While all began with a clear idea of the direct savings that they would realize through a DAM initiative, forum speakers said, many discovered synergies that exceeded their expectations.

"The original return on investment was bringing creative back in from the print vendors," said James Voris, vice president of technology for the Playboy Entertainment Group Inc., "keeping it locally so we don't have to pay for those [service bureau] charges."

Voris soon found value "based on time savings for the dot-com group, because they're able to produce 300 times the amount of work they were doing before." Because Playboy can repurpose content into so many different revenue-producing products, Voris said he expects a continuing stream of benefits.

"We produce assets in a lot of contexts right now; to have a single centralized place that people could go to use those assets we knew was going to be a huge business driver for us … [Because there's] lots of reuse of [content] in our company, we knew that just by having them all in one place we'd be able to make new products and ultimately make a lot of money," Voris said.

Direct cost saving was also the goal of Alex Karinsky, manager of prepress at Columbia House, despite the daunting upfront expenditures, he said.

"We also bit the bullet, realized that we needed the whole kit and caboodle; we needed to have our people on the best platform possible to leverage the new foundation. An outsourcing operation would have cost us about $125 per page, and that didn't even include file delivery systems," Karinsky said.

Karinsky's efforts were quickly rewarded, he said. "We ended up bringing that down to about $12 per page. Our return on investment was [realized] within a week and a half."

He said he has no regrets: "It was a complete win-win situation for us. It was a no-brainer. It was just a matter of 'How do we hit the ground running?' to make it as fluid as possible."

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Part of Columbia House's process involved requiring more of its vendors. "The other key thing was our file delivery system . . . we put the onus on the printer. If they really want our business, let them come and get it from us."

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Illysa Ortsman, associate director of technology support and IT training at CMP Media LLC, only recently installed a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system from Artesia Technologies Inc., but foresees a quick payback. "We were spending between $6 and $7 million a year on outside purchases of photos and artwork. We expect to be able to save a huge amount of that money by being able to reuse our own work in-house."

CMP currently dedicates 9TB of storage space to its Digital Asset Management system, which serves 51 magazines and 30 to 50 events per year.

Several of the panelists said they see DRM (digital rights management) as the next function to add to their DAM systems. CMP's Ortsman said that DRM "is a huge issue with reusing a lot of [our] photos.… We have rights assigned, but we don't have a DRM system sitting on top of our Digital Asset Management system."

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Voris, from Playboy, described a similar issue. "We have a lot of contractual obligations with the photographers, with the models; we can only use them for a certain amount of time," he said, which creates problems with both asset management and rights management when content is offered to consumers on the Web.

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