[Music] [Marc Angelinovic] Hello, everyone. I'm Marc Angelinovic. I am the Principal Product Marketer for AEM Assets. I live, breathe, spend a lot of time sleeping and dreaming about DAM. So this is something that I really care about. I feel like I'm a steward of this, talking at different industry events, etcetera. And I'm honored to be here with Abby who has a long history of managing the DAM. So maybe tell a little bit about yourself. [Abby Davalos] Sure. Well, I'm so glad to be here, everybody. Hello. Hello. And, Marc, thank you for having me.
Been at Fossil now for just coming up on 12 years, always in some sort of content marketing, creative operations type role. I think that, I've served a couple of different teams or been under a different couple of teams but the common thread has always been content and the organization and management of that content. So I like to moonlight as a creative technologist these days. It's what I'm doing. But current state, I am overseeing both in-house photo studios at our Dallas headquarters, and also have a second half of my team that is responsible for regional execution and just bringing to life of all of our brand's assets throughout the globe. Awesome. So when I think about Fossil, I definitely think about the watches, right? But talking with you, I know Fossil is so much more and I'm so glad that you are able to come up and talk because when I often talk to people, I hear, "But retail is not part of my manufacturing or it's not part of my financial services, it's not my vertical." Right? But one thing I really want to have you talk about and bring out is, technology is technology. We all have a supply chain and how we move through. Now fossil touches a lot and I'll have you jump in, in a second here, but it translates across, right? I think in the Keynote, you said, "Managing a marketing team is very similar to driving a race car at 230 miles an hour." I think managing technology and how we look at technology spans across industries. Yes, there are things about compliance, laws, other things that might be unique. But sitting in this room with everybody raising their hand that they have a DAM and understand the DAM, I hope we find a lot of commonalities, right? And so tell me a little bit about Fossil and all the different brands and just the structure of the company. Yeah. So we are a large family of brands. You're probably aware, maybe not, but within the building, we've got a handful of what we call owned brands. So Fossil, Skagen, Michele, Zodiac, these are brands that we soup to nuts design them and development, manufacturing of product, in addition to marketing and all the go-to-market support that goes along with that. And then, the other half of the brands are what we call licensed brands. So this is the Michael Kors, the Diesels of the world. And for them, we do mostly product design and development, manufacturing, and minimal content support but still supporting with basic PDP, photography, and some levels of marketing support for those brands. So a lot of different groups and varying levels of needs but I think, again that the common thread that they all have is content. Whether it's a little bit of content or a lot of content, they've got to know where it is, they've got to store it somewhere. And that's where we came together to build our DAM set up to support all of those different brands. And just to touch on something you said just before about the different industries like, I've had so many conversations here from hotels to grocery and it's all of the same problems. It's all of the same problems. We're all working with the same thing. So happy to talk with you guys today and hear your struggles too. Yeah. Speaking of the problems, I think it all stems from our supply chain, right? From where content is created, whether it's agencies, in-house, etcetera, we all have to drive through this idea that from creation to acceptable usage, content has to go through many different technologies, many different hands, right? And that technology, in your guys' case, spans the globe, right? It spans multiple different delivery mechanisms. You guys have from manufacturing to straight delivery to consumer, for commerce. But then you have the Nordstrom's, the Macy's, the other brands who are reselling. So tell me a little bit about this architecture from the technology you use and then the global distribution. Yeah. Sure. So a lot of boxes on this slide I'm not necessarily involved with but I know they're critical to the operation. But obviously on the far left at the beginning, we're in Product Lifecycle Management with a PLM, where product design development happens, manufacturing goes into SAP for all of that, product data to feed into PIM. All of this stuff seems disconnected from where we would be with creative and marketing on the consumer side and they go to market side, but it's so critical that it starts out accurately there. I think when we talk about data hygiene, having a PIM that's accurate is critical to our automations and integrations on the backend making sense and making things flawless for execution. But in parallel to those, we're in Workfront for work management, obviously, Creative Cloud for content management creation, all feeding into AEM Assets. We'll talk about a PIM integration that we have with AEM, feeding through all of those assets through to Dynamic Media to automate as much as we can to our own sites and, of course, having the AEM Assets spot where anybody else can access the stuff that they need. Lots of channels, obviously, branded sites, CRM, media, SEO, social, commerce. We've got point of sale stores, lots of bricks, lots of clicks and marketplaces as with the Amazons of the world's needing a lot of additional content to support. And then, of course, our distribution channels, so we have our own stores and sites. We've got wholesale places, Macy's and the crisis of the world in Germany. All over, I think, in Germany there's 3,000 doors where we sell our watches, distributors in European markets and again, marketplaces. I feel like I have to say something about my watches because I'm wearing an Apple watch. And I know people are probably like, "Whoa!" But I'm wearing a Fossil watch in my right hand. This is for steps because I'm just curious as to how many steps I'm getting so. It's a Fossil strap, but it's an Apple watch so just to clarify. So I mean, even with that, the complexity of selling Fossil straps, others to other devices-- - Yep. - Right? The technology here spanning across, I think, it can be very similar to a lot of other companies, right? There's a lot of different touchpoints. And with those similarities, there's a lot of different stakeholders or your customers that are going to interact with your content, interact with your application, so why don't you take me a little bit through the different groups that you work with and that interact with that supply chain? Sure. So it starts with Creative & Studio when we get into the content creation phase. I think that overall, when you look at all of these different audiences, you probably each have somebody that's relatable, or different groups that are relatable that all need content in different ways. Some groups may search by SKU. Some may search by season, and brand, and year. Some may just search by asset type. Some may just say show me all lifestyle images. So we want to make sure that our data and our images and assets are accessible no matter who is looking for them and no matter how they're looking for them. So Creative & Studio, obviously, this is where the work starts and is loaded into to DAM. Global Production Studio, which is my team directly. This is where we are not only accessing final images but also running QA checks on any new assets uploaded for my regional teams to go and execute. Marketing and PR teams, these are a variety of people, internal and external, that are needing to search mostly by brand and asset type. But they're working with agency partners, some of which we've brought into our DAM as external read-only users to shorten the gap between them and the content that they need. And then within DTC Sites, direct-to-consumer sites, we've built some automations from Dynamic Media through Salesforce Commerce Cloud to get assets fed to our own sites directly without a lot of handholding and human interaction. Commercial Sales team. So these are the account sales reps that represent maybe a Dillard, so they typically have a list of 30 SKUs that is the Dillard's assortment for a certain season. They need to be able to plug in a certain list of SKUs and find exactly the PDP assets or the feature assets that they're needing to activate for their channels. And then distributors, again, connecting our DAM to their B2B tool so they can, in a similar way, curate their collections based on their partners. So a lot of different needs, a lot of different ways to get to-- Yeah. And we're going to touch a little bit about these needs later on and how they're going to interact with content. Now one of the things I wanted to have a conversation about is that's a lot of information and understanding your workflows and understanding the supply chain. I'm sure a lot of people in this room might have questions like, "I don't know all my workflows. I don't know all the processes. How did you get here? Where did you start?" Right? I need to go on this transformational journey, right? What were the considerations as you went along this journey? Because it doesn't just go from A to Z, right? You have different steps. So why don't you take me through the last few years? Sure. So prior to COVID, we were probably 10 years with a large enterprise DAM solution.
It was on-prem, unreliable speed and was set at the beginning and not forgotten but not really enhanced and not really touched very much it.
As new people came to the company, maybe they weren't trained on it, so less and less people were using it. And then the world shut down in 2020 and we knew that we had to find a solution for asset sharing in addition to our current or our enterprise DAM at the time, ways for people to access assets that weren't having access to our network servers anymore since we were all home. So we moved to a Google Drive solution, with the intention of it being an interim solution. But, of course, with little governance in the Google Drive, we've got 78 folders with all different names, and that makes my head hurt.
But coming out of COVID, we were actually up for renewal with that DAM provider. We could have easily either chosen to renew or upgrade to their cloud service or find something new. So we knew at that time, "Hey, this is an opportunity. Let's look across the whole content supply chain. What can we do to future-proof us for everything that we're seeing now in terms of marketing, automation, and content creation?" And so we made the case for AEM Assets at the time. In 2023, we went through our implementation with our partner, Freedom, now Northern Co.
And that's where we learned a lot about workflows, obviously. So during that process, there was so many-- This is when I truly became a creative technologist, I think, but so many surveys and things that were sent out to truly understand how these audiences needed to get access to the content that they needed. So we've been in now for three years and at the end of last year, we started looking into Content Hub and are very excited about the prospect of Content Hub for our read-only users. So I want to go back a little bit. You talked about using Google Drive. Yep. So how many people here use a FileShare? They have a FileShare system. A few hands here. Take me through the experience. So you have a on-prem DAM, seem to be more of a repository than the DAM, how the organization ended up adopting it. You move to a FileShare, right? There's a lot of conversations I have that, is a FileShare good enough for a DAM? Can I get away with it? Do I need to be on the DAM? What was your experience and helped create some of the ideas of what a DAM needs to solve those problems? Right. I think that the biggest thing that Google wasn't able to support was our need for searching and filtering down to just the assets. I think that's one of many issues with the file sharing, like a Google set of folders, the proliferation of folders, as I said before, with no organization or no thought put to what that looks like. But, yeah, I think the searching and filtering and then we also don't have control over compliance. So there's not an easy way other than going into each folder and deleting assets that are no longer usable or that are out of image rights, then that seems like a very manual, painful process that we would have had to do to keep all of those images in compliance. So it's great for a lot of things but not for that. And so some of those ideas, I think, drove you into this architecture, right? This was your implementation structure. So take me through working with Freedom like, why did you lay out your folder structure, your organizational, how your operation's going to work? Yeah. I love what Hilary said earlier in the Keynote, by the way, she's really into taxonomy and so am I. I could geek out over this stuff. I never knew that I would be but it turns out that I am. So we started at the brand level because as I said before, so many different needs and certain partners and certain groups needing different access, so we wanted to start at the brand level to make sure that as we granted security, access to those folders, that they had the right access to the right brands. And we knew that each brand is very separate in terms of the audiences they support and the levels of support. So we started at the brand level and then moved down into year, and being a retail brand, we're obviously, generally, quarterly updates, spring, summer, fall holiday. All of our newness and product launches can fall into one of those categories. So it made sense for that to be at that next level. And then at the asset type level, we wanted to keep this list as short as possible so that we weren't already getting into this massive list of options where people wouldn't necessarily know, okay, is it this or this? So really, these five or six sum up every piece of content that we would ever create or work on. And we'd know that it would generally be in the right place and tagged with the right metadata based on those folders, and then one level down for sub-asset type. So within PDP photography, we may have a folder for on-wrist shots versus product stills versus on-model PDP.
So one of the things that stands out when we were talking about all of this is, and I think everybody in this room will feel this way, your librarian team is small compared to-- We already have one. - If you have one-- - If you have one at all-- Yeah. If you have one at all. Your team is small compared to all of the different users, right? We talked about those different groups, right? You could have 1,000, 10,000 people accessing, wanting content, but yet very few people who are trying to manage this folder structure. And I think part of your journey in leading into talking about a PIM Integration is automation, right? We have to be able to automate so that that librarian team who one, two, none, right? Five. They have to be able to provide all of that right information to that folder structure that you saw, right? Folders can have metadata. The asset itself could have metadata, right? And so take me through your strategy of saying I need to scale. Yep. So part of the important one of the biggest pieces of our implementation was this PIM Integration to ensure that, just based on SKU as a qualifier, we were able to pull all of that product data into AEM. So in our current state, our PIM, I think only eight people in the building have access to it. So that's not a lot of people that would have access to find product information they need. So with that PIM Integration, we were able to, just by having a SKU added, clarify or bring in content from PIM and know that it was 100% accurate. So if a Sales AE is looking for assets for Dillard's, not only can they find the PDP images, they can also find the product description to go along with those assets and it's all searchable. So if we want to look for all watch images for a certain brand that are 44 millimeters, we can narrow the search down by that data and know that it's just even more rich and findable and not something that anybody had to manually tag other than the SKU. Yeah. And we'll get into a little bit more about automation and GenAI in a little bit.
And so when we think about your content, I think about what you see on the screen, the visuals of product but it's so much more, right? When we talked, there's models, contracts, location to use. Within the model and contracts, there's digital rights usage, right? And then you have compliance of the regions.
And so this jumps into that next slide here. How do you go about metadata? So you have the automation and everything else to do more than just search, right? You're enriching it for activation, for compliance. Take me through how you're thinking about the metadata for an asset to get to this acceptable usage, right? The whole idea is from creation, taking the photo, to allowing Nordstroms to use it or not using it, right? Because some products might be just specific. - So take me through all of that. - Yeah. I think for, it starts with the search, like you said, but it's so much more than that to ensure that countries are using it in the proper countries. In some countries, we have to use certain or reduce the use of certain image types to remain in compliance.
Activation. So a lot of that stuff. So other systems can find the assets and understand where they can use assets to plug into those other MarTech systems and delivery, so the mechanics of using an asset beyond just a human searching for it. Yeah. So when I think about metadata and all of the people that I talk to, we think about the technology and where you're going to capture that metadata, right? So the PIM Integration is a great aspect for enriching that with the product information so that you know the SKU, the usage, etcetera, where you can do it, especially if it's just to certain retail, right? But then the other piece of it is now who else is doing that, right? You have brand managers, right? You have merchandisers. You have other pieces where you're looking at trying to automate that, right? When you started this implementation process capturing as much information in those surveys, take me through a little bit about the-- How did we get to a place where we say, "Okay, we have enough information. Let's move forward." Yeah. I think a lot of that was just the base searching needs. But some things that we did in addition with our custom metadata schema were building some placeholders for some future-proofing. So the hoping we connect more systems into the DAM to gather those assets and pull those assets through. In order to do that, we need to have tags at the ready for it. So we have some placeholder tags for our campaign and I'm really excited about the Brand-Aware Tagging piece because I think that will tie into to making those tags even more resourceful.
So yes, Brand-Aware Tagging. The other tag that we had as a placeholder was personas. So as we look at other MarTech solutions to pull in assets, how can we tag that content to make sure that it's ready for those systems to pull in and serve up to the customer in an accurate way. Yeah. When I think about the Brand-Aware Tagging more importantly, just the acceptable usage, we've all seen slides that say confidential, right? That sends us a message, do not share, right? Metadata often for customers that are successful, use as instructional information, right? Do not use this model in XYZ. And that's tagged with that image and asset, right? This is only for this product. And so when you think about the DAM journey, mapping out your workflows and everything else, but mapping out how you're going to get to acceptable usage is really, really important to than be able to leverage automation and to be able to leverage GenAI. And I think that's the next slide to talk about is the reason we spend all of this time on the foundation here is that this is what builds the house, right? You have everything that you need to then feed an LLM model so that your tagging is successful, right? Being able to create on-brand content, you have to be able to still use it, right? So I can create 50,000 different variations and for a librarian, they freak out and go, "Well, who's going to manage every one of those?" Because if I'm in a compliance industry, I need to make sure every one of those variation, I didn't lose the context of the image because that context can change dramatically and what the impact is. So why don't you take me through a little bit of where you're going next? I know you're leveraging GenAI to do some of the creation. So talk a little bit about that and how you're looking at technology to build your guys' house. Yep. If you don't mind going back a slide, I just want to touch on one more thing on that slide. Absolutely. I think it's critical, the stuff on the right is all of the mechanics and the machines and the computers of the world and how everything's going to connect. But the items on the left, I think, are an important note for the people and the ways that we can make it work for the people. So not only the tech but let's make it work for this. So a couple of things that we did, and if you're in the middle of this process, highly recommend pushing for hiring a DAM Librarian/Admin. I think that's a critical role for someone to keep it going.
We have monthly DAM governance council meetings. Sometimes they last for five minutes, sometimes they last for an hour, but it's really our opportunity to get together as a core team. The same team as we went through the implementation together, looking at licenses and what can we do to make it better. And then these twice a year pulse checks that my librarian sends out. He creates a survey that's just what's working, what's not. Three simple questions what's working, what's not. Any ideas, what it would be great if the DAM did XYZ. And we use those to craft biannual emails to the entire company including all of our external users that say, "Hey, did you know that you can build a collection like this?" And, "Hey, did you know you can download a Smart Crop this way?" Because new people come onboard, you don't know how they were trained. You don't know how they were onboarded. But just a way that we can keep the pulse on it and not just have it be a set it and forget it situation. So important to remember the people. Yeah. I know. I want to dive into that a little bit because that's interesting. How do you go about in activating that survey? So you get information what's not working, right? Missing tags or whatever it might be. How do you guys go and activate that? What is the process of saying, "Okay, I get this survey, but now I'm going to go execute and do XYZ. How often does that happen?" Yeah. So I think a lot of the feedback is just open-ended questions. And we'll all go through it as a team and say what questions can we address with easy fixes? What's the low-hanging fruit that somebody just wasn't trained or doesn't know how to do a certain thing? And those are easy, direct conversations of five-minute phone call or Google Meet with someone and say, "Hey, let me show you how to do this. It takes five minutes and then, they have a skill for the rest of their life." So a lot of it ends up being that kind of feedback. Things that are bigger, we'll work with the product team. A lot of it, I think, is we're hopeful that Content Hub will address. A lot of the frustrations that people have with searching in an AEM will be addressed with Content Hub. But yeah, I think we try to keep it personal too.
I know it would be much harder with a massive company, but we're relatively small in the grand scheme of things.
I think we have 600, 700 users today in our DAM. But try to keep it personal. I mean, five minutes could really be helpful for someone if it's an easy fix. Yes. Does everybody in the room know what Content Hub is, by the way? Hands, who don't? Okay, a few. So Content Hub is a distribution portal. The idea for the DAM is to not have as many people in the actual DAM and bring them to a surface where they can search and experience content which has approvals. Are they able to, actually, see this content or not? So making sure that they're seeing the right content for them, but think about it as how I have, to the masses, I don't want the millions in my DAM. In fact, I want the least amount of people in my DAM like the PIM, right? Eight people go in there. That's awesome. Now I bring content to the edge where you work, right? So, you'll see Content Hub in any of the different announcements, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, Content Hub is powering that. Content Hub is powering Content Advisor. It's powering experience. It is ability to distribute content in an amazing application. So that's how you get that content to everybody else. So as we talk about that, let's talk about where you're going next. We have a little piece of what Content Hub is here. How are you going to use Content Hub or how are you guys envisioning Content Hub to help you? I think that we had a unique setup at the beginning of our AEM implementation that we thought was going to be temporary but it's lasted for three years. And that means all external read-only users are actually in our main AEM Assets instance. So the searching and filtering experience for them is not great. So again, looking at Content Hub working with the product teams to get to, okay, what is Content Hub capable of doing today, what does the roadmap look like, which has been really helpful to understand when we could consider moving all of our external read-only users over there, so very excited about that prospect. - It's much faster too. - Yeah. And so Content Hub for you guys and for pretty much everybody, this is a reference of content. So you're in the DAM, you hit Approve, and then it comes to this Distribution Portal. Now this portal is not a web page. This is a full-blown application. It has search experience behind it. It has filtering, everything else to deliver performances. It also has extensibility in it. So in that regards, for you guys, being able to have different brands, so have different brands come in and content be filtered so that you don't see other marketing stuff being able to have different vendors come in filter out. Those are some of the requirements that you're making sure is when you guys roll this out that we're working together on, that it meets all of those one requirements. So single distribution experience for all of the different vendors that we talked about on that supply chain and having those different requirements met through technology.
Yep. Excited about Brand-Aware Tagging too. I think smart tags is not really something we ever really took advantage of. I think because it wasn't specific to our brand. It may refer to gold watches but technically with Fossil brand, we're legally required to say gold tone. So we would want that smart tag to say gold tone. And I think now with Brand-Aware Tagging, it has the potential to do that which is exciting to make that content even more rich with data. So let's talk a little bit about that. So it is smart tag enhancements. It is just Brand-Aware so it's able to identify that. But how do you-- You talked a little bit about campaign, right? Campaign information. How is the metadata being able to automate the filling of this or expansion? Like, it understands it's a certain Fossil watch. But how does this help through that supply chain? I think for marketers who may not be necessarily looking for assets at a SKU level, they want to be able to say, "Show me all assets developed for the Mother's Day campaign." And that's not something we do today because it would be a laborious tagging process to make sure that everything was tagged with that. So to have that automate based on when the image was shot or what the look and feel is for it to automatically tag it with that, that campaign would be really helpful on the backend. Perfect. And then what about Dynamic Media? So we are in the process of transitioning some of our traditional photography to 3D, which is a very exciting time for us at Fossil. But obviously, we do a lot with Dynamic Media today in terms of feeding PDP assets directly to our sites. But hope to take more advantage of that with more interactive viewing capabilities that showcase the 3D, the great 3D renders that we're going to be getting from this project and help the customer convert at the end of the day. Now is everybody familiar with Dynamic-- Who's not familiar with Dynamic Media? A couple people. Okay.
So DAMs have the ability to deliver content, right? So you have it connected to a CDN and it creates that delivery. There's a benefit though when you own the CDN or you own this delivery mechanism is the transformations. So I don't have to create different variations of content. I can have one piece of content and say do it by 80x80. Do it by 300x300. I can do different renditions of the content, different crop sizes and then different transformations of that content to be able to deliver that yet keep the single source of truth. What I don't want to have is eight different renditions of everything to deliver. I don't know how many delivery sites of a single watch you might have, but you could have hundreds and hundreds of different variations of this, right? If we just think about social media, I got LinkedIn, Twitter, or X they call it now, Facebook, etcetera, those are multiple different variations because they all require that. So you want technology to be closest to the DAM to be able to handle that delivery mechanism so you keep that single source of truth. So there's over 175, I'm sure somebody will correct me, but transformations to be able to have within Dynamic Media plus delivery capabilities, you can have players, etcetera, 3D renders in different variations as well.
So going into your key takeaways. You've gone through this journey. You're starting to look at GenAI for operational efficiencies. You guys use GenAI for creation, doing backfills extension of imagery.
What is your key learnings from what you've learned over the last four years and where you're going that you could share with everybody so that their journey is just a little bit better? Sure. So some of this is specific to AEM Assets, but some of it is just general about implementing a tool like this at the enterprise level. For AEM, we, again, early on established a metadata profile setup for all of our folders. And as you saw on the taxonomy slide, when you multiply that amount of folders by that number of brands, by that number of season and years, we've got a lot of metadata profiles and somebody has to manually enter those today, so amazing if GenAI can help us with that. But I think the Brand-Aware Tagging will help with a lot of that too. So I wouldn't commit to establishing a metadata profile setup just to reduce the tagging labor. I think just setting that up with governance from the beginning, taking advantage of whatever GenAI has to offer to help that process along would be the way to go.
Search options, I think with Adobe, at least, there's 17 different ways to do the same thing. I would probably focus my training and onboarding materials more on a singular way of searching and finding, that being a filtered search because global search is confusing for people that only need to find something twice a year.
They plug something in and get no results and it's just a disconnect, so focusing that search method for new users. I didn't know collections would be as useful as they have been, for at least our group, looking back to the Dillard's example. We've got so many groups that need just a specific set of assets. They don't want to have to hunt-and-peck. We want to do that for them or have that. Be available so that they're sure to get the proper assets. So collections are a very popular used tool so I might spend a little bit more time on that. And then all of our twice a year follow-up emails, that's always been one of the helpful tips is how to create a collection and what benefits it has for users.
And then trust what you know but also seek feedback from peers, like we were talking about the surveys at the beginning, just to truly understand workflows that I wasn't as familiar with.
A quick Google Form survey is so easy to send out to your users and it really helps define at the upfront what the best setup can be for that. And there's no one best setup to the last point about keeping that communication ongoing, keeping the governance conversations happening. Look at your metadata schema, now more than ever with all of this personalization, we've all likely got to update what we've got out there because it probably doesn't include everything that could possibly be needed to support some of this automation and personalization that we're all hoping to scale to. So keeping it alive and having that DAM librarian is critical.
Well, thank you, everybody. - Thank you so much. - Yeah. Thanks, Marc. Thank you.
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