www.palgrave-journals.com/dam

THE OPPORTUNITY

In reviewing their 2004 budget and the one

for the upcoming year, General Electric (GE)

determined that in terms of art costs, they could

actually save money if they created a custom image

library that all of the GE businesses around the

world could share. Their initial idea was to employ

13 different photographers in various parts of the

world, take these pictures traditionally and put

them on some sort of CD. But the folks at

BBDO, the people who would come to coordinate

this project, had seen some interesting technology

used on “ America ’ s Next Top Model ” that bore

some investigation. I ’ ll get to that in just a

minute.

IN THE OLD DAYS …

Imagine if there was no such thing as Digital

Photography or even the internet. Jd Michaels,

VP, Director of Print Services for BBDO

described for me how a project like this used

to be done.

They would have shot ﬁ lm traditionally … the ﬁ lm

would have been sent to different labs for each

photographer and some of them were

international photographers so the ﬁ lm would

wind up going to Japan, Germany, Sweden and

Britain. Once the ﬁ lm was developed, a contact

sheet would be made and each photographer

would review those with an agency art director.

The art director would then review the contact

sheet with the account team and then they would

go to the client and make ﬁ nal choices as to

which frames they actually wanted to work

with.

At that point, we would take those frames and

decide what changes we wanted to make to the

frames with a high-resolution scan for digital

purposes. The high-resolution scan would then be

sent via mail all to New York City, where we

would compile them on a server and then one-

by-one begin to go through and re-touch them

with all of the information in the retouching

being sent either through email or over the

telephone.

So everyday there would be a mass mailing

both to and from the agency to get things done.

Now, keep in mind that developing ﬁ lm takes

about 2 days to do at the professional level. All of

the back and forth of the ﬁ lm lead to certain

unavoidable risks, such as losing the ﬁ lm,

damaging the ﬁ lm or not being able to control

Possibilities

Russ Stanton

Before moving into Information Technology, Russ Stanton had developed a professional resume that encompassed radio

production, producing and directing commercials and longer formats for television. He was the recipient of 13 Addy Awards and

one Gabriel Award. In the late 1980s, Russ chose to move away from TV and radio and jump into the IT movement. In IT, he

has successfully developed and managed enterprise business applications for top entertainment and publishing companies and

has produced various interactive learning websites. His two careers merged into one by successfully implementing the Digital

Workﬂ ow for TV, Print and Radio production at BBDO. Batten, Barton Durstine & Osborn. On a more personal note, Russ enjoys

football, dancing and a good joke. He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA with his wife, two sons and a daughter.

Keywords: GE , BBDO , metadata , Xinet , WebNative , possibilities , successful , digital

Abstract This is a tale of six photographers in 20 cities in almost every continent of

the world, at the same time mind you, taking on the major task of creating a global

photo Library for General Electric. Without giving away too much of the story up front,

let ’ s just say that digital asset management and the internet saved the day because this

was a critical project for both GE and their global creative ad agency BBDO, and had to

be completed in record time. You can only imagine the enormity of such a task, not to

mention the pressure. It ’ s also the story of having the right people in place at the right

time.

Journal of Digital Asset Management (2006) 2, 219 –222 . doi: 10.1057/palgrave.dam.3650035

Russ Stanton

is the Director, Digital

Media Architect,

BBDO North America

Tel: + 212 459 6418

Email: Russ.Stanton@

bbdo.com

Stanton

220

what would have ended up being, over 300 rolls

of ﬁ lm ﬂ ying around the world.

The challenge with this project was that it was

slated for 2004. It needed to be completed by the

1st of January and we started this basically in

August of 2004. Doing it the oldway was not an

option.

HOW ’ D THEY DO THAT?

In brainstorming on exactly how this project

would get done in the time frame required, Jd ’ s

group thought of many things. Some of the things

included having a central lab in Europe do all the

ﬁ lm processing or having day and night shifts to

handle submissions around the clock, given issues

with various time zones. He continues

That meeting just precipitated tears and headaches.

So after the end of that we went back to our own

ofﬁ ces and at about the exact same time we each

met in the hall and said, ‘ Oh my Gosh!! We could

use that Xinet thing and we ’ ll do the photography

digitally. ’

Xinet is a suite of products dedicated to pre-

press, workﬂ ows and digital asset management.

One of the main attributes that captured Jd ’ s

group ’ s attention though was the uploader /

downloader functionality that allows for the

transfer of ﬁ les over the internet and the

ingestion into the Xinet system.

The uploader is almost an applet , Jd said, a speciﬁ c

program that sits on the desktop of a PC or a

Mac that allows you to drag and drop images

directly from your desktop connected at high-

speed anywhere in the world into our ﬁ rewall

protected server.

The trick was could we program the applet to

put them in a speciﬁ c place and tag them with

XMP data (metadata)? This would allow us to sort

through them in any number of ways on the

database without having to have someone here

to administer every photo that came in.

The answer was yes. The images go into this

applet, they are instantly tagged, stuffed or zipped,

transmitted, unstuffed on the other end and placed

in the correct folder for each photographer. Once

they open on the Xinet server, previews are

instantly made and it is searchable both by its

name, its location, and its XMP metadata instantly.

So if we wanted to search for the import date in

the date ﬁ eld, we got to see all the things that

had come in for that date. But could it get

implemented in time?

Jd continues

Because our groups were considerably smaller

and they were a regional team we had to pull

from various groups. So, we had the IT person

who was excited about trying to pull the

technology together and making sure it didn ’ t

conﬂ ict with anything else. You had Kari Nouhan,

who was the art person, who was very excited

about being able to get all the images in and

making sure that they were a high enough quality

in terms of making sure the digital photography

was there. You had myself who wanted to make

sure that when they came in, we could organize

them and get them from place to place. And then

we had Alaina Collins, who was very excited

about programming it and making sure everything

was running smoothly from a moment-to-

moment basis.

By having all of us together as a ﬁ rst team, the

only ramp-up we needed was that all 4 of us

came together and understood what was going

on, because we had taken, responsibility for the

project working.

THE LOGISTICS

So after some discussions with the Xinet

integrator, NAPC (New America Platinotype

Corporation) we decided to give it a shot. We

still didn ’ t have the kind of time that you ’ d

typically require for this undertaking, but we had

made a commitment. So, we had to streamline

everything and make every moment count

NAPC gave us speciﬁ c training for 2 days on

how to set this project up educating us on skills

we needed to know to create uploaders, create

actions on the server, create a hierarchy on the

server, make new volumes, naming conventions,

tag the information correctly (metadata) and

administer names and passwords.

Once we got those lessons down, then we

were able to work the program and make it

actually do what we wanted it to do. So we

really created a machine, and that ’ s all we

wanted to know about it.

As time went on, we realized the production

people could work from home saving more

A true success story in digital photography and asset management

time. They could work from anywhere and do

complete administration of any ﬁ le through the

administration feature.

The amazing part is that all this happened in

a 2 week period; a record implementation

according to NAPC. Jd Michaels says,

They only sold us the system because we made

a solemn promise that we were going to take

complete responsibility for this and not expect

them to staff us with someone. We just had the

right combination of people to make that happen.

It ’ s just a box, but it ’ s a box that responds

extremely well to enthusiasm and ideas. That ’ s

the greatest thing about it.

So, off we went creating uploaders for each

photographer, pre-programming the folders

into the uploaders. Each photographer shot

the equivalent of over 2 – 3 rolls every day and

there was 4 – 6 weeks of shooting depending

on where the photographer was in the schedule.

All total there were over 15 — thousand

images before all the choices were made. We

ended up with 800 prime images that they

use, with another 400 that were considered

seconds. But the 800 that we had were

retouched and put together and color-corrected

uniformly.

The client could even see the previews

online and they would say, “ those 4 don ’ t have

the angle we want its that one ” so we saved a

great deal of time and a great deal in prints,

which kept their cost lower.

The client became so used to the WebNative

interface, that after awhile, we were able to have

them review the pictures at their own site with

their own computer.

The art director would be here on the phone

or they could go on and choose the ones they

wanted and as they chose the ones they wanted,

we could go on and then look at the basket that

they had made and then say OK these are the

ones that they want. It started being a really fun

way or working.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DAM IN

ALL THIS

In the beginning, the digital asset management

piece was the one thing that was simply the way

that they found the few images that really

needed to be retouched and moved, out of 300

images per day. So the initial metadata was ﬁ le

name and photographer plus the day that it was

put into the system. The initial ﬁ elds that were

put in were very simple.

A lot of it came out of PhotoShop. The

cameras that they were using gave a great deal

of information instantly and just came right into

the database through the XMP data. So they

really only needed to put those custom ﬁ elds in

so that they could search. Jd continues,

When we had the ﬁ nal images, we went into

them and then custom tagged them to who shot

them, where they were shot, also, the client gave

us metadata they wanted added in for businesses

that each one represented or the angle they

wanted to put on it so that their people could

ﬁ nd it easier.

When we needed to add ﬁ elds speciﬁ c to the

client, that ’ s when we manually added it.

Everything else we had worked to make sure

ﬁ elds were basic and NAPC worked to make sure

that their program was going to work to pull the

images in the right place and then make sure that

all the metadata that was involved was in the ﬁ le.

Also, a comfort was the fact that our IT guys had

everything backed up and protected behind our

ﬁ rewall with only limited access from outside.

Otherwise, this would have been impossible as

well. We had to make sure that these million-

dollar images, ﬂ oating in cyberspace, were

protected, and that the system was redundant so

that if it went down, it could come up quickly

with no time lost.

AT THE END OF THE DAY

According to Jd, If Xinet was a solution tool

that gave you a workﬂ ow that was preplanned, it

would have been useless, because we didn ’ t need

a solution, we needed a tool that they could

build something with.

We needed a Lowes, where we could just go in

and pick stuff and build something. That ’ s what

this was like for us.

The mixture of relief and pride was truly

legendary with all of us. We had never gotten to

work with a technology before that was so up in

the air. It was like a box of crayons. The box of

Stanton

222

crayons doesn ’ t tell you what to draw with it, and

this was what this was like. Normally, everything

comes with directions, instructions or even

suggestions, but it worked with out imaginations.

What I learned was that you can take pretty

high-end technology and with good people that

understand the basics of each aspect, put together

a super group that just enjoys making things work

and enjoys seeing things happen.

I think that I really learned in business, the

boldness of your plan and your players is directly

correlated to your success. Anybody could have

bought the software, anybody could have said,

‘ we ’ re going to do it ’ , but the boldness of not

being afraid of an 800 page manual, just speaks to

the type of people between BBDO and GE. That

boldness is what really made the project work to

the client; to say

‘ OK this is going to be ﬁ ne with

’ . It was extremely successful, I was extremely

proud of it. ”

At the end of the day, going back to the old

way of doing things as I have described earlier is

now never an option, not only because of the

time, although that was major. But, according to

Jd, if we had done it the old way it would have

cost 4 ½ times as much. Now that is the kind of

success you can literally take to the bank.