The second event tailored to the APAC region.
The second Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management (DAM) event, specifically tailored to the APAC region, was held on March 24th 2022, with over 250 attendees. Once again, Henry Stewart invited me to chair this coming together of great minds and experiences with DAM at centre stage.
John Horodyski, the world leader in all things metadata, hosted the session on ‘Managing Metadata – it’s the Foundation of DAM’. I want to thank him for his amazing job chairing the second track once again.
This year’s presentations came from organisations, institutions and corporations in the APAC region, demonstrating the breadth of possibilities DAM provides. Below are some of my key highlights.
The AFL talked about the enormity of digitising and preserving their history. Not only from a logistical and physical aspect but also surfacing historical content and publicising it to bring value to old tapes and recordings. Beyond storing a great deal of data, they leveraged AI to convert it into shorter snippets that are easy for AFL members to consume. The exercise highlighted the value realised from assets when you do more than simply preserve them.
Preserving and exposing our history and records for all to search and consume is at the core of what DAM and Media Asset Management (MAM) technologies provide. However, it comes with challenges.
The GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) panel brought these challenges to light. I met the people that run and manage the historical archives, and we discussed the process, volume and size of preservation with limited resources and budgets. The scope of the work is breathtaking. It is an area where people expect access to these items, but preservation needs more investment in storage and people to continue at the expected scale.
Preservation is only one area DAM supports. Organisations leverage DAM to underpin many business processes, and it is the foundation of modern marketing and branding experiences.
Les Mills, a global provider of health and fitness programs from New Zealand, demonstrated how a new DAM system underpinned their next brand iteration and delivered value to their franchisees and partners around the globe in a way that was not achievable or possible before. The consistency in branding and quality of their content took centre stage, as this is what their franchisees subscribe to as their value offering and need their franchisor to provide to support them in their everyday businesses.
On another note, World Vision shared how they evaluated and assessed their current DAM platform. It only addressed 30% of their current needs, so they undertook a comprehensive market evaluation to select a new platform. As finding a new platform is often the easy part, World Vision discussed the complexity of planning for change management. However, their upgrade produced staggering statistics for increased usage and benefits to the global organisation.
The sessions from Wizard Pharmacy and L’Oreal showed how DAM systems support product lifecycle and management processes. Both companies highlighted how integrated Product Information Management (PIM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and downstream eCommerce systems meet the size and scale of regional demand. Without DAM and integration with core business systems, the resources and people needed to handle the volume of products would be unsustainable and costly.
The event demonstrated that DAM in the APAC region has become an interconnected ecosystem. Both within organisations and more broadly as part of a digital asset supply chain between primary content providers, creative agencies and brands to allow a seamless sharing of rich assets with consistent metadata.
I trust that we will be able to meet in person next year. I look forward to speaking with many of the people I have connected with online in the last two years and seeing more progress in DAM and how it supports operational functions and data preservation.
You can watch all session recordings and interviews on the Henry Stewart DAM YouTube channel.
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