The explosive proliferation of mobile computing and communication devices (primarily smartphones and tablet computers) is now an undeniable reality. Consider, for example, the following statistics:

• By 2016, 257 million smartphones and 126 million tablets will be in use in the United States. (Forrester Research)
• The number of smartphones in use worldwide reached 1.038 billion units during the third quarter of 2012. (Strategy Analytics)
• By the second quarter of 2013, the global installed base of smartphones and tablets will exceed the global installed base of desktop and laptop PC’s. (Mary Meeker December 2012 Presentation)

The rapidly growing use of mobile communication devices, combined with the continuing use of desktop and laptop PC’s, is causing a profound change in how consumers learn about products and services and in how they relate to brands.

A recent article in eMarketer was headlined, “Are Shopping Apps Taking the Role of Catalogs?” The article discussed some of the findings of a December 2012 research study by Adobe . One focus of this research was the attitudes of smartphone and tablet shoppers toward mobile shopping apps. Here’s part of what the research revealed about how mobile shoppers are using shopping apps:

Two of these findings stand out to me. First, about 40% of both smartphone and tablet shoppers indicated that using a shopping app strengthens their connection with a brand. Second, 21% of both smartphone and tablet shoppers said they typically download a shopping app to become familiar with a new brand. These findings clearly show that mobile marketing in general and mobile e-commerce in particular are growing in importance. The second finding indicates that a sizeable percentage of shoppers are using shopping apps for discovery or browsing purposes in addition to actually making purchases. When used in this fashion, shopping apps perform the same basic function as online or print catalogs.

ADAM Teamwork 1.1 introduced integration with ADAM Workflow, allowing you to plug in approval and collaboration cycles into your enterprise workflow. However, sometimes setting up a workflow may be overkill for what you want to achieve.

Recently we encountered a use case where a customer wanted to configure a simple rule so that an approval cycle was automatically started whenever an asset was linked to a specific classification. The idea was that each approval project would contain the single asset to be approved. It should also be possible to select approvers and set a due date when linking the record to the target classification.

This is what the configuration of the rule in ConfigStudio might look like:

Late last year, Marketing Week published a thought-provoking article titled “Death of the CMO?” The article highlighted the views of Dominique Turpin, Nestle professor and president of the International Institute of Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Professor Turpin says that the chief marketing officer position is no longer tenable because most CMOs are simply executing a communications strategy. As Turpin put it, “The chief executive sets the overall strategy, the research and development and innovation teams design the product, and the chief financial officer determines pricing and departmental budgets.” Professor Turpin argues that the CMO should be replaced by a “chief customer officer” whose primary role would be to listen and communicate the views of customers across the company.

Whether or not you agree with Professor Turpin, it seems clear that many CMOs have a significant credibility problem in the C-suite. In a study by The Fournaise Marketing Group , 80% of CEOs said they don’t really trust marketers, and 64% said they have taken away product and pricing powers from CMOs because those functions are too important for business success to let marketers control them.

In my last post, I reviewed David Diamond’s new book, DAM Survival Guide . A major strength of this book is that Diamond emphasizes the critical importance of the non-technological aspects of a DAM initiative. In his view, a successful DAM project requires a combination of people with the right knowledge and skills, well-designed business processes, well-conceived business policies, and finally, the right technology tools.

On the people side, Mr. Diamond identifies six positions or roles that are essential for a successful DAM project.

• Initiative Owner — This person is responsible for planning and managing the DAM initiative. He or she is the public face of the DAM project and one of its chief evangelists. The Initiative Owner should be conversant with DAM technologies, and he or she should ideally have sufficient authority to obtain and commit the financial resources that will be required to complete the project.
• Systems Manager — This is the individual who is primarily responsible for the technical IT aspects of the DAM initiative. In most cases, this function will be performed by someone in the organization’s IT department. The System Manager’s main job is to ensure that the DAM system has an adequate technological infrastructure.
• Librarian — The Librarian is the person who provides the information organization expertise for the DAM initiative. He or she typically leads the process of developing the taxonomies, metadata structure, and “controlled vocabulary” that will be used in the DAM system
• Technical Developer — The Technical Developer is the person who handles the technical configuration of the DAM software and any custom programming that is required to make the DAM software fit your organization’s specific needs. The Technical Developer is also responsible for integrating the DAM software with other enterprise IT systems.
• Database Managers — These are the individuals who make sure that the DAM system will meet the specific requirements of individual departments within the enterprise. For example, the marketing department and the legal department are likely to have different DAM system needs, requirements, and priorities. Database Managers provide the input that’s needed to ensure that the DAM system will meet these diverse needs.
• Metadata Editor(s) — Metadata Editors are responsible for ensuring that all assets ingested into the DAM system are properly tagged and otherwise described via metadata. Without proper tagging, digital assets can be practically invisible to users. In a large enterprise, each relevant department may have one or more metadata editors.

As Mr. Diamond writes, it is possible for one individual to perform more than one of these functions, and it can be possible to outsource some of these functions, especially during the initial implementation phase of a DAM initiative. However, all of these functions need to be addressed in some way to have a successful DAM project.

The implementation of a digital asset management system is a major undertaking for most organizations. At a minimum, implementing a new DAM system will require many people in your organization to learn to use new technology and probably make at least some changes in how they work. Those individuals who are responsible for leading the DAM initiative have the additional burden of planning and managing the project, selecting the DAM software, and winning the support of both senior executives and prospective users.

There are plenty of resources available to help managers navigate the DAM planning and implementation process, but most of those resources address specific aspects of a DAM project (software features, taxonomy, metadata, etc.). Most don’t provide a “big picture” view of what is needed to make a DAM project successful.

DAM Survival Guide (2012) fills this gap and provides an important and valuable resource for those who are responsible for planning and executing a DAM project. Early in the book, the critical point is made that successfully implementing a digital asset management system involves much more than buying and installing digital asset management software. Throughout the book, the author David Diamond emphasizes that people, processes, and policies are equally important to DAM success.

Distributed Marketing

The reality is, most large companies, particularly global enterprises, use some form of a distributed marketing model. For example, marketing operations is many multinational companies are highly fragmented. Most global enterprises have regional or national marketing organizations in addition to a central corporate marketing department. These regional and/or local marketing organizations often play a significant role in the creation of marketing content and the execution of marketing programs. They usually hire their own language service providers for translation services, and they may also contract with marketing agencies to create original content or adapt “corporate” content for the local market.

In addition to geographically-based marketing operations, line-of-business managers may also have marketers on staff who develop marketing content and run marketing programs. Lastly, if an enterprise sells through independent or quasi-independent channel partners, that usually adds at least one more layer of people and organizations to the marketing “structure.”

Teamwork uses ConceptShare as an integrated viewer application, so this is where the actual viewing, comparing and annotating of assets happens. This means that, whenever you create a Teamwork project, the assets in the project need to be synchronized with the ConceptShare viewer.

In today's blogpost we discuss some of the options you have when saving a Teamwork project in order to fine-tune the process of synchronizing assets with the viewer.

By default, when you save a project through the Teamwork API, only the latest version of all assets in the project will be pushed to ConceptShare:

This is the fourth in a series of posts that are discussing the topic of software durability. By software durability, I mean the ability of a software solution to meet an organization’s needs for a relatively long time. For a software application to be durable, it must enable an organization to adapt the software to business needs that are constantly evolving, often in unpredictable ways. The durability of a software solution depends primarily on its architecture, on how the application has been designed and engineered.

In earlier posts, I’ve discussed how scalability, security, and the ability to support multiple languages make software more durable. This post will cover why an open architecture is also essential for durable software.

What is Flexibility?

Increased marketing complexity and the need for greater marketing agility place unique demands on marketing software systems. To effectively support today’s complex and ever-changing marketing activities and operations, software applications must have an open architecture that provides a high level of flexibility. I’m using the term flexibility to describe three attributes.

A new research report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) argues that several serious “disconnects” exist between Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and other senior company leaders (CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, etc.). Outside looking in: the CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite is based on a global survey of marketing and non-marketing executives from 19 industries in 42 countries, and on in-depth interviews with senior executives from major companies.

The EIU report shows that a significant gap exists between CMOs and the rest of the C-suite regarding marketing’s strategic priorities. EIU asked survey participants to identify marketing’s top priority. The filelink:file0 below shows how both CMOs and non-marketing executives responded

These results indicate that the greatest gaps between CMOs and other members of the C-suite exist around the issues of revenue growth and creating new products and services. Equally important and perhaps more disturbing, none of the priorities identified in the EIU survey captured anything close to a majority of responses, which indicates that there isn’t widespread consensus about marketing’s primary role.