Digital asset management: diverse and expanding

Separate wheat from chaff

TBWA is exploring the use of machine learning to locate documents that might be useful to repurpose for proposals, pitch decks and market research or to connect to published material online that is relevant to particular projects. The Nuxeo platform uses ElasticSearch, a full-text search engine based on Lucene. TBWA is also in the early stages of integrating Nuxeo with Google Docs, which will extend its ability to provide visibility into content for its network of agencies.

Nuxeo has been in the EMC market for a decade and expanded to include DAM in 2014. “Our platform differs from other DAM systems in that it is unified with the ECM system,” says Alain Escaffre, director of product management of Nuxeo. “It is also cloud native, which offers a much better performance in that environment than legacy products that have migrated.”

New integrations are being added steadily, such as image recognition with Google Vision. “We have seen customer interest in this, although it is not mainstream yet,” says Escaffre. One ad agency is working with a consumer-generated campaign that has collected half a million images, none of which have metadata. “If you try to tag all those, you will be there for a long time,” says Uri Kogan, VP of product marketing at Nuxeo. “The goal is to separate the wheat from the chaff so our client can look carefully at the most relevant images.”

Another potential use case for AI is to surface other relevant images through an algorithm that makes recommendations, along with a deep learning algorithm that works from a greater level of insight than basic similarities such as what other images the user has chosen. “Users should not worry about whether AI can solve all their problems at this point,” emphasizes Kogan. “The main point is to train a model and start getting value.”

Digital asset management has proven its usefulness in an ever-broadening range of applications. With new capabilities coming from adding other established technologies such as geospatial solutions and from incorporating advanced AI technologies, DAM is becoming a more powerful and versatile tool for supporting knowledge management.