The DAM Helsinki 2016 experience in a wrap
We are thrilled to hear the positive reactions from attendees to our shared content during the recent DAM Helsinki 2016 event in Helsinki. Parts of the seminar information will also be shared on our website.
We were proud to present the best of breed Digital Asset Management experience by speakers from Canada, Europe, Scandinavia and Finland. This approach gave the audience an international perspective rather than a local one and topics were addressed from various angles in the customer journey.
The DAM Helsinki 2016 event brought together customers, prospects, software vendors, partners and DAM-users. The digital transformation, customer cases, product presentations and technology sessions blended in nicely with effective networking opportunities.
Visual communication is powerful!
I want here to give my short wrap up of some of the signs on how DAMs are getting more sophisticated. Visual media’s impact on communications can be seen in every part of daily communications. We learned how a centralised DAM gives control over visual rich media files and makes them alive for multichannel use! Generally DAM systems are increasingly shifting from data storage to integration with business intelligence solutions including workflow automation and integrations.
Learn from exploring touchpoints in the customer journey
We explored touchpoints relevant to the customer journey, which really is not only html or print. The number of channels and touchpoints in multichannel production is rising in the future and include diverse content ecosystems with multi-touchpoints for delivery and a dialog between all kinds of devices. From the customer’s point of view, disjointed teams, content silos, tools, and repositories lead to fragmented and inconsistent experiences. The challenge is how to handle that scenario.
Communication is changing
We live in the digital information age where we face an ever growing wave of contents to be managed. Additionally these contents are no longer just simple files. We learned how virtual reality and augmented reality changes our way how we communicate in the future, providing rich, immersive experiences to users at its best.
With DAM you can harness the flow of content
CMS-, DAM- and PIM-vendors all need to adapt to the changes in how we communicate and how content needs to be shared, used and reused in different applications. Content has become complex objects, such as social publishing solutions, Web CMS articles, press kits, product data, ecommerce mobile applications and more. Combining files with metadata enables multiple pieces of information to be included and considered as one. There is a need to be able to rapidly assemble various content constituents to produce original content.
Metadata is the key to asset usability
Adding unique metadata to these digital assets is an investment that makes the content searchable, findable, reusable and potentially repurposable, giving it more value. The best video in the world is of no use if it’s impossible to find! So by centralizing your assets in DAM with tags (metadata) attached to media you can help people find the right file quickly. Invest in very practical taxonomies aimed to tame the complexity of the outside channels and maximize automation for metadata tagging when possible to increase findability.
Can a computer create this metadata for our business?
As we can use image recognition and image analysis for keywords and captions, sensors as well as big data processing to automate metadata tagging, we need to accept the consequences of saving inadequate or even wrong metadata to the file. As a conclusion computing can speed processes and reduces manual activity at its best, but it is still today at heart a human activity, requiring ongoing decision making that only human insight can provide.
Modern DAM architectures for cost-effective relationship management
The future DAMs are in transition of becoming a content platform that can route content from where it is stored to where it is needed, utilising metadata at the core. Content is reused in multiple ways, channels and languages. So make sure you can control it. The future DAMs can serve as an integrated backbone or ecosystem to other systems and workflows to harness this process. Not only do all these pieces need to be managed in a controlled way, they also have to go to ever more places automatically on time and in the right format.
Focus on Brand Management policies
One target of the event was to help brands accelerate their digital marketing transformation. Smart marketers and technologists who have understood the power of a centralized operational single source of visual records/digital assets use their DAMs in a very refreshed and strategic way. Make sure to deliver a consistent brand message was a topic which seemed to expose many interesting rules.
Use Brand portals and a modern Brand book
One way is to use dedicated DAM-solutions for brand assets and other marketing rich media that may be used throughout the organization (including globally) and across many different channels. We learned about the importance of a Brand portal and Brand book to control a consistent brand message and streamline collaboration with central & local & external marketing departments. PIM, database publishing and proofing policies were presented thoroughly at the end of the conference.
Awesome feedback from the seminar
I will close this post with the words of Martin Schlüter, one of our confident speakers:
“It was great to be there and connect with all of the attendees. What made it really interesting to me is to see all the different perspectives on DAM and how it can help customers to achieve their goals.
From an attendee perspective that gave a really good overview of the current market and the challenges that we all expect within the next years with managing digital assets.
In addition to that I really liked the way how the event was setup. It was not a sales driven event but more like an exchange between customers, agencies, partners and software vendors like us.”
Thanks for making this seminar a success
Finally a great thanks to all presenters, John Horodyski, Ola Norrman, Christer Lorichs, Jesper Arentoft, Peter Makki, Tomas Westerholm, Martin Schlüter, Patrik Palatz and Jos Claes for making this event such a blast.
As a conclusion from all participants we can state that there is definitely a need for this kind of a seminar. Your comments encourage us to host our next event utilising all the feedback we received during these sessions in our series of DAM-seminars.
Rolf Koppatz
Communication Pro
Host of DAM Helsinki 2016
www.communicationpro.com
