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Achieving Marketing Efficiencies: A Chief Marketing Officer imperative

The focus on higher profitability and cost savings has increasingly put pressure on marketing management to demonstrate marketing effectiveness and improve marketing efficiencies. Marketing departments when benchmarked against financial planning, sales, customer support, manufacturing and other corporate functions within a company are coming up short on systems and procedures for efficient planning of marketing resources, effective tracking of marketing budgets, streamlined execution of marketing activities and proper control on the distribution and use of marketing assets.

Inefficient marketing practices adversely affect revenues (by inappropriately allocating resources for wrong marketing initiatives) and profits (by incurring higher costs for execution of marketing activities).

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On-Demand Delivery of Digital Asset Management in Global Marketing Operations

Impact of Automating the Management and International Distribution of Approved Marketing Content, Reusable Media Components, and Digital Assets on Multichannel Product Launches, Field Sales Productivity, and Brand-Voice Consistency.

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SKILLS OF DAM PROFESSIONALS

MM: Are there any other particular technologies or other kinds of complementary skills that a DAMster should have?

JK: I think a DAMster should have as much knowledge about Adobe’s Creative Suite as they can obtain. I know that’s a very broad statement. There’s so much to extract from the Creative Suite.

But what I’ve seen over the past several years, I think a DAMster could really benefit from learning as much as they could about Adobe’s Creative Suite and Adobe’s future direction when analyzing the Creative Suite.

ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE AS A CAREER

MM: Adobe’s Creative Suite has evolved beyond just a set of tools and technologies. The Creative Suite has become a career platform—a toolset for innovating new workflows and processes, as well as career and business opportunities.

JK: I couldn’t agree more. I think from what I’ve seen, that trend will only continue.

MM: Would you speak to becoming more skilled in the particulars, not just of the Creative Suite, but how to engage and thrive in the whole ecosystem of tools, technologies, and plugins that fit into that?

JK: Yes. Think about how those tools could possibly overlap in the future. I’ll give you an example.

In Flash at one point, you might need to know how to do some coding and scripting and whatnot. I envision Adobe pushing more of that work back to the designer. When the designer creates, the code will somehow be generated in the background. And maybe that piece as a whole gets passed off to a developer, to a client, to a database, et cetera, et cetera.

Adobe is going to make it easier and easier for creative types to do more exciting, innovative work as we progress out.

CREATIVE WORKBENCH

MM: We’ve seen in the new Creative Suite 4 that Adobe added a whole bunch of tools for Web, print, and multimedia. In one respect, the creative professional no longer works in the isolated ghetto of just a print or an online group. Rather, the creative professional has emerged as a multimedia, multimodal communications specialist.

JK: Yes. And the one thing they’re missing is a DAM to organize all of that for you. They don’t do workflow, per se. Combining the two can really help your organization tremendously.

FUTURE PROOF

MM: Fabulous. Would you have any final summarizing statements for DAM and related systems at Newsday?

JK: Yes. I would say in everyone’s busy work career, sometimes we get so caught up in the day to day that we don’t have time to think strategically about the future. Think strategically about a DAM and how it can benefit your organization, and you won’t be sorry.

MM: Okay! James, I want to thank you very much for the time that you’ve spent with us. Great success in terms of continuing to drive process innovation into Newsday.

JK: Thank you, Michael. It was my pleasure.

Hands-on skills

MM: Perhaps you can speak to some of the more human and/or professional dimensions of a DAM practitioner? You led off today talking about your 19-year career and working your way from the bottom up. Now you have 150 or so people reporting to you.

If you were advising or coaching somebody that was 28 or 32 years old today, and who asked you, “Hmm—what’s this DAM thing?” And, “What are the career upsides for that?” What do you envision as necessary skills that someone should possess in a DAM-related environment?

Also, what other kinds of jobs should an innovation leader such as yourself think about having under his or her belt that would prepare him or her for the current and anticipated future of advertising and the publishing business?

JK: To the first point, I’d say to spend time on workflow. It generally will always come back to help you. Listen carefully to your users and get multiple opinions.

MM: By that, James, do you mean getting an academic or a structured education / orientation around definition and modeling of workflows?

JK: I was thinking more of a hands-on approach and using flowcharts to map things out—to clearly understand every step of the workflow. That’s what I was thinking.

Secondly, if you want to get into DAMs—and I see them just growing and growing and becoming more and more prevalent—think about the DAM as more than just what you need it for. Try to think about how it may touch every department in your organization and how you can help those departments.

I’ve mentioned several times today that all of the creative and production folks are on it. And the advertising folks. I didn’t mention that the marketing team at Newsday—as soon as they heard about Cumulus—wanted in. So we said, “Sure. Why not?”

When the Pennysaver or Star Community Publishing wanted in, we said, “Sure. Why not?”

So think about more than just your local department. That can go a long way in helping the company and your career.

MM: So daily production workflow would then include pulling many large files across the network. How did you accommodate that? Do you have a separate network over which you pull these files? Or does it take place on your basic corporate network?

JK: It’s the basic corporate network. And I’m glad you asked that question, because I do want to share something with the readers.

The basic core network is 100mb to the desktop. It’s nothing super-super sophisticated.

I was fortunate enough to get some Intel Macs last year, and we did notice that the ingestion of the assets and the calling of the assets out of the database did seem to perform better on the Intel Macs as opposed to maybe some of the older G5s or whatnot.

This is because of the engineering effort made by Canto in Berlin. The Cumulus client is designed to handle much of the workflow processing itself, only going to the server to write metadata or draw out info and assets when required. So the more powerful the workstation, the better the performance.

The users are very picky in many cases, and performance has never been an issue. We do embed all the high-res artwork in the InDesign documents that we store in the database. But when the users call them out, I haven’t heard any complaints about things taking too long.

So clearly, the architecture of the system must be doing something right because we don’t have complaints on that end. And the searches too, Michael—finding the assets.

MM: Yes. That makes sense. You’re just hitting metadata and thumbnails at that point. Right?

JK: Yes.

File Delivery System

MM: Let’s step outside the firewall of your advertisers and field organization. Do you use any kind of special bandwidth optimization or asset-delivery systems? Low-end systems might entail services YouSendIt and at the high-end, services from Radiance or Aspera, or other kinds of bandwidth optimization systems.

JK: No. We have not.

MM: Is that something that you anticipate being an issue? Or does it seem that everyone’s fine with their basic HTTP connections and FTP servers?

JK: I think it’s a topic that will need to be explored, especially as the system grows. But as of right now, Michael, it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

MM: Would you speak to your IT infrastructure? How has it grown since the inception of your Cumulus DAM, in terms of your network topology, bandwidth requirements, storage, servers, and stuff like that?

JK: That’s an interesting story. The Canto Cumulus solution was originally purchased as a small workgroup solution for the small group of artists.

MM: As many are!

JK: It’s a wonderful solution. I’m sure it works fine.

Strategically, it didn’t take long for us to see that it could be much more than that. It could not only support all of our internal folks—advertising included. We wanted to take it outside and have the folks tap in with the clients, out on the road, and keep the feet on the street.

When you go from a small workgroup solution, of course, to a pretty big enterprise version solution, when you start talking about hundreds of users on the system, we needed a good partner to support us. Then of course the IT structure came in to play.

We started, Michael, with one Windows server that was running both the Canto Cumulus solution and its Web services on the same exact box.

MM: This was a 4-wide Dell or Compaq type box?

JK: Yes. Exactly. It’s going to the point now where the whole solution is being ported to Linux. Full disaster recovery.

MM: That would be like a RedHat Linux?

JK: That’s correct. And a separate Web server.

MM: And you’re running on probably the same kind of Intel box? Or are you moving?

JK: Yes. I believe it’s that same type of Intel box. It’s going to be high availability and recoverable, et cetera, et cetera.

I guess the plans for the future could even be porting it to Solaris. The IT folks here are certainly comfortable with all of the solutions between Windows, Linux, and Solaris. But they felt that the best solution for now was to go with Linux. They want the user to have the best experience.

Another thing I’ve learned many years ago, Michael—sometimes with the users, the advertising folks, et cetera. You have one shot to grab their attention and to get their buy in. IT plays a role in having the system perform well and help you with that. Certainly your support vendor plays a huge role in that, as well.

MM: So right now, you have 200 users and a quarter million digital assets on one 4-wide Dell server or Compaq server?

JK: Correct.