Scott Pellicone, VP, Digital Publishing, Quebecor World, Magazine Business

MM: When you talk about the DAM in that context, many people associate that with, “Oh, yes. A specialized database with lots of metadata to describe photos, illustrations and videos.” But it sounds like you’re talking about a DAM that’s larger than that, that includes tagged editorial copy — text — and treats that as an asset.

SP: Yes. Absolutely.

I think the former — what you said — your images and your pages and your videos that are tagged with some basic metadata and put into a vault — that’s pretty much the legacy DAM which is being migrated into the operating system.

You’re not going to go out and buy an Xinet system, a Telescope system or an Artesia system just to do that. This can easily be accomplished by a number of low cost, off the shelf solutions such as Cumulus, Portfolio, Adobe Bridge or even via the operating system using features such as Spotlight on the Macintosh operating system. What I am actually referring to is an interactive database-driven piece of technology that uses XML and RSS feeds to update websites and micro-sites and documents on the fly. It needs to be completely integrated.

MM: So you’re really speaking now of what we’ve referred to in other places in the Journal as a digital media services platform.

SP: Yes.

MM: Visioning.

SP: It depends on the market vertical that you live in. When I wear my premedia hat, I basically represented magazine, catalogue, retail, book and direct mail. Each market vertical has very specific asset management requirements. Retail and Catalog are quite similar as their assets are typically identified by SKU, and tend to have a long useful life being used and re-used across multiple print campaigns, website and direct mail efforts.

Magazine on the other hand, are quite different as their content has a very short life and tends to expire. Images are not so important to the magazine publisher as many times they have only negotiated a one-time use of a photo or illustration. What is really important to the publisher is their editorial content — the final pages, the PDFs that are delivered to our press rooms. Publishers want to be able to extract and basically take that content and replicate it into a more interactive format — e-publishing, digital editions, websites, emails which can actually improve on the original printed edition.

Finally, when we look at the Book publishing DAM requirements we refer to technologies such as Ingram and Libre systems which create a digital warehouse to accommodate their archives which may include thousands of front and back list titles.

MM: Front list meaning the things that are out in the bookstore, and back lists are things that are…

SP: That are no longer in print.

MM: Right.

SP: They want to be able to do two things. Store them in a DAM, slice them and dice them so they can actually sell bits and pieces of them through their e-commerce site. They want to be able to integrate into Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, and all those web-based retailers for e-commerce.

Another revenue stream for the book publisher is to convert many of their back list titles to print on demand via the digital warehouse. The user experience would be, “I want to go find this back-list title.” I go to the website and I can actually order an out-of-print book. Then the files could be extracted from the DAM, sent to the printer, the printer prints a one-off, binds it and sends it to the consumer.

MM: I was suggesting, Scott, that DAM has evolved from this point solution — which is a bit-bucket, vault, check-in, check-out, to more of a services platform. And by a “service platform,” the ability to add new output management type devices — be they in-design servers or image servers or webcast servers or whatever. And that it really enables very accelerated workflows.

From that, it kind of evolves into a content and services platform, where you can position new formats of pre-existing content thesis — digital assets — thereby unlocking the revenue streams.

You gave a nice summarization from book, catalogue, direct and magazine. Perhaps this is the time to bring forward the topic of supply chain and how you define or explain a supply chain to a fairly smart executive. And how have these supply chains evolved over time — specifically incorporating things like DAM and XML and web services and things like that?

SP: The supply chain, basically, in my world is from creative to ink-on-paper through logistics and fulfillment. It starts with the cameras click and the photographer gets the image to the publisher — the magazine publisher — the cataloguer, the retailer, and the life of the magazine or catalogue begins in the creative part of the equation.

Not so long ago, the supply chain was quite different as we have definitely been effected by a digital evolution. Typically, way back when in the old days (10 years give or take), the photographer would shoot an image on a piece of film, the file would be developed and delivered to the agency. The agency would represent the photographer and sell the image to the publisher. The film would travel from the publisher to the lithographer, where it would be separated, proofed and incorporated into a page layout. The lithographer would forward plate ready RRED Negatives to the printer, who would print and bind the job and deliver to the distribution house for delivery to the magazine wholesalers or post office.

Now things have changed. It’s not as linear. There’s a lot of overlap in responsibilities. There’s also a lot of sharing of content, because the same content that goes to drive the magazine print edition is also creating the e-commerce edition and the micro-site.

MM: To summarize just that one point, Scott — we’ve gone from these decoupled, physical supply chains with silos and a lot of sneaker-ware or physically moving stuff from one place to another to now a digital supply chain, where things tend to move more like water through a warren or a creek or something.

It flows in a lot of different places, wherever it’s needed. Need being your low spot in the creek. Instead of it being really a kind of structured linear process, it tends to be much more of a fluid, almost lateral or diagonal process, where it ebbs and flows.

SP: We’ve gone from a straight line to a cloud.

MM: Right.

That’s the way I always think of it now. Guys from production — like I started out in production. Everything followed a very linear path from beginning to end. That’s not the case, any more.

Also, technology has allowed the different silos, as I had mentioned. You’ve got your creative and then you’ve got your production and you’ve got your print and your distribution silos to sort of blend together. So now creative people are doing production. Production people are now doing creative. And because we’ve had other different technologies that drive e-commerce and that drive the distribution of information — that is,… the internet and so on and so forth…. There are different things. It’s like a hub-and-spoke type of model. That asset may be used in many different channels.

Then it gets even further complicated. Publishers and agencies are now looking more toward the globalization of the industry. Certain features and functions need to be done offshore, to save on production costs.

Silhouetting and very labor-intensive tasks can be done in China and India. They’re just seconds away over an internet connection, and you’re able to save 40, 50 or 60 per cent of your costs.

MM: Scott, I’ve seen what you’re describing. I’ve seen that characterized. In fact, we characterize it as the physical supply chain becomes digital. At some point in its process or transformation into an all-digital supply chain, you end up with a redistribution of work to what we call “centers of excellence.”

We define centers of excellence as highly automated, autonomous business operations that have all-digital or nearly all-digital workflows. And more importantly, they invest in ongoing productivity enhancements and efficiency gains.

That gets to one of the underlying dilemmas for a lot of companies. Whether it’s Quebecor or whatever. Efficiency rarely if ever has a deadline. Unless you give efficiency a deadline, there is very little moving out of your comfort zone in order to achieve it.

We’ve found that these centers of excellence have emerged like collateral operations or web operations or a localization operation. They do one thing brilliantly, and better than any other node in this digital supply chain.

As you were describing, in some cases, doing the color retouch or shadowing or digital cosmetics as best done in some lower-cost labor markets like China or India — that would be an example of this redistribution of work to where you get the lowest price at minimum acceptable quality.

SP: If we parallel — one comment I wanted to make was…. We have experience utilizing technology in (2008) via Avon. You’ve probably heard it at many of the Henry Stewart symposiums. But QW was, the first vendor/partner of Avon to share content across the web. We started with Imation Media Manager. Then we grew to Media Bank. Then we migrated to Telescope.

MM: That came out of our Orlando operation. Is that correct?

SP: Thay is correct, QW’s technology solutions center is based out of Orlando, FL and they are responsible for our hosted content management business.

The DAM deployment is an excellent case study as we were able to help Avon to significantly reduce costs, while at the same time improve quality.

Historically, Avon worked in an analog workflow, where transparencies would be duplicated 28 different times and sent out to 28 different countries and separated into 28 different renditions of the original file.