on brand
• Rights compliance – lower risk and avoidance of law suits
• Lowest cost to get system up and maintained

What else have you found in your experience?

MM: Ideation is really kind of about workspaces for instant ad hoc collaboration. Then the next piece is scheduling. That’s, “How do we manage a whole bunch of different conversations with our supply chain?” That goes into the editorial copywriting workflow management system.

If you do it right—which is to say, if you think about it as tagged XML data or tagged XML content… so the content is going… all the copyrighting is happening as tagged XML content within a database or a data structure. Then you also get the delicious opportunity of being able to pour liquefied editorial content into print, online and POP formats, as well as being able to speed the localization—which is the translation and regionalization of stuff.

BG: Yes, essentially we are flowing the copy from Adtrax into designer layouts. But as you mentioned we are not making catalogs full of copy.

Localization Comes Next

MM: I’m not sure that localization is a big deal for Victoria’s Secret now, but I’m sure it’s something that will be.

BG: It will be, we are expanding next year internationally.

It’s very, very interesting how we work here. It’s like no other place I’ve ever been. What you just mapped out in is something I could see happening at other companies I’ve worked at. CKS—a design firm—or Apple or Oracle. I can easily see that. Especially Oracle because it’s marketing is localized in so many countries. They have a more traditional set up for the marketing department.

MM: I understand. And it’s retail.

In this stage of the Solution Lifecycle, most customers confront significant and, in many cases, unforeseen disruptions to the daily work life and operations. Before they can move, they must “work through” several essential questions:

Types of complaints by end-user
What are the typical end-user complaints in a start-up phase?

• Workflow changes – “old process worked better than new”
• Difficult to use new system
• New tasks ‘not in my job spec’
• System does not do ‘X’
• When can I get access to the system (i.e. for users that are not yet included in start-up)

Driving user acceptance
What can a customer do to maximize user acceptance from start?

• Early communication
• Sell benefits
• Scheduled training sessions
• Gain input from key employees during deployment
• Force people to stop using old methods
• Provide adequate support if things go wrong

What else have you found in your experience?

MM: It seems to me that the route to that integrated system will be through your catalog and web team. That’s because the point of integration oftentimes starts with editorial and copyrighting workflow that precedes the actual publishing process—be it print or online.

So the point of integration would answer the question, “How do we have one Marcom editorial platform, copy database and project management platform?

At least in large global brands that we’ve either interviewed, they tell us that the editorial workflow becomes the critical handoff of marketing plan and the creative brief to content execution. Not surprisingly, this editorial and copyrighting workflow represents one of the messiest and most inefficient part of that whole Marcom operation—copywriting become the beat-up go-between of poorly defined strategy and you’re-always-late creative execution.

BG: It is here too. It’s the messiest part.

MM: What makes strategy execution messy is that it’s circular and iterative–not linear and sequential. It has a fundamentally different kind of focus in terms of knowledge worker interactions. Its primary focus entails discovery. “Ah! That’s what we need to do!” We speak of it generically as Ideation.

So there’s a whole bunch of communication, interaction and collaboration that goes into the big, “Ah-hah!” Then “Ah-hah” crystallizes into a strategy and the basis of a marketing plan that bridge to scheduling and a marketing calendar. Project management comes still later.

The best way to think about the scheduling piece is like an air traffic control system. You’ve seen these on CNN or one of the cable news networks, where you see 20,000 airplanes in the sky. Somebody’s keeping track of all of those, and keeping them in their own kind of traffic lanes.

They’re coordinating their landing at any number of airports. Think of airports as vendors and/or operation groups. There needs to be a certain number of landing gates with ground crew to be able to deplane folks. Those are all the worker bees in various operating groups that do stuff.

Part of an overall planning or scheduling tool is to make sure that as we launch new products and/or launch and/or create new material, throughout the entire supply chain, there are people ready, willing and able to do something with that. To do their job within a particular set of time and financial constraints.

Those tend to be the big issues, when you move upstream.

BG: Agreed. We have a different department outside of marketing that manages that entire process holistically called Business Strategy and Execution. They map the project from product design, to testing, determine time of year to launch, to planning sales and merchandise orders, then to marketing strategy and creative. So you are saying that the challenge is getting those discoveries upstream communicated or cascaded to all the other teams working on the launch. How so we keep the them informed? Is there a central portal with all this information?

Hmm, we are not there yet on the retail channel side.

In this stage of the Solution Lifecycle, most customers confront significant and, in many cases, unforeseen disruptions to the daily work life and operations. Before they can move, they must “work through” several essential questions:

Tools and procedures to speed

What are the tools and procedures for documenting bugs, “breakdowns” and deployment issues, or requesting help?

• Structured, uniform problem-issue form
• Bug tracking system or database
• Action-planning procedure

What else have you found in your experience?

In this stage of the Solution Lifecycle, most customers confront significant and, in many cases, unforeseen disruptions to the daily work life and operations. Before they can move, they must “work through” several essential questions:

Operational responsibilities of key client contact
Who has operational responsibility for the successful deployment of your product or service?

• Overall program management for the project
• Review with Vendor and senior management – get departmental buy in, review demo and sign off. Make sure that the proposed set up of DAM works for them
• Ensure that the relevant assets are collected together in the correct fashion
• Agree sensible roll out program
• Be focal point for vendor to get things done

What else have you found in your experience?

MM: A couple of last questions. To what degree have your creative teams integrated their desktop tools—Creative Suite or Photoshop or whatever—to the DAM directly? Or are they working through a browser?

BG: They’re working through the browser.

AS: Is this an integration you’d like to see BJ? Or is the browser enough?

BG: I would have to understand better what the benefits are to having the tools connect to the DAM. If it changes the way the creative team builds their files and disrupts their routine with no benefits then I would think working as we do today is fine.

AS: You might see, though, that the metadata in the Creative Suite is the same metadata framework as in your DAM system. So you do have an entrée at the asset level.

BG: Right, but I wonder what the benefits are. I see having that technology available is new and interesting. But what is the pay off or win?

MM: Another question I have with respect to your system. You really talk about an image library and an image workflow where photograph is king. Clearly, in a marketing operation, there are things like documents—be they catalog pages or sales sheets or direct mail pieces, video, etc.

MM: How have you integrated, if at all, the document publishing workflow into this Global Edit workflow that you have today?

BG: I have a two-part answer to that. The first part of the answer is how we are doing it right now, and the second part is where I’d like the system to evolve and the challenges with that vision.

First, we currently store final marketing documents in the DAM project folder, JPEGs of the final in-store signs, advertisements, CRM, PR.  I definitely wanted to capture all the marketing materials that we created with these images and post them to the DAM system so everyone could reference what was done from our end with those images—a comprehensive library of the project.

Second, we do more of the publishing workflow and project tracking in a software application called Adtrax. The creative job jackets are here where the copy team writes in the system, schedules are kept, email notifications are sent with updates, and we keep legal boilerplates here. The system works really well.

The challenge for Industrial Color to come up with a way that GLOBALedit and Adtrax share information or link. I would like it to be either by job number or some sort of code that makes them link. So if you’re in a job folder in Adtrax you will be able to connect to GLOBALedit and see the images that are being used for that project.

There is not only appetite to have the two be able to link, but even further than that is “Can Industrial Color build out a project-management tracking system to work with the image asset workflow system?” It would be interesting to be in one big system that is web-based. I have to give it more thought to see if it makes sense because if it’s not their expertise then I don’t want to go down that path. We won’t get the best product.

BG: Sad to say, but we want to keep IT out of our projects, and we want to keep our executives out of our budgets.

MM: BJ, that really underscores the whole value proposition of “software as a service.” That’s, “I don’t have to deploy anything.” You call it a web service, but it’s hosted on the web. It’s not just hosted on the web, but hosted to multiple clients from the same code base.

BG: Yes.

MM: That means that if I make an improvement here, then everybody that’s using the system gets the improvement.

BG: Yes. Just how life should be!

MM: Well, increasingly, that’s going to be how life is.

BG: Right.

MM: One of the things that’s really given you the ability to fly under the radar has been taking this software as a service route, trusting that your vendor would manage these assets in a way that was trusted and secure and certain.

Generally, that’s the hump or hurdle through which a lot of people need to go—called, “Can I really trust a company to manage these assets?”

It seems that the other critical element of trusting these companies is that the company hosting the system is really an independent service provider, as opposed to part of your print supply chain.

BG: Agree.

MM: Then all of a sudden if it’s simply a service as part of the print supply chain, you’re kind of locked into a transaction model that can get expensive.

BG: Yes. Unless they’re flexible with how you run your system. If they don’t feel threatened by other competitors working in their system.

MM: I suspect that was one of the primary reasons printing firms spun off a hosted DAM—to lock in their customers, and to create an emotional if not physical barrier to switching.

BG: Yes. Correct.

MM: So I think your choice was spot-on by going to an independent DAM services company that wasn’t trying to make money as a function of selling printing or color retouch or any of the other prepress services.

BG: Yes. It’s been a great choice for staying flexible with the people I want to work with.

In this state of a Solution Lifecycle most buyers confront the real and threatening issues of change, disruption to ongoing operations, loss of stature or respect resulting from a bad business decision, how to justify the purchase of a product or service. However before they can move forward, they must answer several essential questions:

Precipitating events

What types of catalytic or precipitating events would jump start a DAM project?

• Existence of a marketing operations initiative with executive sponsorship that is already addressing the financial and campaign management components of the marketing organization i.e. existing momentum around driving  efficiencies
• Rebranding campaign or new Agency of Record involving acquisition of lots of new imagery
• Sarbanes-Oxley audit – need to ensure correct process to stay compliant with image rights
• Failed marketing campaign (over budget, late to market)
• Competitive pressure – i.e. evidence of best practice from another business

What else have you found in your experience?