Planet DAM Now Syndicated On DAM News

Recent visitors to DAM News might notice the sidebar with links from Tim Strehle’s Planet DAM feed which we have now syndicated (with Tim’s permission).  Planet DAM is Tim’s hand-picked selection of DAM articles from different participants in our industry and includes vendors, consultants and a variety of personal blogs and related websites. I frequently use this as my go-to source for current information about DAM now (as well as being an avid reader of Tim’s own blog – which I can also highly recommend).

There is an interview with Tim on Widen’s digitalassetmanagement.com site that they published recently under their ‘DAM Champ’ series and this is well worth reading as it gives some useful perspective on what it’s like to deliver DAM solutions as a developer, which isn’t something you read about a lot (even though it’s this group of people who have the responsibility for getting the DAM systems that the industry uses to actually work).  In addition to Tim, they also have interviews with Deb Fanslow, Laura Fu and a number of others who are both active DAM users and well-known in our sector.

Those who have spent some time reviewing on-line materials about DAM will note the remarkable similarity of the DAM Champ articles to the DAM Guru interviews on the DAM Guru site which have already been running for a few years (since 2013, I believe).  DAM Guru was established by Picturepark (although I gather some of the people managing it now work for other organisations).  One key difference is that DAM Guru also run an entirely free ‘matching’ service where they link up those looking for expertise with suitable providers like consultants etc where Widen have more taken only the ‘content marketing’ aspect of the exercise.  The other difference is that the DAM Champ series is liberally sprinkled with advertisements for their sponsor and exhortations for you to request demonstrations of their products, however, to date I have not received marketing literature as a result of being signed up to DAM Guru (and I believe they operate a very strict policy about not allowing it to be used for sales and marketing purposes).

The phrase ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ often gets used in these situations and (by that measure) there’s a lot of flattery in general across the Digital Asset Management industry as I’m regularly needing to contact someone or other to decline their kind offer of vacuous compliments in exchange for their use of copyrighted material that I have responsibility for and request, instead, that they substitute it for attribution of their sources and/or hard cash.  In this case, however, it’s merely a good idea which is being borrowed and to be fair to Widen, they have provided a link to DAM Guru at the end of Tim’s interview (albeit at his own suggestion).

One further reason why this might be a positive development is that a few more vendors have begun to grasp that them and their senior personnel are actually not the most important people in the DAM universe.  In the past, I’ve compared some vendor output to watching North Korean state television and continuing that analogy, you used to regularly get interviews with the vendor’s equivalents of Kim Jong Un and have to sit through videos where they talked about how much they were into basketball, where they went to university, their favourite chewing gum etc.  I get the impression that much of this was at the behest of the PR agencies or marketing consultants that most of the vendors thought they could leave their marketing communications tasks with and the firms responsible went in for this kind of exercise because it was a good way to convince their clients that they were doing something to justify their fees.

Thankfully, the ‘new emperor’s clothes’ era of DAM marketing seems to have ended and although a lot of the sell-side output (by both vendors and consultants) is still over-simplified DAM content marketing dross, the focus has moved towards those who will be actively engaged in DAM initiatives and may, therefore, have some potentially useful information to share.  Progress (however modest) should always be welcomed.

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