The Expanded Role of Digital Asset Management

Cruce Saunders
Welcome to towards a Smarter World. This is your host, Cruce Saunders. Very pleased to be joined today by Theresa Regli, a 26-year veteran of information technology, with a focus on marketing asset management: all those creative assets, all those digital assets that are used inside of the enterprise. She knows everything about that. She's been working in it for 17 years as a consultant or fractional Chief Digital Officer. She advises executives and technology project leads on Martech and DAM and broad digital strategy, data design, tech business cases, vendor selection. And she's worked with over 20% of the Fortune 500, including Unilever, Coca Cola, General Mills, Shell and Nestle. And she is amazing. Thank you so much, Teresa, for joining us today.

Theresa Regli
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah. This is an exciting topic because there's so much change in the world of digital media today. One of the big changes is about just the category of technology that we're actually addressing. And so many different marketing executives, content executives, deal with content, sometimes without an understanding of the landscape of the technology environment that's supporting all of the assets they're working on every day. But let's start, in order to help our audience out, defining some of these categories of technology you've worked with, and a little bit about how they're changing today. I saw that you've been speaking recently on Product Information Management. So, let's start there with a category a lot of people are familiar with, if they're in the commerce side of the business or the product business. But there's really a lot of diverse businesses using PIMs today to move content in and out of marketing teams. I'm curious what your definition is of a PIM, and how does it relate to the rest of enterprise content?

Theresa Regli
A PIM is managing the authoritative, market-ready, customer-facing data about products. And I make those distinctions because there's product lifecycle management, which is managing a product while it's being developed, from ideation through the development - @TheresaRegli , through the design, those 3D drawings, the CADS, that's different technology. PLM, Product Lifecycle Management. When the product is done and ready to sell, we put the data specifications and eventually the marketing orientated content, we put that into a PIM, and that's when it's ready to go out to retailers, it's ready to be syndicated, it's ready for customers to see it. So that's how I make the distinction.

Cruce Saunders
And how does that content, which is about the product itself, relate to, for example, a Digital Experience Management platform's content?

Theresa Regli
Well, there are many ways you can relate. Digital Experience Management, of course, is how it's essentially managing customer experiences or what I like to call fragments or mini experiences, where if you have a history buying a certain type of product, for example, a PIM system is going to contain data that would allow a marketer or an ecommerce professional to, for example, correlate a related product and target it to me. So if I bought a red dress, they might know that I want red shoes. And so the PIM is going to have the data about the colors that match the shoes and the dress having the same color. So that sort of very specific product data can be used to cross sell upsell, promote, market related products, or anything that you might know about a particular customer, their demographic, where they are geographically located, how much money they've spent in the last year. All that can get related to product data and used in a more targeted or relevant way.

Cruce Saunders
And so when we're connecting the actual marketing content about the product into the rendering of a, for example, commerce page, and that is then part of a customer journey with that product that might have other kinds of for example, support content and what not. How are you seeing that the PIM providing content into those rendered pages or experiences or devices that are dealing with those different parts of the customer lifecycle with that product?

Theresa Regli
Yeah, that's a great set of examples that you're providing in terms of the multi-channel experience and consistent experience that enterprises are trying to create across all these different devices. And even in a store where maybe you look at some things online, you explore products online, but then maybe you really want to go into a store and touch it and feel it before you buy it. That data in a PIM is really used by more intelligent platforms. So I would argue that when it comes to creating a smarter world, the PIM contains the data, but it's not really doing the decision making. - @TheresaRegliIt doesn't have the logic that's doing and creating that intelligent presentation. It's just the repository for that product data that the smart layer needs to make smart decisions.

Cruce Saunders
Very specialized data-repo, providing content into the overall customer experience. But really, IT departments have to pull all that together. Correct? Okay. And so let's talk about something else they're pulling together, which is Digital Asset Management (DAM), your favorite topic. And Digital Asset Management is such a huge area. And this is a big question because it's evolved a lot over the last few years. And I'm curious how you're defining DAM today, and can you give us a little bit of the history of what made DAM get to where it is today?

Theresa Regli
Sure. DAM is still at core about the management of digital media through its life cycle. But I would argue that, that life cycle has expanded in terms of scope @TheresaRegliSo if I was to go back 15-20 years when I first started working in DAM, we were really just trying to create centralized repositories of pictures and occasionally audio and video back then, but not nearly, of course, as much as today. And it was about getting the final copies of things into that repository and putting some data around it. And that metadata was usually created by the same person who created the media or was putting the asset into the system. Now it's a much broader set of requirements that these systems fulfil. Sometimes DAMs help with the actual creative process much earlier when an agency is hired or when a creative team is putting together the first beautiful marketing images of something, and the DAM might be supporting that through workflow. DAMs have also gotten a lot more sophisticated in terms of review and approval and sending things around to different groups, to management, to advertisers, to make sure everybody agrees with what is being generated @TheresaRegliand going through that much more extensive workflow.

They've also gotten a lot better at distribution, which I think is going back to your point about customers and the customer experience. There's many DAM product vendors that really expanded how they deliver. They've added APIs to enable better delivery, not just of the asset, but all the metadata along with it, so that those intelligent presentation layers can make better decisions and show me the most relevant video about a product or about the media or the band I'm following, whatever it is. So much bigger scope, much more interesting and exciting in terms of what these vendors are doing.

Cruce Saunders
You're talking about the intelligence being applied to the assets once it's in the repo. Can you talk about some scenarios that are emerging? For example, we've seen auto tagging take off. Right. And so what other kinds of AI-based or other intelligent processes are happening within these systems once it's there? So it's not just a dumb database, it's doing something more.

Theresa Regli
Yeah, I would say the sort of less intelligent initial layer is applied when you get the assets into the system and you can apply rules, for example, based on who is uploading something, the department, the brand, the agency, whoever it is. There can be metadata applied based on who they are and the area they work in. But actually when we get into the system now, there's actual visual analysis of a lot of these assets, and not just of a picture, but even of a video. So when a video gets ingested, it can be listened to in real time. It can do real time transcription. It can then take the metadata that it sees or the things that it sees. It can tag images, but also it can create collections of things that are related, basically on the fly based on what that intelligence sees or learns listening to a video or a piece of audio. I think there's incredible things that a lot of these technology vendors are doing with the public cloud services. So you have Microsoft Cognitive Services, which lives in Azure. Amazon has a tool called Rekognition. And then some of the vendors as well are using third party tools such as Clarify.

And they contain their own arsenals of essentially vocabularies and subject-based areas of metadata that you can apply. So, if you work in aviation, you can apply a specific vocabulary that's very very detailed about airplanes. If you work in cooking, you can apply a very, very specific vocabulary about food, pans, kitchens, whatever it is. And those standards are really useful. And also those pieces of software and those services that live in the cloud, they already know what a Dutch oven looks like or what a spatula looks like so that you don't have to teach the software what these things look like.

Cruce Saunders
Okay, so this gets into Semantics. I'm glad we're touching on this. Tagging in these DAMs is such an essential feature, and we're moving towards auto tagging, but there's a danger in that. And so when you talk about vocabularies, I'm hearing a recognition that human definitions of semantic meaning need to rule in many ways, and we need to be able to get our tags to match so that at least we can pull up the same object when four departments call it something different when we do a search. And so being able to take those tags and associate them with the thesaurus of terms so that they are able to disambiguate or tag an object many times with different terminology that's related. That's all part of this discovery, instant discovery of the right assets for the right customer moment. And I'm really curious about how tags have been evolving and this movement towards auto tagging, how we eliminate the risks associated with that with a defined semantic model.

Theresa Regli
That's a great question. I think in the past, tags have been about what something inherently is. So this is an airplane, this is a spatula, and they are evolving to become much more about how something might be used @TheresaRegli.They are much more contextual, and they are also about perception. So it's not just human vocabulary, it's how might our customer see this? What might they need it for in this particular instance? So if I have a spatula, an important piece of metadata might be pancake, or it might be sandwich because I'm searching for tools that will help me make pancakes or that will flip cheese toasty or grilled cheese, say, in America. Soit's much more about use. It's much more about thinking like a buyer. It's much more about context. Context is the word I would use. And how can we add tags that will help us contextually apply this asset in a smarter way? @TheresaRegli 

Cruce Saunders 
Beautiful. And we've been building these intent taxonomies for companies. It's based on this contextual usage of that particular content fragment. And it's no longer just the article, right. It's what is the intent being represented by this para or what is the intent being represented by this headline even? It's like sometimes metadata is getting very micro.

Theresa Regli
Absolutely. Para-metadata. That's a word that I hear thrown around now. Para-metadata. It's like metadata about metadata, which sounds kind of crazy, but it's almost like another level of essentially what is the data @TheresaRegli, not just about the asset, but in terms of if we have this metadata, which is, this is a picture of a spatula, what are all the ways that it might be used? So it's like the next level of detail down, or it's the contextual metadata. And to your point, it's that extra layer of knowledge that is needed for the software to make the decision on what to show rather than a person.

Cruce Saunders
Right. And so before we're loading the image of the spatula into the DAM and somebody is typing in the word spatula. And then with auto tagging, now it's sort of like there's AI, there's this image recognition, recognizes it and tagged it with spatula. But what happens when marketing calls it a flipper or somebody else calls it a Gizmo? So in other words, there could be different words for that and therefore different tags. And if they don't get correlated, then we kind of lose the relevant asset when we need it. So how do we get around that?

Theresa Regli
Well, you mentioned the word thesaurus, which is definitely one way I don't like to use the term thesaurus too much, because it does make people think of an old school library or a big thick book where they have to sort of look up a particular word and then read through the synonyms. What I'm finding is that more advanced organizations, they will have a centralized technology to manage synonyms that might be called a master data management tool of some kind, or they will use the very fancy term knowledge graph or ontology management system @TheresaRegli.It sort of depends how you want to set things up, but this is essentially a map of the human knowledge in an organization that would contain some of these synonyms, for example. So, if you were to have synonyms for spatula like a flipper or whatever, I don't know if they actually call a spatula flipper anywhere, but I think we might have a new trend here, then you would manage that. So that if someone typed in a different word for the same thing because of maybe a more relevant. Let me give you a more relevant example. As an expat living here in London, it took me a long time to use words like trousers instead of pants.

So there's a good one. It's a better example. If I'm a clothing company and I sell trousers in the UK, I would be calling them pants in the US so I could use a client of mine. One of them is Land's End. They sell trousers here in the UK, but they're obviously pants in the US. So you need to semantically manage that in your organization. If you have international clients that speak many different flavors of English, that has to be managed somewhere.

Cruce Saunders
Got it. That semantic system of record becomes a source of truth for understanding what things are called and the meaning of things, and it's their relationship to other things. I'll have that ability to form into what is ultimately a graph @mrcruce. And that starts with something simple, like a controlled vocabulary, like you're saying for an industry or it could be for department. What do organizations need to do in order to build such a controlled vocabulary set of terms? There's a function there that that implies inside of the enterprise. And what is that function?

Theresa Regli
It has to be a neutral party, I believe. So that person doesn't usually quote, unquote belong to a specific department. So I'm increasingly seeing enterprise taxonomists or master data management architects or master data architects. So the taxonomist is less technical, much more someone who has a library science background or a terminology background of some kind, whereas a master data architect tends to be more on the IT side and they actually implement some sort of central management structure @TheresaReglithat essentially houses this master data vocabulary and these master categories. And usually those two roles ideally are working together to maintain vocabularies to ensure that the standards are applied across all the technologies. And of course, there's often also outside parties who might come in that have experience in widely in an industry to help apply these principles and standards.

Cruce Saunders
Got it. Yeah, that's really in keeping with this idea. We've been advocating at [A], for this Content Services Organization which is independent of a particular department, which is responsible for maintaining the semantic standards and the source of truth. Right. Whether that's a semantic system of record or master data management platform of some kind in order to maintain cross functional vocabularies and interoperability between knowledge sets. Because of course, siloed tags mean we have siloed data and that means our content and our assets and ultimately our customer experiences don't work together @mrcruce.

Theresa Regli
They're fragmented, they become fragmented. And I found over the years, especially in my earlier years working in DAM, everybody said, well, the marketers will tag or the photographers, when they're putting photos into the system, they will tag and they just don't want to do it. They want to do their primary jobs, they want to create a great campaign, they want to take a great photograph. The art of managing great metadata is a job in and of itself. And I think it's taking a very long time for that realization to happen. And I am still constantly having to help my clients justify hiring these sorts of people @TheresaRegli.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah, this is something we're battling every day. And really I thought we would be over it by now. I mean, because the value of content assets is becoming self-evident in a more and more obvious way, like in a way that especially with NFTs and Crypto, and everybody is moving towards really headless systems where digital assets are being syndicated and used across departments. So there's really a lot of obvious signs saying digital assets are important. You actually need to spend time and energy and money and resources curating and managing them as a function, organization-wide function. Why can't we bridge the gap yet? @mrcruceWhat is the missing piece? I want to know.

Theresa Regli
I think it's hard for organizations that are used to selling and valuing tangible things to value things that are intangible. I think that's part of it. But it's also only just getting to a point where, for example, digital art is being valued as much or more as a piece of tangible art that hangs in a Museum. And there's so much out there now about artists who are selling specifically imprinted art that is unique, that is a digital piece of art, and that is being seen as auctionable by Christie's, for example, or one of these great auction houses that are used to just pulling the curtain off of a framed piece of art. It is a shift in our perception as human beings to value things differently. And organizations, they still don't quite understand as well the power of what software can do with metadata. And I think that's another bridge that we still have to get over in the sense that you've got really smart marketers that know marketing, you've got really smart CEOs, you've got really brilliant business people. But if you ask them to explain, well, why do I need metadata on my digital assets? What is that going to allow my ecommerce system to do? Or what is that going to allow my content management system to do? How is that going to help me capitalize on more sales? Or how is that going to build my relationship with my customer? I don't think they can do it. And they're the ones signing the cheques, they're the ones making the financial decisions. So we have so much education to do.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah, and it's a shame because the value is by organizations that get it is being mined almost green field, because they are the ones spending the time using content assets to perform significant work that the other ones aren't. But still, because it's invisible, there's this gap, there's this chasm that still needs to be crossed in 2022. But we're getting there in terms of the headless shift, which has really driven a lot of interest in decoupling content and presentation and different parts of the customer experience, stack all the data about customers and starting to be seen in this more orchestration-oriented way by IT leaders at least. And so that seems to me to be driving at least the forward edge of the interest wave in content semantics and structure, which will make all of that stuff work together.

Theresa Regli
Yes, I think you used the keywords you used there was orchestration. That's a word that I use to describe my own consulting services. I'm here to help you orchestrate data and systems, because to go back to one of your original questions about Digital Asset Management and how has the scope expanded? People call me up and say, I need an updated DAM strategy and I said, well, you can't do it by itself anymore. There is no such thing as just having a DAM  strategy. Because if it doesn't connect and it doesn't orchestrate with the legacy systems that you might have and the PIM system and the CMS and your custom built apps that your customers are using, if that orchestration is not thought through, your DAM is just going to be the same DAM it was ten years ago. It's not going to get you to that next level.

Cruce Saunders
Just another data silo.

Theresa Regli
That's right. So it's all about orchestration. And I am happy to say that I'm hearing more and more marketers use that term, not just in terms of customer journey orchestration, but also what do we have to do to our marketing assets to orchestrate quicker time to market, better campaigns, better targeting, etcetera?

Cruce Saunders
Yeah. The content orchestration model is something we've been working towards. This is how content assets become a unified experience that really requires orchestration. It's just like any Symphony. You don't have silos of musicians playing separately. Coherence requires a unified understanding of music theory and how all of those notes and instruments and harmonies work together. And there is an orchestration function. Right. Symphony is very literal. An orchestrator.

Theresa Regli
Yes.

Cruce Saunders
But that in enterprise content. The existence of that I see more and more, but it's something that we believe really is required to get content towards these intelligent experiences. There's really no way to silo your way through coherent, multi-channel personalized experiences.

Theresa Regli 
No. And a lot of it is an understanding of context. Andthis is why people do customer studies. This is why they do consumer based research. Because you can't orchestrate in an effective way if you don't understand your customer @TheresaRegli, it all goes back to that customer/user call it what you will. But I find that big companies and lions share my work is with these giant Fortune 500 global companies. They are really investing in more contextual customer experiences. So if I sell a food product, I'm going to have a virtual chef that I can experience when I'm researching the product so that I know how to sell this really great 85% dark cacao. And here's how you're going to make a chocolate cake with it. It has to be inspirational. It has to motivate. It has to get me to that page where I'm going to click and say, yes, I'm going to buy this, or it has to motivate me to get out into the store. And that's the kind of thing that they're driving towards now.

Cruce Saunders
Cacao sounds good.

Theresa Regli
Yes, I'm in.

Cruce Saunders
Okay. Yeah. So crypto is such a big talking point now in the public market, and it's really taken over the term asset. Right. It's like, what is the digital asset? NFT, these non fungible tokens, are becoming a commodity conversation almost at this point. It used to be kind of leading edge stuff, and now all of a sudden there's a very significant interest from across many sectors in having blockchain-based records of digital assets. I'm curious just about your take on blockchain and this move towards crypto and NFT conversation about how that will impact them.

Theresa Regli
It already is. Yeah, it already is. It's funny because I've been moving away a bit from using this term Digital Asset Management, because I get contacted about crypto, which I don't consider myself knowledgeable in. But what is happening that's sort of been forced on me in the industry that I work in is how do you authenticate media as being something that is actually what it is? And I think especially about deep fake videos. There was about a month ago there was a fake video of Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, giving a speech that wasn't really him. It's done tons in politics where they fake someone saying something. The value of having a blockchain and NFT is being able to trace the authenticity of media, and that's especially important in narrow fake news and inauthentic art that isn't actually sourced where we think it is. So, I think it's a little less important for corporations as it is just for us as human beings to be able to say, where did this come from? Is it authentic? Is it the real thing? Am I actually looking at a picture of this person doing this thing? Because all the sort of fake things that circulate around Twitter and everywhere else, that is when it comes to Digital Asset Management.

I see the value much more in media, press, etcetera, in terms of authentication.

Cruce Saunders
Do you think provenance and trustworthiness is resolvable with blockchain technology?

Theresa Regli
I think it can be. I think it can be. It depends how, of course it's applied, and if you even have the right piece of technology to be able to trace it back, a lot of us wouldn't necessarily. We're just sort of scrolling through our Twitter feed and we're seeing a video. I can't believe that person actually said that. And in many cases, some of the most interesting things on the Internet are wrong. Did this person actually say this and tracing it back? So, I think it can be applied in order to do that, yes. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah, I'm really interested to see how that works inside and outside of the corporate firewall, where we've got digital assets that are inside of various kinds of content platforms that the enterprise maintains the metadata on the provenance for exactly is then logging those things to a public blockchain, maybe a public metadata record associated with it is the relationship between the publisher and the public blockchains, and then how those assets get reused, remixed and sublicensed or reused?

Theresa Regli
Yeah. Traceability, actually, this was a theme of a keynote I did a few years ago is called Traceability and Trust. And if you're a corporation, you want to build trust on the part of the customer. It's to be able to trace not just where a digital asset might come from and making sure that's actually from the company or the organization or the person, but it's even okay "I've bought this shampoo and how do I actually know that it didn't harm the environment?" Or "how do I know that an animal didn't get tested with this product?" Or if I have a particular code of ethics, if I'm vegan, do I know that this is actually vegan, this product that I'm buying. Those sorts of things have become increasingly prominent and important for consumer decisions. And so, knowing where that traceability is and where does it go back to. And, oh, if there's palm oil in this or I'm buying fair trade coffee, and what does fair trade coffee mean to me as a consumer? And can I actually know that the farmer was paid what he was deserved to grow this coffee? Those kinds of factors actually affect Digital Asset Management because can I put this fair-trade logo on my package?

And am I going to be able to trace that back and prove that to my consumer?

Cruce Saunders
I know the name of the farm. Hand raised Chickens. That's right.

Theresa Regli
That's a great clip from Portland. I remember that one. The name of the chicken. That was a good one.

Cruce Saunders
Well, it's offering us an opportunity to see a world where there's more trust in assets and there's also more fungibility in terms of economics for assets as well. Like there's ability, too.

Theresa Regli
Yes, there's a lot of economic ramifications. And another thing that came to my mind while you were asking this for bringing this particular point up is in the era of where vaccinations and Pharma and Life Science is being so big, in some cases, this stuff is a matter of life or death. Are we putting the right warnings on the label? Is that content supply chain properly checked? Is it traced back? Has Legal reviewed it? Because you have to say certain things on a label in England that you don't have to say in America, for example, or vice versa. And is somebody who's allergic to not getting the right information on the label so we can't take this lightly. And this all affects Digital Asset Management because it's a picture of the label, and then I'm going to potentially order a whole box of these things and consume them. So, it's all very important.

Cruce Saunders
Circling back, we talked about PIM, we talked about DAM, and we've really been all around the evolution of semantics, as well as the way that the blockchain is impacting how we're annotating what's inside of our Digital Asset Management systems. A couple of other major categories in content technology that I'd love to currently take on, especially with the shifts that have been happening within CSPs Content Service Providers and acquisition of Nuxeo by Hyland, which was very interesting to us because we've had a lot of clients who pay attention to these kind of Federated Digital Asset Management platforms that are able to really pull together different sources into kind of unified API. And so curious about your take on where CSPs are, where they're going and just the market dynamics.

Theresa Regli
Yes, everybody wants to be an aggregator now because the more you aggregate, the better your APIs are. And the more legacy content you're bringing in, then the more you become ingrained in an organization and the more dependent the organization becomes on you @TheresaRegli. So, I don't think it's just the CSPs. I think it's the DAM vendors. I think it's Adobe, it's Open Text, it's all of these big ... Sitecore as well. They're all competitors trying to essentially own the stack, own the digital experience. I think own the experience is actually one of the mottos or the taglines for Sitecore. And as I see it, it's highly competitive, these marketplaces, it's highly acquisitive in terms of acquiring competitive tools. And they are also, in addition to providing content, they want to essentially supplant old tools in organizations as well. And so, I see it as an interesting evolution. But I also think the more they try to do and the more they acquire, it's sort of less well, they do certain things. I admit I'm still a big fan of best-of-breed for certain types of technology and the more I see vendors trying to sell a stack, so to speak, the less well they tend to do individual parts of that stack.

And it's a big problem when somebody in enterprise says we're just going to buy everything from one vendor, we're just going to go with everything they have. And I think that, that is where people don't then think fully through what the best solution is for each particular task at hand.

Cruce Saunders
Making decisions with the basis of the glue as a core decision making factor. A lot of times it's the label, but we have to put these things together. And it is rare for an organization to take an orchestration-based approach where the glue between all the standards and way that content moves structure and semantic uniformity and congruence and coherence across content sets becomes the primary operative approach, with the technology selection being secondary. And we believe that that is ultimately the way to get to intelligence is start with coherence as the mandate and then get the technology to conform to it. Don't pick a vendor or a stack even and say we're committed to that thing which is going to deliver and manage all of our customer experiences. We're committed to our customers, we're committed to the coherence of our content sets, we're committed to our content assets. But the technology then needs to play in an interoperable way with our approach to content.

Theresa Regli
I agree. Unfortunately, there's rarely someone in an organization who is thinking the way you just described. I'm starting to see Digital Transformation Groups, VP of Digital Transformation or SPP of Digital Transformation. Sometimes you have a very progressive CIO who's thinking beyond the Exchange servers and the ERP system, who says, "Gee, we actually need to align these tools so we can do digital right". But more often than not, unfortunately, I see Siloed implementations of specific tools where there's been no alignment. But I think the reason why this is all coming to a head right now is because everybody's realizing, oh, we can't build this digital experience that we want to build if we stay in our silos and we have our separate vocabularies in every single system and we're not basing everything we do on a bigger plan, this bigger plan that you just described driving a customer experience, it's just suddenly become this complete crutch that people and enterprises cannot do what they want to do because of these ongoing silos. 

Cruce Saunders
Yeah. And I think it really goes back to a conversation we were having years ago about the value of content assets. I mean, the decision making is often department-based, quarter-by-quarter, outcome-oriented. So, all the funding for a lot of these initiatives often gets put into P&L, or at least the content assets themselves and the infrastructure. Sometimes it's capitalized, but it becomes kind of a one-time planting of a tree that they hope is going to grow into a bunch of customer experiences. And how should it work?

Theresa Regli
Well, there needs to be a group dedicated, I'm usually calling it the Martech Strategy Group or the Digital Transformation Group. And it needs to be about the connective tissue, as I call it, or the orchestration. And it is a group that is dedicated that they're not in a silo. They don't have any particular department's interest at heart. They are a senior team that is focused on that. And I really do, maybe it's because I am inherently an optimist, but I do believe this is going to change over the next three to five years. I would give it because I see the nature of my own projects changing. I see the nature and I am a planner. That's what I do for my clients. I plan their futures with technology. And just in the last three years, during the pandemic, I think everybody had a little bit more time to think, everybody had a little bit more time to reflect. And are we doing the right thing, not just with our lives, but with our businesses? And I see now people don't just say we need a new whatever. We need a new DAM , we need a new CMS, we need a new PIM.

They're saying we need to plan orchestration, we need to plan our stack, we need to think through the whole thing now. And they're looking at it three to five years, we need a new DAM in 18 months. We need to integrate all this to do to build our future. So I do believe that this is happening now and I do believe we're going to be in a very much more interesting place quite soon.

Cruce Saunders
That's awesome. Yeah. We're seeing really similar motion in that good direction. There's so many sustaining other trends that are happening that are driving it, some of which we've talked about already. And it's forming kind of an interest in unified data management on the customer side and unified content management. That's cool, because the departments are forming. I worked with a number of them. These functions are forming really independently of departments and where they report is totally different from organization to organization.

Theresa Regli
Yeah, I have to bring up, I think there's a talent crisis as well. Of course, there's not a lot of people who've done this before, because we're all sort of doing it for the first time now and we're starting to think through it. And to be fair, some of the biggest organizations that I do work with, they've had a digital transformation team for a while now. They've already integrated their DAM  and their PIM. They're already doing dynamic presentation layers, creativity at scale, things like that. But I will say that every week, two or three different organizations, not even my clients, they're just contacting me saying, Theresa, can you help us find somebody to manage digital transformation or to do an enterprise semantic strategy for us? There's a real lack of talent and there's a lot of companies looking for unicorns that are hard to find.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah, well, similar. They're asking us to produce outcomes, then they don't have somebody necessarily ready to own it, own it and maintain the rhythms around it. So there really does need to be a development process. And this is an industry basis, really, because we can't loan yet. We need to figure out how to replicate the mindset and the knowledge in a way within enterprises that can fractal scale out.

Theresa Regli
Absolutely.

Cruce Saunders
Because that thinking doesn't just have to permeate that group. Let's central content services, organization and marketing, technology coordination or the digital transformation office, whatever we call it. It's that centralized department-free organization advocating for the coherence of content and customer experiences right across an enterprise that also is going to need a mindset shift among the content producing functions within the business.

Theresa Regli
Yes.

Cruce Saunders
And so can't just empower the leaders. We also have to catalyze a shift in understanding how content works together. I'm not just producing content in this one, silo in this one place, for this one, artefact at this one time, but that content is now part of an ecosystem and evolution that's happening. And it's really mindset shifting from, I think of it as almost a grid relational database thinking to a graph, which is a lot of relationships, more flexible and nimble and more intelligent, ultimately. But I think we're kind of moving the big shift that's happening is from two dimensional thinking to three dimensional thinking.

Theresa Regli
Yeah, definitely. I think that it's also a matter of, frankly, sort of younger people coming into the workplace, I think is helpful because they don't think the way I do. I've been working in this industry now almost 30 years, and I started at a newspaper. So I still do think about things like how something should be laid out on paper in my default brain. And I find that a lot of us who are used to more traditional forms of media are more traditional ways of managing content. We need to think beyond the way we first learn things, and that's a difficult thing to do. It's a very difficult thing to do. So I have those similar conversations with marketers a lot. Well, you're going to have to generate this content in a different way, and it's going to have to be modularized, and it's going to have to be able to be shared. And you can't just put it in a spreadsheet and send it over email because this is not going to get to where it needs to go. So that mind shift is difficult, but it helps if everybody understands the outcomes, and it helps if you describe what those outcomes will be.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah. So we're in the revolution. It's happening. It's happening all around us. Where would you say we are in the life cycle of that revolution. Is it still pretty early?

Theresa Regli
Oh, absolutely, very very early. I consider myself very fortunate because I finished University or College, as we'd say in the US in 1995. So I was sort of at that perfect moment where the World Wide Web was just becoming a thing, and it was becoming a commercial entity. And I think, wow, okay. It's been almost 30 years that I've been doing this, and it still feels very early. I think. And I think about my nieces and nephews and babies being born today and how different the world is for us than it was for our parents. I think it's going to be sort of Moore's Law. Right. It's going to be that much more dramatically different for the next generations. I did a virtual reality experience on Saturday where it was an Alice in Wonderland puzzle, and it was just epic. I felt like I was really in Wonderland, and I was solving the puzzles, and I was going through this. You forget about reality sometimes when you're in these VR experiences, and that didn't even exist in the relatively not too distant past, that did not even exist to be able to do that. And so I think we're extremely early in this mark of change.

Cruce Saunders
Yeah. It's amazing because we're now multimodal publishing content into so many different kinds of experiences that we've lost track of, really just how much that evolution is going to be, not only impacting what we're doing right now, but impacting everything we are going to be doing in the future. It's all based on a shift toward this three-dimensional, personalized, interactive, intelligent, real-time world where we have both the digital and the physical rendition of everything.

Theresa Regli
Yes, I think some people are intimidated by it, but I find it very exciting. One of the things that I was thinking when I was in this VR game on Saturday was wouldn't it be interesting if I played this game a few more times and then I asked the game make it more challenging for me. And then I thought back to when I had an Atari 2600 as a teenager and I could set the level one to five or as I advanced in the game, it got more and more challenging. So the principles are the same as they were when I was playing that Atari 2600 when I was 16 and I was playing Space Invaders in those games. But here I was in this VR experience where I was completely immersed in this world and the number of variables and the amount of content I was experiencing. I mean, at one point I just looked up and the leaves were falling. The leaves were falling towards my face. I'm having this complete experience and I sort of thought I'm solving this puzzle now. Give me a Blizzard like make it harder for me to find what I need to find to get to the next level.

I think that's very exciting. We can have a dialogue with the worlds that we're in. We can have a dialogue with the companies we buy from and if we let them get to know us, we can have a whole separate podcast about data Privacy and what all that means and personal protection and GDPR and all this stuff. But I actually find when I do interact more and I experience a product more deeply that a smart company knows how to respond. Just like a virtual reality experience knows how to respond if I'm doing something and what's going to happen. That's the kind of relationships that companies want to build their consumers. And I think that's fascinating and really interesting, but it can be scary at the same time. That's probably another podcast. 

Cruce Saunders
Yes, it is. It's a joy. This has been so much fun exploring this incredible shifting world of content, technology, people, and how it is all coming together. It really is moving toward coherence and that is, I think one of the things that gives me the most excitement about what we do. We're helping organizations in this process of moving toward content that works together, people that work together and as content and people work together, that starts to create more coherence in the organization itself, though I believe we're in a really good place for being able to impact the world in a small way.

Theresa Regli
I agree. Excellent.

Cruce Saunders
All right, thanks very much, Theresa.

Theresa Regli
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Cheers.

Cruce Saunders
Cheers.