Podcast Ep. 31 – Navigating the Digital Asset Management landscape w/ Thomas Stilling

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Thomas Stilling is a digital content and technology leader driving solutions for the transformation of complex digital journeys into highly impactful customer experiences. Most recently at Forrester Research as VP, Digital Research, he built a team to reimagine the digital ecosystem and technology capabilities supporting Forrester’s research portfolio,

A known thought leader and a sought-out speaker on digital content, media supply chain and customer journeys, Thomas has presented thought leadership on timely topics including “People or Process – the Quest for Automation”, “14 Weeks: Scaling Your Team to Manage Disruptive Change”, and “Lessons from the (Digital) Front Lines”.

Previously an executive at 20th Century Fox, Thomas built a global organization overseeing digital and physical product planning and launches for film and tv projects. Leading teams through a period of extraordinary change in how digital content and IP were distributed and consumed, he was recognized for developing best in class organizational strategy and practices to support the realities of increased content volume and customer complexity.

In addition to his work at 20th Century Fox, Thomas has partnered with Warner, Disney, National Geographic, and Sky Media among others operationalizing high value customer experiences. He also has served as Head of Product for a NY based digital startup focused on monetizing content and building scalable SaaS licensing products

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Noz Urbina  

Hello, everybody. I’m here with Thomas stilling. Welcome, Thomas. Is first time we had Thomas on the podcast. I’m excited for today. Because I know that we have lots of people in our omnichannel X audience who are quite CMS aware. We’re getting into headless CMS as you know, we’ve got our our Adobe Experience managers and our systems like that which are basically page based systems. That have digital asset management capabilities. However, there is a whole class of digital asset management systems or dams, which is this whole class of of system which many of I know many of our customers are using, but often in a disconnected way. So I invited Thomas here today because he’s an expert in these things to tell us about what dams are, how they interact and how we can work with our colleagues in more effective way. So Thomas, you want to tell the audience little bit about yourself?

Thomas Stilling  

Sure. Thank you and thank you for having me. You know for myself I most recently have been with Forrester Research, leading digital strategy and really cut my teeth on dams years ago when I worked at 20 Century Fox so spent 10 years there working with lots of different kinds of assets when you think about marketing assets, large files, TV movies, crossing localization. Genres, metadata, all the words that you love, hear about when you think about asset management, and it was just such a fabulous moment. And so for me, digital asset management over the years has really been such an interesting field, both to interact with and to continue learning from so working with Fox working with Forrester Research. And then also currently I am of course instructor and creator at Rutgers. And part of what I teach there is a data governance and governance for assets in general, but also an upcoming certification course that’s going to be on AI workflows and leading change through this extraordinary period. So just a couple words, I’m really happy to be here.

Noz Urbina  

Fantastic. Well, that’s that’s many, many things. I have a deep interest in and I know my audience does as well. So can you kick us off with just a definition of a DAM, what is a DAM and also, what is a DAM versus a standard? Content Management System that my, these our listeners might be familiar with?

Thomas Stilling  

Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, one of the courses that I teach, our first question is tell us how you’ve interacted with them. And often you don’t realize it. Dams are in the background of so many different omnichannel and experiences. And journeys that are taking place. So anytime you look at a product anytime you interact with something, whether it’s visual, whether it’s audio, you are interacting with a product or an item that has been stored in the DAM, whether it’s marketing images, the video images, or the audio files, that’s where companies are tracking it and keeping their assets. And so if you think about the difference between a CMS and a DAM, you know, for a CMS, whether it’s headless or not has, you’re working with a tool that is meant to publish things to track versions, and to get the content out into the channel that you’re distributing it to DAM originally started years ago as just a very simple asset management tool. You put things in, how do you find it and then you put things out and what it’s really evolved into, and we’ll talk a little bit about it is this wonderful Cornerstone or foundation that really powers so many omni channel experiences? And when you think about what it connects to and how it connects, even though you don’t may not know that it’s there. It’s probably present in all of your organizations. And it’s powering so much of the work that you do.

Noz Urbina  

So I’m if I’m right to make this distinction, but dams we have a little bit of a fight over the word asset here, because we talk a lot about content assets and managing your content as a business asset and asset asset asset. But when we’re talking about DAM, we’re and we say that we’re digital asset, there’s actually a slightly different definition there. You’re dealing mainly more with photos, videos, PDFs, things that are not web text.

Thomas Stilling  

Correct. It tends to be less copy. That’s not always the case. And that depends on the industry. So and depends on the branding and what the tool is trying to accomplish but typically DAM for originally used for, as you said, video assets, audio files, image files, you know, all the different varieties and you know, downstream upstream assets that are moving. And so when you think about what’s on a CMS in your publishing, dams traditionally don’t have that publishing motion. They are meant as sort of core functionality of storage, and, you know, adding in other layers, so access control, adding and versioning. And so there’s a lot of really interesting use cases around the fact that you were storing these assets and then how are they used? In your organization?

Noz Urbina  

And then licensing as well.

Thomas Stilling  

DAM can pick track licensing, but there are separate categories of tools that are much more efficient. And I think what you’ll find nowadays is that like many tools, dams are trying to be all things and so they have overlap into licensing. They may have some light publishing capabilities. They likely have aI capabilities now, and what we’re seeing in these last couple of quarters, and so you’ve got this sort of what was originally meant as a dedicated tool to do a thing, now working to become a Swiss army knife, and there’s pros to that. And there’s cons to that when you run into it. It makes

Noz Urbina  

me a little crazy. I have this thing with with software we have we have a love hate relationship software because I love you know, I love a good tool as as everybody does

Thomas Stilling  

always need a good tool functional tool, right?

Noz Urbina 

Gotta have a good tool. You know, Lord God, do they always want to just keep expanding what they do. I am not going to mention names but certain very famous CRM system which decided it’s going to be a knowledge base. And inside it’s going to be a web publishing system as you know it like it’s the eye. Are you familiar with a mock architecture? Yes. Yeah. So this idea that you can provide lots of capabilities, but let the people mix and match to build the systems that make sense instead of having these massive beasty overlapping systems where you got your CMS that can do DAM and it can do taxonomy and your DAM does taxonomy and so do you do have a kind of picture of what you think good looks like in terms of distributing the load between these systems? When do I know I need a DAM versus just whacking images and videos on my CMS?

Thomas Stilling  30:47

I love the question because oftentimes organizations know what they don’t like and what won’t work. And sometimes they start from there, which can be a useful and sort of a scoping exercise to understand what you don’t need and what are the requirements that are not a priority. But I think good right now, if there’s two different sort of approaches that are that are working for DAM, to your point, I think the mock architecture is wonderful. You’d have this ability to really find the capabilities that you’re looking for. And generally, that’s lightweight systems and tools that can connect whether through API or through another layer. And that is something that you can then build over time and can be really flexible for your organization. It also could have some positive cost impact there. Are some wonderful ways to sort of slice the onion with a couple of different tools. And then you get what your organization needs the most of the second category, which is sort of what you’re talking about these sort of big omnibus tools, which have everything and you know, rolled into one. There is an elegance to that. And I appreciate that companies who have Enterprise rollouts and are really trying to target you know, perhaps hundreds or 1000s of users having one system that is one label, one user interface, really has value. And if you think about a typical day, if you’re no matter what role you’re in, the number of the moments of task shifting that we do across our different applications and across our own work, get can be more complicated or perceived as more difficult and pain points if you’re constantly using different UX and having different experiences. So I think good for me, really in for an organization is defining what do you need? And it’s the core tenant of governance when you think about governance for digital asset management for CMS, for any type of system that you’re putting in play is defining what you need. And then when you look, you’ll know what good looks like for your organization. And that can be very small, or that can be more complex, but it really comes back to what do you need to be successful in to meet your goals?

Noz Urbina  32:50

I can envisage a future I’m interested in your opinion and I can envision a future where in the same way that when we when we deliver an experience we expect to the external audience that the tech stack under that to be completely invisible. Like I don’t go to a website and go I’m in the CMS now. Now I’m in the CRM,

Thomas Stilling  33:11

but sometimes you do which isn’t designed to raise

Noz Urbina  33:16

the kind of the so we didn’t define mark. So Mark is a microservices and micro service is simply this idea that you you package up these little services. Rather than having the big piece of software it’s digested into these different services which can be called by different applications across your tech stack. API first. Again, a very techie word. So I’ve got acronyms on top of on top of acronyms here. But API first is the the idea that was designed for integration. It wasn’t designed to be monolithic, and then integration is an afterthought. Design with integration from the ground up. There’s there’s two different definitions of see, Cloud is the one I see most often does not want to come or one of us cloud or component, something like that. But basically, I think cloud is the is the is the correct one, and then headless. And so if if we’re moving in this headless direction, where you’re you’re building a layer, that is the interface point with whomever it is on the outside, and that’s going to pull from the DAM from that CMS from the CRM from the technical documentation repository. It’s gonna pull this experience together from whatever systems that needs to because they’re all disconnected from they’re not directly part of that. Why can we have that internally? Like to address exactly what you’re talking about? Why do our internal people have to have to go into all these different UIs and different experiences? It would make a lot more sense if we could build them, interfaces which were decoupled.

Thomas Stilling  34:52

Yeah, I think you’ve got a great point. You know, one of the challenges is when you look at tools that do both microservices and have a user experience moment, is often you see tools that do that. Don’t do it. Well. They’re they’re trying to do too many things at once. So maybe they built in some micro services, which for user means I can be in the tool that I know that I only love, and I have these capabilities and behind the scenes, I don’t really need to understand what’s in that stack to your point. I can just do the work that I need to do to be successful. I think we’re tools are sort of struggling is when they try to have a designed experience and a microservices experience. And then you get this really interesting moment of I’m almost in the tool that I know but I sometimes have to go somewhere else. And so whether it is a DAM, or CMS or a CRM, if you can bring these things together on an almost agnostic layer and allow your users to really benefit from the different pieces of punching functionality. You have a win. Now so for example, when you talk about going to a place dams used to absolutely and still are in many cases the destination, you go to a thing, and many companies will customize it. So if I’m putting in you know, 100,000 assets, or I’ve got 500 video images, or I’ve got you know, different things I’m using for my marketing campaigns. It used to be a destination, you would go to the DAM you would search you would find your assets. Maybe you would assign rights to them some light rights management, you would tag some metadata to your assets, and then that could flow into an ecosystem. But often still, when you look at organizations, you go to the DAM and then you go somewhere else. And so one of the moments that I get really excited about and there’s a great segment and one of the conferences that we attend called the the DAM bakeoff. And one of the this scenario is you put these DAM vendors and providers up on the same stage and they have a short amount of time to demo to the exact use case. And when you see integrations work, like when they’re integrating with you know, just to you know, your favorite image tool when they’re integrating with you know your taxonomy. When things work. It is very exciting. As soon as you have to start scrolling, and you’re clicking and you’re bouncing around trying to fit the pieces together, that negatively impacts the users efficiency and what they can do for output. So it’s very exciting where some of these tools are going because it’s moved beyond what was the core functionality of DAM and when it connects. It’s a beautiful thing. And when you’re just clicking and scrolling, like I said it can be painful.

Noz Urbina  37:31

Some of the examples which have I’ve seen my clients doing it really well. They are you know, when you make a webpage for example, you can’t insert anything, but it can come from the DAM. So you are using the CMS but every time you want to insert an image or a video or a download, etc, that always comes from the DAM people can’t just upload stuff, throw it on the CMS somewhere. And there

Thomas Stilling  37:55

was great. There was a great anecdote. Tim was telling me the other day about a marketing campaign that was happening in Germany, and the key art was all locked down. And so just to go back to the theme around governance and standards and how do you you know, sort of enable your your outcomes. They screenshot the image from the DAM. They then modified it in a separate program, uploaded it back into the DAM as a new image with metadata to completely defeat the workflow. And that got them into brand compliances and got them into standards issues. And unfortunately, they also had incorporated an image within the image that was not licensed. And so it was sort of this trifecta of problems. And it sort of makes me smile a little bit no matter what you build as a tech stack or what you build as a tool for your teams. The human mind is very creative, and water will seek to run downhill. And so part of what we do when we you know put these systems together is we have to be really thoughtful about where do they play? How do you interact with them? And what’s that access and the rules that you work with? But yeah, it was it was a really interesting scenario of how they completely bypassed all the existing workflows, which weren’t very tightly controlled anyway, and so it was sort of a symptom rather than the problem.

Noz Urbina  39:15

So that takes us to some some interesting questions. So if you are on the CMS team, and you know this a DAM team kicking around, but you’re not properly integrated. What’s, how do we start that dialogue as a CMS people to try to integrate what are the two, two of the biggest content repositories that possibly in the brand?

Thomas Stilling  39:40

Yeah, and you know, for ownership of systems, which organizations can get really tied up about? often but not always, the CMS will be controlled by one part or one part of the organization and the DAM will be controlled by another part. And, you know, everyone has good intent, but you know, time crunch, you know, focus, what are our priorities and different budgets, maybe the two never meet. And I think really, when you start that conversation, it is a change moment. And one of the things if you know, if you’re overseeing a CMS, to go back to a note I made earlier, what do you want to accomplish? And I think part of that is education. Once you decide what you want to accomplish, part of it is education, and going to the owners of the DAM team, and learning about the capabilities. It may be that they’ve got a wonderful system that you just haven’t been made aware of. Or it may be that, you know, there is sort of an older model, so to speak, sitting in the garage, and it really isn’t meant to interact with the CMS. And so beginning that conversation and learning about what are the requirements what are the capabilities that we were looking for, and then how could the systems work well together, becomes, you know, good old, good old change management practices. And I think that that often gets skipped over and you go people who jumped into a technical conversation before they really define what the business outcomes are. And so it should be grounded in that. And then you can have the requirements and the technical use cases that you’re trying to achieve and how that you want them to integrate. So like, what are some of the problems that you’re seeing most with CMS because for us to that point, like if it’s your earlier example, if a CMS is already connected to a DAM, and they’re attempting to do rights workflow around, that’s a positive stuff. If your CMS is one in which you are reaching out and you have to take additional steps to get a thing from the DAM. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. But often it’s really understanding the capabilities and knowing Okay, what do I need to be successful for this outcome?

Noz Urbina  41:47

So we had examples, for example, in pharma where it was it was just that people didn’t have the assets available. People didn’t know what was available to them or there’s this kind of, we’re hitting a scale problem all across the content world. So you just can’t have one global enterprise search, you know, as much as we want kind of like the executives all say, well, it’s putting my question, I’ll get my answer. We want to pre filter that so I like I want to know I want the assets that are from my brand. I want the assets that are for my region. I want the assets you know, that are current, like just cut out tons of these results and give me something that’s more filtered. On the on the flip side of that we have this problem with both DAM and CMS, which is tagging it to do everything I just said, Who’s going to tag all this stuff, so that you can do all this filtering on the front or back end. I

Thomas Stilling  42:45

now into tagging is where I think there’s a lot of excitement and it’s so interesting in the market. So find ability. You’re absolutely right I need a thing. How do I go find this thing? And so an asset without metadata, and I forget how many years ago we did a talk at a Finance Conference, we were talking about that an asset without metadata is basically useless. And so if you have an undescribed object, you can’t find it. You can’t use it, you don’t know where you can use it. And so what do you have to start? So one of those foundations is the ability to tag an asset, a digital asset in a way that’s useful to the organization and what is exciting about AI and some of the automation what you’re seeing out there with a lot of these tools are automated tagging, where they take our photos, for example, and they you know, identify who we are, you know, comments around what we’re wearing, maybe because it was sourced from a specific agency or you know, outlet. There’s some other additional information about you know, where we’re sitting, what time of day, you know, general descriptive metadata, but I think when you pair descriptive metadata with more around how you can use it, that sort of licensing and that access, then you get very interesting results. And what often happens and a question that came up a lot earlier in the spring, we were at a conference is an executive from a gaming company said, Well, I have a problem. I have, you know, several terabytes of data. These are images, these are components. These are different pieces for the games that we’re producing. And I don’t know where to start. And my question back was, well, what what is the challenge specifically, and they said only 20% of their assets actually had quality metadata, and the rest of it was complete was incomplete. And so if you don’t describe a thing, in a way that you can find it, it doesn’t exist. So it’s, you know, if a tree falls in the forest without metadata, the the tree didn’t fall.

Noz Urbina  44:43

Page seven of Google

Thomas Stilling  44:44

Yeah. Right. So

Noz Urbina  44:47

so well, that that raises the the the the buzzword of buzzwords, which is Ai, ai, ai. So you know, what I’m seeing is that everybody in all the systems wants to put in all the AI features that they can think of, and cram them into their cram them into their software. What are what do you think are good implementations of AI in a DAM and what do you think is probably better done in another system?

Thomas Stilling  45:16

Yeah, and it’s a real fair question on the level of AI, and sometimes what I call, you know, what can be called pseudo AI, which is really more on automation or machine learning a little bit. But what’s great is and what gives you a star is automated tagging. And again, it’s not perfect, I think, you know, whether it’s 8020 6040, it gives you a start, so that for example, if you are transitioning into a DAM or you’re moving your assets, and you have X number of assets that are undescribed. You can walk them through, potentially a tool or this functionality and get maybe a starter set of metadata, which is a beginning. And never underestimate the fact that even if there’s some, you know, the metadata is imperfect, you at least have a dartboard that you’re working with. So I think a lot of the DAM vendors for automated tagging, are doing great work here. I think the other piece that’s interesting that blurs the line a little bit as particularly for marketing when you’re doing variations of an image. multiple tools now are taking say, a flat image for a product you know, maybe it’s a razor or maybe it’s a you know, in the department store or drugstore and you can do variations on background. You can change the image itself, and whether it’s templated or workflow, you can get a little bit of that generative AI moment to sort of brute force out the marketing materials. That one I think is interesting, but it works really well when you again you have a defined outcome that you’re looking for. I think where dams are getting a little bit into trouble is if they’re trying to reach too far into the creative zone, and maybe they’re trying to go a little bit farther in in the image creation. Or you know, I think one of the companies that has a some functionality is going to not save for work. I think some of that has less value for the core purpose of DAM and then those creative functions probably should be sitting somewhere else. There’s a debate about where they sit. But I think right now that to your point AI is getting appended to so many different tools out there in really useful ways and maybe in ways that aren’t as useful or don’t fit as much. And I think when you start really crossing over and you’re seeing this overlap between what are the requirements for my core asset management, versus what are my core requirements for creative team that is really generating and working with original images. Where does it begin and end? Some of it to me feels a little bit like sales where and if you know, yes, you’ve got that functionality and it’s wonderful, and it will sell the product when you actually look at what a DAM is being used for. It is still the core use case of find ability and usability

Noz Urbina  48:06

storage. I’m I’m this I think was something we didn’t address is that I see one of the big difference between CMS and DAM is that CMS is very often used as your creative space, you create content in your CMS. Whereas you load content into your DAM. You write your you’ve created it somewhere else and you put it in there as a for storage for findability accessibility from different systems, but you made it in PowerPoint or you know, Adobe tools or whatever you did. And that’s, I see that the both good and bad. And I’m interested to know if this if this is being improved, for example. We’ll come back to the front of use cases. We’ve got tons of PowerPoints in there. And these PowerPoints come out as PowerPoints for presentation. They also come out as PDFs as Downloadables. But the actual assets within each PowerPoint, its entirety, which could be 100 slides on pages is an asset. But then there’s massive duplication across these assets. And I’m wondering if if DAM is doing anything to help us try to address that because I don’t want them to they can’t become the actual you’re not going to make your PowerPoints in the DAM system. But some way of letting us know that there’s exact duplication in in the different assets. In there definitely I’m all for that.

Thomas Stilling  49:31

Ya know, you know, when you when you think about deduplication PowerPoints an interesting use case, because so for example Version Version Control very elegantly if you are creating a document in PowerPoint, for example, and you are saving it consistently to your DAM, many DAM tools do an excellent job of providing that versioning status, making sure that you’re always seeing your last one. And you know even PowerPoint does it pretty well when you actually go through your version history. But that should be able to enable that where I think deduplication runs into the human element is we consistently try to rename and put things in places that we know very well. So for example, one of the discussions for many, many years in the studios about asset management was what do you name a thing and there used to be something called intelligent coding so that you can look at a code and you could tell that it was a TV show, or that it was a movie show and these code naming convention. Have a naming convention. Yeah, just the naming convention. And so but what you would happen is you would create your favorite code, maybe I would create my favorite code and because dams weren’t, you know, as functional as they are today, you’d run into a lot of a lot of duplication for multiple types of assets. And I think what dams can do very well is that version control and history and status a lot around the workflow. It’s ready for you to review I’m going to review it now. You’ve got some great possibilities there. The image deduplication is an is an interesting use case. I think there are some dams again, like we were saying earlier that are incorporating more creative and more true generative functionality. into their systems. And it can look for similar images, but it’s still evolving. And I think that if you’re reliant on so for example, if you have a dirty set of assets, we call it dirty data, or dirty assets. You would take a couple of passes with the AI to do automated tagging to do some deduplication. But at the end of the day, today, you still need a human often to do that quality check on that quality call. So AI is a tool to be used but it’s not the end all be all in a DAM.

Noz Urbina  51:49

Yeah, at this I’m also realizing that there’s the core use case of what we’ve been talking about with DAM videos, photos, etc. That’s all fine, but where I’m bumping into it a lot is actually where people are, are are loading text heavy documents in there. So we just mentioned the PowerPoint one, PDFs could be hundreds of pages long. Do you have any feelings on how that workflow should look in terms of if we’re going to handle creation and deduplication outside? How do we make sure that we’re governing content governing this process? So that when we’re putting stuff into the DAM, we can map it back? Like if we have more variants of a white paper, they each have their version history and they each have their real workflow, etc in the DAM, but you know that if they’re 80%, the same. They’re actually pointing back to 80%, the same component our CMS system so do you have any kind of intellectual thoughts on that particular?

Thomas Stilling  52:51

Yeah, I you know, the first jump to mind and I’m smiling because it’s for publishing, for digital publishing. One of the wonderful things if you are using a DAM correctly, and you’ve got your metadata tag to it, is that teams are there was a team that I worked with and they actually were using the DAM, there was metadata on the DAM, but then within the document, they were putting in descriptive metadata. So you would have this conflict between the the data in the tagging in the document and the tagging of the container of the document, right and that caused endless agita as the teams are really struggling with that. But I think when you look at some of the opportunities there, you still have the ability to go to core principles. And again, it comes around to governance and process and standards. So and I appreciate the question of like, you know, what would you do? What are some things that work well, but again, if you don’t have that foundation to approach the work, it doesn’t matter the tool and it doesn’t matter the process, and I think there is for CMS or for DAM going back to those basic principles is something that I constantly work on with my own colleagues and clients just trying to help them understand this is how you approach this, and how you move forward. And we were talking at a conference earlier in the year and someone said, oh, it just sounds like really good governance and change management principles. And I said, Yes, that’s the basis for this. And that’s the basis of what you can do. But you know, I’m not sure that quite answers your question when I was thinking about republishing metadata around the container there and metadata in it, and just bad practices that get introduced into an ecosystem and, you know, independent of the tool. Well,

Noz Urbina  54:31

I think what we’re what we’ve concluded is it it can get complicated fast, and setting up those setting up those those processes and the desired state and discussing that monitor teams is vital to untangling that.

Thomas Stilling  54:47

Yeah, no, and I think if you think about you know, in the greater context of DAM in the creative ecosystem, often organizations may have a mini DAM or they do have a DAM that’s connected to the rest of their tools, and it’s silent, and maybe it works well. And I think and maybe it doesn’t, but I think when you look at the potential into your question back, you know, if a team who owns the CMS is working with DAM if you look at the potential for real, functional ecosystem, you know, connectivity and integration, you’ve got some amazing possibilities to expedite content to increase scale to approve and do quality checks over a higher volume. Like there’s a lot of opportunities there. And I think where teams struggle is if they’re locked into I work with this tool unjust this tool, you’re working with your tool, you’re losing that opportunity, even if the systems aren’t great. Working together, absolutely produces better, more consistent and streamlined outcomes. And I think that’s just one of the key takeaways to highlight.

Noz Urbina  55:51

I think that’s a good omnichannel X message to end on. We you know, we’re it’s coming back to what we were saying before, we’re building your tech stack should be one system made of made of different software applications within that and you’re gonna get the most you get the best result. If you’re thinking about it that way. Instead of silo thinking, well, this is my, my email tool, and this is my no social media tools, my DAM tool, and it’s my CMS tool.

Thomas Stilling  56:18

And then especially for larger organizations, you know, there’s one company we work with that has 22 brands. And so within those 22 brands are 22 separate technical tech stacks and in you know, functional ecosystems, and the tool that will you know, save them is not redesigning everything, but really looking at okay, what are the capabilities you need? What’s that foundation and then microservices integrations, you can go a long way very quickly and low CapEx spend, if you’re smart and you know what you need to do. But yes, the problem usually is the silos and dams you know, should be part of every conversation in these in these moments as an integrated function. It doesn’t have to stand alone, and it can’t push out an overlap too much with your existing

Noz Urbina  57:10

processes. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Great. So we’re on time. I want to thank you so much, Thomas, for joining us. This is really nice talk. We haven’t had enough. We have not had enough DAM content so far. So I hope this is the beginning of good things. We didn’t even get to talk about where your where your taxonomy should live.

Thomas Stilling  57:28

Oh, DAM and taxonomy. That’s another half hour we can actually go with that one.

Noz Urbina  57:34

I think we should probably park that for a future episode. Because that’s a whole topic. I know. There’s lots of interest in our in our audience going well, okay, but we’re no How do I keep these tags straight?

Thomas Stilling  57:45

Right hierarchy taxonomy. We can do a wonderful session on metadata. And many, many anecdotes to come on. That topic.

Noz Urbina  57:53

Fantastic. So thank you so much. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Remember to check out OmnichannelX.digital We’re running several event series. Now it’s going to be an ongoing thing. So you can always check out the Events tab on our website and see what events are happening. This is we’re thinking about different categorizations for this one. So we did we’re just finishing up pharma and omnichannel last year. So we talked a little bit about Pharma. We talked about DAM so so keep your eyes out on the website and the newsletter for more. Absolutely. Thank

Thomas Stilling  58:24

you for having me. This is fun. We should do it again.

Noz Urbina  58:26

Absolutely. Okay. Bye, everybody.

Thomas Stilling  58:29

Bye. Just recording stopped. Awesome. Okay, that was all right. Sorry. I know a couple of your questions. You were searching for something specific and my brain started floating and I didn’t quite get to where I think you wanted me to go.

Noz Urbina  58:46

It’s okay. I understand. I understand. I’ve been there. I think you had a you had some I loved an asset without metadata as useless that’s going to be our hook at the beginning of the episode for sure. And I think we got there at the end, and that’s, you know, it was a good conversation. And there were there were valuable nuggets in there, but I know I know. I know what and when you’re talking about it happens.

Thomas Stilling  59:09

Oh, yeah, no, your last question. I was like, I started thinking about the anecdote and I literally forgot what you were asking. And so I just started tap dancing.

Noz Urbina  59:18

So good. Oh, good.

Thomas Stilling  59:20

No, but I love your idea. You know if you are actually doing I know you’re a time a DAM series in the future, and we want to be like very specific, like DAM and metadata, DAM and tagging. You know, I think people will listen to the chat and, you know, they’ll understand that there is a lot of change out there. And your question about silos, I think was really good. And so hopefully, my wrap up statements sort of helped bring things together.

Noz Urbina  59:46

Yeah, no, no, I like that. I think we ended up we ended ended nicely, you know, and that’s, that’s, you got to stick the landing. That’s the important part. So I think I think that was good. I’ve got to run. But thank you so much for doing this.

Thomas Stilling  59:59

You have amazing presentations. If you get a chance to catch up next week or so that whenever works, I’ll shoot you know, let’s like chat and tell you about travels and stuff.

Noz Urbina  1:00:08

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Let’s, uh, let’s talk and see if there’s some opportunity for us to collaborate in some way.

Thomas Stilling  1:00:14

Sounds cool. Awesome. Thanks, man. Really appreciate it. A pleasure.

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