My observations on the health and maturity of DAM, based on my participation at Henry Stewart DAM New York and Sydney 2024.
In October and November, I had the privilege of attending the DAM New York and Sydney events within weeks of each other. The differences between both markets got me thinking about how DAM has evolved and where we stand now.
As many of you know, I've implemented and supported Digital Asset Management solutions for about 30 years.
In the 90s, it was the time of the early adopters, creative and printing transformation in the early days of digital publishing or a new tool to support extended librarian and collections management functions for the GLAM institutions.
In creative and printing, we mostly solved simple reuse scenarios, which saved the time to rescan film of various sizes from prepress and supply on removable cartridge hard drives (PLI) to creative teams via courier. If, for publishers, you were on the same physical network, it still took a lot longer than an internet download to get your files.
For the GLAM institutions, DAM was a desire and goal based on individual enthusiasm and the will to embrace and adopt modern digitisation techniques that were starting to flourish with advances in digital capture technology.
Any way you look at it, DAM was a niche solution solving a specific point, and general IT didn't get involved, or if they did, it was a side project.
Of course, DAM has come a long way since the single user and small workgroup servers solving a specific department's needs. There was a peak of vendors, and many 'build your own' internal IT solutions came and went. With the rise of the internet and, more specifically, microservices, a plethora of DAM solutions were born, either from new startups, existing vendors rewriting them, or even creative agencies building their own. The other catalyst was the rise of the Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which needed content velocity to feed its ever-growing demand for consumption and personalisation.
Effectively, you got two things: the adoption of DAM as a shadow IT product in departments such as Marketing and the commoditisation of DAM as a media library-type tool for digital teams. In many cases, an organisation had one or both. But they were (and are in many cases) disconnected by human processes deciding on which asset(s) should be reformatted to suit and shoved over the wall to be combined with the other content (text and other attributes) in the digital channel of choice.
That brings me to my observations on Henry Stewart's DAM New York and DAM Sydney events.
It's no secret that I've wanted to go to DAM New York since its inception 21 years ago, and this year was my first opportunity. I was partly driven by the fact that I was about to be chairing the inaugural event in Sydney on November 7th and wanted to understand the format and audience so that I could be prepared, and partly because the timing with the Sitecore Symposium in Nashville aligned perfectly.
When I walked into DAM New York at the Hilton in Midtown, I was immediately greeted by an enthusiastic group of speakers, vendors, and customers who were all actively participating. Shared knowledge and experiences, plus robust discussion and alignment on common themes, ran throughout the two-day event across four streams. For many, this wasn't their first attendance, and they'd built many friendships and relationships over several years. What stood out to me the most was a broad range of industries and organisation types with several representatives from both business and IT roles, all using DAM to manage and deliver content at scale and, more importantly, across business divisions/departments.
Compare that to the Sydney event two weeks later; you have a different audience. Whilst there was solid attendance for an inaugural event (three times the size of NYC originally, I am told), it was only one stream, and many were DAM administrators and librarians, whose role is core to the organisation they represented. These DAM administrators have morphed into BA roles, IT support and change managers mainly because they are under-resourced and probably not fully understood in terms of what they do. Don't get me wrong; the event was full of insightful and interesting conversations, with some amazing case studies on the value of DAM and, of course, the arrival of AI and its impact on more than just tagging images. I didn't come across too many using DAM across their business as a whole, and almost no executives or senior IT representatives. There was an emphasis on DAM for GLAM and some DAM for Martech, but there was nothing much in the middle.
Having attended New York and Sydney in the same year, I can emphatically say that the DAM community in ANZ has a long way to go to get a broader appreciation and use of DAM inside our organisations. I am passionate about this, intend to learn from the Henry Stewart team and plan to start nurturing it in 2025.
This is where we need to put an organisational maturity lens over things. A single department solving a point problem is DAM 1.0. Add some downstream integration and automation, and you will get DAM 2.0. I'm not going to get into the virtues of a fully integrated DAM 3.0 in solving operationally manual and time-wasting workflows other than they are multi-departmental and require a more transformational approach.
I have several blogs you can refer to here on the benefits of taking this approach:
My point is that DAM is so much more than that, and the technology has advanced to a point that it can and should be a foundational technology that every CIO and Architect should be embracing and understanding how it can benefit not only asset delivery but content throughout the systems and processes in every organisation.
At its core, DAM is a management tool for rich digital assets (images, video and audio) and metadata. However, content needs other textual and supportive information (factsheets, instructions, compliance information, health and legal, etc). For a company to adopt DAM as a foundational layer, it must consider all the stages of the content lifecycle across every department and function and how to keep the rich assets and content in sync and delivered as one data source.
Many people at DAM New York had been on a journey for several years, and as they matured into their DAM adoption, were on their second and third DAM vendor. To support this adoption and need for measurable goals, the technology and capabilities needed to advance to support the expanding strategy and requirements. Therefore they moved from DAM 1.0 to 3.0 and, in the process, changed vendor to suit. You need to ask yourself, where am I now in my DAM journey, and where do I want to be?
Now, let's go back to some details on the trends and insights.
There is an ongoing debate around the role of DAM or even a MAM (Media Asset Management - think lots of video and editing) and how it intersects with other content required to use and publish these assets for consumers. Of course, it depends. If you are a media company publishing movies to channels and YouTube, like Nickelodeon, then the promotional metadata sits with the video. If you are a manufacturer, then there are all sorts of related content, such as product imagery, instructions, how-to videos, specifications and regulatory information. All this needs to be managed and served to customers and employees.
Is DAM or MAM even relevant anymore? Is it just Asset Management?
For many organisations, it is not just digital assets. There is a whole content lifecycle to consider, and in many ways, this is where you need a centralised business process tool like an Omnichannel Content Platform (OCP). A combination of DAM/MAM plus an authoring system for text and Product Content Management (PCM) to define all the relationships, wrapped up into a set of workflows and deeply integrated with upstream data and downstream publishing channels. However, IP Rights and Legal need to be better integrated with the content lifecycle. But that is too adjunct at the moment and reliant on external processes. To get greater adoption we need to solve the privacy, security and licensing access of teams ‘not in the system’.
At DAM New York, we saw forward-thinking use cases around AI and data, with many referring to it as DAM 4.0. As data and analytics can now be ingested and analysed at scale using AI, many can harness the benefits of bidirectional integration to influence decisions on the value of assets and content. This ultimately drives decisions on what content to create or, more importantly, repurpose from the vast array stored in some DAM platforms on show. Data is driving the workflows. Analytics are powering decisions at a fast pace, and AI is helping streamline repeatable processes. It's both a content and data lifecycle.
With AI, there is no doubt it will transform the way metadata is applied and provide enhanced asset and content findability for users who leverage and expect more natural language search. Visual search is becoming more common, but I think using more natural language rather than remembering or knowing the taxonomy value is what will come very soon. DAM needs to be the interpreter of the request just like the librarian you ask about what interests you, and they tell you where to find the reference books or get them for you.
And finally, the view in New York was that generative AI will not be used for final content assets (yet?). However, it will be used to automate repetitive tasks that humans do now (for example, removing image backgrounds and summarising copy and translation). However, in Sydney, we heard from production companies using it for content generation. Packaging renders and labels and applying language translations. Ultimately, this will free up people and their minds to be more valuable to the organisation. There is still some caution, with many people of the opinion that we still need oversight by humans to review the output and continue to tweak the configuration. We are not ready for a set-and-forget, and in many ways, it's extending the need for enhanced governance (that should be a priority for DAM but sadly isn't typically resourced properly).
Running AI still needs skilled people; governance is the number one issue. Lots of experiments but little in production. Watch this space at next year's event to see how reality pans out. I know my team at Creative Folks is in the process of moving some customer AI pilots to production right now. I'm keen to see the results of their impact on many aspects of the day-to-day operations, plus the value of enhanced findability and reuse. We are on the cusp of realising that you must organise your data before AI can do its job. Is DAM going to get a renewed focus more broadly in ANZ? For the content and data lifecycle and the opportunities AI brings, it has to. Stay tuned.