Maxwell Mabe

What companies/organizations have you worked for as a DAM professional? What was your role at each?

• Extensis, Systems Engineer, Integration and Consulting Services
• Extensis, Product Manager
• Apple, Senior Product Manager
• Adobe, Senior Product Marketing Manager
• Adobe, Senior Product Manager
• Cloudinary, Senior Director Product Marketing and Strategy
• Aprimo, VP of Product Marketing

How do you describe Digital Asset Management to others?

A centralized collection of items including rich media, static assets and associated data, leveraging intelligence to facilitate cross-team collaboration and greatly enhancing content velocity.

What’s the most important thing for someone new to DAM to understand about DAM?

Every DAM solution requires regular care and attention. Workflow and business needs change. Available features in the DAM change. To maximize the value of DAM you must regularly and systematically tune and update.

How did you learn DAM? Any recommended sources?

Organically. At the start of my career, I managed a large digital photography studio. We moved thousands of files through complex workflow, editing, and approval processes. This led to the creation of a detailed asset workflow guide (little did I know it was the start of my career path in DAM and technology).

What is your ongoing greatest challenge with DAM?

As a Product Manager and Marketer, the ever-present challenge is understanding the needs of our end users. How to gather and sort all the technical advances, how to adapt and craft useful features, once ready how do we craft a message that is easily understood and valuable to more technical and non-technical users.

What is your vision for DAM? What will it look like in 5 years?

There are several factors that have raised the profile or DAM within organizations. I’ll touch on three: Composable Architecture, an increased need for more digital assets, and technical advances.

Moving away from monolithic solutions to a collection of well-connected, best-in-class, focused applications has driven the need to have a centralized repository for digital assets. An organization cannot realize the full potential and value of headless without DAM.

The number of assets required to feed experiences and the growing number of channels has exploded. Old ways of tackling this with file and folder structure or sync and share online services do not scale. Businesses of all sizes need more functionality: better collaboration, better search, more automation, etc. You can only get this with a modern DAM solution. Without DAM business will miss out on growth and quickly find themselves far behind competitors.

Finally, technical advances. Artificial Intelligence has been used in DAM for several years, many think it’s a recent inclusion. It’s been used for smart tagging (keywording) for ages. New on the stage is Generative AI which has created a huge wave of excitement for users and developers of DAM solutions. Generative AI unlocks an incredible variety of net new features along with impressive enhancements to existing workflow-focused features.

All the above will lead to a future where assets manage themselves with little or limited action required by users.

What was your biggest mistake with regard to DAM?

Me make mistakes, never. In my career I have seen any number of businesses rush into DAM with no real understanding of the importance of having a plan. The excitement is real and understandable however just dumping thousands of assets into the DAM without proper planning will lead to very poor ROI in the immediate short term. The process does not have to be complex, seek out a DAM professional to help you get off on the right foot, start small, test and tune.

What was your biggest success with regard to DAM?

There are a quite a number, too many to choose just one. During my years of consulting, I really enjoyed helping companies large and small get up and running with DAM. There are several interactions with end users that are priceless memories, those light bulb moments when they get the value, understand the reasoning—when it all clicks in for them. DAM is a great helper and it’s amazing to be part of that help.

If you weren’t doing DAM as a career, what would you be doing?

I would likely have a career in architecture as a huge fan on modern structure and the entire process of construction.

What more would you like to learn about DAM?

As a DAM professional and seasoned tech worker this is hard to answer. At this stage of my career, I am delving deep into the technical details of Generate AI: LLMs, RAG, Tokens, etc. One must keep current.

 

About Maxwell Mabe

Maxwell is the Vice President of Product Marketing for DAM software vendor Aprimo.  He is a passionate business leader with extensive experience in product development, strategy and marketing and is also a subject matter expert in DAM, video, and advanced media such as 3D formats.  Maxwell’s professional certifications include: Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and AWS Technical & Business Professional Accreditation.

You can connect with Max via his LinkedIn profile.

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