“North Plains is recognized as the world leader in helping companies effectively leverage their visual media content including images, photos, videos, 3D designs, and others to maximize market success. Providing a complete array of products, services and solutions, North Plains is uniquely positioned to help corporate marketers, advertisers, content creators, and publishers to be more agile in the creative development process, and in the management and distribution of marketing and brand communications. Since 1994, North Plains has helped its customers stay ahead of their rapidly changing marketing needs by expanding and evolving its suite of offerings to include Digital Asset Management (DAM), Marketing Resources Management (MRM), Creative Workflow and more”. Source – company website
North Plains Ngage 2013 Global Conference in Niagra Falls
How Digital Asset Management Systems Work
North Plains’ Makeover
“Over the past year, North Plains has been on an aggressive schedule of acquisition and rebranding, casting itself as a more complete solution for creative lifecycle management. In December, it announced the purchase of VYRE, a provider of marketing resource management and brand asset management software. VYRE’s solutions included its software-as-a-service On Brand management of brand guidelines, asset and creative workflows, and Unify, a web-based marketing application platform.
In November, the Toronto-based company had launched a complete corporate rebranding, following the arrival of a new President and CEO, James Christopher. In April of last year, the company had acquired Xinet, a provider of file-based management of work-in-progress visual content, as a complement to its visual content management product, Telescope.
This resulting lineup family of solutions provided Xinet for the creation and production of assets, Telescope for management of those assets, On Brand for brand-related workflow and Unify for distribution”. Source CMSWire
Xinet – production asset management system
On Brand – Marketing Resource Management
Telescope – is an advanced enterprise Digital Asset Management (eDam) solution used to manage the millions of images, videos and other rich media files across the end-to-end lifecycle from “Concept to Consumer”
ConnectR – connects Xinet and Telescope modules together and in the future external products
“The new releases of Xinet and Telescope include the advent of the new ConnectR interoperability, which streamlines the transfer of assets between North Plains’ products and facilitates repurposing of assets across the enterprise”.
Unify – Rich Media Content Management System – award-winning platform for developing web applications and rich customer experiences
North Plains is suffering from growing pains as the company shifts right from it’s North American heartland to Europe (London & Germany) and further east. This means that staff with single product expertise must quickly build knowledge across all four products and embed professional services capabilities.
Moreover, aggressive acquisition has resulted in a degree of functional product overlap and Customers eagerly await the North Plains product roadmap to be released.
Digital Asset Management solutions provide easy asset storage and retrieval, as well as sophisticated workflows. For me, the critical success factor is that digital content owners must be able to easily search, share, publish and repurpose and control their digital assets.
Customers will derive the most benefit by making sure that they classify Metadata for their digital assets accurately
“Metadata provides enough information for any user, tool, or program to find and use any piece of content. Metadata is also used to drive business processes. A simple example –publication and expiration dates
Use specific terms
- Apply the most specific terms when tagging content. Specific terms can always be generalized, but generic terms cannot be specialized.
Use multiple terms
- Use as many terms as necessary to describe What the content is about & Why it is important.
Use appropriate terms
- Only fill-in the facets & values that make sense. Not all facets apply to all content.
Consider how content will be used
- Anticipate how the content will be searched for in the future, & how to make it easy to find it. Remember that search engines can only operate on explicit information”.
Source – Metadata Deep Dive – Joseph A. Busch, Taxonomy Strategies
It should also be noted that corporates are introducing the Chief Digital Officer role and at an operational level I envisage that some form of “Librarian” will come about.
My prediction is in 2020 Digital Assets (creative content) will be more valued than Financial Assets Under Management by Hedge Funds, Investment Banks etc.and that the Data Steward of Digital Assets role will be key to success in any enterprise.
Here is an innovative marketing campaign for MicroLoans
North Plains: LOWE and Partners Customer Success Video
thisiswhatgoodlookslike 