DAM News Round-Up – 22nd June 2020
A collection of recent DAM-related articles from around the web, sourced from DAM Federation member, Planet DAM.
Paul Melcher of IMGTAG writing on kaptur.co discusses the issues with fake images. He describes three main types of fake: out-of-context, modified and completely fabricated images (of people, especially). He goes on to outline several solutions (and each of their shortcomings) ranging from blockchains, digital catalogues, invisible watermarking and date certification. This is a good overview of the issues associated with image authenticity, in particular Paul’s observation that “ironically, photography has evolved mostly as a tool to alter reality rather than to reproduce it with fidelity.” The issues around fake images bear similarities with duplicate image detection which I discussed on DAM News a couple of weeks ago.
On the Bynder blog, Grace Sherman, describes Bynder’s recent integration with Tray.io. The latter is a Digital Transformation automation platform that facilitates the integration of different enterprise Cloud products. Essentially, it provides a conduit for sending messages and triggering actions upon certain events which makes integration and automation far easier to implement. In a consultative capacity, I have been involved in some client integrations with DAM tools (including one instance where Bynder was the counterparty) and this was non-trivial to say the least. Some very old-fashioned belt and braces approaches using scheduled data loads were required due to the lack of connectors or sufficient API capabilities being available. This seems like it would solve a lot of those issues, in particular I found Tray.io’s “On-Premise Connectivity” feature one which looks potentially quite interesting for those dealing with integration projects involving core in-house managed IT systems (of which there are far more still in-use than many realise).
While the world is elbow tapping, we’re doing handshakes
Along the same lines to the previous item, is this from vendor, IntelligenceBank, about their ‘handshakes’ method of integrating with other platforms. From what I could tell of the write-up, this is developed by IntelligenceBank themselves rather than being a third party technology (unlike Binder’s use of Tray.io). IntelligenceBank have a number of pre-built connectors to tools such as Dropbox, JIRA, Slack, HubSpot (to name a few). There is a full list of third party integrations with some more details on their site.
When a Taxonomy Should not be Hierarchical
In this article, Heather Hedden describes how taxonomies do not always need to be hierarchical, in particular in the case facets where the taxonomy consists of attributes which do not have the classical parent/child or broader/narrower relationship which tends to be associated with taxonomies. Heather lists some reasons why you might not want to use a hierarchical taxonomy, noting that hierarchies should be created only if they serve a purpose.
Scott Brinker on his MarTech predictions
Briony Storer recently interviewed Marketing Technologist, Scott Brinker for the Bright Podcast and this article is a transcription of that recording. As many readers will know, Scott is responsible for The Marketing Technology Landscape graphic which shows 8,000 firms in the 2020 edition. My feelings over this diagram are mixed, especially as it relates to DAM. I would argue that DAM is less a ‘marketing technology’ and more a technology that is used by marketing people. DAM is primarily about metadata operations management, it just so happens that this fits very well with the requirements of marketers, especially in-relation to their rich media content like images, videos etc. The other issue I note with the diagram is that it less shows the growth of the industry and more Scott’s own appreciation that there are more firms in it than he previously realised (and in fairness to him, probably everyone else in the world too). For example, ResourceSpace are shown in the DAM area of the 2020 diagram, however, they are not in the 2015 edition. As I understand it, the ResourceSpace DAM platform has existed for about 11-12 years, the reason for the omission in 2015 is more likely to be that Scott (or a member of his team who does the research) had not heard of them at that point. As such, this is less useful as a proxy for gauging the growth of the wider martech sector. With all that said, Scott has some valid points, in particular that technology management and operations are now embedded in most marketing departments. I would certainly agree with him over that observation.
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