Posts Tagged ‘DAM’

I recently read an article on techtarget.com on how to make the business case for marketing automation. It was published in their CRM section, but actually their arguments are valid for the marketing automation solutions we provide as well.

You can read the full article here. I’ve highlighted two key points below.

About the business case:

The article quotes a Gartner VP : “It’s an easy sell for components like marketing resource management (MRM), where you can point out how much cost you can cut out, what level of productivity and throughput you can increase with it. That can be put into a fairly straightforward business case”.

Faster time to market

If a marketing team can reduce the time to deployment and put a solution to work faster, it can sometimes help spur executive approval. In this way, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions can reduce the initial capital outlay and let an organization ease in with specific campaigns or efforts that may be able to show value more quickly than large-scale, big-bang rollouts.

Applying this to our Marcom Factory suite

Whether you’re looking into digital asset management, automated publishing or web-to-print for distributed marketing, our solutions deliver a faster time-to-market and an excellent return on marketing investment. We actually see these solutions paying back their investment within a year. And since we’ve been building these solutions since 2001, we have a growing number of  examples we can share to help building your business case.

When talking to customers and prospects in marketing departments about possible configurations for their Digital Asset Management (DAM) I often find a situation where a global company, operating in several areas of the globe, has different solutions in place to serve the distinct needs of the markets they cover.

To take an example we often encounter here in Europe : a multinational company with headquarters in the US and EMEA operations in Brussels. Whether they operate in a B2C market or in highly specialized technical B2B environment makes little difference. Each time, having up-to-date and validated digital assets available in a variety of formats for advertisement and colateral production is a key element in their marketing operations. Since this is recognized as an essential contributor to an efficient go-to-market strategy, you would think the company would have organized their operational marketing function to enable this, right?

Well … yes, sometimes. But very often we see ‘one size fits all’ DAM systems being implemented and forced down the marketing pipeline with little or no difference being made to adapt to the specifics of a region or market. And so, after a few attempts to adapt the global solution, the regional marketing function starts to organize their digital assets in a way that is better suited to the needs of their own customers and users. Eventually, by responding to their user’s needs, they’ll find themselves coping with a recurring workload to convert and distribute their digital assets. So in turn, they might turn to a solution or SaaS provider in the DAM marketplace to help them.

Our SaaS marketing operations suite is often a good intermediary in those situations. With a limited investment, the regional function sets up a download portal to serve their local users. The sales team, the channel partners, the country teams access regionalized collections of digital assets for usage in their local marketing actions.

The resulting configuration : multiple DAM solutions in place within one global organisation. Is this really a problem? There is duplication of effort of course : you need to maintain several databases, you duplicate digital assets, etc. But on the other hand, your regional marketing needs are serviced by a solution that can be fully localized, both in content, in operating hours of the hotline etc. And there is nothing to stop you from evolving to a centralized platform with distributed databases in the future.  Migrating assets and metadata, especially from one XMP-enabled DAM to another should not be the hurdle.

Best of both worlds? Our  Global DAM customers within the EMEA region seem to think so. What’s your opinion?

One of our large DAM customers called me last week about how to manage the rights on photographs. The problem at hand : images of applications are used for commercial purposes by their subsidiaries worldwide. Sometimes the “owners” of the application have given limited rights to use this imagery. Before XMP, an open standard sponsored by Adobe, this would have implied maintaining and synchronizing this information in multiple locations and databases. This exercise in digital rights management can be simplified by adhering to the XMP standard.

To implement XMP to the present DAM system, which is basically an entry-level application of our Marcom Factory SaaS suite, we do two things :

1. append XMP metadata to the present collection of images. This is achieved by importing a simple text or comma-separated file containing that information and linking it to the assets. From then onwards, every file ordered in the DAM will be downloaded with its metadata envelope.
2. write a small how-to guide so the creators, managers and approvers of new images can enter the metadata in their CMS system.

What remains to be done is educating your users on rights-managed images and how to use them within the agreed limitations in time and territory. Which is something you would have to do anyway.