E-COMMERCE digital asset management <strong>12</strong> < steel, waves, fence, flower, cog, cactu From archive to asset TRYING TO TAP INTO THE NEW MEDIA BOOM BY SETTING UP A WEB DESIGN DEPARTMENT MAY HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE FOR PRINTERS, BUT PROVIDING A DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT SERVICE IS AN OPPORTUNITY THAT BUILDS ON EXISTING SKILLS, AND CAN INCREASE REVENUE AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY. KAREN CHARLESWORTH EXPLAINS. <strong>Imaging</strong> <strong>12</strong> autumn 2002
T heart of a digital asset agement service is its metadata: rt descriptions, thumbnails /or keywords relating to the ets that are stored in a abase and searched by the user. adata can be entered per asset automatically on a batch basis. metadata is linked to the et itself, which is normally red on a central server for y retrieval by terminals running ent access and he radical conclusions of the Pira/DTi joint study, Publishing in the Knowledge Economy, published in June this year, sent shockwaves through the industry. Publishers who are not prepared to embrace multiple delivery systems face a bleak future: “While there is no sign of the disappearance of print as a medium, it is no longer helpful to conceive of publishing solely in these terms,” was the report’s verdict. “Increasingly, publishing is a set of skills and core competences consisting of the acquisition, selection, editing, management and sale of content.” While there is no immediate danger for printers and repro houses, they must not rest on their laurels, the report concluded: there are enormous opportunities for climbing aboard the content management bandwagon, and by doing so, securing customer loyalty and opening up new revenue streams. According to the 2001 Frost & Sullivan report Digital Asset Management Markets, content management is one of the fastestgrowing business-to-business sectors: the US market has grown from $68m in 1997 to $839m in 2000, a twelve-fold increase in three years. Multi-channel mistake? The phrase ‘multi-channel delivery’ tends to elicit groans from printers: the concept isn’t new and has been heavily discredited in recent years. Five years ago, many column inches were being devoted to the exciting new idea that printers might also offer Web and CD design using the same content as the printed document. Despite investing heavily in equipment, software and staff, only a dozen or so UK printers ever managed to establish successful new media divisions, and most of those have struggled to stay alive in the sadder and wiser world that followed the dotcom boom-and-bust of the late 1990s. So it seems that UK printers have been there and done that. Or have they? Pira and the DTi think not – their suggestions for how printers can capitalise on the new media boom are subtly different. The THE ADVANTAGES OF OFFERING A DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT SERVICE ARE PERSUASIVE: ADDITIONAL REVENUE AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY report points towards one related group of services that all types of printers and repro houses can offer: digital asset management (DAM). Put simply, the idea is for printers to look after their clients’ stock of collateral so that assets can be called off and sent to new media designers, other printers, print designers, TV stations and so on as and when needed. Printers and repro houses will be familiar with the general principle of digital asset management. Most probably already do something like this for their customers on an informal (for which read ‘unpaid’) basis. But in Pira’s brave new Knowledge Economy, the informal is set to become formal on a grand scale. “Any customer who regularly places print is likely to have a set of assets that needs to be carefully managed as they move towards different publishing channels,” says Mark Stephenson, <strong>Fujifilm</strong> <strong>Graphic</strong> <strong>Systems</strong>’ sales support manager. “Sometimes the customer may want to do that management in-house, but they don’t always have the expertise or the manpower. There is a growing gap in the market for service-orientated organisations who can look after those assets properly and distribute them in suitably repurposed form on the customer’s behalf.” The advantages to printers of offering a digital asset management service are persuasive: an additional revenue stream and customer loyalty. The opportunities for long-term relationship-building are immense: even allocating search keywords to images in a media database demands more than a passing knowledge of the customer and his business. The UK’s general commercial printers in particular are seeing their tally of loyal customers declining year on year; the asset management service’s implicit encouragement to loyalty represents not only revenue but also regular income. Making it pay Charging for digital asset management services is a thorny issue. Mark Stephenson believes that printers and repro houses must use a different pricing model for asset management than the per-job , spiral, sky, mesh, railway, freight, droplets, basis on which they currently work: “The pricing structure for asset management has to be based on a regular retainer, because the work is usually a series of small tasks that individually don’t amount to much, but would take more time to document and invoice individually than it would to do the work,” he says. “A retainer also allows associated overheads to be properly accounted for.” Printers and repro houses are particularly well-placed to offer digital asset <strong>Imaging</strong> <strong>12</strong> autumn 2002 13
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