What is a Digital Asset?

"Digitization-the replacement of information exchanged via paper documents or interpersonal contacts with their digital equivalent-has spawned valuable but largely untapped assets for many companies. Called digital media assets, they consist of company information in digital format-information such as research, meetings, client and product information, sales and marketing support materials. Most digital media assets consist of unstructured and unconnected content-video, audio, images and even text- which are not stored in traditional databases. These digital assets can be transported easily and leveraged for multiple uses by multiple users." Gartner G2 Report, April 2002

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What is Digital Asset Management?

Alan McCord of The University of Michigansays, "Digital Asset Management" is an integrated suite of infrastructure components used to capture, catalog, store and manage digital assets, and to expose those assets to creative tools for producing video, audio, Web, and print content. While DAMS is related to the market segment of document management, Web content management, and integrated library systems, we view DAMS as an infrastructure component that supports these other environments. Defining DAMS elements include:

Viewing assets as digital content play the associated metadata the enables it to be identified;
The ability to group individual assets to from collections or packages of assets
The ability to ingest, index, catalog, navigate, transform, re-purpose, package, and publish to a wide range of digital formats while protecting the integrity of the original assets;
Enterprise capability and linkage to technical infrastructure (e.g. network, storage, database) and enterprise services such as integrated library systems, Web portals, and course management systems;
The ability to define rights, permissions and process rules about assets to enable their use in a variety of settings while protecting rights of owners, and
The ability to administer and control the flow of assets into and from the system, as well as the groups and individuals who have access to assets."

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Why Asset Management?

In a quote from The Report on Retail, February 2002 AMR Research, Inc., Greg Girardsays, "Retailers equipped with better Advertising, Marketing, and Promotion (AMP) systems and processes will hold an advantage over competitors in achieving revenue, margin, loyalty, and category goals through better demand creation." Managing Digital assets is key to improvements in these areas. Currently says Peter Abell, also of AMR Research, Inc., "Retailers, especially those selling through multiple channels, are spending millions to create, acquire, manage, and distribute product images and key product content. Technology is just hitting the market that partially solves the inefficiencies in what today is largely a manual process.

Without a comprehensive and coordinated DAM program that includes internal organizations and manufacturers, many marketing and merchandising goals (such as the following) will be almost impossible to meet on a wide scale:

Responding to new marketing opportunities by rapidly redeploying existing digital assets
Developing personalized and targeted sales and marketing campaigns, computer-based instruction, and customer support
Creating rich media assets, including streaming video, images, and audio, to produce cutting-edge online products and enhance the customer experience
Simplifying workflow in the marketing and advertising departments and enhancing collaboration with the store operations personnel, which results in a quicker time to market
Automating the simultaneous and secure delivery of content to stores, Internet sites, portals, and print media"

Gene Alvarez of Meta Group writes, "Meta trend: By 2004, 95 percent of Global 2000 firms will deploy a content management infrastructure to control Web content and associated costs. Vendors will embrace more diverse content (e.g., documents, images, rich media, reports, catalogs, code) and channels (e.g., devices, internationalization), conforming to clients' strategic goals. By 2004-05, traditional database vendors (e.g., Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) will commoditize the repository (avoiding niches such as document automation, output management, and records management), driving content management vendors to focus on vertical and horizontal content-rich applications."

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DAM, Music and arvato systems

BOL.com(link to case study) offered millions of music cd's in almost half of its 14 international online stores. In order to enhance the customer's buying experience most of the products had accompanying cover art and 30 second streaming digital clips associated with some of their tracks. The cover art and the clips were supplied by outside vendors as digital files. The problem was to ingest these files into a central repository and publish them to their corresponding country site.

arvato systems developed a repository for all of this data called the GPDB (Global Product Data Base) where Meta-Data about products and associate assets were ingested from local country vendor files, and stored. This product data and its assets where then published to LSDBs (Local Store Data Bases) where they were stored and exposed to the customers through the site programs. This system utilized XML, PLSQL, Oracle DBMS and Java.

Digital Exchange- arvato systems developed a Digital Asset Management System for BMG, called Digital Exchangethat allows internal BMG users to browse through BMG's worldwide repertoire and download/stream digital content like clips or images (CD covers).

It stores Metadata and Digital Content
Allows searches by Product, Track, and Participant as well as other fields of the meta date.
It handles Digital Asset Types such as Sound Clips, Artwork, Bios, Ads, etc. and allows the easy creation of new types with unrestricted quantity and type of properties
It enables the bulk import and export of assets via an XML interface. The input and output files can be transferred via FTP or HTTP protocolIt validates and completes the meta-information also creating alternative asset versions, such as lower resolution images, etc.

Its technologies includes, Java, a BEA application server, a Sybase Database, Real streaming servers and Akamai to increase the availability of the assets.

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