DAM-PIM-CMS BLOG

DAMEU 2019, report and analysis

Jul 8, 2019 10:53:46 PM / by admin

Just one week after we can say that the #DAMEU 2019 Henry Stewart DAM Europe in London is again the world’s largest conference dedicated to Digital Asset Management in Europe. This year we had some great presentations from Cecile Marchese - Nestlé, Elisabeth Knulst - Pandora, Kerry Gilzene - Theremax, Kristina Huddart, Victor Lebon ICP explaining how to manage your #digital content with a #DAM system. DAM Henry Stewart Event is always a unique time for attendees to exchange knowledge, share experiences and build long lasting professional networks. Thanks to all the Henry Stewart Team with Dan Luper, Patricia Connelly, Jad Farhat..

Enjoy the #DAM community with my video recap :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQo3WEvZKXs&t=40s

During the 2 days attendees had also the time to review a selection of the top DAM vendors, Nuxeo, Cloudinary, Widden, Sitecore, Aprimo, Mediabeacon, Open Text, Celtra, ICP, Tweak, Leappoint, DALIM, Chili publish. Making a selection as for example for a RFP of the best vendor is more and more a challenge. I can see that today working RFP for #brands, it depends of your location, the security and legacy agreements, cloud or hybrid, localised support…

The Omnichannel stack vendor map from the Real Story Group is more than welcome to bring some order into this complexity. Jarrod  Gingras was describing in a technical session how DAM needs are evolving and becoming more sophisticated as enterprise digital leaders seek greater re-use and customisation at the customer delivery tier.

Real Story Group unveiled this year 13 demo scenarios that I real advise you to use during your RFP process. Do not let the vendor playing his own demo with its now files (most of the time small files), choose a demo scenario or write your own one that fits exactly the daily workflow of your customer from the content creation to the distribution. During that demo it is useful to catch the knowledge and the experience of the vendor that will have to deploy the solution, it will make a huge difference at the end so stamp your vendor !!

I like also the great job that Mark Davey did during this last years proving to all of you a easy to use platform to compare DAM systems with a strategy in 6 steps : Gap Analysis, Ressource Audits, Requirement gathering, Governance, use can scenarios and vendor selection. Everything is very well done here.

DAM use cases :

- Photo Library

- Brand Management

- Marketing Manager

- Packaging Manager

- Publisher

- Broadcast Manager

During the DAMEU 2019 after as usual a welcome introduction with some good advises from David Lipsey we started with the DAM foundation, I mean the presentation of Theresa Regli, always the big milestone to get the last insights of the market and I will say the feedback of her experience that she had from managing so many DAM projects along side the years.

Traceability and Trust is the topic this year if you want to be successful: trust in your metadata, assets, connectivity and knowledgeable people are some the key points to build a efficient GMSC ( Global Marketing Supply Chain). This next graphic is a good representation of that, coming from Faith Robinson (Tenevos) Keynote at DAMNY 2019 :

Back to the use cases in London :

We started with Victor Lebon from ICP talking about the #DAM Journey where everything is changing and where the DAM system has to be flexible between business priority, technology, competitive environement…it is all about long term focus, choosing the right partners to power your brand and we had a very good example with Mercedes F1 team. Victor said “ Don’t only focus current pain-points and gaps or you will end top moving sideways or even backwards…don’t re-invent the wheel”

Kerry Gilzene from Theremax explained us how to build a DAM to feed your CRM. The purpose said Kerry is to enable the content in order to help delivering brand truth and value to customers. It is important from the DAM to talk to your CRM. It enables the automation of content development and real time analytics.

Then we had a fantastic presentation by Elisabeth Knulst - Pandora talking about the evolution of a DAM system inside Pandora. Interesting subject as too often I heard people saying ok we are buying a solution for the next 3 years and then maybe we will change…why ? One of the reason of silos inside large organisations today. Pandora jewellery is sold in 100 countries around the world with a lot of points of sale and important to provide a full omnichannel brand experience across all the stakeholders. The beginning was hard and failed just because as we already said no demo during the selection !! Stop powerpoint please.

Then Pandora moved forward with a selection of a DAM and a PIM system. The user interface was a the heart of the brand and involved during the last years to move from the content management to distribution. The DAM today is not any more a simple repository of assets, you have to be able to manage marketing campaigns and approve the content in all the organization up to the syndication ( website and social). Pandora has a now a strong PCM ( Product Content Management) able to adapt to emerging markets, increasing the brand consistency, better, faster and cost conscious said Elisabeth.

Day 2 Cecile Marchese from Nestlé explained us how towake up a Sleeping Giant: Elevating the role of all coffee assets at Nestlé. It was a very use case of a DAM migration plan in the scope of Theresa Regli, explained us last year.

The migration is always a long process starting from archiving obsolete assets, ensuring IP rights information, working on new taxonomies and the organization of users at the top. The migration is a success with one single point of contact for all assets adaptation said Cecile. And of course it is important to think about the on-boarding and training sessions for internal and external users.

Kristina Huddart, demonstrated us the Emotional Case for DAM – Change Management Principles for a successful DAM Adoption. During this sessions Kristina Huddart shared her experience leveraging the power of traditional change management principles to win over even the most resistant users.

As usual I really like John Horodyski’s #metadata sessions, just because what ever DAM project you have to start this is only thing you have and so important at every stage of the migration. Of course we are taking about taxonomy, custom metadata, librarians, DAM Manager and how to manage the whole things inside an organization with different people an different roles…

The #AI is the one more thing to help indexing but is has to be controlled and please vendors provide translation management, not Evry people in this world is speaking English…

The well know Peter Krogh made a nice proof of the usage of #AI especially with Lightroom  to getting real with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). I advise you to buy his book “The DAM Book 3.0”.

I will end up with the DAM Clinic roundtable sessions always a nice moment to share experiences and knowledge between different people, customers, vendors , consultants…I had the pleasure to be part of the “ What Should you Include in an RFP? “ moderated by Robert Majkowski from Widden. As we said even more difficult to choose the right vendors and do I have to put everything that the customers will never do in the RFP, something sometimes I can see in some of them just like a list of shopping. 

As a conclusion it was a great moment to share with the DAM community during this DAMEU 2019. I will just end up with some of my key points to select the right DAM :

- UI/UX the most important thing today in order to get fast adoption, in 2019 the customer experience is much more important then anything else, so drag and drop, responsive UI, easy to use driven by smart technology like #AI, predictive workflows, personalization.

Think about your content in context too.

- Metadata and governance first !!

- Run a PoC, proof of concept in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the solution to solve your business requirements.

- API more and more important to drive connectivity along side your supply chain.

- ROI. A DAM system is not something you will deploy in more than 6 months outside any custom integration.

Enjoy your vacation time and have a great summer and see you at DAMCHI 2019. You can use my code SANUY100 to get a 100$ discount.

Frédéric SANUY

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