PvT: Okay. Talk a little bit about digital asset management and whether or not that’s a feasible way for global organizations to manage their corporate brand identities, photos, and videos—their brand assets?

MM: Sure. Well, just for a little bit of a history on that. My firm invented the term “media asset management” in 1994 in our work with Aldus and MediaStation.

Later in 1996 or so, we expanded the term when we wrote the white paper for Apple Computer as part of their Masters of Media Program—a brilliant industry-wide marketing framework that included Adobe, Agfa, Kodak, Quark, and Xerox conceived and executed by Jeff Martin, then the Director of Marketing for their Advertising, Design, New Media, and Publishing division.

Apple commissioned an executive white paper to make the business case for their line of Apple servers. IBM picked up from there and commissioned another white paper and international roadshow—also to make the case for the IBM Content Manager.

In 1998, my partners and I wrote the first full market report on DAM and continued with the reports until 2002.

In 2001, we began our long-standing partnership with Henry Stewart Events and their DAM Symposium.

In 2003, as the Editor in Chief, I started the Journal of Digital Asset Management—with which I continue today.

Strategic Capability

I say this all as preamble, do I consider digital asset management strategic capability? The short answer is, emphatically, yes. You can’t manage a global brand and a pan-regional marketing operations without some form of DAM. In fact, we have published a series of executive white papers on the subject.

Now DAM has a lot of misinterpretations, or misunderstandings in terms of what it constitutes.

DAM, first and foremost, constitutes business strategy for accelerating operational processes within media, entertainment, and publishing, and marketing content processes within global brands. So it’s reducing cycle time, reducing cost, and having a process that’s far more agile or flexible in adapting to change.

I contrast digital asset management with content management. I used to say somewhat tongue in cheek that content management is really ‘crap management’.

Content management deals with more or less self-descriptive files—documents or Web pages for which you do not need a lot metadata to describe its contents, meanings, semantics associations with other content and, more specifically, who owns the content or images—from where did the editorial or copywritten material come, when does it expire, all that.

Digital asset management, in contrast, deal with non-descriptive files, hence the emphasis on metadata and the systematic reuse and transformation of preexisting digital media files. This entails the creation and management of metadata associated with findability, reuse standards, and permissions or digital rights management.

Now a reusable digital file may represent an image, photograph, or publishing template. Digital assets may include text or product claims used in marketing communications, or video clips, MP3 podcasts, and type fonts, or Flash animation. Or elements that contribute to immersive virtual world experiences 3D and 2D models or primitives.

A digital asset might also include software code assets—scripts and programming—and things like IT service management policies and business rules or software libraries and software objects. Or learning objects or reusable pieces curricula that flow into books, instructional DVDs, or online courseware.

So, digital asset management is really about reuse and creating metadata that give you competitive advantage: Cost reduction, time to market, higher quality, greater process agility, and the ability to maintain transparency or governance across an entire marketing supply chain.

As a business strategy, digital asset management starts with a DAM repository—where you put all those bits—and begins to really payoff with an operational group—a DAM service group—that maintains the integrity of metadata, digital asset files, and user productivity.

This brings us to the current state of the art in DAM:  Managing a supply chain for continuous improvement and reduction of cost, cycle time, defects, and opacity of key business processes.

So, I do not consider digital asset management an option, nor a luxury. Just like you have an email system, you must have a DAM. It’s just not an option.

Key challenges marketer face today

Peter van Teeseling: Michael, in those firms with whom you consult, what do you consider as today’s greatest challenges in marketing?

MM: Well that constitutes a fairly open-ended question. So let me respond with a kind of a similarly open-ended response and then we can build from there.

Most organizations drive their businesses against a strategic plan with pretty clear objectives and quarterly milestones against those objectives. In one way of looking, that means that most organizations really represent executional systems—where most of the roles and responsibility, and more specifically, the clarity about who does what, relates to activities and tasks directly related to execution of annual objectives and quarterly milestones. And that’s all great so long as the strategy and objectives remain aligned with customer requirements or congruent with the realities of the world; however, increasingly that’s not the case.

In today’s world, customer requirements and preferences continue to change more, if not transform, in ways not easily predicted. Paraphrasing the cyperpunk novelist, William Gibson, “The future arrives unevenly distributed.”

Increasingly, many global organizations find themselves not well-aligned with customer requirements, including a broad range of capabilities and/or offerings, and/or services of the organization. In particular, customers seek deeper, more interactive, and personalized communications, flexible interactions and mash-ups, and collaborations with brands AND the community of brand users.

Next, generally, and this is a distinction I draw between what I’ll call senior marketing executives and junior marketing executives. Junior marketing executives think in terms of programs and campaigns, and what I’ll call easily defined, easily recognized wins in their particular market, and that’s all good, that’s why we have junior marketing executives.

Senior marketing executives don’t think in terms of tactical wins, they think more in terms of a broader front – in the language of generals, you’d call it a theater – and more specifically building operational capabilities by which to monitor the execution many programs and campaigns. Do get me wrong, senior executives want to achieve short-term wins; it’s not their primary focus; it is the primary focus of their subordinates.

Senior marketing executives watch the measurable progress against objectives. Increasingly, the data has become real-time and granular—specific to a market or segment. These granular or detailed data become proxies or suggestive of larger patterns of execution and marketing effectiveness.

If we examine the idea or underlying assumptions of an operations capability and say, “Well, what does the term really mean?” I think that it means that senior executives understand a hard won lesson in their career: You can manage people or you can manage systems, with the one caveat. People are unmanageable! So operational capability really means that senior executives know their sustainable success directly correlates to their building systems, process, and accountabilities by which to execute strategy – by which to marshal available resources for competitive advantage.

And so senior executives, for the most part, grapple with working through which of their existing operational capabilities should be enhanced which ones they build from scratch, which ones to secure through acquisition, and which ones to secure from partners, understanding that the operational aspect of marketing drives major global organizations forward, and more specifically, gives them competitive advantage.