7 Things I learned from Henry Stewart DAM London

Recently I was able to take some time out of the office and spend it at a couple of industry conferences, the first of those was a rather fine Henry Stewart DAM event.

Having heard rave reviews from the event in New York from my US colleagues, along with a couple of our UK team here I gave their London event a go.

I have been around the block a bit, I have attended and spoken at a lot of conferences and it’s easy to get jaded by these events, but the Henry Stewart events are really hitting the mark with the DAM community – and I thought I’d share a few things I picked up.

Much of what I am going to share here is from Filippo Catalano, Chief Digital Operations Officer, Nestlé who gave a great presentation.

1. Content is at the centre of the digitally transformed enterprise - well, you wouldn’t expect me to argue with that – but there were some great examples in a few of the presentations of how DAM systems are at the centre of these programmes. It’s a view that I am hearing outside these conferences too, this recent post by Nick Barber at Forrester is a good example.
2. The plethora of touchpoints and channels are stretching our content management capabilities (or ‘conversational interfaces’ as Catalano described them) and this is not just the social channels, but messaging apps are the next big content challenge.
3. Voice is coming! And it’s going to change the way we think about content.
4. Similarly, Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality – (all the realities!) - will have a profound effect on the business of like Nestlé.
5. Social content is still a big challenge and driver – as Cantano said “content receivers are also the best content producers” and in my opinion this is something that all marketers, not just B2C brands like Nestlé need to embrace.
6. Organisations are struggling with disparate systems and processes, to satisfy this explosion in the need for content. Or as Catalano described it; “DAM Value chains are broken”, although he was optimistic that this will be fixed.
7. And this was my favourite; “Dynamic Creative Optimisation” and I need to directly quote Cantano’s presentation here “On-the-fly assembly and optimisation stresses interoperability and modularity of DAM solutions”.

2, 3,4 and 5 are what I often describe as part of what’s driving “explosion of content need” within brands, that is making content publishing the second business for almost every organisation.

My interpretation of that last point is that tomorrow’s digital experiences cannot be served by the silo’d, monolith content systems that have a single task within the marketing technology ecosystem, like web content or – rather, they need to be built on a platform of highly performant content services that sit across all the customer’s digital touchpoints along the entire customer journey.

I should also give a special mention to my industry chum Theresa Regli who ran a rather entertaining vendor panel. Now I would not be so indiscrete to mention our competitors here on our blog or the fiery hoops that Regli as ringmaster had them jump through, but integration into the broader marketing technology ecosystem seemed to be a challenge for the panel and the definition of what capabilities a DAM should provide in that stack created a decent debate.

I also got a few moments with the chair of the event David Lipsey, who opened the event sharing some of his experience. It seems like it’s a great time to be in the DAM industry right now.

For sure, censhare will be back to Henry Stewart to hang with the DAM crowd. We will be sponsoring their Chicago event on September 12!

If you want to get more reactions from the event, Henry Stewart posted a reallynice summary of the whole event on LinkedIn.

Image courtesy of @henrystewartdam.