When You Steal It, Admit It

By and large, I find marketing people to be vapid, oxygen wasters. Not because I find the art and pseudo-science of Marketing to be inherently evil—I don’t. After all, I’m a marketing director. But it bothers me that marketing people come into their positions, usually without a shred of industry experience, and then start blogging about best practices and tips like you’d think they invented the damned topic.

And the Digital Asset Management industry is full of examples of this. We’ve seen DAM News take on an unnamed DAM vendor for stealing content on several occasions. Recently, I also had to send a takedown notice to a company that had stolen content right off the Picturepark website.

And, really, this is bad enough. But when one marketing director uses his CMSWire authoring slot to steal copy verbatim from a CMSWire article written by the marketing director of a competing company, this is below low. In fact, it’s shameful.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote called “Lost in the DAM,” which CMSWire published on March, 12 2014:

Here’s an excerpt from a piece called “6 Reasons Why People Don’t Use Your DAM,” written by Neil Monahan, marketing manager for Brandworkz, and published by CMSWire on August 20, 2014:

Thank you for the vote of confidence, Mr. Monahan. But I’m not Wikipedia. 

Here’s what I would like to have happen from this:

1. I would like Mr. Monahan to publicly apologize for his plagiarism, to me and any other authors from whom he has stolen content. And I would like him to remove that content from the Internet.
2. I would like CMSWire to require their contributing authors to verify that all materials submitted are original, not copied in any way from another source, and not written by a ghost writer. After all, if we are to trust CMSWire content to be valuable and educational, we should have some assurance that it is so, to the best of their knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with someone learning from something I’ve written and using that knowledge in their work—that’s why I do what I do. But it irks me when someone tries to pass himself off as some sort of DAM expert when, in fact, copy & paste is the only expertise that has been adequately demonstrated. 

The Digital Asset Management industry has enough problems without being polluted with nonsense written by (or stolen by) people who don’t know enough about what’s going on to speak from experience and tell their own stories.

UPDATE: CMSWire has since removed the three numbered points from Mr. Monahan’s article and replaced them with a link to my article. I was not told of any policy changes that would be made as a result of this. I will update this post if that happens. Mr. Monahan has also emailed me an apology in which he blames an intern whom he had to do his research. This, of course, made me feel stupid because all these years I’ve been doing my own DAM research. I didn’t even know that outsourcing expertise was an option. 

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The DAM Plumbing Problem

Digital Asset Management at the “point of consumption.”

“Point of consumption” is a concept I’ve used for years to explain away the primary reason digital asset management has not become the business staple it was expected to become. The problem, as I see it, is that DAM too closely follows the metaphor of having to go places to get what we need.

But this isn’t us. We want entertainment streamed into our homes because a trip to the local video store is too much. We want food delivered so that we can watch that streamed entertainment and not go hungry. And when that TV is no longer awesome enough, we ask Amazon to bring us a new one.

We want what we want when we want it. This means delivery to the “point of consumption.” There are countless examples of this around us. Enough so, in fact, that the world supports not one, but several international delivery companies, such as FedEx, UPS, etc. We are all about “bring it to me.”

Yet, digital asset management software was built on a paradigm that says, “if you want it, come and get it.” DAM vendors are trying harder than ever to make their systems attractive and usable; but the core problem isn’t beauty—the core problem is that no matter how wonderful the local video store might be, it’s not Netflix.

CMSWire has published “Reinventing Digital Asset Management,” an article I wrote about this topic. Until we reinvent the DAM paradigm, I think we remain stuck where we are now.

 

Image courtesy of Gualberto107 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Lost in the DAM

While recording Berlin’s second record, we ended up with a few too many tracks. You know, albums and cassettes had their limitations. One of the extra tracks was called Lost in the Crowd. I loved this track because it was one of the few on which I played guitar. I was officially a keyboard player for the band; but I was actually a better guitar player than I was a keyboard player–go figure. (Somehow, it made sense at the time.)

Anyway, because this was considered a “throw away” track, we got to have fun with it. For me, this meant bringing out my inner Blue Oyster Cult. You can hear my guitar at the opening and during the outro (3:30). But the most interesting part is at about 2:15. Right after our real guitar player, Ric, finishes his solo, I sort of stepped out of bounds. The part I added ended up in a feedback-sustain that actually caused an argument in the band. Some argued that this wasn’t Berlin. They said it stepped on Ric’s “new wave” guitar part that was more who were were. Others saw it as being cool.

Ultimately, all my noise stayed because, after all, this track wasn’t going to be on the album or cassette. It would be only on the CD player thing, and no one had a CD player.

So, here we are, just a few years later. I find myself writing a new piece for CMSWire that discusses how mandatory metadata fields or having too many metadata fields, and a few others things, can actually lead to content becoming lost in the DAM. Now, I know that this is going to piss off some people who are believers in these things. But I’m getting used to this social media-staged warfare. In fact, the anticipation sort of put me into the same rebel mood I was in when we recorded Lost in the Crowd, back in 1984.

So, I’m ready for it. Tell me I don’t understand DAM policy. Tell me my experience is theoretical and not practical. Tell me all about it. All I know is that my guitar was howling that day. It was so loud that it was like a taste of World War III. And by adding this track, we didn’t know what to expect. Would our synth fans abandon us? Would real rockers make fun of us? I remember hearing it all.

But sometimes, you just have to turn things up to 11 and deal with the consequences. Sometimes you have to admit when something isn’t working and either be ready to fix it or walk away.

Read Lost in the DAM here.

And thanks to the fact that there are others who are willing to shake things up, we have YouTube, so you can actually hear my inspiration too. (And another thing, David, new-wavers aren’t supposed to have facial hair. So lose the Clark Gable mustache.)