DAM Coalition: Tell us about your company. How would you describe your product and service?
Jody Vandergriff: WebDAM helps marketing and creative teams manage, share, distribute and track rich media and brand assets. It is an enterprise cloud-based platform offering extensibility for easy integration with third party systems. WebDAM is deployed by brands such as Salesforce.com, Intel, Symantec, Danone, Elmer’s and hundreds of others.
You just announced the WebDAM for iPad and iPhone, specifically designed for enterprise marketing and creative professionals. How does it impact and change things for you and for your customers?
With just an iPad or iPhone in hand, WebDAM users can quickly locate, view, approve, control, monitor, and distribute their digital assets. They are no longer tied to their desks. A creative director can approve a design on the road. A sales rep can grab and present the latest version of the slide deck right from their iPad. A marketing manager can approve a request to download brand assets from their iPhone. And a project manager can capture images from the field to share with colleagues around the world.
Our customers already advocate that WebDAM provides the best user interface and customer experience in the industry. WebDAM for iPad and iPhone is extremely intuitive, which enriches their DAM experience. In just a few swipes and clicks, they can connect their teams, files, and brands. It is powerfully simplistic.
How is it different from other mobile apps that are out there right now or that are currently being developed?
Our mobile app is more than just an asset search and viewer tool, like many others. It is a full-featured digital asset management application. We didn’t remove essential features that creative and marketers need. We built them in and more. Incorporating push notifications, direct upload/download from the mobile device, offline access, social collaboration features, real-time alerts, approvals, and more. WebDAM isn’t another place to view pretty photos. It is a place to get work done. And now marketing teams can work faster from their mobile devices.
Does this app allow users to access and use the system from any location? Why or why not is that important?
Yes, users can securely access and use WebDAM from any location.
Why? As the leader in cloud-based DAM, WebDAM focuses on providing a better, faster, and more natural way for enterprise teams to work. It continues to be what sets us apart from today’s archaic and monolithic solutions running on yesterday’s technology.
How have you seen digital asset management change?
DAM has evolved from a technology adopted by traditional media and print companies to being the underlying platform driving digital marketing initiatives. The opportunities that exist for DAM today are endless. With the explosion in marketing technologies and focus on rich media content to drive user engagement, DAM is taking center stage.
At the same time, cloud has transformed the enterprise, enabling teams to be more agile, work faster and dramatically cut costs. Cloud technologies, like WebDAM, have enabled organizations of all sizes and across all industries access to an enterprise technology that was previously inaccessible or just plain too difficult. We are pushing the pace of the industry, providing for even more rapid development and innovation. As a result, DAM is changing at a faster rate than ever before. Just in the last couple of years, we have seen DAM evolve from a monolithic, siloed technology to an integrated solution powering everything from creative workflow and production to e-commerce, global distribution and cross channel marketing. These are exciting times for DAM!
What sort of challenges do you see out there that you have or are working to eliminate?
Marketing has gotten incredibly competitive with the rise in marketing channels and new opportunities to reach a wider audience. This has made it increasingly more difficult to maintain brand control and consistency across channels, teams and regions while working at a rapid pace. WebDAM provides brand owners with control and transparency while enabling remote teams, distributors, partners with real-time access to the latest brand assets. We are continuing to innovate in this area, as we see it becoming an increasingly difficult challenge for marketing teams.
Do you think people will continue to want to access and use their DAM system with their mobile devices and tablets? Or is there another platform that will take over?
Absolutely, mobile will continue to dominate. WebDAM acts not only as a tool for the creative teams to manage the production and approval of assets, but also as a distribution and delivery tool and this won’t go away. At the same time, WebDAM will continue to innovate in its platform capabilities providing deep integrations with solutions across the marketing ecosystem, ultimately offering more and more flexibility in how assets are accessed and used.
Where can we go to learn more?