By Mary Wagner
Consumer products manufacturers are happy to provide pictures of their products to the retailers who sell them. After all, that’s one of the ways retailers let consumers know they have the products for sale. And who better than the manufacturer itself will make sure retailers use the best quality photos of each product?
But sometimes providing those images can be overwhelming. Family-owned Tasco Worldwide, a manufacturer of recreational and sport optical gear, for instance, receives 10,000 requests for product images every year from dealers, mass retailers, catalogers and media outlets. Communications manager Deena Forrest literally spent her entire day tracking down the requested photos in the art department, burning CD images, and shipping the discs. “It was time consuming and expensive,” she says.
Miramar, Fla.-based Tasco, which manufactures the well known telescope brand Celestron, wanted a solution that took its marketing department out of the photo fulfillment business, while making sure partners got the images they needed when they needed them. It got what it was looking for in November when it licensed a digital asset management system from MediaBin Inc. Tasco now uploads its original high-resolution product images onto the MediaBin servers and authorizes its business partners to access them through the web. Partners looking for a telescope, binocular or any other product image can instantly find images for whatever format they need, from web-based thumbnails all the way to high-resolution images for use on glossy paper stock.
“Spending two minutes giving users the password and telling them how to download the image is a lot easier than spending the whole day finding images and sending them out,” Forrest says. “My job efficiency has skyrocketed.”
From images to assets
Product images today are more than just images. With the investment and labor required to create and manage them across multiple formats and selling channels, images and other digitized content are corporate assets, as surely as cash in the bank or the real estate that supports a bricks-and-mortar store.
That’s a realization that’s come only lately to most retailers. As Forrest’s experience shows, many retailers and manufacturers face major headaches in simply locating and identifying the properties of what may be thousands of images that have accumulated on servers. And after finding the images, there remains the problem of reformatting them for different media uses when needed. Conducted manually, that’s a labor-intensive process that’s not readily scalable.
Today with the web, the problem is even worse. Not only do retailers need a whole new set of images to present product on the web, they also need multiple versions of the same image. A thumbnail in a search result is different from the picture that appears on the main product page. Sites that allow customers to click the picture for a larger view need yet another image for that view. Then there are the 29% of apparel sites that allow customers to change the color of a piece clothing—also requiring new images. “When you get on the web which may need multiple versions of the same image, you have a problem,” says Nancy Tubb, senior analyst with the Boston-based Delphi Group technology consultants. “For the longest time, companies needed images for print only as advertising and sales collateral. There weren’t nearly the number of outlets needing images that there are now.”
A number of technology developers have stepped up to the plate with comprehensive digital asset management systems that help companies operating on the web and in other channels manage the full spectrum of content, ranging from text documents to product images to rich media visuals such as video. “Ideally, asset management systems will access content from anywhere, store any type of content and deliver it to any medium,” says Joshua Duhl, an analyst with IDC.
With enormous requirements of scale, behemoth manufacturers such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. were among the first to get images and content into automated digital management systems. Those uses were primarily for storage. But the technology has evolved until now the systems allow owners of the images to manage them as well. “Originally, digital asset management had to do with archiving,” says Chris Lynn, vice president of marketing for MediaBin. “Second generation systems are more generalist within the companies that use them, oriented to distribution of the assets rather than just archiving them.”
Variety of backgrounds
Vendors of automated image management systems present retailers with a wide array of solutions as vendors try to capitalize on their roots in publishing, advertising, technology and other industries. Some asset management systems serve as the infrastructure where all the company’s digital content, including images, resides. Others provide the customer-facing applications that let shoppers generate derivative images of an original on demand: switching the color of a red sweater to green, for example.
Some web retailers focus image management efforts on this piece as a stand-alone application. “Retailers like Saks and Sharper Image are taking the high resolution images from their catalog and re-purposing them for other onscreen uses” requiring different file formats, says Tim Bigoness of Equilibrium Technologies Inc., provider of automated imaging technology.
Some providers of comprehensive digital asset management systems partner with technology vendors who specialize in high-volume dynamic imaging to present clients with a bundled solution that handles both functions. Those tend to operate corporate firewalls and be linked to a database. Geared to the collection, storage and sharing of content, “asset management systems are part of the infrastructure,” Lynn says.
When it comes to output, some systems have more flexibility than others to deliver images on demand in multiple formats. Because that capability is critical to getting the most use out of product images, it’s made image server providers into a growing subset of the content management marketplace. Perhaps half- dozen technology companies have entered this space in the past two years, says Duhl.
Just another data set
High resolution print images, stored in digital form, can be re-purposed for use in other formats or other sizes. Image transformation systems automate the process, saving what might otherwise be hours of manual labor in reformatting stored images. For when it comes to the creation and storage of digital images, an image is simply a set of data to be sliced and diced in different ways to produce different end results. “When you’re going from a JPEG file to a TIF file, you’re changing the algorithms for rendering that picture,” says Duhl. “You put it through an image server on its way to the web site. That server makes some changes and then renders the image to specification on the fly.” Such re-purposing covers more than just changing formats to the output requirements of different media; it covers resizing for web display as well.
By having to store only one original image on its own servers and dynamically generating derivatives on an image server as they’re needed, retailers will store fewer images overall, simplifying storage and sorting. “Your storage requirements will be less,” Duhl says. “Your processing requirements might be higher, but if you are serving up millions of images that people want to look at in their own way, image servers begin to find a niche.”
Start your engine
For example, at Equilibrium, whose clients include The Sharper Image, Sundance Catalog and Van-Heusen shirts, Bigoness describes the company’s server-based MediaRich platform as “an imaging engine” that can link to a digital asset management system or sit alongside a database to generate derivatives from the original product image on demand. “Let’s say a shopper goes to a retail site and does a search for a sweater,” he says. “Instead of having to pre-generate and store all the different images of the sweater in each color, our system gets the original high resolution TIF file from the product database. If the shopper wants to see the sweater in green, MediaRich will take that image, transform it into a JPEG file in the right color, and serve it up on the web server.” That enriches the shopping experience for the consumer while cutting down on storage requirements back on the retailer’s server and ensuring the correct images are served up to the shopper pronto.
Apart from providing a customer with a richer shopping experience, image management systems play an important role in brand management. Whether simply reformatting images on the customer side so as to re-use them and save costs or building an entire digital management system to organize images and other content and share it among business partners, digital asset management systems can deliver brand-image consistency. “When retailers or manufacturers operate on multiple channels, they want the image to look the same wherever it is,” Duhl says. “It might not be just the web site images they are trying to manage, it could be the images that go into their Sunday fliers or even the video they used in the ads last month.”
Brand protection was part of what high-end furniture manufacturer Herman Miller Inc. was after when it hooked up with digital asset management system provider Artesia Technologies Inc. last year. Holland, Mich.-based Herman Miller had amassed many thousands of product images for catalogs, brochures and its web site, but it had no central repository for storing, organizing and sharing them within departments or among business partners. Instead, the marketing department stored the images in a variety of ways, such as on CDs and on shared corporate servers. And it wasn’t just product images that were scattered, but other digital content ranging from illustrations to presentations to video as well.
Moving outside the 4 walls
“We’ve gone from a system that wasn’t working efficiently to a single repository for our digital assets and a single way to manage them,” says Kurt Slinglend, team manager at Hermanmiller.com, which oversees development of the company’s corporate portal. “We know with confidence now when we pull up an image whether it’s the right source for this digital information, and when we share it with a partner we know exactly how it will look. That helps protect our brand, and at Herman Miller, known for innovation in design, our brand is our life.”
Digital asset management systems such as Artesia’s save labor, time and cost on the back end in part by making digital content like images easily searchable. “You can find a text document with a keyword search,” points out Slinglend, “but you can’t do that with a picture. You have to search for elements within the picture.”
Digital asset management systems search images using metadata—in-depth descriptive information that goes beyond a simple naming system—that’s attached to each stored image. Metadata can include product information such as product line, color, or size, as well as information about the properties of the image itself.
The system not only speeds up locating images, but also automates re-purposing to generate them in whatever format needed. The capacity to do both is one reason Herman Miller chose Artesia’s system, Slinglend says.
Closing in on break-even
Herman Miller licenses the software from Artesia and runs it on its own server. Slinglend won’t say how much Herman Miller has spent on the system. But he does say that only six months out, it’s already approaching break-even. Over the next six months, the company will integrate the Artesia system that now resides within its walls into its corporate portal so business partners needing digital content from Herman Miller can access the same functionality.
“This will let us be as flexible as we need to be in the future,” adds Slinglend. “I can’t predict when we’re going to need a picture of what product, but if I have a system that lets me quickly extract and transform it, whatever the request may be, I’m miles ahead of folks that don’t’ have that capacity.”
San Francisco maternity and baby gear retailer eStyle gets similar service out of its MediaBin system. It stores images for catalog, ad campaign and web site use in digital form on its server; and MediaBin server technology can extract them in whatever format needed. The technology and automated solution have not only saved hours, says a company spokesman, but also saved money on repeat photos at $1,000 a pop by allowing a single stored digital image in a high enough resolution to be reformatted for other uses. Re-purposing the images also has saved on labor by automating the task of re-sizing photos for other needs.
A Delphi Group study last year shows that on average across a company, workers may spend the equivalent of one day a week looking for information they need to do their job—that’s across all departments, and all offline or web-based forms in which the information is stored. But Tubb says that number goes as high as 50% of their time for workers in information-intensive jobs, a group including graphics and art directors who manage and use digital images.
Requests will come in for images in various sizes and formats, requiring image manipulation that administrative staff may not be equipped to do. “Some of the company’s higher-paid graphics people end up doing it,” says Tubb. “Manually re-sizing and converting JPEG files for thumbnails takes up time they could be using to work the magic they’re uniquely qualified to do.”
Where’s the beef?
The measurable benefits of adding a digital asset management system or other technology products that automate parts of the image management process will vary, adds Tubb. “It’s very situation-specific, but its not unrealistic for companies to expect a 30% to 75% improvement in productivity by implementing an image management system,” she says.
But at what cost? It depends on how much image management you want. Equilibrium’s MediaRich platform, which focuses on the high-volume dynamic generation of images, starts at about $35,000 per server, says Bigoness. Companies may start out with two to three servers, which with installation costs, may get them in the door at under $100,000. MediaBin’s system, similarly scaled, is also similarly priced. Comprehensive, infrastructure-heavy digital asset management systems may cost considerably more, depending on what capacities are purchased.
So is the real value of digital asset management systems and automated imaging technology in cost savings, labor savings, or the ability to improve the customer’s experience on a web site? It’s all three, Tubb says, but for companies just now eyeing an investment, it’s initially easier to quantify time and cost savings.
“If I were at a company trying to get budget for a system, I’d justify it in terms of the productivity and dollar cost savings,” she says. “It’s harder to make the correlation between improving capabilities and the top line, though the presumption is that when you do that, your site will be more successful. I’d try to set up some kind of tracking so that later, I could come back and say not only did this save cost, but it generated extra money as well.”
mary@verticalwebmedia.com
