Advertising 101: Agency Digital Asset Management
Digital asset management - also known as DAM - is a system used to efficiently and securely store, share and organise digital files and their assets. One of the most important features of DAM systems should indeed be the efficiency and ease for users, however in recent years, particularly within the advertising industry, that has not been the case.
Matt Cooper, CEO and founder of Little Black Book and founder of the revolutionary Beam TV, believes having a structured and well-organised DAM is a must moving forward for agencies and brands. "The amount of content being created is higher in volume than ever before and every company needs to save time creating and managing it. Tracking the content and re-using it in an efficient manner is more important than ever before. In my eyes, the time saved using a well structured DAM is a must, especially now that re-using assets is as important as creating them."
Sounds straightforward, right? But Matt believes the problem comes down to the fact most companies' DAMs have been built in a smart way for their clients but are not necessarily fit for purpose for their own asset management and business promotion.
“So many companies have gone down the route of trying to build a superstructure - a tech stack that works for everyone - but they have sometimes forgotten their own marketing needs,” Matt says. “In my opinion, people might have over-complicated things. Many of these systems try to cater for client needs, but don't offer a simple way for a creative company to market themselves or simply find work they need for pitches etc. They are not being filled with the data or assets needed as these users don’t see any end value. I think they need a bit of simplicity in many instances. I know many an agency creative who struggles to quickly get to the work their agency has created.’’
In comes Little Black Book, with its free to view globally available library. Equipped with 2.4 million credits, each of which leads to a person’s profile and counting, LBB has attempted to crack the code for successful digital asset management for businesses in the creative industries and simultaneously unlock it for the world to see. Here’s how.
BEAM.TV: A DAM That Changed How We Work in the Creative World
Matt joined adland in 1988. Starting in the post room at Saatchi & Saatchi, he joined the Mill as a librarian, which became one of the top creative post production companies in the world. With offices in New York, London and beyond, the Mill was, as Matt puts it, “a truly global post house.”
“We covered lots of areas and captured data in ways that few others were, we had different needs,” he says. “In that stage of the internet, just to establish a connection was costing us £20,000 a month. That’s how far back we go.”
Things were far from simple. He tells me about when The Mill was working on ‘Gladiator’ with Ridley Scott, they were opening satellite feeds from London’s BT tower to LA, to play a shot for Ridley, which would roughly cost £2,000 for 15 minutes.
On a smaller scale of this, U-matic tapes were being carried around on planes, trains and automobiles like there was no tomorrow. “We used to carry our passports to work,” laughs Matt. “Once I had to jump on a plane to Boston to bring a U-matic. This was a regular occurrence back then.”
The Mill (and virtually everybody else in the post and production worlds) was clearly concerned with moving huge chunks of data from New York to LA, or London to New York or vice versa.The only thing to be done was to look at systems they could buy.
“But these digital asset management solutions were unbelievably expensive and were sometimes over architected. We’re talking about spending millions of pounds to launch something that might not even be what people needed,” says Matt. Coming from this post production context and seeing the difficulty of working with data spurred an idea.
“We worked out we needed to squeeze video down so small and transfer via FTP (file transfer protocol).” Then, give the director a log in to see it online. “We did this with Ridley and people couldn’t believe what they were seeing.”
“Once we had done this I remember very quickly running up to my boss at the time and saying to him ‘I’ve seen something that will change our world’,” says Matt. The time of U-matic tapes was running out and it was time for Beam TV to be born.
Still running today, Beam TV was on the very top for ten years after its launch and changed the world of digital asset management forever. “We talked to the global creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi Bob Isherwood. At the time, he couldn’t show new material to Toyota in New York because it was made in Australia and the U-matic didn’t come on the plane,” remembers Matt.
“We put a Beam box in his office in New York, which he could plug it into his TV and we’d send the video into the box. Every time anyone at Saatchi & Saatchi had finished a cut, they’d turn on that box, and he could play it directly on his TV. It was game-changing.”
Not only could this system be used by every agency in the world, but also could be utilised for submitting work to award shows - a matter of adding one more click that would allow people to send assets to Cannes, D&AD, and dozens of other shows. It then move onto to storage of raw assets and pack shots to be used for versioning and localisation.
“It was smart as we gave people a real reason to use the assets and from there listened and offered more. What’s happened now is that people have created these data management systems, these DAMs, where assets are sometimes buried and impossible to find, I'm not convinced they are always built by people whop really understand the workflows of a creative company''
What sat at the core of Beam TV’s success was that not only Bob Isherwood didn’t need to fly tapes all over the world, but heads of TV, or virtually anybody else, could use that technology to create reels and send them out for pitches.
“Simplicity and Utility” at The Core of Digital Asset Management
There’s a few ways in which Little Black Book, today helps the industry cut through this mess by echoing the simplicity of Beam TV.
“The whole LBB model is very similar to what Beam TV was,” says Matt. “What we’ve created is a place where any agency or production company of any size can be seen through their news and piece of work. We’ve got the news as an asset, but we’ve got the work too separately, with all the data/credits tied to both. It’s what we’ve been building for the past 15 years and what has come to be a truly global library. The IMDb of advertising”
What LBB allows users is to not only store their asset in the archive, but allow the world to play with it - because it’s free to view. “There is no paywall to view and we have given people real reasons to use their archive at LBB whether it’s building a collection to share for a pitch or to enter The Immortal Awards, it's there and dead simple. And thousands are using it daily to see who did what.”
He adds: “Production companies spend their lives making reels to pitch for work. That’s not going to go away completely and they can do much of that with LBB, shortly all of it. The exciting thing is that all companies on LBB are discoverable even when they are sleeping. People interact with our archive 24 hours a day.”
What’s utilitarian about the LBB archive is the ease with which anybody can sort through it - no heavy blankets of data and no confusing routes with dead ends. You want funny car ads - you get funny car ads. And once you’ve built those collections you need, you can take a look at the structured data.
“In the last three years, we have added 2.4 million credits to the work in our library and have made every one of them clickable. If you’re an agency creative or producer looking for a certain type of director, you can now see that. You can play with intelligent data and find what you’re looking for, without being charged for it.”
The ‘management’ part on digital asset management is also important to touch on. As Matt sees it, 25 years ago when things were way more literal - rooms with tapes all over the wall - and an agency wanted to put together a reel, there’d be somebody to manage the process. These days, unreachable data sits under piles of useless assets and is managed by virtually no one. This is where he started - a librarian at the Mill - where he really understood how one builds an asset management solution while storing and sorting the data wrapped around it.
Agencies Aren’t Always Thinking About What They Themselves Need
“I don’t think people are taking this nearly as seriously as they should,” says Matt.
“Today, outside of LBB, there are agency networks with 100's Vimeo accounts,” he tells me. “And that’s not their fault. They have an office in France, an office in Japan, they all have accounts, but none of them connect.”
In Matt’s opinion things aren’t getting any better either. He believes that what these agencies need first and foremost is a place to store their new and old work for marketing/brand purposes and it needs to be connected.
Beyond multiple offices, adland has grown bigger and deeper than it ever was, and the data coming out of it is only growing too. Agencies have in-house production departments, so do brands.
Connectivity between all offices of an agency network and all parts of one company is what helps awards people sort through a sea of work, clients to easily access the data wrapped around the asset (e.g. who produced it or directed it, etc), and cut cost massively.
While we’re long past the days of extremely expensive internet connection or the travel costs of a U-tape getting where it needs to be, 300 Vimeo accounts round up to about £360,000 a year.
With 40% of LBB’s viewers being brands, the benefits for agency networks melting their 300 accounts into one LBB page are very clear-cut.
Matt is categorical: “Digital asset management needs to evolve. People need to be more open to what can help and need to stop putting this off. From a marketing perspective it doesn’t benefit anybody. Like a brand wants to see what an agency or prod co have produced, but the business is making it so hard to do so”
‘’There is so much stuff being made now and someone needs to store and manage the 'work' files properly. IE packshots, generics. In the long run it will be the brand who takes control of that, though. They’ll need to as they work with so many different partners and suppliers. But I think what is incredibly important is that agencies, production companies and others have a simple place to store their marketing archive. LBB can do this and save the global business of advertising an absolute fortune. The money being wasted in this area is incredible and, even worse, some just don’t have the time or resources to get to it'’
Looking at the future of these systems, he leaves us with this: “What I’m most excited for is the day when people wake up and realise that heritage and history is just as important as the now. These asset libraries don’t just store, they educate the future group of people to come, they’re a place where people can see the great work that has come before them and build on it. They can open and they can benefit your brand massively”
If you’d like to learn more about LBB membership and how it can help the industry, email membership@lbbonline.com or find out more here https://info.lbbonline.com/lbb-membership
