Listen here to the article.
The management and organization of brand and product content are increasing issues on the technology agenda of organizations. The adoption of digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) solutions is increasing in proportion to the rise of digital promotion and sales channels. But what is the perimeter behind these acronyms? A universal answer does not exist; let us try to give you ours.
We have been dealing with content for over twenty-six years. Of their organization, classification and distribution. The Chalco BrandLife Suite rests its foundation precisely on a powerful Digital Asset and Product Information Management engine. With this article we tell how we came to deal with content and thus how our history has also strongly influenced the evolutionary path of the Chalco BrandLife Suite.
Let’s start with an important clarification: what we mean by product content. It may seem trivial, but an initial lack of agreement on the perimeter and meaning we attach to the concept of content could lead to misunderstandings or misinterpretations-it has happened to us before.
A definition of content
By product content we mean any type of asset[1], information or data created, stored or distributed in digital format and related to a product/collection master structure. In these terms, the meaning of content takes on a very broad perimeter: in addition to images, video, 2D, 3D, it can also include supply chain information, technical, commercial, descriptions, translations, relationship links (and we could go on).
While it is true that in this sense it greatly increases the perimeter of what we define as content, over the years we have also wondered how much this consequently increases its value. Adopting a more systemic point of view to the topic, we realized that the sum of all that content actually led to a very valuable result. In fact, proper correlation of those contents led to the consolidation of what we called Digital Product Identity in 2015, so in fact the best and most complete digital representation of the physical product. Centralizing the governance of the Digital Product Identity in fact guarantees organizations a more correct and efficient distribution of the product to the multitude of promotional and sales channels that are today essential for business sustenance and growth.
And if this was true for product, going up one more level, we also wondered about the value that the consolidation of Digital Product Identity took on in an attempt to circumscribe the brand identity perimeter by arriving at what we recently called Brand Digital DNA. We will talk extensively about Brand Digital DNA and Digital Product Identity in our upcoming articles. We will also see the role these two concepts play with respect to the use of AI for the generation of brand and product content-but let’s go in order and go back to the basics for now.
The origins
When we started in 1998, the challenge was to support publishers and ADV agencies in managing the lifecycle of images and layouts through an innovative approach and tool for the time.
The acronym DAM was not widespread, but the need to bring order to the multitude of content they both managed as a core element of their business was beginning to spread: publishers to build the book or magazine, agencies to respond to the growing demand from companies for more and more specific content for a number of channels that was bound to increase exponentially.
It was the era of the first e-commerce sites and soon of the realization that the Web would increasingly be a channel of communication and branding, not just a tool for service, presentation or mere sharing of “hyper-related” information.
The direction seemed clear to us almost immediately: content governance would not remain the exclusive preserve of publishers and agencies for long. Brands-accompanied by the explosion of social media platforms-would soon become their own publishers. Designing, producing and distributing the physical product would soon no longer be enough. The content needed to present and market the product through the new digital platforms would soon become a topic and budget item central to any organization’s growth.
Covid certainly accelerated this awareness but the theme was now clear: NO CONTENT NO BUSINESS. It is true in B2C but also in B2B. There is no B2B sales campaign or sales process today that does not include the massive use of digital product presentation tools.
Two lessons
Understanding the role that content would play in the lives of brands and thus the importance for brands to equip themselves with DAM technologies as well, we felt that we were still missing a few pieces along the way. Our experience was rooted in two areas that were in many ways tangential and in others very distant: publishing and marketing. It was in those experiences that we found the first two pieces that we were missing to really help brands that were at that time facing a world that was changing radically.
From agencies and then from marketing we learned that there is no communication, no promotional or commercial success without a strong product at the center. The best communication campaigns always started from there, put the product at the center and built around its characteristics. Physical, performance, aesthetic, aspirational, values but the protagonist was him, the product.
First lesson, first piece: we couldn’t help companies manage their content without worrying about relating that content to the product it represented. It was out of this thinking that Chalco’s first PIM engine integrated with the system’s original DAM matrix was born. A single platform then with both digital asset and product information management functionality. The value of assets at this point doubled: the same product image was worth much more if it was “aware” of representing that specific product or set of products. The very ability of the system to search for content within it increased exponentially with the introduction of meta-dating of the content itself.
From our long — and still lively — experience with publishers we have learned instead that content does not fall from trees. The book does not build itself. The construction of the book or magazine is the result of a complex process involving people, resources, different atoms of content that must be amalgamated and correlated to generate a result that is worth much more than the algebraic sum of its component parts. That magical process of construction is called the editorial process.
Second lesson, second piece retrieved: if we really wanted to deal with content and support the companies that that content had to produce, we also had to concern ourselves with the process required to create that content. Hence the decision to also introduce a third element within Chalco. A workflow management engine capable of managing the different phases and elements that characterize content creation projects: technical and creative guidelines, allocation of tasks to different resources whether they are people, teams or machines, the definition of project milestones and deadlines, budgets, approval processes, review, adaptation, distribution and real-time monitoring of production.
Chalco BrandLife Suite today
Today, Chalco BrandLife, with its more than four hundred active installations in different areas ranging from Fashion to Retail, is a complete Suite of solutions for the production, enjoyment and distribution of brand and product content. Of course, it is based on a powerful DAM and PIM engine and some would call it a PCM (Product Content Management) system. Acronyms are useful to demarcate a macro-perimeter, but even within the same solution context and acronym, the solutions on the market can be very different from each other. The use cases of a DAM and PIM system can vary greatly from one company to another, as we do not rule out that increasingly organizations will find themselves in need of integrating different DAM and PIM solutions depending on specializations and operational contexts.
[1] Digital Asset: A “digital asset,” a “file,” and “content” are related concepts but not exactly synonymous. A digital asset is a broader concept than a file. It refers not only to the file itself but also to a set of files, all the metadata and additional information that makes that file useful and usable within a system or for a specific purpose.
