Brandworkz Partners With Differentia Consulting To Provide Advanced DAM User Behaviour Analytics
One of our featured DAM vendors, Brandworkz, have announced a partnership with UK Business Intelligence (BI) consulting operation, Differentia. Brandworkz’ DAM solution will capture raw auditing data which users can then audit using one of Differentia’s BI dashboards (which are developed using tools from a vendor called Qlick):
“The Smarter.DAM Dashboard creates a single view of the way digital assets are being used, marketing activities managed and campaigns executed. The dashboard application is designed to be visual and easy to digest, taking complex data on the marketing processes and assets that represent a brand and presenting the data so that it can be analysed quickly. The dashboard gives clarity on how marketing management is affecting brand consistency, governance, education and operations via powerful attribution analysis.” [Read More]
This is noteworthy for a couple of different reasons. The first is that more focus is now being placed by some vendors on auditing asset activity across their lifecycle, not only as it applies to DAM but also potential use outside also. The second is that partnerships are being formed with specialists, rather than the vendor taking on the whole task themselves.
On the first point, the motivation for DAM vendors wanting to provide more visibility about asset activity has presumably come from their end users needing to know more about what is happening to their digital assets. As we have discussed many times on DAM News, it is the post-implementation ROI where the action is in DAM, as organisations consume and produce even more digital assets. Auditing data provides tangible proof of that ROI, rather than a pre-implementation estimate that is more intended to be a vendor sales tool than statement of fact. Business Intelligence extensions of the type described in this release offer the opportunity to work out how to optimise ROI further and you would expect demand for them to increase over time – so I can foresee other vendors building up features in this area.
The press release makes some reference to Big Data, which might in part be more buzzword than reality at this point as I am not sure most DAM solutions yet generate enough data to get towards the petabytes that are considered a baseline for that term to be justified. However, that is only the current situation and I could foresee scenarios in the not to distant future where combining DAM data sources with something on a much larger scale (e.g. transactional data) could acquire the necessary volume for the ‘Big Data’ description to be more justified.
The second item of interest is the fact Brandworkz have partnered with a third party. Last year we discussed the DAM Value Chain in some detail and anticipated that DAM vendors would increasingly have to choose their battles more carefully and pick partners to cover features which would stretch them too far to provide entirely using in-house resources. A lot of DAM vendors I talk to still think of Business Intelligence as essentially ‘reporting’ and it is true that this is at the core of what is being offered, but the scope of what that description entails is going to get a lot wider and deeper than many may have bargained for. Clearly Brandworkz have seen that as a possible risk and this is why they are partnering up with a specialist in that field.
Business Intelligence, like asset manipulation, annotation, workflow, archival and a whole spectrum of other DAM related functions is another area that lends itself well to a supply or value chain concept in DAM and is not complex (from an engineering perspective) to allow other tools to plug into. This is already well established in WCM (Web Content Management) where it is usually understood by most that some third party tool can and should be used rather than having web developers build general reporting features entirely from scratch. The same technique looks like it is going to be more widely applied in DAM also very soon and, judging by the amount of marketing cash being thrown at CXM currently, some crossover between different applications in this area (where they apply to marketing oriented uses) certainly seems in prospect.
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