DAM Deep Dive: Frontify

Chris Lacinak: 00:00

Hello, and welcome back to the DAM Right Podcast. I'm Chris Lacinak, the host of the podcast and CEO of the best DAM consulting company in the business, AVP. I'm very excited to be back with the inaugural episode in a series that I'm calling the DAM Deep Dive Platform Series. The purpose of this series is to give stakeholders and organizations that use, manage, decide on and buy DAM platforms a deeper look into the technologies, philosophies, people, and future roadmaps behind them. If you're a DAM platform and you're interested in applying to be in the series, please reach out to me at damright@weareavp.com If you're listening to or watching this and you have ideas or suggestions for the Deep Dive series, give me a shout at the same email. For instance, I'm wondering if there's interest in me publishing the original one on one interviews in addition to the format that you're about to see or hear. The deep dive series as it stands now consists of interviews with two or three people at an organization. We're then taking excerpts and clips from these longer format conversations and compiling them within topics or themes. It's more of a highlight reel than what you've heard on the DAM Right podcast before. Let me know what you think about the new format and your interest in hearing the original one on one interviews in addition. In this episode, you're going to get a deep dive look into the Frontify platform, featuring interviews with Roger Dudler, Founder and CEO, and Thomas Meichtry, Director of U.S. I think you're going to love hearing from them and appreciate the different perspectives that they each bring to the table. I can tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with each of them and am excited to be sharing it with you today. And as always, remember, DAM right, because it's too important to get wrong. **Entrance to the DAM-osphere** *Roger Dudler, Founder and CEO.*

Roger Dudler: 01:49

So I was working in several software companies and then also in a web agency. So very very classic way of a career path as an engineer. And My issue was that I found that the designers or the creative people are talking a different language than the technical people and are talking a different language to the business people. And that there's kind of like there needs to be some kind of translation in between, which in the beginning was more about you know, uploading designs and sharing them with others and clarifying specifications and things like that while building software products. But then, as you know, I mean, goes from colors to fonts to brand elements, and then eventually goes to images and further. So I really found that interesting, this kind of intersection of of the three.

Chris Lacinak: 02:49

Yeah, yeah.

Roger Dudler: 02:50

And I I just wanted to make my life easier in the beginning, you know, and in twenty 2013, when I started off, I just wanted to make my life easier first, and then eventually it became bigger.

Chris Lacinak: 03:01

So you were personally as a software engineer feeling those pain points and you wanted to solve that problem.

Roger Dudler: 03:06

Yeah, exactly.

Chris Lacinak: 03:07

Yeah, interesting.

Roger Dudler: 03:07

Yeah, because it was really difficult back in the days. There was not really I remember I called it, my little prototype, I called it Clarify. which it didn't I wasn't called Frontify at that point. And then it was really about like, hey, I get stuff from you. But I don't understand. So can you clarify? You know, can you help me understand things? So so I got more material, which then over the years became more evident that it's much a a much bigger problem than just for for like software people.

Chris Lacinak: 03:41

*Thomas Meichtry, Director, Sales U.S.*

Thomas Meichtry: 03:45

I grew up in a small town in Switzerland and have since moved to New York City with my beautiful wife and Dalmatian in the middle of last year. And I started working with in the DAM space about seven years ago, and that was back in Switzerland with where our headquarters is, so with Frontify. Back then, I think it wasn't quite a DAM yet, you know, when I started. But that's kind of where I started getting into the you know, brand portals. We had a really solid brand portal product back then. And we started building more and more like DAM features. It was originally more of like a media library, icon libraries, things like this. So I would say really in the DAM space, I've been about five years since that's been probably I would say the time frame when we started winning our first larger DAM deals and RFPs. So that's probably been the time frame on when I've been in the DAM space.

Chris Lacinak: 04:39

Got it. So are you from St. Gallen as well?

Thomas Meichtry: 04:44

No. So I grew up in a very tiny town. So it's about a thousand people. It's in the south of Switzerland. It's in a beautiful area called the Valais. So it's like very mountainy. It's like a three hour train drive from St. Gallen away. So yeah, that's that's kind of where I grew up. So it's quite the difference to now where, you know, the the big New York City

Chris Lacinak: 05:06

Yeah. And how did you happen upon Frontify? Like, how did you even come across it as a prospective employee originally?

Thomas Meichtry: 05:13

Yeah, that's actually a funny story, and I keep telling that all the time somehow because I was in St. Gallen and I was just walking through the train station and there was like a big poster and the poster said lowest salaries in town and there was a Frontify logo next to it. And I was like, that that's I was like, that's kinda weird. Like, why would you do that? That just makes no sense. So I was like, keep walking. I was like, yeah, that's. I don't know, that's actually, you know, it's actually not that stupid. So I was looking at what they do, and, you know, having studied marketing and like I have a Master's in marketing management, and I've always been super interested in technology. I kind of saw that it's a business, that it's in Martech, and I was like, that sounds pretty interesting. So I applied, and it was back when we were about, I think, 30 people were at the business then. It was pre-Series A. And yeah, got the job and since then it's been a quite the right.

Chris Lacinak: 06:10

Great, great. I hope the salary has increased it uh if it was the lowest salaries in town.

Thomas Meichtry: 06:16

And it wasn't the lowest salaries in town, luckily, you know.

Chris Lacinak: 06:19

Just just an eye catching thing to say, huh? That's funny.

Thomas Meichtry: 06:23

Yeah, yeah, it definitely caught attention. It even made local Swiss news and the advertising. It's kind of like the the Ad Week of Switzerland. It was called out there as well.

Chris Lacinak: 06:33

Well, so smart marketing. **Company History**

Roger Dudler: 06:36

There's two, there's probably two stories, one that is the truth and then one that is the adaptation over time. The truth is from the beginning, I've been working as a front end engineer.

Chris Lacinak: 06:48

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Roger Dudler: 06:49

So you can already tell front in the name Frontify comes from front end because my original goal when I started off was like how can I help people go from an idea to a design to actually make it happen.

Chris Lacinak: 06:56

Okay.

Roger Dudler: 07:04

So this front and that then users consume, I wanted to simplify that process. But it took us then nearly three or four years. to end up in a little bit of a pivoted thing. So when you look at what we do now as a brand management vendor and DAM it's a bit of a different position. So when you explain it now, it's not so technical any more, but it's still about a brand and its front window to the world. You know, it's like about how are people perceiving a brand and what is needed that you are perceived the way you want to be perceived. So obviously it's about consistency. It's about like using the assets that you that are proper on brand and all of these things. So I think the analogy is still true, but I would say it doesn't have much to do with front end anymore.

Chris Lacinak: 08:08

On your website, you described Frontify as a brand building platform where a user friendly DAM meets customized portals. You talked about like when you started the company, DAM wasn't a term that you were using. And frankly, DAM as a label doesn't have a ton of meaning because so many things that call themselves DAMs do wildly different things. The specificity here is really helpful. That origin story about where you came from, where the product came from, and what those pain points were originally intended to solve That goes back to 2013. Here we sit today, 2025.

Roger Dudler: 08:47

It's a while.

Chris Lacinak: 08:47

Frontify is hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, global company. Tell us a little bit about how Frontify has evolved and maybe how much it's stayed true to that same origin story between 2013 and today. How do you think about yourself in the DAM space and the brand building, brand management platform space. Help us understand a little bit about where Frontify fits into this big ecosystem.

Roger Dudler: 09:16

Yes, sure. So I would say when our when we found our first product market fit was about 2015. So when essentially we moved from What I described earlier about like simplifying the developer designer workflow, and we moved into brands. You know, brand guidelines. So, going from those specifications that we were generating over to, oh, we have customers asking us to document way more than just a few colors. So how can we do that? So we essentially build the first comprehensive solution for guidelines for brand guidelines. So that was our starting point. When we started, this was about like, hey, I create documents that are describing my brand. All of the colors, the fonts and all that stuff, tone of voice, what's the vision, all of these things. So they help people to be on brand. And so that was essentially the starting point of the brand portals that we that we are kind of like still doing today. And as part of this journey of getting more and more customers on board with the brand portal, we had more and more customers who were asking, hey, we can add images and videos in those portals, but we have way more of those. Why can't we have like a nice place to show them off? So because we we kind of like that our employees and partners have this very easy to use, beautiful access point to the brand material. So why can't they access the imagery and videos and stuff in there? So that was the moment when we decided to build something we call the media library. which was essentially a consumer-oriented view to consume assets. So that was basically a very light version of a DAM. But we were not like we came to this through requests from our customers and essentially were covering mostly brand related assets. So not really the full scope of a large organization. So When we did that, we learned, oh, there is more and more customers who like that. And obviously, as you know, then more requests come in You go from managing expiry dates to licenses to formats to conversion to all kind of things. And so over the years, we started to develop all those functionalities. So the use cases got bigger and bigger and bigger. we started to bring in more sophisticated specific libraries, for example, the icon library, which is a small thing, but we were coming from, as I said, like I'm a developer and the designer originally. So I was seeing the need for a specific way of delivering something like icons because they need like maybe you want to recolor them, maybe you want to show them in a smaller size. So you want to probably have that more specific. And by going into those areas, we really just solved the problems of those customers. And over time, I would say, since about three, four years we have like a feature set that is very complete. And so the use cases got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now it's basically what any other DAM is allowing to. But in combination with the brand guidelines and brand portals, which still are at the heart of the system. So we always kind of preach the idea of, hey, it's nice to have an asset repository, but It's only as valuable as the context you give it it. You know, it's not, you just know you don't want to take a bunch of images or videos and then throw it over to the people and then here you go, figure it out. But you want to give them guidance about why does it matter that that you choose this image versus the other. You know, why do we care about that stuff? Why do we care about what the brand stands for? And why do we do all of these things? So, This has always been in the DNA of the company and then led to the complete suite that is today.

Chris Lacinak: 13:51

I want to switch a little bit to your culture. And rather than just ask you to describe your culture, which is always a tricky thing to describe, I guess one thing I'd like to zero in on as the Founder, Are there founding kind of principles, mantras, personal beliefs, things that you feel like you brought to the company back in 2013 that persist today and are important to defining and understanding the culture that exists within the Frontify organization?

Roger Dudler: 14:22

Probably quite a few, I think. Maybe there's other people who can answer that better, but I think there is Yeah, because I'm a product person, there is always this obsession with product, you know, that I cannot stop having, even though I am probably in a role now that is a bit different than in the beginning. I'm not so good at coding anymore. And I don't code code anymore.

Chris Lacinak: 14:45

That's okay, you've got plenty of other things to worry about now.

Roger Dudler: 14:48

Other things to work on. But but no, honestly, like this obsession about I don't know, like every every single time where we cannot fulfill something specific, I get like, you know, it it hurts. So, you know, every feedback that we get back that is not excellent hurts. So There is this real obsession of like, you know, building the best possible product that people love. And I know how har it's hard in the enterprise space to do that because there's just so much you need to do. But on the other hand, I think we have always had a big focus on the people. So we're definitely a people first company where something that I think we are not able to show to the outside as much as we should maybe is like the level of service that we are providing to our customers and the human interaction with the people in our company is, I think, truly unique. the way we sell, the way we serve, the way we do support, the way we like anyone that you talk to in our company, I'm pretty sure you would learn that it's different, you know, because I don't want our people to go out and let's say, just sell something for the sake of selling, you know, because it's about these relationships. Let's assume you have someone who wants to who doesn't see the value in the product or wants to wants to to leave, that you go like, Oh, there's a contract and do this and this and that. No, I mean, that's not the point. Like, it's really about these relationships with people that make our customers, I think, enjoy working with us. So it goes beyond just providing a piece of software, which is very intangible. But like this this way in how we treat people outside and inside, I think is truly unique and manifests itself in all the touch points.

Chris Lacinak: 17:04

I think if I've got my history right, that you started the company on your own back in 2013, but that you've had now several rounds of VC funding to get you to where you are today. How do you think that, that has influenced your approach? What has it enabled you to do that maybe you wouldn't have been able to do otherwise? I guess I'm interested in hearing about how this has shaped your company and who you are today.

Roger Dudler: 17:30

I think it you know, taking funding, I think is is is speeding up things a little bit and sets the right ambition. I think we wouldn't be where we are today without that, and also with the help that we have from our investors. We raised a pretty significant amount until today. But I think what it truly enables is that You know, it's easy sometimes when you don't have that to chill a moment and like just say like it's all cool, you know, like why why bother? I think it it helps to set the right ambition, which means like if you I want to always have the company in in kind of a state of chaos sometimes. But then shape, you know, have it a bit more stable again, and then a bit of chaos again, and a bit of stable. So it's it's this kind of like strategic play of always setting a super high ambition, which doesn't allow people to stay the same. I think the the moment when you set an ambition like right above what's maybe naturally possible, then you know if we just continue doing ho doing it how we're doing it, we're not gonna make it. So this is just setting you in the right mindset of, okay, cool, we need to think about something. We need to get better every day. And it's not like we cannot get complacent and just tell ourselves that we're doing great.

Chris Lacinak: 19:13

Yeah, absolutely. urgency. There's always it's always nice to have some urgency behind things. But there's a fine line between urgency and burnout too, right? So I can I understand that line of tension that you have to walk.

Roger Dudler: 19:30

Well, you know, I mean, as a as a as an owner of a business by yourself, it's like it's it's um yeah, you you want people to to be healthy, right? And and still uh you I think it's a tough balance, right? To to be in the mix of like setting a high ambition and growing and and never being able to really rest. And I think this is the biggest challenge for leaders, to do that the right way. How can you ensure I mean, why am I still here? Why am I not burnt out yet? I mean, even though it's like been crazy, a crazy journey, I think because I think in day one I decided that I I want to have a life, and I ask for the same for my people. So from the beginning, I didn't work in evenings, I didn't work on weekends. I don't do that. And I don't care if anyone is against that. But when I see someone in the office after, I don't know, six thirty or seven, I'm saying, hey, are you sure you need to stay? Isn't it better to go home and then come recharged tomorrow? And so I think it's it's it's always been in our culture while you cannot you cannot you cannot influence all the aspects of people's lives. It's only one factor, the business element. But there, I want to make sure that people take their time to recharge, while it's not always that easy. But it's important.

Chris Lacinak: 21:09

**Customer Overview**

Thomas Meichtry: 21:10

We cater to like small businesses. And with small businesses, I mean maybe fifty, one hundred employees, they're just getting started. They want to mature out of a cloud. storage solution. We cater to midsized businesses, and we tend to cater to enterprises. So we really have clients across the board

Roger Dudler: 21:27

Yeah, I mean, I I love obviously the ones who has have started at some place and then grew into something much, much bigger and much more broad on the long run. There's a few of those examples, but one to pick out is probably Bosch.

Chris Lacinak: 21:42

Hm.

Roger Dudler: 21:43

So you're familiar with like Bosch, huge manufacturing company.

Chris Lacinak: 21:47

Yeah, yeah.

Roger Dudler: 21:49

When they started using Frontify, they were just using it as a design system. They were just using it from the from a UX perspective, just ensuring that like all the design teams inside Bosch you know have guidance on how to design, essentially. Over time, people liked it, so more people started to adopt it and they started to understand, oh, well, actually, maybe our core brand elements should also be in here because that's kind of somewhat connected. So they also added the brand portal. They started to add all of their brand assets. They started to see the same heavy adoption across the company and eventually seeing their requests go down and seeing more efficiencies and better output. And then later on saying like, well, actually, we also have this all like all of these assets lying around and we like that you know, we like that it's with the user first in mind. So why don't we put that also in there? And then we have one brand. So we put out like a a package for all of our other brands. They have like, I don't know, sixty five, seventy brands or so. So we say like, hey, we if you want to bring your brand on here, here's a package. We help you on board, we help you set things up. And so they started to do that. So more and more brands came on board. And more and more departments came on board, more and more countries came on board. And so slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, it expanded across the whole organization And the beauty of this is just like you have one central place, you have all the users in there, you have like a split between different entry points for different brands, they all look different. They all have their own brand, they all have their own vibe. And they can manage all of this in one single platform all by themselves without any kind of like complex technical stuff going on. And they can change it all the time. When they merge two brands together, they can just bring them together. So I think it's a beautiful case with and there's many of those.

Chris Lacinak: 24:05

And it was this a transformation that took a lot of these departments or business units or brands out of maybe managing their brand guidelines and assets and like PDFs and on Dropbox and Google Drive and things like that.

Roger Dudler: 24:15

Yeah, I mean there's lot all kinds of things out there, right?

Chris Lacinak: 24:17

Yeah. Yeah.

Roger Dudler: 24:18

And even this goes back to I told you about the story of the origin story, but if you think back, it's kind of connected. So it was in the beginning it was about I wanted to bring people together, right? So I wanted to bring together the designers and the engineers, the technical people and the business people. What Frontify is essentially doing in all of those companies, it helps them in the transformation. It essentially helps them to bring together teams who they never managed to really bring together. Same story with Lufthansa, I remember back in the days, still a customer since 2014 when we had nothing basically, or not much, compared to today. But it started off where the first time where all the agencies who are working with Lufthansa came into one room and were finally aligning with each other. Because it's like it's part of this idea of wait a second, shouldn't we shouldn't we start like do one thing? We say we have one brand And we all work for that one brand, but we don't really know what's going on. We don't really know who is doing what. These guys over there are doing the same stuff as the guys over there. So I think we are not only bringing in a product, but we also help to change the narrative internally. and bring people together finally, whether this is IT, marketing, sales, design, all kinds of departments. So where they finally sit on the table because they have a place where everyone gets a share, where everyone has something that is really providing them value, and it adds value to the overall picture. So I think it's something hidden But it truly it truly triggers transformation in a broader sense to those companies.

Thomas Meichtry: 26:22

Uber acquired Postmates in I think I believe it was 2020. And Postmates has been a client of ours since twenty nineteen. So they've been using the platform, they've been using, you know, kind of those early media library functionalities that we've had that developed into the DAM. They used the brand portal quite well. So 2019, Postmates was acquired. 2020, we changed the contract. And then starting in 2021, they started looking at how they're doing things. So the creative operations team at Uber was looking at, hey, how do we manage our assets? It was a similar use case, like disjointed ecosystem. Some was in Box, some was on a PDF. They had this custom CMS that they've built for brand.uber.com They used to have a DAM that was owned by one of their agency partners that was managing all those assets for them. So they kind of said, look, we probably want to replicate what what Frontify has done with Postmates. So we started engaging together into that journey And in 2021, we then really replaced everything, like that Box folder with all the marketing assets, the DAM, like lots of those toolkits and guidance. And they they what they did really well is they went they really got to value quickly. Whole implementation was about four weeks. It was stressful, especially for them because they really self-managed that. They're super smart people. They were looking at the platform. They obviously got our guidance, but they didn't really need our help because we have great documentation and the platform is easy to use. So they were launching it and they kind of saw that initial launch and usage. And based on that usage, they kept expanding it. So Right at that time after that launch, maybe six months down the road, they were going through a brand architecture work, because as a business, they've acquired more and more businesses, right? So they acquired Cornershop, Drizly, like a bunch of others. So they're really like level setting them on, hey, Uber as a brand and as a business, as a marketing organization is complex. We have that B2B function, we have a B2C function, but for riders, for For Eats delivery, we do alcohol delivery with Drizly. We have different markets where we show up differently as Cornershop. So what they ultimately did was then really find redo their whole brand architecture. As part of this, that they replaced that brand.uber.com the custom CMS that they couldn't maintain was like expensive, wasn't really agile enough for their type of business. And then they ran a full integration motion with it. So they acquired Cornershop. They replaced the tools, that saved them some money. They built a completely separate domain. It was brand.cornershopapp.com The team was pretty independent, and then they folded it in as part of like the integration process over the next twelve to eighteen months. So it's super flexible, and they all stood that up without us really needing to give them that guidance. And that then also showed in terms of how the additional use cases came about. The employer branding team looked at it and they're like, oh, this is amazing. I need my employer branding portal. We have our employer branding assets. We need our templates there. the email design system started building some guidance on it, earner marketing, campaign portals. They even had a merchant portal or even have still a merger portal, merchant portal, sorry. Uber for Business built like their B2B sales enablement portal on this, integrates with sales enablement tools. So they really they really saw all these like use cases because it is slightly different how Uber is perceived across these things. And they even have a completely separate co marketing hub, which is for another external stakeholder group, where if you do co-marketing with them you log into that portal, you get the same assets from like the DAM, but with guidance around co-marketing, specific templates for them. So that's been quite interesting to look at because I catch up with them once in a while and it's always impressive to see what they've done. And our case study says that and I think that was released maybe two, three years ago. And on the case study, it says to have twenty thousand total users I was just checking it and they have forty seven thousand total now, and that's more than they have employees. So they have less employees than users that access the DAM over that time. And when we look at metrics, it's one point six million one point six million page views on portals over twelve months, over a million downloads, four different domains, more than ten portals. So that really is a very nice overview. And then in terms of delivery, even when they integrate downstream, they have over half a billion of external asset deliveries. And we haven't even touched that to the fullest yet.

Chris Lacinak: 31:15

And what are the most kind of common pain points that you're hearing from customers today that they're looking for Frontify to solve?

Thomas Meichtry: 31:25

I'd probably classify them into like three areas. So number one, I'd say there's generally applicable pain points. Number two, it's like first time DAM buyers. And then maybe number three is like second or third time DAM buyers. So starting with that generally applicable piece, and by the way, all of those have been in more than 20% of our conversations, at least. I think the first ones may be more like 80%. And that one is understaffed teams. Everybody needs to do more with less. It's overwhelmed creative teams. That's because they need to create a high volume of assets. There's a lot of design requests. And there is maybe bottlenecks in the workflow that then lead to people reaching out to the DAM owners or the creatives, like, hey, where do I find this? Where do I find that? And that really takes their time away to focus on strategic tasks. Or it's maybe localizing content, changing a title, changing an image, stuff like this, which is more operational things that don't really need to be done by a designer nowadays. And that's all essentially amplified by the second problem that I think is generally applicable, which is a fragmented ecosystem. So that's more in terms of when we look at marketing and go to market. There is a ton of content. It starts with visual identity, it continues to campaign toolkits, it continues to sales enablement materials. And all that somehow ties back to assets. And typically, we see that stuff being across SharePoints, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations. If you're a Google company, you often have that stuff in Google Slides. Then you have assets in a DAM. Maybe there is a templating tool that's used. Maybe more Canva, more as a shadow IT type of usage where people start using Canva to create content. And if that's the case, people don't know where to go, and they go back to the people that own the content, making it essentially understaffed. And that's then kind of what I would say is kind of that second part of that generally applicable pain point. And that then leads to, I would say, more of a business impact of all of that, which is high costs and especially struggling to maintain brand consistency across You know, ever-growing touch points, of course. But then, when we look at maybe first-time DAM buyers, you know, the typical thing that's probably not changed over the past years, which is Oh, I don't find anything. I have my Google Drive set up. There's like 15, 20,000 assets, if not more, in there. And I just we don't find anything. We keep going out, shooting new content instead of reusing whatever we've already done. So that's been in bit of an evergreen problem. And then I think once you maybe mature to your first time DAM What we hear a lot is that the DAM owners that implemented the first time dam, there may be dissatisfied with it because of whether it's clunky interfaces, they've used it for five, eight years to some extent. There's like limited functionality, poor user experience, it doesn't really get the adoption you need. And there's also lack of innovation often that we hear, especially now that we look forward towards generative AI and just being top of mind and where the market's going. And that then often leads to the low adoption or inability to scale it across the enterprise with different use cases because it is, DAM isn't something that you should set up once and then just leave be, and people go in there and it's going to be fit for purpose for that team. Adjacent teams have different use cases, and that needs a little bit more flexibility.

Chris Lacinak: 34:57

Are you in the market for a DAM platform? I know it's a ton of pressure to get right. It's something you do not want to get wrong because if you do It's wasted money, it's wasted time, it's wasted energy, it's wasted morale, and so much more. So we've put together two things that I want to share with you today. One is a guide. It consists of seven resources to walk you from the beginning to the end of the DAM selection process. And it puts 20 years of experience to use in us helping organizations select DAMS, and it gives it to you for free. You've got to check it out. There's nothing like it. It's better than anything else out there. You can find it at bit.ly/yourdamchoice. That's bit.ly/yourdamchoice. DAM DAM, of course. No spaces, no hyphens, no periods. All lowercase. The other thing I want to turn you on to is a webinar that we're doing on October 7th. It's tied to the DAM New York event but it's freely available for everybody, and whether you're going to DAM New York or not, you can come. It will be led by Kara Van Malssen and Amy Rudersdorf, two leading experts on selecting DAM systems in the field. Much of that guide that I talked about comes from them and their expertise in choosing DAM systems. This will be a webinar format. They'll walk through how to get the DAM selection process right, how to make sure that you make the right choice. And of course, for those that are going to DAM New York, we'll have an opportunity to talk about it there. There's a session that we're doing there that'll tie it in. But whether or not you're going, it'll provide a tremendous amount of value. So make sure you check it out. You can find that at bit.ly/selectingyournextdam. That's bit.ly/selectingyournextdam. All lowercase, no spaces, no periods, no hyphens. All right, back to the show. **Customer Success**

Thomas Meichtry: 36:57

Early on, it was very much around Because the platform is so easy to use, it was literally like, hey, we're going to teach you how the platform works, and then you can start implementing it, right? And that was great for those early adopters. They all loved it. They went in there. And we still have customers that are that way, that really want to go in there and kind of start building themselves and they want to get used to it. They watch the videos that we have in our Academy, they speak to our customer success manager, which are very hands on in terms of being available, being able to suggest best practices and all that kind of stuff. So that used to be very much more of that motion, right? But the more we matured, I think the more we then started leaning into best practices because not everybody needs to do the same learnings. There is industry specific best practices because a CPG their portal and DAM setup is going to look different than a software company. The templates are different. So we they do gather and still gather a lot of data around what works, what doesn't. And we try to standardize that for a lot of our clients so that we can give them a head start to like get going. Then we have a really strong implementation partner network as well, like yours included. where it's really about building and implementing the platform. If they don't have the resources, we have calculators that we can exactly know what's the effort going to be? How much time do you need? And then we have that conversation around do you have the resources or should we get some help? Because that's important to client success. And then once that gets over to customer success, they're extremely hands on, they're extremely knowledgeable. We've had people that have been here with the business for five, seven years or more. So they really know the ins and outs of the platform. And I think where we we don't want to limit the time that you can spend with us, and we don't want to make it hard for you to like find the the information you need. So we have a big help article knowledge base. We have a customer onboarding hub with videos. And then obviously there's the one to one support that you get from a customer success manager. And you also have an account manager at hand as well who can help you optimize the structure as well, maybe more from a business value perspective and work with you on rolling it out to other teams. So if you need support on like selling it to like other internal divisions and stakeholders, that would that's what the account management function is there for.

Chris Lacinak: 39:22

Are there mechanisms for the community of Frontify users to engage with each other? Slack channels or groups of some sort where, or maybe even you get together in person. I don't know. Maybe there's an annual event or something. How does the community around Frontify engage and interact?

Thomas Meichtry: 39:39

Yes. So we are big fans of like connecting our clients that have similar challenges. I think When you look at our client base, whether you're managing a corporate brand or whether you're managing a product brand and marketing and all that goes with it. those challenges are differently and unique. Not unique to the business, but unique to the setup and the brand itself. So that's where we try to connect people together. So we've had and we do that with either email intros. We're always open to doing that. But we also do regular local get togethers. So we have those in Switzerland, in Germany, in London, in New York City. And those come in in, you know kind of more of like dinners, could be dinners, could be knowledge sharing sessions. You know, we had in person events where we talked about the future of AI, which is obviously something that a lot of people were interested in. So we did that. Session together, we bring in thought leader and experts. And then we have a yearly conference, which is called Paradigms. This year it's going to be in Marrakesh. So it's it's our yearly conference. It's amazing. It's paradigms.io Very nice. It's very it's high quality. The food is amazing. The program is amazing. We've had speakers from Coca-Cola and Nike, so it's really, really good. And I think lastly, the developer portal and community is big as well. Roger, our founder, he's a developer or he used to be a developer and still is at heart. And given our strong API and the brand software development kit, we really want to make it easy to build on top of our platform, especially for maybe custom Gen AI use cases and stuff. So this is where we have dedicated Slack channels to build to kind of come in and ask questions. You've got direct access to our developer team as well. If you want to build themes and you want to completely customize the look and feel, that's exactly what that's there for as well.

Chris Lacinak: 41:42

**Strengths and Key Differentiators** What would someone, you know, looking from the outside, maybe going to a conference, they see Frontify is one of several booths in an organization. Maybe they go to your website to look around, but What's something that your organization, your product, those are two very different things, but love to hear a little bit about both really excels at that you think is You know, might not be apparent to someone on the outside, but you think of as a real core strength of Frontify.

Roger Dudler: 42:13

Yeah, I mean, there is a few things that I mean, probably everyone claims for themselves, things like being a very user friendly system. But I think when you when you look at what customers are doing with our product, I still think it's not, we don't always like manage to show that the depth of what customers are doing with the system to the outside world. I think it's something we still need to work on. But what I think is powerful is the combination of the different product areas that we call, like the brand portal, the DAM and templates. Now these things which other vendors offer too. But we think because of our strength from the branding side, we more often have a higher adoption. I think that's always our key metric that we internally our biggest driver of value, we think, is the active usage that we achieve in organizations. So more often than not, you have organizations who go much broader in having usage on Frontify than most other DAMS. So you have a lot of companies who have like tens of thousands of users on Frontify regularly. And I think this is this has always been in the nature of what we're doing because it was more about the brand itself, right? It was more about like every employee needs to understand what the brand stands for. So every employee needs to have the tools and the guidance to be on brand. And the same applies to assets. So naturally, I think we do have more adoption. That's also what we get confirmed with some of our customers. And I think this goes back to really this origin where the brand is in the DNA of what we're doing. And DAM is a very important piece, but it builds on top of this idea. And I think that's why I think the main differentiation here is adoption.

Thomas Meichtry: 44:23

I think where we're really strong is obviously on like multiple markets, multiple use cases, multiple brands. Like that is something that we're really, really strong at. We have a really strong corporate brand and communication use case as well because they do struggle with communicating brands and assets downstream to a huge amount of people. But in the same way, we also work really well with creative operations, marketing, design or adjacent use cases like employer brand and increasingly also IT and technology given our SDK and API capabilities there. So it's it's it's I'd say it's really companies and maybe if I put it into like one sentence, it's companies that create a lot of content and have some sort of complexity the way they share it. So lots of stakeholders on the receiving end, on the content creation side. They need to localize, distribute, personalize a lot of content. Brands that are stretched, Uber, for example, is stretched across the B2B business, it's across a B2C business. It has multiple brands underneath it. So it's that type of stuff that we're really good at. But at the same time, if you're just getting started in that journey, we're usually a really good solution for that as well. And when we look at the way that Frontify is set up, let's take the small businesses, for example. I think we're extremely scalable and it's easy to like adapt, create the portals, change the UI. but not just change a logo on the top left, but really change the the visual interface of the DAM, change the structure, top line navigation. It's almost like building a website, which we call these portals, or in the market, they're generally known as portals. But they can really have a ton of information there. And that then also allows you to then scale beyond original use cases that you started with to adjacent use cases, adjacent teams. And that's then usually where we get into like midsized businesses. They do need that kind of setup and they don't want to just do it once. And then you probably learn from your first implementation, your second implementation. So having that operational agility and cross functional collaboration is super important. And I think that's kind of where, because we've come from like this brand portal portal type of setup. The way our system is set up is more on like that library type and multi brand, which makes it extremely flexible to really overlay the DAM on top of your business structure, the way you work, the teams that you work with. which is then also why large enterprises with multi brand governance, multi use case really, really like that side of our platform as well. When we look at the portal side, I don't think there is another DAM in the market that replaces multi hundred thousand dollar custom solutions that enterprises have built. For example, Mercedes, it's one of our case studies on the website. They really used to build like their brand portal and kind of their marketing brand DAM that was all built based on AEM. They had developers going in there customizing the navigation, customizing all the content, putting guidelines in there, digitizing all that kind of stuff. And that's kind of a setup that we're usually seeing where even if you have a strong enterprise DAM, that portal need on the left side is needed to like provide the context to all the assets. And especially at organizations that work across multiple markets, multiple agencies. And that's usually when they start investing into these custom CMS builds that we then easily can replace nowadays, even when you want to have the flexibility to make it look and feel like your brand, this is what we have themes for, where you can still build a custom interface while still retaining that ease of editing. So you don't need to have a developer be in between your documentation and the people that own the documentation, whether it's brand, campaign toolkits, employer brand, could be anything.

Chris Lacinak: 48:21

Is there anything like that about the platform that you feel like you just nailed it on some element of the framework or infrastructure or technology?

Roger Dudler: 48:29

The latest and greatest that I'm I think we really nailed it is basically everything we do around the extendability of the platform. So we call it the SDK. It's like a you know, it comes it actually also goes back a little bit to my earlier time while we're doing this. But basically what it allows you to do is you can build um you can build themes for portals, you can build like content blocks for for portals, you can build apps on top of the platform. There's also an API for sure, but I'm more talking about this extendability of the platform. So you can bring in other functionality in a native way into the product. So why is it particularly nice? So the idea goes back to something I was building. There was a a programming environment back in the days called Eclipse. And Eclipse had something special. They had some a concept called extension points. So it was the most popular programming idea at that time for for the Java world. Why? Because it was so extensible. It had lots of plugins and lots of like you can really make it yours. And so the idea was that you have different places in the product where you can just plug in your own functionality And I really loved this concept. And so we brought the same concept over to Frontify. So which means like what we call it Surfaces. It's a little bit different, but it's just different areas in the product. So there's lots of them where you can hook in and contribute functionality. So imagine if you are like on an asset, you can have asset actions. And then you can have your own asset action, which is super easy to code. I think that's another element that I really love, is like I can within a few minutes I can have an app up and running in a in a Frontify instance that does what I want to do. I can even the cool thing is, I can even go now with something like cursor I can do with AI. I can if I want something that manipulates metadata in a certain way that I that only I want and not anyone else, but it's very specific to me and my needs. I can just describe this in cursor and boom, I have it up and running in twenty minutes. And I have native functionality in Frontify, and I can play around with it as a developer locally, but within my instance, and then I can push it and publish it to other customers also, when we review it and give it out. But I think the what I really love about this and how the people built it is this absolutely flawless developer experience. Because a lot of us are developers. We come from the developer space. We love like this super, super straightforward and fast ways of extending products. I mean, just giving you the comparison to, I don't know, Adobe. Adobe Experience Manager. Have you ever built an extension for Adobe Experience Manager? You know, it's not the most straightforward process So it takes a really long time. Documentation is super hard. It's like I'm not blaming that it's an excellent product, but it's just very, very hard for a developer to extend to build an extension on top of it. And so this is something that I think is really amazing and technically quite difficult. Think of something very basic like I don't know, you wanna have a function that renames your assets a certain way based on rules that are on metadata, whatever. So we have like a small little app that does exactly that. You know, you can mark assets, and then you have bulk asset actions. It's another surface. So you plug your little tool in there and then everyone in your company can use this little tool to rename those assets properly. So and the same way we do more advanced stuff like a creative we call it Batch Creatives app. So what this does is it allows you to basically take either a bunch of assets or like a spreadsheet or something with data, and then you can run it through our templates. And so you can basically create like massive volumes of let's say ads or other creatives just with the click of a button. Another thing is like Image Studio. It's like a where you can manipulate images. And the whole idea behind this is that with the rise of AI tools What we believe in is that there will be an ever changing landscape of AI tools, right? And we believe that customers every customer will choose their own. But their big challenge right now is they have like a wild, wild west in the way people are using these AI tools, right? So what you really want is you want them to be able to use those, but you also want to have a certain level of governance around it, a certain level of control and visibility. So we think that the future is that you actually build I build an Elevenlabs app which allows me to create voiceovers and you you just have this app that lives on top of Frontify, and you give people access to Elevenlabs through Frontify. And by doing that, you have all the tracking and everything, you can ensure that voices that are being used are the ones that the brand has approved. You can make sure that maybe there is a double check in the end that checks if something is on brand or not on brand. And so There is a lot of things that are beneficial in making sure that content creation, even though they're using many, many tools, is routed through the platform. allows you to do certain things that are extremely powerful. So finding the balance between control and creativity, so allowing people to use all of those tools, but then giving them an environment That is more governed, you know, and the apps are basically enabling that.

Chris Lacinak: 55:16

**Roadmap**

Roger Dudler: 55:18

I think we're thinking about a lot of cool things. And one of the elements that is coming up also very, very soon that I really like is a thing called automations. So we have worked quite a while now on basically allowing not only those apps to bring in external functionality, but also have a way to automate these things in a simple way. So we already allow to create like complex workflows in like IPAS systems and stuff. But we bring in like a new functionality into the system called Automations, which allows you to basically say, hey, whenever an asset is uploaded, I want to I want to gener I want to send it to ChatGPT. I want to detect if there's a mountain in it. If there is a mountain in it, I want you to go into that spreadsheet with all the mountains, and then I want you to select one of those as the matching one. And then I want you to put this into a metadata field. Then I want you to set the status to this, and then I want you to send it's not something unusually new, but I think the way we implemented it and the way this interacts with the apps is unique. So the stuff that I told you before about the apps is adding functionality to those automations. So which means imagine you have an app from ElevenLabs about like creating voiceovers. So you could say like, oh, now I want to do like whenever it's about whenever it's a video I want you to automatically create the voiceover, and I want you to store it there, and then I want you to notify this person. And then so I think the extendability aspect of this is crazy. And the way it's enabled for an end user is super user friendly. So you don't need to code anything. You don't need to, you just click a few buttons and you're there. So that's always the goal. It's no there's no implementation project. There is no coding involved. It's just like boom and there you have it. I think that's super cool.

Chris Lacinak: 57:36

It sounds kind of like uh I don't know if you're familiar with like n8n or uh or uh

Roger Dudler: 57:40

We are actually using n8n in the background for this.

Chris Lacinak: 57:42

Okay. I mean it s it sounds to me like n8n, yeah, it but n8n within.

Roger Dudler: 57:46

Yes, you can already, I love n8n by the way. I mean, we use all these systems, Tray, n8n, Make, whatever. But n8n is particularly nice, I think, for such a use case. And you can already today use n8n in the cloud to interact with Frontify, but we also now have a way where you can securely use those automations in a more isolated sandboxed environment. And the automations are basically making use of the n8n infrastructure but just basically simplify the usage of it. But technically, you could have any kind of workflow behind it. And you can even build it in n8n in the cloud and send it to us and we can deploy it in a sandbox and then allow you to use it in your Frontify.

Chris Lacinak: 58:40

So it strikes me that uh this picture that I think we see painted very commonly right now of uh kind of the seamless interactions with various AI tools, bring your own AI, bring your own workflow, bring your own whatever the case may be. One of the challenges that I haven't yet seen conquered might be out there, I just haven't seen it yet. And I'd be curious like where this is and your thinking and roadmap is. When you think about this in an organization use as opposed to an individual use, the management of tokens, price, vectors, whatever the limits are around things, like how do you manage that in an organization? Do you have an evolving picture on how you think organizations or I should say technology platforms give organizations the ability to get their hands around that and kind of manage that? Because that seems particularly tricky right now.

Roger Dudler: 59:34

I would say there's two aspects to this. I think one is that with the introduction of the apps, we provide a way that you can streamline the consumption of those services. So you can you can have either you can have your own API key in there. And so that's kind of in transparent to the user. So it you can centrally manage all of that even though you give access to many, many people. So this kind of like metered pricing allows us then also to allow basically not even having an account with someone like Eleven Labs or ChatGPT or OpenAI. So basically, even us being the contractor and just charging you basically for what you use is simplifying that quite a bit. And then there is an interesting element, I think, to shared elements of using those services. I mean, I I brought up the ElevenLabs example of voices. So At the moment, most of the AI tools out there are not really good at allowing you to manage your team. And if they are, it's only focused just purely on them. So it doesn't really fit like an enterprise architecture. And so I think take the example of Midjourney. If you're using Midjourney for image generation, you can use a thing called style references. So a style reference would be specific image style, maybe you've trained one by yourself, whatever. But you actually want to give your people just a selection of those. So you don't want to You don't want to just give them like do whatever you want kind of style. But you can say, hey, here is guidance. You know, we have like ten different style references. We have one for illustrations, we have one for this, we have one for this, one for that. And these are the approved ones. These are the ones that we we want you to use. And here is the guidance about them. And so instead of giving full access to all those tools, you can give a bit more limited access. only a number of voices to choose from, not all of them, because they wouldn't fit the brand. And only a number of styles only the ones that would fit the brand. So I think this kind of like combination of simplifying the, basically the building process, but then also simplifying access to shared presets and stuff is much easier in a system like ours.

Chris Lacinak: 01:02:20

Yeah, that's interesting. So I mean, governance is at brand guidelines management core, right? So it sounds like you in some ways you you've got

Roger Dudler: 01:02:30

And as you can see, this is not always directly related to assets directly. You know, it's like that's why this element of understanding the brand is so core, and everything else is built on top of it.

Chris Lacinak: 01:02:44

So it's all the activities that surround a given brand you're kind of bringing into a single place that helps Govern and manage. **Industry Insights and Future of DAM** In a hypothetical scenario, you find yourself on an airplane sitting next to another CEO at some Fortune 500 company, and you guys start chatting and she asks you or she tells you or what she asks you what you do and you tell her and she says, Oh, well, you know, it's funny, I've got I've got, you know, my vice presidents or senior vice presidents asking me for budget for DAM or brand management or whatever they say. Probably not DAM, but whatever they say, however they describe it. And she says, I'm not totally convinced we need this. What would be your pitch to that or advice, let's say, to that CEO about why they need to take that seriously and why they need to be thinking about implementing a platform like Frontify at their organization?

Roger Dudler: 01:03:45

Yes, I would probably first ask them how much they would be concerned if they would see a billboard with the wrong logo on it out in the wild and whether they care about that or not. Because I think The the baseline for needing a system like ours is you care about your brand. If you don't You know, you yeah, you can use any DAM, doesn't matter. But I think the moment when you care about your brand truly, you understand the value of your brand, you know that like probably the majority of the value of your company sits in the brand and the brand equity. When you do know when you do understand that and you know the power of it, then I think there's a reason why you should consider making sure that many, most of your people, ideally all of them engage with a brand portal to learn more about the brand. So you give them simplified access to all of these elements. And you get one by one more on brand and you have less risk of destroying your brand on the long run. So I think really it goes back to do you care about brand? You should care about Frontify.

Thomas Meichtry: 01:05:09

We're big fans of like, hey, before you make that commitment, it's a long commitment. Do trials with your top two, three providers and two pilots. See how it is, see if you lo how you like it, how you like the people behind it. That's usually very important. Yeah, I think you know, you buy technology for two things. It's either you want to re increase revenue or want to decrease cost. And I think excitement only gets you a certain way there because they might come to us and be excited about something. If it doesn't solve a business challenge, there's no way the business case gets approved.

Chris Lacinak: 01:05:43

Are there aspects, themes, trends that you've seen over time that tell you selling into organizations is somehow different today than it was five years ago or in 2018? Has anything changed there that's notable?

Thomas Meichtry: 01:06:02

When I started, cloud used to be more of a like, oh, I'm not sure if our IT really is down to go to the cloud. So I feel like that's maybe something and that trend that really kind of vanished. So cloud DAMS, I think especially for marketing use cases, have really become the standard, I'd say. There is also more of an integration focus, an ecosystem focus. I think There is a big trend towards maybe, hey, no DAM does it all, right? I think in today's world, there are different use cases, and maybe there is like a two DAM setup that makes sense for the business. If it's a one DAM setup, it needs to integrate to the marketing technology stack from an upstream and downstream distribution perspective. And so that is a big focus as well, because these tools, they really became bigger and bigger over the past years. Organizations have bought tools left and right. So there's maybe more of a bit of a consolidation going on in the past twelve to twenty four months, whether it's in search of cost savings or streamlining processes, like that type of stuff. And I think generally budgets are scrutinized more carefully. I think maybe post in a zero net, zero interest policy environment it was much more easier to like get DAMS and brand boards approved. And now I think ROI really must be clear before the investment. So that's probably, I would say, the general trends in the buying behavior over the past three to five years.

Chris Lacinak: 01:07:34

I'm guessing that frequently the case might be a champion that wants to bring a DAM into the organization comes to you and says, I'm interested in this. And then they've got some challenges back home they need to deal with. And some of those, I imagine, might be ecosystem challenges. We need to integrate this into a larger ecosystem. Some of them might be leadership doesn't understand the value of brand management and DAM. Some might be, we don't have a strategy. And until we figure out X, Y, and Z, we can't, I don't think I'm going to be able to get support for this. I'm making up hypotheticals here. I'm curious, what are the things that you tend to hear the most about the struggles that people anticipate having when they're looking at procuring Frontify?

Thomas Meichtry: 01:08:19

I mean, your hypotheticals don't sound like hypotheticals to me, because it's pretty much, you know, a good summary of what's happening out there. The old tale of not getting executive buy-in is probably kind of the number one. It's more it's not not getting it, but it's just it's the way to get there, which is usually quite like lengthy and needs that business case. It's not something we can't overcome. I mean, we've got we've built strong business case templates and we support our contacts and if they want to procure and move on with the platform, we're obviously there to support, and we've got a lot of experience for that. But it is usually quite a rigorous process at the end, right? You need to really make and ensure the ROI is there, the case is made. And it's often also tied to potentially the fear of effort and change management because maybe they've been burned in the past. I've seen a lot of DAM implementations where people just chuck in a couple of assets and they trusted the whole saying of, oh, we have the best search. And then you don't find anything because you've got missing governance, missing data, missing metadata, taxonomy, et cetera. So it's really then also making sure that we maybe learn like they learn from those kind of mistakes, and we make sure that we support them with implementation and governance, and just ensuring that we're not just talking software, but we're also talking implementation. So those are, I would say, some common objections that we're typically seeing. Next to maybe more I'd say a common one as well is maybe more like missing education on the buyer side. It's more like the amount of times I've heard people say, oh, can we not use SharePoint or Dropbox for this, right? And that's just maybe coming from someone in IT who owns like the overall tech stack. And they're like, SharePoint does that, don't they? And that's even on a brand portal use case, that's even worse, right? Where maybe there is already an existing DAM in the organization and they're like, oh, but we can use this DAM for our brand portal. Usually you can't. And that's where we then usually set up maybe integrations with that platform. So we've really been able to get around that with more market education as well.

Chris Lacinak: 01:10:30

What do you think are the red flags that come up for you the most when you're looking at An organization, talking to an organization, what are the things that are indicators to you in conversations, things that people say or things that you see that tell you that an organization might have a high chance of struggling with implementation and adoption and those things.

Thomas Meichtry: 01:10:58

I think lack of executive sponsorship is the number one, right? It's like if you don't have the executive sponsorship, you don't get the resources. If you don't get the resources, implementation is going to suffer. Or at least it was like this in the past at least 12, 24 months, or even before that. I don't know what Gen AI is going to bring. Maybe it's going to make it better and easier and cheaper and faster. I strongly believe it will. But that's still like a big, big problem, I think. Then just shortly after that, it's the no-clear implementation strategy. So if you don't have defined use cases, don't have defined jobs to be done, there was little involvement of the business in writing user stories, like that type of stuff, then usually is a bit of a red flag because it's who are you building this for? Like the DAM isn't necessarily just for you to manage your assets and your three people going in there, it's really to support and enable the business as a whole. So, if there is maybe a lack of cross-functional engagement and collaboration, that's a big red flag. And then I think adoption and rollout and communication is equally as important because I've seen some of the biggest DAM programs out there. And if you talk to some local marketer, they're like, wait, where do we have these assets? So that like communication and adoption and running that kind of continued program is equally as important.

Chris Lacinak: 01:12:20

So nobody loves to answer RFPs or requests for proposals. The ideal scenario for every product and service provider is that someone comes to them directly, falls in love, wants to work with them and only them, right? That's the most ideal scenario However, the reality is that there are RFPs in the world that organizations put out. And I'm curious, from your perspective, what do you think makes for a effective DAM procurement process. And what are red flags when you see something in an RFP that that you say, I don't know about this, and maybe offer some advice to folks out there that are writing RFPs that would be helpful to you and to them on how they could do better.

Thomas Meichtry: 01:13:09

I like when I think the requirements are clearly written down, right? It's like But that needs to be clearly written down, right? So you need to have defined use cases, pain points. You need to look at integrations, and not just... why is the integration there? You know, don't just put, oh, we use these tools and you export a list from like your finance team and you slap all the integrations on there and you don't know why they should be on there. Like, that's not an integration like RFP. That's not what should be. It should really, you know, prioritize with a use case. The objective evaluation criteria should be done. I think every vendor has its DAM RFP template. Like get them out. See what's out there, get that first information, and then really build your own requirements based on that. See what's out there and see what you need. And then roll out when you roll out the RFP process. I think that's when I think the fun stuff starts, which is then allow Q&A questions. Because RFPs, you can literally, questions can be interpreted in multiple ways. So for us as a vendor, it's always helpful to be able to follow up with questions and just really make sure we understood what that means, what that's there for, because we want to avoid misunderstandings. And we also want to ensure long term support and governance, right? So it's like talk to the don't just send an RFP and then just have everyone write down whatever they do, and then just evaluate like this. Talk to the vendors, you know, see what the people behind the platform look like, how they communicate, how they structure things, how they follow up, how they help project management, what their like expertise is. There's a ton of institutional knowledge within all the DAM vendors that you don't get on the website, and that you get that by talking to people. So it's usually Set up these sessions, talk to folks. And then I think most importantly, trial. And I said it before, trials are, while time intensive, and they do need time to like really go in and test out the system. And if there is a learning curve with each one, shortlist two or three vendors into the trial. DAMS are long term investments, long term engagements. So before you get married in that sense, you definitely want to first start dating, and that's probably a good way of doing that. And then the red flags, I think no proactive IT involvement. I think that's usually that might lead to issues. Like you can you need to like have cross functional teams involved. And I think the second one the one that's like that's super important to me is don't just write requirements for your team, right? You need to involve the business. The DAM is something for the business, and otherwise it doesn't get adoption. So really make sure that you speak to people, understand their pain points and don't just say, hey, I can't manage assets effectively. It's all about making sure the DAM gets used by the broader business. having that cross-functional support and those requirements in the tool as well, or in the RFP, that's important.

Chris Lacinak: 01:16:10

**A Personal Touch** You sit today, I'm guessing in St. Gallen, where you live, and I think where the headquarters of Frontify is, right? But you have offices all over the world. I have to wonder, Frontify has to is is Frontify one of the success stories of St. Gallen? I mean, it's about, what, eighty thousand people.

Roger Dudler: 01:16:30

It definitely is.

Chris Lacinak: 01:16:30

It seems like it must be a pretty cool thing for the city there to have uh Frontify as a as a kind of uh something to brag about. Um but yeah, I guess I guess I wonder Like, do you does you've chosen to stay there. This is personal for me because I also have chosen to live in a, I think, where I want to live. That's more and more common today, but run a company that operates at kind of a high pace all over the world, you know, with Fortune 500 companies and companies doing all sorts of amazing work. The pace, though, obviously, is different in St. Gallen I wonder, like, and I don't want to read too much into this, but does that change, like, do you think that changes how you lead the company, kind of what your perspective is on leadership, culture, and how you approach things?

Roger Dudler: 01:17:23

I think absolutely. For me, it has been a dream always in the beginning when I started off to have an impact in the in the region. I think it's not something that probably someone outside really cares about. But for me personally, it's been always great if I can talk to students in St. Gallen and show them, hey, you can build a global leader from a small city. And I think the amount of people that are inspired by that story is amazing. And so for me, that has always been like a super rewarding experience to be able to do that. And being you know, being a Swiss company um and having Swiss roots is truly having an impact on the culture, obviously. It's the the way we think, the way we operate is different to other cultures, and that is reflected in many things that we do. I think it starts with things like being an extremely healthy company, not kind of like overdoing things and not going crazy and then roll back. And it's not always what people maybe want, but there is a beauty to this kind of balanced approach. And I like being in this intersection of being in New York, for example, coming back extremely inspired, you know, like seeing like how everyone's like chasing, you know I wouldn't say chasing their dreams, but like I would say just the the general like ambition is different in the US, for example, than it is in Switzerland. And we're still learning here. And when I come back, I get that fire. which I bring back, and then let that like also influence the company. But I'm also the guy who lives like ten minutes from here in the green, or like next to a forest and with my family, and I truly enjoy that. I wouldn't want to live without that. So I think this this balance between this grounded way of living, but then the extremely high ambition globally is a super cool interplay.

Chris Lacinak: 01:19:52

Yeah.

Roger Dudler: 01:19:53

that I like. Yeah, and I we we try to take the best out of of the Swiss culture, but then also be mindful that it's not always great to to work like that. So like mix it with all the benefits of the other cultures, you know. How should I say there's no reason for people here to start a company? in technically. Like you can make a lot of money, you can make a lot of like you can be fine, you know, you can be super comfortable. So there's no there's no need to take the debt risk theoretically. But so it means like for me it was always when I when I kind of do that step and take that risk that I ensure that I can still continue living a balanced life. And I enjoy life, so I wanna I have a lot of passion besides work and I wanna I want to spend time on them too, and they inspire me for the business. And I think there's different approaches in the startup world and scale up world which I do not agree with. And um but but it's okay, you know, it's a choice. And I just chose a path that is more it's more balanced, and I want to build a company is more balanced, while accepting that might not give us the absolute fastest growth possible. But that's okay.

Chris Lacinak: 01:21:22

Do you have a current mantra or something that you know maybe Sort of philosophy that you try to drive home to your team today, you know, in 2025 or maybe over the past months or something that you think is you're really trying to ingrain to either orient folks in the right direction or to kind of orient the culture or something along those lines.

Roger Dudler: 01:21:47

Yes, I mean, I try at the moment, I mean, a big focus of mine is trying to make sure that we don't forget that we can also do stuff a bit more scrappy sometimes and like a bit more flexible. I think there is a beauty in, you know, trying things and, you know, also doing things a bit quicker. But it's a tough balance between like doing that and maintaining the quality and the level of service and so on that we want to provide to everyone. So but still kind of this basically unlocking the unlocking everyone's excellence somehow by giving everyone the enabling everyone and to to to to uh to try things. And it's a big focus of mine, uh, to not be too process oriented, to not be too formal. But you know, everyone everyone owns the product. Every just give it a go, you know. Convince people that you're doing the right stuff.

Chris Lacinak: 01:23:03

So what is it about scrappiness? Why what do you think it is about scrappiness that brings out excellence in people?

Roger Dudler: 01:23:08

Yeah, I mean, that's maybe a personal thing, but I think you can scrappiness, I think, makes you focus on the really important stuff at the very beginning. And it assumes I think it it assumes a certain level of curiosity, so that you instead of thinking, hey, I do know everything already, and so I am in a position to plan this out properly, whether this is in the product or in any other process. But like, instead of saying, Hey, I know everything exactly, I'm like curious, you know, I know stuff better, and then I other things are more blurry. I'm fine with that. So let's focus on the stuff that is more clear now And then you go with that, and then you learn, and then you listen to people, and then you adjust, and then the picture in the end gets less blurry over time. So if you do the analogy to product, Back in the days when I was still coding and I saw different approaches of building products as a in a more like a waterfall model, you know, you go out and you gather requirements and then you write a book about all the requirements. So you get like end up with such a book, and then you start building that. And whenever, so you build for like a year and then whenever someone's like, ah, damn, we learned something new I think we're doing the wrong thing here. And then when you do that, everyone's like, oh, damn, we can't go back. You know, we invested too much. It's like done. So That was the beginning, and then people moved into a more agile approach and go really scrappy, right? Like, go out and like super bad quality sometimes, whatever, and and learned along the way. And then we're now in the phase of like these worlds coming back together. Like there's good stuff in the old world and there's good stuff in the new world. And so the beauty of it is if you can go out early, while you know you're somewhat going in that direction, but it's still a bit blurry, but you're willing to take a first step and then learn. And then along the way, that picture gets a bit more clear. But the first the steps you're making have a level of quality that is on par with the final product. It's just limited in scope. And I think this is this is the the balance you need to find in today's world.

Chris Lacinak: 01:25:52

I can imagine that scrappiness, as you talked about, you had in the early days, and as you grow, there's necessarily more process. You say you don't really want to add too much process More line drawing, you know, here's my focus. And there's some really great things about that. But it sounds like you want like I can imagine that scrappiness is important to maintain to make sure that people don't get complacent. That people are not saying, I'm not going to think about that because that's not my area that you want everybody kind of engaging with some level of

Roger Dudler: 01:26:19

And I think there is an element to missing I think you you run the risk of missing pieces. So if you don't if you don't try to do something quick or like or quicker. It might be that you just put something on the on on you know on the roadmap or like in prioritization, whatever. which if you would have had a look earlier on, you maybe would have been able to solve it in a day. But because you have processes, you may end up putting those on the list always, because that's just how you do it. And like this, you miss the opportunities that you have. And I think this is it's a big piece of customer delight and in serving customers to be able to navigate those smaller bits and pieces which do not necessarily would find their way into the roadmap or whatever, but like be smart about how you choose those. And I think If you go too strong on the processes, you may lose this ability.

Chris Lacinak: 01:27:30

So just one final question, and I know that this one will have special meaning to you as someone who I think I watched you on a podcast say that you spend an hour a day, although that was a couple of years ago. I'm curious if you still do, spend an hour a day making music uh in your little h lab at home. Uh but I've I I ask all my guests on the podcast what what the last song they added to their favorites playlist was. Uh and if you need to pull out your phone, that's fine. But

Roger Dudler: 01:27:56

Yeah, let's check liked songs. It's it's called Cornfield Chase from Lynnic

Chris Lacinak: 01:28:08

Okay. All right, I'll look it up.

Roger Dudler: 01:28:12

It's some EDM kind of electronic, um, vibey kind of um what is it, like melodic house kind of thing.

Chris Lacinak: 01:28:20

And is that your music type of choice? Or is that just yeah, okay.

Roger Dudler: 01:28:23

Yes, yes, I like that a lot.

Chris Lacinak: 01:28:24

Is that what you make yourself?

Roger Dudler: 01:28:26

That's also what I make, yeah.

Chris Lacinak: 01:28:27

Yeah, very good.

Roger Dudler: 01:28:28

And I don't really make, I'm more like I'm just enjoying the process of creating some you know, my my wife, she's always like when when I don't have headphones on, I mean, after like 10 minutes she goes crazy and it's like they put headphones on like no one you know you always press the same button again like ee eee ee eee ee eee So it's like Yes, I think it's really annoying for people who are not doing it by themselves, but I truly enjoy the process.

Chris Lacinak: 01:28:59

I get it. I'm also a closet music maker, which nobody ever hears, but I have fun doing it. Although I I'm a

Roger Dudler: 01:29:06

I I can only by the way, I can only recommend it to anyone out there because the the because it's a cool thing, even though you're like I'm not talented for that, by the way. So I'm like Just the the beauty of it is you're in the moment.

Chris Lacinak: 01:29:22

Yeah, mm.

Roger Dudler: 01:29:22

You're doing something and you concentrate fully on it. I mean, other people do sports more, but like I think music has this really beautiful combination of focus, creativity, technology also because there's so beautiful devices out there.

Chris Lacinak: 01:29:43

Yeah.

Roger Dudler: 01:29:43

So for me, this is like, yeah, it's a dream.

Chris Lacinak: 01:29:45

Yeah, that's great. Well, Roger, thanks so much for sharing this time with us today. I really appreciate it. It's been fun and interesting and inspiring. It gets me excited. I want to go make things happen now. So thanks.

Roger Dudler: 01:30:00

Come to Switzerland and visit us. There's beautiful mountains as well here.

Chris Lacinak: 01:30:05

Yeah, I also live in a mountainous region. So I looked it up on Google Maps. It looks gorgeous. I would love to visit. But yeah, thank you for giving us your evening.

Roger Dudler: 01:30:13

You're welcome always.

Chris Lacinak: 01:30:15

I'm sorry for keeping you a little late, and really appreciate it.

Roger Dudler: 01:30:18

All good.

Chris Lacinak: 01:30:18

All right, be well.

Roger Dudler: 01:30:19

Thank you so much.

Chris Lacinak: 01:30:20

Now down to the final question that I ask every person who comes on the DAM Right Podcast, which is what is the last song that you added to your favorites playlist?

Thomas Meichtry: 01:30:30

So, I'm embarrassed to say that I'm like a little bit of an algorithmic you know, a guy when it comes to listen to music, so since we've went to streaming, it's like I have my playlists and I just go into those and and then you know Apple serves me all the music that I listen to. I used to be completely different because I used to go really deep into like looking at specific artists and I don't know, sometimes I still do that if I like the artist. So, uh, the the most recent Eminem album I added to my my um, you know, library. But quite frankly, eighty, ninety percent of times I will listen to like algorithmic music, which is just serve me nice music. Maybe I'm I I want to have, you know, hip hop, maybe I want to have German rap, maybe I want to have pop. Sometimes when I'm at home I used I used to play jazz and and then it's really just hey Siri play some jazz. So I'm more like that type of music listener If you'd ask me which podcasts I listen to, I'd have a pool list, but my music, I'm more of an algorithmic guy.

Chris Lacinak: 01:31:32

All right, well you mentioned Eminem, so do you have a favorite song on that album?

Thomas Meichtry: 01:31:36

The most recent I had it had mixed reviews, but I quite like Houdini.

Chris Lacinak: 01:31:41

Okay. All right. And what is a what is give us one of your favorite podcasts? I'll take that too.

Thomas Meichtry: 01:31:47

Oh, yeah. I think the the the the Prof Galloway, um, there is always a one which is called the Prof G Markets podcast on Monday. That one is great. He dives into general things that happen in the market, and he's just a fun guy to listen to. And then I'd say probably the FT News briefing every morning is pretty good as well.

Chris Lacinak: 01:32:09

Okay. Wonderful. Well, Thomas, thank you so much for your time and insights and experiences that you shared with us today. I really appreciate it, and I'm sure the listeners will as well. So thank you.

Thomas Meichtry: 01:32:20

I hope so. Thanks for having me. This was a blast.

Chris Lacinak: 01:32:23

Are you in the market for a DAM platform? I know it's a ton of pressure to get right. It's something you do not want to get wrong because if you do, It's wasted money, it's wasted time, it's wasted energy, it's wasted morale, and so much more. So we've put together two things that I want to share with you today. One is a guide. It consists of seven resources to walk you from the beginning to the end of the DAM selection process. And it puts 20 years of experience to use in us helping organizations select DAMS, and it gives it to you for free. You've got to check it out. There's nothing like it. It's better than anything else out there. You can find it at bit.ly/yourdamchoice. That's bit.ly/yourdamchoice. DAM DAM, of course, no spaces, no hyphens, no periods. All lowercase. The other thing I want to turn you on to is a webinar that we're doing on October 7th. It's tied to the DAM New York event. but it's freely available for everybody, and whether you're going to DAM New York or not, you can come. It will be led by Kara Van Malssen and Amy Rudersdorf, two of the leading experts on selecting DAM systems in the field. Much of that guide that I talked about comes from them and their expertise in choosing DAM systems. This will be a webinar format. They'll walk through how to get the DAM selection process right, how to make sure that you make the right choice. And of course, for those that are going to DAM New York, we'll have an opportunity to talk about it there. There's a session that we're doing there that'll tie it in. But whether or not you're going, it'll provide a tremendous amount of value. So make sure you check it out. You can find that at bit.ly/selectingyournextdam That's bit.ly/selectingyournextdam All lowercase, no spaces, no periods, no hyphen.