DAM Dispatches from Henry Stewart Creative Ops NY 2024

(upbeat music)

Chris Lacinak: 00:01

Kara Van Malssen, welcome back to the DAM Right podcast. Good to have you.

Kara Van Malssen: 00:06

Thank you, thanks for having me back again.

Chris Lacinak: 00:08

And we are here today to talk about a recap

of the Henry Stewart Creative Ops Conference, which the name is a bit deceptive

because it was more than just creative ops.

It was actually four tracks,

creative operations, photo studio operations,

design operations, and creative production.

We both went, this just happened this past week.

It was Thursday, right?

May 16th.

And we both went and it was, I'm not gonna lie,

it was hard to pick which sessions to go to.

We used different tactics there.

Although I had the all access pass,

I wasted it because I spent my whole day

in the creative operations that was chaired by

our friend Thomas Stilling.

And you took a bit different of a tactic.

You jumped around a bit more, right?

Kara Van Malssen: 01:02

I did.

I divided my time between creative operations, creative production and design operations.

So I caught a couple of presentations from each one

and I did unfortunately miss the photo studio operations.

So I don't think we have anything from that event.

Chris Lacinak: 01:23

In order to frame this conversation,

you've given us a big head start here. You've just this morning kind of posted your five,

it's kind of five variations on a theme,

five themes on LinkedIn.

People should definitely check that out.

But I thought we might use that as a way to just walk

through some of the takeaways and share our thoughts

on the conference.

Would you mind sharing your first takeaway?

Kara Van Malssen: 01:49

Yeah, the first thing that came to mind

is sort of a framing takeaway, which was creatives are having to do more with less.

There's more channels, there's evolving audience needs.

There's more demand from stakeholders,

but there's less budget, there's less resources.

So there was definitely a theme about getting creative

with those constraints and those demands

and trying to figure out what to do about it.

So I saw that coming up over and over and over again.

Chris Lacinak: 02:24

Yeah, one specific thing I'll call out,

John Pagano, JJ Pagano, he said people call him, from Paramount Pictures talked about,

they have in the creation of content,

they have gone from taking upwards of 60 minutes

to create two and a half minutes of content,

to taking eight to 10 minutes

to create eight minutes of content.

I thought that was just astounding.

I mean, wild, right?

That's bonkers, that's like a ridiculous increase

in efficiency, largely attributed to use

of both automation and AI.

So that was interesting, but yeah,

I think that speaks to what you're talking about there.

And I just kind of threw out AI there.

I mean, in your interpretation of what you heard,

was that really kind of the linchpin

that that whole doing more with less was,

or were there other ways that that came up?

Kara Van Malssen: 03:18

No, it actually came up in a lot of other ways.

So maybe, we'll definitely come to AI, 'cause that's a huge 800 pound gorilla in the room,

in all the rooms.

But no, I think where I started my day

was with the folks from Nickelodeon,

talking about how they had to adapt during the pandemic.

And this is the folks that run their YouTube channel,

and many, many channels, I should say 24 channels,

I believe, globally.

So they had to shift immediately from,

we have no way to access our library,

we have no way to shoot talent in the studio,

we've all got to retreat to our apartments, what do we do?

So that was where it all began.

And so they started getting creative

with repurposing content into puppet form

and things like that.

So rather than having live actors, like using puppets

and things like that.

And they did talk about later innovations

in the ability to search and find and repurpose content

from their library,

and that being another way of doing more with less.

So not needing to shoot new content,

a new original material.

And that same theme came up again,

this was also in the same track on creative production.

There was a panel of producers,

and I think the topic was doing more with less.

And so that was just the whole theme.

And there were a lot of different things that came up,

but one recurring theme there was also similarly,

making one piece of content that can be repurposed

many, many times and take many derivative forms.

So that was coming up,

use of archival content again was coming up.

And I actually saw that in the third session

in the design operations room,

which was a presentation from the company Celtra,

which helps people kind of create using atomic content,

as they say, kind of very rapidly repurposed.

Now there's AI layered into all this a little bit,

but the theme here was,

and even another group I was thinking of it was Hilton.

And they talked about something similar,

kind of a master content model with many derivative assets

and kind of derivative content pieces

from that one kind of highest level creative asset.

So does that resonate with what you heard?

Chris Lacinak: 05:57

Yeah, well, and actually,

as you talked about the Nickelodeon session, I mean, it's funny because it was at the same time

as JJ Pagano's from Paramount Pictures,

a similar deal, 'cause he was talking about,

I mean, it was all focused on their YouTube channels.

They have many YouTube channels.

The use of puppets, I mean, all those things,

actually, there was a lot of similar.

We hadn't talked about that.

So it's funny to hear that.

But in doing more with less,

I kind of went to like efficiency,

which you gotta ask, well, what's the outcome?

Did the quality go way down?

Did they hurt their metrics?

Like, how good is it?

And one metric that he gave was that

between March,: 2023

they went from 1.6 billion with a B

to 2.8 billion watch time minutes.

So not only did they get more efficient,

but they also saw much, much higher response rates

to the content they were putting out there.

But yeah, I did hear that routinely in all sorts of ways

about doing more with less.

Interestingly enough, actually, as I think about it,

even in kind of the,

there was a session on sustainability

as in environmental sustainability.

And they also talked about intentionally

doing more with less as a way of

addressing environmental sustainability to some extent.

They talked about a lot of things,

but that was one aspect of it.

So yeah, well, let's jump into your second takeaway.

What was your second?

Kara Van Malssen: 07:27

Well, I think we've just bridged from one to two

because the first one was doing more with less. The second one is one of the ways they're doing that

is to creating more with less content.

But that theme is just keeps coming into my mind

and hearing that over and over.

And what you said about the performance of the content

and of scaling and increasing at the same time

makes me think of another insight

from some of the speakers, which was that kind of,

the kind of master creative content

that sort of you create all these derivatives from,

if that's being created using insight from measurement,

from predictive analytics or from,

to performance analytics to,

so you're actually informing the new content creation

by what's performing best out there

and sort of getting smarter.

So it's not just repurposing for repurposing sake,

it's actually kind of a work smarter,

not harder type of theme as well.

So were you hearing the same thing

in the sessions you were in?

Chris Lacinak: 08:32

Yeah, absolutely.

I was looking for the term in my notes that came up in the sustainability session

and I knew there was a specific term they use

and it was micro production.

So that was just about it,

asking like, do people really need to be here

at this production or how can we do production

in a way that utilizes as few people as necessary,

only the people required and things like that.

So, and they did reiterate multiple times

that that was not just about environmental

sustainability,

that there was also a bottom line aspect to that,

that was attractive when it came to the financials

of production and operations.

So should we jump to the third?

Kara Van Malssen: 09:11

As we hinted earlier, AI was a very big theme.

I think every session touched on it. I think at this point, if you're in this type of community,

you cannot avoid talking about it

because one of the things,

trends we're obviously seeing with Gen AI

is creative output or something that looks like it, right?

The ChatGPT can write, you have DALL-E Midjourney

creating images, video content, et cetera.

And so there's this, obviously an important concern

is the AI coming for our jobs as creatives.

And so that was sort of touched on by,

I think every speaker that I saw in some way, shape or form.

Chris Lacinak: 09:59

It sure was. It was a big theme for sure.

Kara Van Malssen: 10:03

Yeah, so you saw the same thing.

Chris Lacinak: 10:05

Yeah, I mean, I think,

and we talked a little bit about this. There were kind of two competing narratives

or counter perspectives.

One was, is AI gonna take our job?

The other one was, boy, isn't it great?

AI is saving us from having to do all of the mundane work

that is not creative, is not impactful, but has to be done.

So it was interesting, there was that sentiment that

what AI and automation, which I just wanna say quickly,

it's kind of a pet peeve of mine,

how AI and automation are conflated so much.

They're very different things.

So let's be clear about that.

But they are often talked about as being synonymous.

But in this case, I do mean both.

It was talked about,

both of these things were talked about.

Isn't it great that they can save us so much time

so that we can now do the most impactful work?

I would have loved to have heard some more details

about that, like I love the concept.

I don't disagree with that.

But I think where the tension still lies is

how exactly will that play out and how true is that?

I think to alleviate some of the folks

that are concerned about, is AI gonna take our jobs?

But I don't know, what do you think?

Kara Van Malssen: 11:20

Well, your two kind of views on that,

I saw kind of a through line to them, which was the answer to the question,

will, is AI coming for our jobs is no,

it's coming for the tedious parts

that you never were good at

and never got around to in the first place

or struggled to do, which is your point about automation.

And there was some conflating there.

But I think what people were saying is,

use AI to help with automation.

Automation isn't just AI driven, obviously.

So there are ways to insert AI tools

to help with certain automation tasks.

And so that was the theme I was picking up on there.

I think a few examples were given

of what the practical uses of those things are,

things like kind of automating delivery

of something once it's created

and pushing it out to these various places,

things like that, just kind of a little fiddly bit stuff.

I think what Celtra again is doing

to kind of very rapidly take large volumes

of modular assets and then quickly repurposing them

into many, many, many, many different assets

that can be pushed out to lots of different channels

is another example of, I think there's AI in there,

kind of mixed into that sauce.

So things like that,

that kind of getting more done faster type of track

was coming, that was the kind of thing

that it was being pushed.

But I thought there was one really interesting takeaway.

I can't remember who said this now,

but they said just be aware that even using AI

for automation will still result in more assets,

more output, more content.

So it's not like just using AI for automation

is just getting the same stuff done faster.

And if we avoid having it do creative,

then we won't increase our output, but actually we will.

So I thought that was a really interesting takeaway too.

Chris Lacinak: 13:39

Yeah, there are two kind of quotes or moments

that come to mind for me. One is I thought that the presentation

from Dax Alexander was great.

That was called "The Real Deal,

A Practical Roadmap to Harnessing AI in-house."

So he's from a company called Oliver.

And he talked about a lot of things.

He started off by saying,

"The reason we're here is because it's a f'ing mess,"

which that's a good kind of sobering thought

to start with.

And he did that,

he had a slide of about a thousand different products

that fall into different categories when he said that.

So you felt it, you felt it when you looked at it.

But he had a really great framework that they use

around helping guide folks through the use of AI

and all sorts of criteria, what the tools do,

how they work, what the legal agreements around them,

licensing agreements are around them.

Actually, that was one of the biggest things

that came out of it for me,

is the legal stuff is the hairiest part, probably.

And so there's a lot of analytical frameworks

around use of AI.

And in large corporate settings in particular,

where there's a lot of probably nail-biting going on

about are people using a dark AI

that's not been yet vetted and approved by the company.

But the other thing that was relative to that

was Guido Derkx, I believe was his name,

talked about, I mean, he kind of started his talk by saying,

he was sitting around with friends and had the realization,

we were just talking about the AI taking away

all of the mundane tasks that he had the realization,

wait, are we the robots, right?

We're doing all of the mundane tasks,

all this really boring, systematic, non-creative work.

So that was an interesting and funny twist.

Kara Van Malssen: 15:41

Yeah, I think, so while Dax's presentation

kind of is the jumping off point for my fourth takeaway, which his message, another one of his messages was,

AI is here to stay, embrace it, wrestle with it,

because you're gonna need to figure this out.

So I thought his framework that you mentioned,

here's a very practical kind of four step process

to adoption.

And he really emphasized the culture shift,

there's resistance, there's certain people who are,

embracing it, running, let's go, let's do this,

maybe recklessly perhaps.

So he's also got a lot of caution, I think, in his approach.

And then there's a lot of people, maybe the majority,

who are very apprehensive, nervous,

they don't understand it,

and rightfully scared and confused.

So he did talk a lot about the culture piece being,

the number one driver,

and that you have to kind of bring people along

in really interesting ways.

But having time, whatever you're trying to do with it,

to strategy, being a really key piece,

and then having leadership sponsorship

was also a big part of that.

And then his framework was sort of,

I think it was, define what are the goals

we're trying to achieve here.

I select the right tools based on your use cases,

really get into what those are, pilot, and then scale.

And he had a lot of really interesting anecdotal stories

to share about how they do scale,

if they decide through a pilot, like,

okay, let's adopt the tool,

how they scale it out to their like 5,000,

I believe, employees.

Chris Lacinak: 17:28

Yeah.

Kara Van Malssen: 17:29

So that was really interesting to hear about.

Chris Lacinak: 17:30

Yeah.

As a side note, that just made me think of the change management conversation.

I'll just inject a couple of thoughts here.

So there was a session called Mastering Change Management.

There's a few great things.

One is, there was a woman who worked

for Office of General Services,

Media Services in New York, Kate Schmieding,

rhymes with meeting, I remember that's how

she introduced herself.

And she had a meeting,

she has a meeting with her staff once a week

called I Hate It Here,

which is in which all the staff members come

and they talk about the things they hate, which I thought,

and someone asked, how do you make that productive?

And she said, it's not, that's not what it's about.

It's about people being able to vent

and talk about the things that annoy them

and things like that.

So I thought that was just,

that got the room cracking up, that was hilarious.

And she was, I appreciated that contribution.

But the other thing that came out

of that change management meeting was,

or change management session was,

I love it, someone, you know,

some kind of one of the concluding thoughts,

it was also one of the opening thoughts is,

they try to remind their employees

that change is not permanent, it's not forever.

And I thought, that's an oxymoron, right?

But yeah, in Dax's session,

that definitely came to light is,

how do you roll that out through a large organization?

Kara Van Malssen: 18:54

Yeah, and it sounded like, this is not a similar thing,

but they do have sort of a recurring meeting, like an office hours type of thing,

where they, you know, people can come

and it's somebody that's new to the technology

that's actually running the session

and trying to teach it to colleagues.

And they're, you know, struggling with that as well.

So it's like, you know, they're barely half a step ahead

of the other people coming.

So they're kind of helping people learn together,

but they've got the SMEs sort of lurking in the wings

in case they need to jump in.

But that was kind of cool, just to kind of help,

you know, they're helping each other along

through that process.

Chris Lacinak: 19:36

- Yeah, that is a great idea. It's a good structure.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:39

- Yeah, I like that, I hate it here meeting too. I mean, that's a totally different thing.

Chris Lacinak: 19:45

- Courageous exercise as the leader of an organization to engage in, I give her props for that.

Kara Van Malssen: 19:50

- Yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 19:52

- So the other person who had a framework

and it's related to your point number five, your takeaway number five was Tony Gill.

He also showed its framework that was,

I mean, we couldn't see the details of these,

but on its face, it kind of looks similar

to what Dax showed in the sense that it had kind of red,

green, yellow areas of risk and things like that.

But what is your fifth point?

Kara Van Malssen: 20:10

- Well, my fifth point was kind of a message

for DAM professionals, for digital asset management practitioners,

because this group of folks are the ones that are,

the creative operations people are kind of orchestrating

the creation and reuse of the assets

that the digital asset management person is stewarding.

And a lot of the use cases of the creative teams

are not necessarily met by enterprise DAM.

So Tony sort of broke that out and said,

an enterprise DAM solution,

which he also kind of lumped with a marketing DAM,

which is a lot of times where it sits,

it's very much more of a library kind of solution.

It's search, browse, download, share, use,

disseminate, measure,

but with rights and security mixed in.

The needs of the creative groups are a lot more,

we need speed, we need edit, we need file lock,

we need version control, collaboration.

And these are all features that are in,

all of the features combined

are in digital asset management solutions,

but they're not always done well

for the creative production groups.

And within an organization, there's usually,

not usually, but often one DAM

and it's the enterprise solution.

And so we've seen that with our clients,

that the creative groups are sort of still left out

in the cold, like fending with themselves

on hard drives and whatnot.

And it's not well integrated into their workflows.

So I think his point was,

there's been a fraught relationship there

and the DAM community should be looking at this closely

to think how can we kind of enable this creative reuse,

but by meeting the folks where they are.

So yeah, that was one of my key takeaways

from Tony's talk that I thought was very interesting.

Chris Lacinak: 22:12

One of the questions he raised,

nd apparently at DAM New York: 2023

in the stump of the consultant session

for asking the best question,

was should work in process assets be stored in the DAM?

Apparently still a hot topic

'cause lots of people had lots of thoughts about that.

And he did a hand raise in the room

about who thinks they should, who thinks they shouldn't,

and who's in between.

But what were your thoughts on that?

Kara Van Malssen: 22:40

Well, I thought that was funny

because I've been on stump of the consultant panel one time at DAM LA.

I was not at the one that he won the thing for on the panel,

but I was in the audience.

And I remember thinking,

what would my answer to this question be?

And he had said that the panel

all either gave the response of yes, or it depends.

And I was like, yep, I would have been one of those,

it depends people.

And, 'cause I think it depends on the purpose

of the DAM system, who it's serving,

what are the main use cases that it's helping to enable?

And if your main use cases are spread out

and varied enough that it warrants more

of that library like approach and library system,

then that may be your right solution.

Maybe you don't have creative production in house,

maybe that's an ad agency partner.

So therefore that's not necessarily a need.

But if you do have, especially video production in house,

there is often a need for a two system solution.

And I think he was also pointing to that,

like embrace this, this is,

there's a photo studio or a video production,

PAM or MAM, so production asset management

or media asset management system,

that's more gonna have those features

that he was describing, faster edit, version control,

file lock, collaboration, et cetera,

to service them through that edit process

and then push to the final deliverables

and kind of evergreen content to the enterprise DAM.

I think he was advocating for that kind of model.

And I thought that was a really good point.

And I've seen that work well in a lot of cases.

And therefore you have a home for work in progress

when it's in that kind of PAM environment.

Chris Lacinak: 24:36

- That's exactly where my head went with,

which is over the years in our work, I think here about organizations like HBO, for instance,

like they have a PAM and there is a new,

I've heard PAM more recently in reference

to what someone referred to as a product asset management

in addition to a PIM product.

But PAM as in production asset management,

this is an asset management system used for production

and post-production processes

for things that are work in process.

And the final state deliverables that come out of that

is what goes into a DAM that is used for distribution

and access and things like that.

So, and I sat with a group of folks at lunch

and I kind of posed that question

because everybody had been in Tony's session.

So, and no one else there had heard

of a production asset management system before,

which I think, it may have to do more

with just folks that are more involved

in kind of media and entertainment workflows

where video production has driven that need.

It was so much more necessary to have a PAM

that was separate from the DAM

when you're dealing with kind of really large file sizes

and maybe more complex operations

than compared to non-video workflows.

I don't know, I wasn't quite sure

why I was the only one at that table

that had had that experience.

But do you have any thoughts on that?

Kara Van Malssen: 26:04

- Well, I do think it's from,

those who are familiar with it are either gonna be from media and entertainment,

production, bigger production companies,

or large enterprises that have had in-house video production.

And I do think this is rooted in the video space.

But Tony was also talking about photo studio.

Chris Lacinak: 26:26

- Yeah, that's true.

Kara Van Malssen: 26:28

- Kind of PAM-like system.

So, that's interesting as well. But yeah, we've done work with clients in the past

where we helped with PAM implementation.

Then there was a DAM.

Sometimes they call it MAM.

PAM MAM thing gets, I think, confusing.

There's a little bit of a identity crisis

between those things.

So, some people might be like, "What's a PAM?

"I've heard of MAM."

So, I think there's some acronym overload going on.

But it is still larger organizations

or very media-heavy organizations.

What I also thought was interesting related to this

was I was in a panel of producers,

and I asked the question,

"Okay, you're talking about a lot of content reuse,

"repurposing, using archival, using library content.

"So, what can digital asset managers do

"to better support you?"

And they were like,

"We don't know what you're talking about.

"What's that?"

It was basically their response.

Chris Lacinak: 27:30

- What's that as in what? What's "that" in that sentence?

Kara Van Malssen: 27:33

- What's digital asset management?

A lot of these are from small production companies, independent filmmakers.

And they're just like,

"I'm over here trying to deal with the files.

"And if you can help, can you teach me something?

"I'd like to ask you a few questions."

So, it kind of made me realize

those who even know this concept

are in a privileged position to begin with

because you're in a big company

that has supported this technology and infrastructure

and people that can enable that.

But a lot of people out there

are just winging it on their own.

They're working in file sharing systems,

hard drives, small RAIDs.

They're just trying to keep the files organized.

But them as a practice is not present

in many, many, many places.

So, that was also sort of an aha moment.

Like, "Oh yeah, this is not exist everywhere."

Chris Lacinak: 28:26

- Right, well,

DAM operations exists in all of those scenarios, but whether they're recognized as DAM operations

and how well they're serving their users is another question.

Any other final takeaways before we sign off here?

Kara Van Malssen: 28:39

- No, I think it was a great event.

I enjoyed it a lot. And I'd love to go back.

I think it was some very good conversations.

It was extremely active.

The participation was, you know,

kind of, everyone was very engaged.

So, I thought that was wonderful.

Chris Lacinak: 29:00

- Yeah, I agree.

I think Henry Stewart did a great job putting it together. I think that the, all four consultants,

consultants, I think all four moderators,

some of which were consultants,

did a great job.

And we got, you know,

while I said that I sat in Thomas's

creative operations stream all day,

there was a final session at the end of the day,

which I think was fantastic.

I think Henry Stewart should do this

anytime there's multiple panels.

They brought all four facilitators,

moderators of those streams together

to kind of summarize, recap, engage with the audience.

And so we got to hear about and see from all of them.

And I thought they were all just fantastic.

Really did a really wonderful job.

And that was a really fun session.

I thought that was a great way to end it.

So, a big shout out and props to everybody involved

in that decision and actually making it happen.

Kara Van Malssen: 29:52

- Yeah, I think, yeah,

the Henry Stewart team deserves a round of applause. All of the moderators, obviously all the speakers.

But yeah, I second that,

the end of the day session where they brought

the moderators together.

And I think the audience was just so engaged at that point.

There were so many questions, the conversation kept flowing.

I think we went right past the time

where the drinks were supposed to start

and people were fine with that.

They were just like, let's keep talking.

So I think that was wonderful.

Chris Lacinak: 30:19

- It's a good sign. It's a good sign.

Kara Van Malssen: 30:21

- It is.

Chris Lacinak: 30:22

- Great.

All right. Well, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much for the great takeaways.

And as I said, that's a LinkedIn post

that folks can go check out too.

And yeah, it was fun.

Thanks, Kara.

Kara Van Malssen: 30:34

- It was fun.

Yeah, thank you.

(upbeat music)