dam in advertising agencies see inside of digital... · digital asset management in advertising...

DAM IN ADVERTISING AGENCIES

S E E I N S I D E . . .

Digital asset management inadvertising agenciesTony McCarthyis the Director of Worldwide Technical Sales of Xinet, Inc. He has been involved with the development and execution of digital asset

management systems for 12 years. Tony has spoken on digital asset management at Graph Expo, Seybold New York, Seybold San

Francisco and PrintMedia MagazineTech in New York, and has been widely quoted in publications.

Keywords: advertising agencies, DAM, speed-to-market, profit centers

Abstract This paper reviews how some advertising agencies in the USA and Europe —

Ogilvy, McCann Erickson, Grey Worldwide, BBDO, Leo Burnett Worldwide, Euro RSCG, Publicis’

Capps Digital and TracyLocke — chose and implemented a flexible, scalable digital asset

management (DAM) system that allows them to collaborate via the internet with hundreds of

agency offices and clients, worldwide. Executive, creative and production people from each ad

agency describe how they approached their return on investment (ROI) research before

choosing their DAM solution, and how they implemented the solutions to deliver lucrative

business results. Agency staff explain how a coherent DAM system allows advertising

agencies to do more work with fewer staff by ensuring speed to market, productivity savings,

increased agency and client revenues, secure client branding and a 24-hour art studio. The

paper also tells readers how to handle the critical issues of file-naming criteria, load balancing

and ensuring a cultural buy-in within the agency.

INTRODUCTIONIn the last decade, most advertising agenciesrecognized the need for a coherent digital assetmanagement (DAM) system and manyimplemented solutions to best meet theirrequirements.

As the number of assets grew, and manyagencies consolidated into much largerorganizations, however, the need for moreflexible, scalable and accessible asset managementsolutions became very apparent.

The following is a review of how someagencies in the USA and Europe — Ogilvy,McCann Erickson, Grey Worldwide, BBDO,Leo Burnett Worldwide, Euro RSCG, Publicis’Capps Digital and TracyLocke —chose and implemented a DAM system thatworks, that grows and that allows the agenciesto link up hundreds of offices and clients,worldwide.

THE TIME TO UPGRADERecognizing the need to ‘‘know whereeverything is,’’ McCann Erickson implementedtheir asset management strategy seven years agowith Canto’s Cumulus.

However, as the number of McCann’s assetsgrew beyond two million, ‘‘the system groundto a halt,’’ said McCann Erickson’s New YorkSenior Vice President, Brad Mintz.1

While researching their options for areplacement system, McCann identified asolution that would return many thousands ofdollars in savings and new revenues. Launchedon 1 January 2005, the new DAM systemconnects 120 people in the prepress studio andcreative departments of McCann Advertisingand McCann Relationship Marketing, and willultimately link all McCann offices worldwide.

‘‘Xinet’s WebNative is, in my opinion, the defacto standard for doing digital assetmanagement at ad agencies,’’ Mintz said.

NEED FOR SPEED TO MARKETWhat drives the push for more effective DAMsystems at ad agencies is the need for speed inhighly competitive industries.

Research by GISTICS Incorporated, anOakland-based research firm, indicates that speedand coordination in the creation and distributionof marketing content leads to successful newproduct campaigns.2 And any increase in the

# Henry Stewart Publications 1743–6540 (2005) Vol. 1, 3 189–194 JOURNAL OF DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT 189

Tony McCarthy

Xinet, Inc,

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 312,

Berkeley, CA 94710, USA

Tel: +1 510 845 0555

www.xinet.com

time to market — if only by a few days — canmean increased sales.

‘‘Speed to market and real-time marketing iswhere you need to be right now in theadvertising industry,’’ said Fred Squeo, Partnerat TracyLocke, the agency of record for PepsiInternational and Grand Marnier.

‘‘Your client is always challenging you to dothings efficiently, and to explain where theirmarketing budget is being spent, and is it to thegreatest effectiveness. We knew we had to havethe technology to help us get there,’’ said Squeo,who uses DAM to create and host all theadvertising and promotional assets for PepsiInternational and Grand Marnier.

Like McCann Erickson and all the agenciesmentioned here, the solution used byTracyLocke is Xinet’s WebNative, whichprovides web-based, 24/7 access to live andarchived files, and significant image and layout-handling functionality. Figures 1–9 in this paperare images created and distributed by advertisingagencies using WebNative, Xinet’s DAMsolution.

Without leaving their common workenvironment, people can contribute to theback-end systems, such as designers accessinglow-resolution images through a web interface.The solution creates a transparent workflow bynot changing the workflow already in place.

‘‘DAM gives our clients speed to marketbecause it cuts down time during the creationand approval process,’’ said Chris Formisano,Vice President Associate Creative Director atEuro RSCG in Wilton, CT. ‘‘The bigger the

business, the more levels of bureaucracy thatslow down the approval process. Now theprocess is more active because everyone hasaccess to the system from any web browser.’’

MONEYOf course nothing spurs action like a ChiefFinancial Officer recognizing a huge monetarywindfall.

‘‘When I did the calculation on productivitysavings with our new DAM workflow system,the numbers were so astronomically high, I wasafraid to present them. I had to dumb themdown,’’ said McCann’s Mintz, who spentmonths studying every DAM solution on themarket and possible workflows of how hisagency would use the new system.

‘‘I based the ROI on little calculations of howmuch you’re going to save on this task and thattask, equating time to dollars. When you dealwith a formula like that, the savings can be hugein terms of productivity. And when you add inclient cost savings and additional revenue fromnew services, the figure is even higher,’’ Mintzsaid.

In other words: time is money, says ChrisCarlock, Infrastructure and Workflow Engineerat Publicis’ Capps Digital.

‘‘The quicker we can get this stuff, the morewe save because we pay overtime. If you cangrab assets off the system or server quickly, andit saves five minutes from each worker’s dayevery day, those five minutes mean you aresaving a tremendous amount of money,’’Carlock said.

HOW THEY DO IT

McCann EricksonAs the agency of record for Microsoft, McCannErickson uses its new DAM solution todistribute all the assets and ads for Microsoft to60 different McCann Erickson and McCannRelationship Marketing offices used worldwide.

‘‘When it’s four in the morning here andsomeone in China needs an image for an ad, Idon’t need to worry about having someone hereto make that image,’’ said Warren Vegas, VicePresident of Production Services for McCannSan Francisco. ‘‘It’s a 24-hour facility withouthaving to staff it 24 hours a day.’’

Figure 1: ‘‘Mr Incredible’’

from the popular film ‘‘The

Incredibles’’ is an image from

a McDonald’s campaign

through Europe

Figure 2: Digital asset management ensures that advertising agencies

can provide their clients global branding, speed to market and

real-time marketing

JOURNAL OF DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT Vol. 1, 3 189–194 # Henry Stewart Publications 1743–6540 (2005)190

McCarthy

Every image placed on the DAM database anddistributed to each country includes informationon how the files should be used, color conversioninformation, color standards for Asia, Europe andUSA, and SWOP Toyo in the Euroscale.

‘‘All these asset management modules allowthe studio and production teams to be moreefficient when finding files we’re working on,finding the right version, and distributing themto creatives as they’re needed — withoutmistakes,’’ Vegas said.

Ogilvy LondonOgilvy London uses its DAM solution tomanage the brands of blue-chip clients such asCastrol and Unilever, and to collaborate withOgilvy offices in 106 countries.

Running off Ogilvy’s server at the Londonhub office, images and brands are accessedsecurely from any location worldwide beyondthe firewall.

‘‘Through a series of customized websitesdesigned for each client and product, artdirectors approve shots, images, brands, andlayouts wherever they are in the world,’’ saidIain Seers, Director of Ogilvy London’sCreativeSystems group. ‘‘For file delivery, oursystem allows us to reach our 26 markets and 50offices across Europe alone, quickly and reliably,eliminating both the hard and soft costs ofordering, burning, amending and deliveringartwork CDs.’’

‘‘The ROI on the software itselfwas paid off within three months,’’Seers said. ‘‘When you factor inexpense of the platform, it wascovered within a year.’’

BBDOSince implementing an organizedDAM system in their New Yorkoffice, BBDO is doing twice theamount of work with two lesspeople.

‘‘That’s based solely on ourDAM organization,’’ said JdMichaels, BBDO’s New York VicePresident Director of GraphicServices. ‘‘Before DAM, searchingfor a file was akin to an ‘X-Files/Indiana Jones’ scene. Rememberthat room at the end of ‘Raiders

of the Lost Ark’? That was our DAMsystem.’’

The first thing Michaels did when he arrivedwas install two enormous blackboards in hisoffice.

‘‘The best DAM systems are visual. Artdirectors think in a visual way. If you try toexplain something to them and talk aboutnumbers or concepts, all you get are puzzledexpressions. But if you go to the blackboard andshow them, the light bulbs go on. The lightbulb DAM solution is the one that shows me, itdoesn’t tell me,’’ Michaels said.

Days after implementing its new DAMsystem, BBDO used it to solve a colossalproblem: One giant client had a worldwideshoot scheduled for 5,000+ final photos fromeight countries with eight different languages,and wanted every image processed through theNew York office.

‘‘It worked perfectly. The photographers shotdigitally. We gave each of them an uploader fortheir desktops with their names on them so theycould drag and drop their images 24 hours aday. When the New York office woke up, therewere 5,500 final shots awaiting them that wereuploaded while we slept.

When our creatives came in to review them,we said: ‘Click here. These are all your pictures.’When the client came in, they were expectingreams of paper photos taped up on the wall, butinstead we used the DAM system to project

Figure 3: Images placed in a

DAM database ensure colour

standards and accuracy

Figure 4: WebNative enables ad designers to access low-resolution

images through a web interface

Digital asset management in advertising agencies


them as a medium. Then we gave them a webaddress so they could review it at home if theywanted,’’ Michaels said.

This underscores the central misconception ofasset management, Michaels says. ‘‘It’s not alibrary function. It’s a dynamic active databasetool designed for problems like this.’’

Leo Burnett Worldwide, LondonFor Stars Digital, Leo Burnett Worldwide’s in-house digital studio in London, installing aDAM system six years ago was instrumental inadding to the agency’s client roster of corporatebig hitters, which includes Coca-Cola andKellogg’s.

Stars Digital uses its DAM solution to workon the production of mechanicals forMcDonald’s Happy Meal boxes, which go outto 46 different markets and can range up to 2GBin file size.

DAM also translates into savings for StarsDigital because the customers access their filesvia the internet, eliminating all couriercharges during the creation andapproval process.

‘‘Our system is reliable andstraightforward for our clients to use.Normally we can have them set upwithin five minutes to use their owncustomized image banks,’’ said DaveEwers, Systems Manager at StarsDigital. ‘‘And the 13 built-in languagesthat come out of the box with thesystem are really useful because we hostsites for clients in a number of Europeancountries.’’

Grey WorldwideGrey Worldwide’s New York officeturns out ads for billboards, print,magazine, newspapers and the web withremarkable speed, thanks to its DAMsystem.

For example, a recent job for Grey’s clientCanon, a photo spread from the IndianapolisSpeedway, appeared in a magazine one day afterit was photographed.

‘‘After we upload the files, art directors lookat them online without having to download thewhole high-resolution file. Then we can pass itto whatever vendor needs to see the ad, thensend it to the magazine itself within hours,’’ said

Graeme Thomson, who works in Grey’s artstudio and graphics services department in NewYork.

Grey also uses its DAM system to automateand simplify PDF creation and printing.

‘‘PDF creation is an important thing for an adagency, because a lot of our type proof orreplacement proof work goes back and forth tothe client in PDF form,’’ Thomson said. ‘‘Bycentralizing it with our DAM system, we haveone way of making a PDF. We don’t havedifferent people with different settings makingdifferent types of PDFs at different resolutions.And we’re not wasting bandwidth, sending filesto the client.’’

Publicis’ Capps DigitalSince implementing a DAM system, Publicis’Capps Digital has eliminated an entiredepartment within its agency, the archivinggroup, which had two full-time employees andone part-time person.

‘‘We’ve gained the ability to un-archive filesin a matter of minutes, versus having anarchiving group where people would takerequests and find specific files on CD,’’ saidCapps Digital’s Chris Carlock. ‘‘Now we havean interface that anybody here can access tosearch and retrieve files from any location. Andthey can see a thumbnail of that file.’’

Capps Digital also gained a new revenuesource by creating customized websites where

Figure 5: DAM gives large

corporations like McDonald’s

secure brand management

Figure 6:

Leo Burnett’s Stars Digital uses Xinet’s WebNative to work on the

production of mechanicals for McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes,

which go out to 46 different markets and can range up to 2GB in

full size


McCarthy

clients access, review, download and upload theirassets.

‘‘Each customer wants to look at somethingpersonalized for them. Now we can quicklydevelop personalized sites and create customonline storage solutions with custom coding thatgives the client a site with a unique look, feeland shopping cart,’’ Carlock said.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?Success stories aside, everyone agrees that thecrux of a good DAM system is built on logical,file-naming criteria.

Like the Dewey Decimal system developedfor US public libraries, an ad agency DAMsystem must have an intuitive, proprietarynaming system so an agency’s staff and clientscan look at a file and immediately understandthe aspects of it.

‘‘The asset management system is only asgood as the information that’s put into it,’’ saidCapps Digital’s Chris Carlock. ‘‘Keywords don’tgenerate on their own. It has to start at thebeginning of the workflow system with work inprogress on the server, then go downstreamfrom there.’’

In other words, adding metadata adds valueto the digital shoebox. It shouldn’t all bevisual.

To preserve the consistency of the metadatathat goes in, some sites find it necessary to

employ a full- or part-time librarian to inputmetadata. The beauty of the systems executed bythe agencies profiled here, however, is thatmetadata are automatically ingested from thefiles themselves, along with XMP metadata anddocument linking information. Alternatively,agencies can choose to add more metadata froma separate interface, if they want.

‘‘Databases and metadata are only good if youapply them,’’ said McCann’s Warren Vegas.‘‘Once you put a million assets into your system,no one goes back to enter metadata. You haveto come up with a plan at the start that extractsinformation from the assets as they’re ingested,and that takes into consideration what theaccount people are looking for, what the studiopeople are looking for, the client job number,etc.’’

A good place to begin is to ask the clientexactly what they want in a personalized DAMsystem. That’s the approach TracyLocke tookwith its client Grand Marnier.

TracyLocke’s Director of Studio Serviceswrote a discovery survey for Grand Marnier thatcovered 15 questions, such as: What’s importantto you in a DAM? What are you looking to do?Do you want a button that says ‘‘DownloadJPEG?’’

Then TracyLocke built the whole systemaccording to the client’s specifications.

‘‘Instead of being locked into a box of an assetmanagement system, we really noticed how viralthis could get as far as of branching out intoother possibilities,’’ said TracyLocke’s FredSqueo.

LOAD BALANCING AND CULTURALBUY-INOne bonus of having an agency-wide DAMsystem that’s widely used is the ability to balanceworkloads between offices.

‘‘If our San Francisco office has more workthan it can handle at a given moment, NewYork can take on extra work to help out andvice versa, and this system will certainly enhancethe process,’’ said McCann’s Brad Mintz. ‘‘Whenone talks about load balancing, to me that meansit’s going to streamline our production processtremendously by allowing our people to gettheir work done faster and make them lookbetter. Getting work done faster means moremoney.’’

Figure 7: Using a DAM

system to search for images

increases agency productivity

Figure 8

A DAM system with effective metadata adds value to the digital

shoebox so the system is not just visual

Digital asset management in advertising agencies


To ensure a cultural buy-in so his agencywould feel comfortable using the DAM system,BBDO’s Jd Michaels brought in AppleComputer so that his colleagues — some ofwhom were in their mid-60s — would first getfamiliar with programs like iPhoto, iMovie andiTunes.

‘‘I put iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes oneveryone’s desktop so they would play withthem and get them familiar with them in thatway. One woman is 63 and now she can bothsearch our DAM and mix and burn CDs! She isthe first person you turn to when you needsomething,’’ he said. ‘‘She learned, throughlooking for songs on iTunes, the basic principlesof navigating any digital asset managementsystem.’’

DAM AS A PROFIT CENTERPart of the fear for some ad agencies inembracing DAM is the fact that it represents anew business model for advertising.

‘‘We did a proposal last year on how bymoving to a distributed model over the internetand no longer burning and shipping discs wecould gain an efficiency savings of six figures forus and the client,’’ said McCann’s Warren Vegas.‘‘For us, the big savings revolve aroundefficiency. We will still charge for doingsomething but the man hours for doing them isway lower because it allows the server and thedistribution method to do most of the heavy

lifting for us. And it’s now usually correctbecause it’s consistent.’’

The new business model that DAM presentsboils down to more work with fewer people.

‘‘In terms of the business model, we areworking faster and we are working smarter.We’re able to handle more work, and I have notasked for one more employee,’’ said BBDO’s JdMichaels.

In a nutshell, a good DAM system issomething an ad agency puts in once, thenleverages over and over for clients on oppositesides of the globe.

‘‘With today’s technology, the geography ofyour office means nothing. It’s the technologythat you have. We are in Wilton, Connecticut, asmall suburb 45 miles outside New York City,but we service our Pepsi International clientthroughout the Mideast, Asia, Europe,’’ saidTracyLocke’s Fred Squeo. ‘‘That we aremanaging all the assets for Pepsi Internationalout of our server in Wilton, Connecticut is a factthat really speaks for itself. Fifty gigabytes weredownloaded last month off the Pepsi databankand our server didn’t even break a sweat.’’

References1 This remark, and all others cited in this paper, are

sourced from personal interviews conducted onbehalf of Xinet, Inc.

2 Moon, M. and Warwick, J. (2004) Business Casefor Marketing Content Repositories in the Enterprise,GISTICS Incorporated, Oakland.

Figure 9: It takes minutes for

new clients to become

accustomed to utilizing a

good DAM system


McCarthy

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