Since 2002, GISTICS has asked consultants and project leaders about their experience of defining the business case and user requirements for digital asset management in marketing.

In this series you will find summarized the inputs of several dozen DAM professionals.

The figure below depicts the five basic phases of what we call a solution lifecycle, emphasizing set of essential questions that most firms answer in the course of executing a DAM strategy.

At this stage of a Solution Lifecycle, most buyers find themselves “lost in the fog” of issues, problems, conflicts, and general dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, before they can move, they must answer several essential questions.

SYMPTOMS
With respect to retrieving reusable media components and templates as well as “use as-is” content, what are the easily acknowledged issues (symptoms)?

• Lots of collaboration on marketing materials with external agencies and partners.
• Time wasted trying to find assets that already exist; still more time lost when sharing them across distributed teams.
• Often workers keep offline their work-in-process and finalized assets.
• Money wasted buying image assets that the organization had previously licensed but could not retrieve.
• Customers particularly want a better way of managing the images they licensed from Getty or Corbis and making them available to their organizations
• Difficulty staying on brand. Particularly with global corporations, there is a struggle to manage the brand assets and ensure consistent use throughout the organization. Need to define what constitutes a brand asset; need also make them more available.
• Staying compliant with rights. Hard to manage licenses and ensure that all uses are compliant. Need consistent visibility into rights and restrictions and ability to track usages – a Sarbanes-Oxley issue.
• Difficult and time-consuming process to distribute materials to end-users internally and externally. Particularly difficult across multiple territories. Hard to distribute on time. Need to issue amendments/revisions quickly
• Difficulty measuring the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. There is a lack of visibility and accountability around what has been spent, on what, and what was the return.

What else have you found in your experience?

At this stage of a Solution Lifecycle, most buyers find themselves “lost in the fog” of issues, problems, conflicts, and general dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, before they can move, they must answer several essential questions.

ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES
What underlying organizational issues add to the “fog” of more clearly diagnosing the real business problem?

• Lots of different marketing silos, i.e., multiple groups working with assets, for example brand teams, creative services, marketing operations
• Lots of data silos within different teams. Often lack of ownership over whose issues is the better management of assets – is this marketing, content management, IT?
• Marketing in general is a black science. Certain skepticism around what marketing actually does which makes it harder to justify spending on operational and infrastructural tools like digital asset management. Marketers can’t talk to IT
• High personal turnover can make it hard to get at the real issues
• Individuals prefer to keep control of assets for job security and control.

What else have you found in your experience?

At this stage of a Solution Lifecycle, most buyers find themselves “lost in the fog” of issues, problems, conflicts, and general dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, before they can move, they must answer several essential questions.

Hindering issues
What else has prevented them from already solving this problem?

• DAM seen as a technical implementation and yet the main beneficiary is the marketing department who are generally unwilling or uninterested in technical implementations – they are scared off by technology
• Certain corporate culture favor an installed solution over ASP or on-demand but are then scared off by potential disruption and time required to deploy even a host solution.
• General view that DAM has failed to live up to its promise – inability to articulate the ROI both in terms of cost savings and/or revenue enhancement, as appropriate
• Cost of opening DAM up to multiple users in many countries requiring multiple languages etc
• Marketing department’s inability to create a proper ROI justification. Costs are scattered across multiple functions so its not easy to do a simple cost justification

What else have you found in your experience?

At this stage of a Solution Lifecycle, most buyers find themselves “lost in the fog” of issues, problems, conflicts, and general dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, before they can move, they must answer several essential questions.

Financial issues
What, if any, financial issues or contracts support the status quo or create resistance to change?

• With an installed solution, the large up-front costs can be prohibitive
• With an on-demand solution, the company may be unwilling to commit to pay rental fees for a long period of time into the future
• Inability to justify the purchase in terms of ROI metrics already used by the target company
• Marketing budgets often limited to marketing programs, not technology acquisition
• Hard to dig out costs scattered within multiple departments

What else have you found in your experience?

At this stage of a Solution Lifecycle, most buyers find themselves “lost in the fog” of issues, problems, conflicts, and general dissatisfaction with the status quo. However, before they can move, they must answer several essential questions.

Underlying Business Problem
What is the real, underlying business problem that when addressed will eliminate most if not all of the current symptoms?

• Lack of single repository for marketing and brand assets. Existing tools such as network drives and FTP simply don’t work
• Lack of single metadata model for assets in repository, including information about license and usage restrictions
• Lack of ownership or governance of the repository
• Inflexible permissioning makes it hard to open system up to many different users
• Total cost of ownership considered too high, particularly in terms of up front costs

What else have you found in your experience?

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:

Institutional Accountability

Who in the organization has clearly established accountability for the effects of the current situation?

• Chief Marketing Officer – overall responsibility for brand stewardship and marketing effectiveness
• Marketing Operations (VP or Director) – responsible for driving efficiency of marketing process
• Brand Manager or Director – responsible for the integrity of brand-voice: keeping the marcom on brand
• Creative Services or Marketing Communications (VP or Director) – responsible for marketing communications and the execution of campaigns. Responsible for budgets as well as creative
• Line Manager, Project Manager, Art Director – responsible for the creative execution itself
• IT – responsible for systems

What else have you found in your experience?

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:

Groundwork issues

If no one has declared clear accountability for the problem, what groundwork must take place (usually done by a Solution Evangelists within the account)?

• Somebody needs to offer up a real example of best practices from a relevant business
• Such best practice would highlight an ROI that resonates with the above listed executives
• Evangelists usually need to present to multiple groups – This obtains buy-in to the solution
• Evangelists need to build ROI model – to get buy-in from business and finance
• A clear articulation of strategic marketing initiatives, and how to resolve bottlenecks/difficulties in delivering. Also need to get them to recognize the true cost of the inefficient methods they use now. They don’t always see that there is a cost attached to the problems. Get them to think about what they could be doing if they weren’t doing this boring/time-wasting stuff – like more snazzy marketing. Create some scenarios where things could be so much better using our solution. Help them to identify how much they can save.

What else have you found in your experience?

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:

Lack of internal resources
What evidence or set of facts would convince a decision influence team that they lack the internal resources to solve the problem without external assistance?

• Sponsor would be able to give multiple examples of when they requested IT resources and were turned down. IT managers would communicate a delayed timeline for any implementation.
• Marketing will not have an IT contact for help to implement DAM systems
• IT does not show any leadership in understanding the problem space, technology options or suggestions on solutions
• IT may simply not have the resources to help out

What else have you found in your experience?

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:

Disruption-recovery issues
What types of workflow or organization disruptions (resulting from deployment of your product or service) would key decision makers need to understand and proactively solve before committing to a purchase?

• Who is going to own the asset repository and level/role of resources required to implement solution
• What metadata schema is going to be used and who will own it
• Who can access the asset repository. Permissioning is key. Is it just for internal use or will it be available to outside vendors too?
• How quickly can it be deployed?
• What sort of training will we need to get up and running. Who will provide the training?
• Changes to workflow that result from implementation
• Changes to staff roles and levels that result from implementation
• Changes to Agency contracts

What else have you found in your experience?