Gorilla Market Leaders

PvT: Which marketing solution providers are top-of-mind for you? And why? Again, that’s a broad question, but considering some of the challenges that you’ve just mentioned, can you think of solution providers that address customer engagement?

MM: Well, I have the delectable challenge that many of the vendors—technology OEMs, ISVs, marketing service providers, and solution integrators in the DAM, MOM, and related publishing technology markets, are my clients. So I am little biased towards my clients!

Now, that all said, I’m also a category champion: My job is to cheer, lead, and create energy around the next big opportunity; energize and bring new companies into the larger category of DAM, marketing operations, engagement platforms, and open-innovation processes.

That all said, I’m a little bit like a mother with a whole bunch of children. You know, mom loves all of her children. Now she might love one more than the other, but she never says. It’s really important that all of her children feel loved.

PvT: Yep.

MM: Now, so I’m not gonna be namin’ names; however, I can outline some general attributes of the leading vendor or ‘gorilla’. Probably first and foremost is that they have an integration strategy that links explicitly or implicitly to the customer-making process. So they’ve got technologies and capabilities related to pre-sales and post-sales across the customer-making lifecycle. Boom, one.

Two, that they understand that fundamentally the Web does not constitute a channel but a business eco-system. And an eco-system requires a business strategy that anticipates and rewards contributions to the ultimate end-user customer from third and fourth parties. So a business eco-system strategy really comes down to how well you understand the needs of business partners; not just strategic business partners, but perhaps most critically independent consultants and small niche boutique solution providers – 3, 4, or 5 person firms.

The third thing that really distinguishes the real gorilla or market leader is the company that really understands that purchase of its technology represents barely 10 percent of the overall commitment and value that you bring to the customer; that really is about a structured service fulfillment methodology in the spirit of satisfaction assurance. That really is an agreement by and between the vendor and the customer to build or to facilitate the customer developing or building new operational capabilities within the firm.

So that you bought my stuff and make it shelfware is unacceptable. I’m not gonna let myself off the hook until you’ve bought my stuff, you’ve deployed it, you’ve undergone all of the change management and disruption-mitigation processes, and that fundamentally you’ve created new accountabilities around the care and feeding of my technology, and that you’re now using my technology to drive strategic growth. Top line growth, be it with existing customers, or incremental business in new markets with new customers, and that I’m generating sufficient profit to offset the investment that you made in not just my technology but in my service fulfillment methodology.

Those are the 3 hallmarks, if you will, of the vendor who will succeed in this marketplace.

PvT: Fantastic. A very comprehensive answer!

How does the customer benefit?

MM: Cool! Love doing it. You know, I’d like to expand on what we just discussed, emphasizing the levels of good, better, and best—or the simple, moderate and, you know, the Mercedes version—of DAM as business strategy in global marketing operations.

PvT: Okay.

MM: Let me start by saying that enterprise DAM supports a marketing supply-chain strategy for sourcing marketing content as well as an expanding array of services for engaging customers throughout a life cycle.

PvT: Okay.

MM: Next, let’s address how firm innovate new processes within the marketing operations. I put that under the rubric of bottom-up innovation in global marketing operations. This perspective reflects some of our most current work: how companies innovate new processes using small executive peer-workgroups to create 15-day project plans that single person or small group can execute with existing resources and constraints. Specifically, this emphasizes the creation of a master project roadmap for driving innovation into operational capability.

Third, and the one that directly relates to our new white paper on operational capabilities for managing engaging customers for across an entire lifecycle.

So it would be kind of a über roadmap for how all these technologies integrate to a customer-making process model, the various integration points of these various technologies and disciplines, what are the things that you should do now, next, or later, and specifically answering one question over, and over again: How does the customer benefit?

You know, hey, this is a really cool social media technology…uh, how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new analytic tool…oy, how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new web content managr…yes, but how does the customer benefit? Oh, this new email system…how does the customer benefit?

So that’s my mantra, that’s the organizing principle, how does the customer benefit with very specific proposals from the vendor community?

And, of course, that requires that you have an integration mindset, a customer-making process model, and an innovation-services platform by which to accommodate and integrate these new technologies to new or enhanced operational capabilities.

Finally, DAM becomes integral with that innovation-services platform. In fact, digital asset management with its extreme emphasis on process and procedure for ensuring the integrity of metadata, media, and user experience (findability, usability of what you found, and permissions to do what you need to do with what your found) enables a firm to reengineer its processes of creating content and interactive services.

DAM as a Business Strategy

PvT: What type of competitive gains can companies expect from digital asset management?

MM: Well, first of all, digital asset management’s not a thing, it’s a strategy—that evolves through various what I call “process maturity stages.” For most enterprises, DAM entails operational digital asset repository. So that means you’ve got workflows by which to ingest digital assets and content, and tag these them correctly.

That means that you have content specialist, “cybrarian“, or asset services group who maintain overall quality of the both the metadata and source files—content, digital media, publishing templates, fonts, color profiles, and user accounts.

It also means that you have well-maintained metadata, descriptive taxonomy, and perhaps faceted taxonomy, by which to support very specific users in finding and retrieving what they want; and when they retrieve things, it means they’re getting the right file in the right format, including the correct permissions to use or alter the retrieved item.

Second a DAM-as-a-business-strategy entails automating activities, tasks, and workflows of digital asset creation. Automation both accelerates core business processes and lowers operational costs.

A more detailed examination of workflow reveals sub-systems for scheduling, collaboration, project management, (job jackets), review and approvals (online proofing systems—such a ProofHQ—that enable all approvers to use at one centralized commenting system, so everyone else can see everyone else’s comments), and dynamic rendering of images or database publishing of content to Websites or printed collateral. In more advanced DAM systems, firms use specialized XML databases containing product claims and pre-approved copy of marketing communications and packaging to further reduce time to market of products and promotional campaigns.

Third, DAM-as-a-business-strategy may include large file distribution, and more specifically large smart content distribution—automated packaging and publishing of finalized content into websites or microsites. Or it means that a firm can send a PDF file containing an ad to optimized for a particular magazine or newspaper—that’s been cleansed and scrubbed of all the bad PostScript data, funky TrueType fonts, and all of the pixel discontinuities or artifacts of vector and raster artwork files.

So, DAM-as-a-business-strategy become essential in orchestrating multichannel and multimodal marketing processes. Multimodal? The ability to pour content and services into engagement frameworks, engaging the particular criteria, means of consumption, and preferences of individual consumers.

Realignment of Sourcing Process in Marketing Supply Chains

When senior marketing executives really get DAM-as-a-business-strategy, they recognized smarter ways of buying creative services and marketing content as well as a whole new class of creative partners—small, nimble, and very innovative creative or customer engagement agencies—with whom to outsource or partner.

This oftentimes means renegotiating long-term contracts with advertising agencies and marketing service firms. This includes specifying the technical parameters by which creative partners will submit finished artwork, upload mastered digital assets into the DAM repository, affix the right metadata as a condition of payment.

So creative realignment—how a procures digital masters of marketing materials, ads, or online content—becomes the next phase of the process maturity model. We recently published a comprehensive white paper on collateral factories and how progressive levels of automation pay what what call productivity dividends.

At this point, many global firms punch into pan-regional localization factories such as Adnovate in The Netherlands or Arizona in Brazil. So that instead of having to manually localize or translate files in country, firms can centralize localization with highly automated systems.

This means instead of taking 7 to 11 weeks to localize print collateral for a reseller or retail channel across EMEA, I can now get that done in five to seven working days. Fabulous!

Origins of DAM

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.

SOA Value Chains?

PvT: Who are the prime contributors to the development and support of an operational marketing and service innovation platform? And how did you start researching the technical ecosystem—what you and I now call engagement marketspace?

We started in 1995 with digital asset management and content management because no matter what else came along, you must have a media and content under management.

In 2000, we started investigating another class of vendors in the marketing automation, MRM, and marketing operations management space. Some of the vendors have make great progress.

With rare exception, they all still need to better understand DAM and, more the point, metadata management—a database and DBA for logging and tracking enterprise metadata as instantiated in all enterprise databases, including ERP and CRM, as a strategic asset.

Since 2004, we have tracked vendors that come from the CRM, business intelligence, and process analytics space.

For the last three or so years, we have tried to understand firms in marketing service provider and data enrichment vendors—lots to cover!

Of course there are whole sets of vendors in dynamic messaging and email management content space, and in the customer experience management space too/

As I stated before, there’s many different technology vectors in the marketing and innovation value chain, that ultimately support the idea of an innovation-services platform.

This calls attention to, however, the critical need for leadership within marketing to have a services integration framework and an underlying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabling this integration framework. IBM does some great work there with its component business models—what I call CIO blueprints.

Services integration

However, the senior marketing executive, not the CIO, must commission and own the services integration framework—it basically specifies in one wall-mounted poster all of the services – marketing and innovation-related services – of the business eco-system from which the firm will build, buy, or rent technology or engagement services over the next five years.

Now, the CIO blueprint represent an living, evolving visual depiction of one thing: how firm intends provision services needed attracting, serving, and keeping profitable customers for life.

The CIO blueprint also makes explicit how the firm intends to marshal the resources of a global business eco-system: ‘Here’s what we bring to the customer experience. Here’s what our partners bring, and here’s how it all integrate to an end-to-end process of customer-making.

PvT: I guess that repositions marketing automation a bit player in a larger play?

MM: Well, I don’t think that the rubric of marketing automation delivers useful distinction anymore. I don’t like the term “marketing automation” because many of the research firms and vendors have abused the term, rendering it useless.

Rather, I would like to speak about marketing in terms of process maturities, and levels of process maturity for a marketing operation.

Again, the senior executive doesn’t really care about technology or marketing automation, per se, he or she is most concerned with operational capabilities and building or enhancing capabilities which will related directly to a process maturity model for marketing operation.

However, this all underscores a very strategic point: business rules and metadata enable orchestration of the technologies and processes of how firms attract, serve, and keep customers for life. Very, very few technology vendors deliver solutions for orchestrating the customer engagement life cycle. Typically, the missed or underplay the role of three SOA capabilities: digital asset management, metadata management, and marketing claims management.

Marketing claims management

This last one, marketing claims management, entails a end-to-end workflow for developing and publishing approved copywritten material—product or service claims—to a specialize XML database publishing system. I use the term broadly to include anything written, formatted, and published in printed collateral, business communications, web sites, interactive detailing or presentation systems, catalogs, microsites, newsletters, etc.

In my view of the world, marketing claims management represents a subsystem of DAM and metadata management—that in turn represent subsystems of master data management.

And all of which requires a IT governance scheme—systems, processes, and accountabilities for researching, acquiring or developing, deploying, provisioning, managing, and retiring the technologies used to attract, serve, and keep customers for life!

Key point: tomorrow’s CMOs are mid-level IT executives today getting their masters in Business Administration or Media Psychology.

Process maturities for marketing operations

PvT: And how have you seen organizations change or shift their global marketing efforts based on these changes.

MM: Most, now well. Why? Most of the major organizations, with the exception of those that area really far down the maturity process model of say, Lean, Six Sigma, or something like that – some other management process-control framework – most companies do not have the operational capability for engaging in the customer-making process as an integrated process.

I believe that innovation has undergone a fundamental discontinuity. And in turn, that continues to disrupt marketing as we know it.

You know, when the 1990’s came along, we had saw a number of enterprise software firms emerge: operating systems, office applications, financials, databases, and so on. You could say that the 1990’s brought a fairly uniform wave of innovation to large and small business, with a whole bunch of little micro-specialties in it; but the overall wave of innovation move everyone off of batch data centers, into more online interactive systems with enterprise software, and enterprise databases, and enterprise reporting, and all that kind of stuff.

A whole wave of innovation just washed across large, medium, and small enterprises.

With the Web, and the Internet, we all experience another wave that roll through from say 1996 through 2007.

We now find ourselves in a new era; as a function of advances of web services, service-oriented architecture or SOA and application mash-ups, we’re not just talking about mashing up content or on-demand applications. This calls attention to the wonderful, stupendous, and almost unimaginable implication of the Apple AppStore: the near complete dis-integration and dis-entanglement of hundreds or thousands of single-function capabilities of large, complex, and bloated software suites, including enterprise software applications. I have already seen very sophisticated, enterprise applications built from the mash-up of dozens of software widgets—all within an iGoogle framework.

Functions-as-a-service at 99 cents

While this puts a lot of stress on integration, user requirements, and just-in-time training, it brings us the reality of “function as a service“—sold at the AppStore or the Google equivalent of for $0.99. And, yes, that will transform the iPhone tablet computers and those running Android-Chrome into the next trillion-dollar market. Trillion with a ‘t’!

Right on the heals of that we will have the next wave around the semantic web and semantic applications—where everyone can exploit industry metadata standards and schemas, innovation will not just accelerate; it will hyper-accelerate.

We now live in an era that Michael Schrage– I think he’s with MIT – speaks about; the age of hyper-innovation.

50-plus Innovation Vectors

The age of hyper-innovation means that enterprise planners no longer grapple with two to five major innovations that influence their ability to market and innovate. Enterprise planners must now grapple with 50,100, or potentially hundreds of innovation vectors, any one of which could disrupt their market.

So most marketing organizations are, I would say, suffer a deep myopia as to what drives or will soon drive marketing and innovation in their particular businesses.

It’s as if you’re just out flying down the road, 90 miles an hour, fogbound with, you know, 20 feet of sight. At some point you’re gonna hit somethin’, and at some point there’s gonna be a big splat.

And so the inability for marketing organizations, 1) to prioritize innovation vectors, is a pretty serious challenge. Then the next thing is mastering the operational capability to incorporate those innovations, that is building new or enhanced operational capabilities with the technology.

We’ve found persistent trait in execution systems: change generally and, innovation in particular, become sand in the gears of execution.

Calls for innovation leadership

Most medium to large size companies do not have a structured repeatable process for innovating new processes.

Now I know that sounds circular, almost tautological nonsense, but it is fundamental to the challenge that confronts most global marketing organizations. They do not have an effective change management practices or disciplines as it relates to fundamental changes in marketing and innovation across the customer-making process.