INSIDE GOOGLE'S DAM & DRM STRATEGY
Adapted from an Orange Logic webinar hosted by Misti Vogt. Questions have been consolidated and rewritten for clarity. Watch the full on-demand webinar below to hear directly from Kathleen Cameron, Senior Digital Assets Operations Manager in Marketing Operations at Google.
Google’s marketing organization produces and licenses a large volume of creative content, including high-stakes video with multiple rights holders. Every asset carries its own usage terms, and at Google’s scale, tracking those terms manually puts the business at risk of costly rights violations.
Kathleen Cameron, Senior Digital Assets Operations Manager in Marketing Operations, leads the team that manages the DAM program for Google’s marketing organization, with a focus on promoting discovery, rights management, reuse, and reporting. For her team, it is not enough for people to find an asset. They also need to know whether it can be reused.
Kathleen Cameron: I'm the Senior Digital Assets Operations Manager, which is maybe the longest title any of us have at Google, for Google Marketing. I've been at Google about nine years. I got my start at the Bettmann Archive in a pre-digital world, where I started learning about rights and licenses and licensing images.
That's just sort of carried on through my career, as a photo editor where I was licensing assets and hiring photographers, to being a digital asset manager where I'm now managing all of that data, rights data, along with asset details and all that. I also studied photography as an undergrad, so this is all near and dear to my heart.
Kathleen Cameron: I think many of us have had this experience. I'm in marketing specifically now, in a large global organization, but it happens in small companies too. You're generating wonderful creative, but nobody knows where it is. Somebody wants to reuse it, and the producer's out or they've left, and no one knows where the assets are. If they can find the assets, they don't know if they have the rights to reuse them. And sometimes they reuse them when they shouldn't be able to. This is the biggest problem set I think we've faced in regards to how we leverage our DAMs for more good than just cataloging assets.
There is stuff everywhere. I mean, even for me, there's still stuff everywhere. And it's variable. I still struggle with differentiating for my users what's a piece of source photography versus when that piece of photography is used in a banner ad or a social ad or a print ad. We do the same things with video, illustrations, logos, et cetera. We want to keep track of it all. One of the things when I first started here I hadn't really thought about was that fonts are licensed. So you have to track your fonts and what those rights are, too, unless you've created your own fonts.
Then you have the global perspective, and every country has slightly different rights, what you can and cannot do, depending on what your products are. Some countries have very restrictive rights in terms of how you show a product. Or you can't show the Eiffel Tower, or we talked about the Lone Cypress in Carmel, which is IP-restricted. And then on top of that, whoever's negotiating those rights may or may not be consistently negotiating the same rights. You might have one set of rights for a photographer, a different set of rights for the talent, and maybe there's some other IP-restricted content, like an old MG in the photo, and you need to get permissions from MG. If you have variable rights, that becomes even harder to keep track of.
Kathleen Cameron: It can be mind-blowing. It gets overwhelming quickly. I was thinking about one of the most complicated sets of rights I've gotten since I've been here. I had photographer rights, and the model gave us like 18 months for their full body, but three years if we just used their hands. And I was like, "No, really? Why would you do that?"
There's just so many notes that you have to put in. You can use this, but only if you promise you only use their hands.
Kathleen Cameron: I know Sarah Cervinski is on the call, and she was there with me for the Sydney Olympics. This was my first DAM. We had to build a DAM in about six months, I think, for the Sydney Olympics for a company called Quokka Sports. They already had an online presence with a variety of sort of nonstandard sports, sailing and BMX bike racing, that sort of thing. But in this case, they didn't have a DAM. Things were just stored in various drives and whatnot, and we needed to pull that into the DAM. So we had to build a taxonomy. We also had to build an infrastructure where we could take in the live feeds.
And again, this was 2000. This feels like forever ago. It's so much easier to do that now. Because it was all editorial use and we had permissions from the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, we knew we had a lot of flexibility with those assets. That was pretty simple. I mean, it sounds horrifically complex to me at the moment, like, how the heck did we pull that off? But we did. Because we had those permissions and it was editorial, it simplified our rights management. We weren't really even thinking about rights management. We were just trying to tag all these assets with a lot of structured data and get them cataloged as quickly as possible. Again, simple use case compared to what I've got now. And really only a couple file types. We were taking in photography and we were taking in video.
Now what I find is I've had to build a system that's much more agile. It's less about trying to solve for one need and trying to build something that solves for a variety of needs. That combination of structured and unstructured data is really important from my perspective. We track things as they come in by teams. We track them for specific regions and countries and languages. And then, of course, we're tracking by rights.
We don't do marketing really any differently from a process standpoint. We hire a photographer, we hire talent, we hire a video producer, we license music, et cetera. We build the same kind of assets any other marketing team builds: social, print, out-of-home, digital ads, et cetera. But keeping that all organized at this scale comes with challenges because we aren't negotiating the rights centrally and we don't all do our creative in-house. We're working with thousands of ad agencies. So that level of change management, when you're trying to pull everything into a DAM and get people to understand that structured data, including the rights data, has its challenges. But it also gives us a lot of flexibility. Once we kind of laid that foundation, we were able to build a lot of automations to get to a lot more efficiencies.
Kathleen Cameron: The structured data comes with how you've set up your metadata. We tend to think of it in terms of project data, rights data, and then asset data, which is kind of how I learned it when I did my archival studies program. And then there's a lot of AI tagging that can be done, and that's more unstructured data.
When we really started to talk to our stakeholders, what we realized is that the rights start at the create stage. The rights often start getting negotiated or figured out, not necessarily completed, very early in the process. So as assets are getting generated, you can already be building out your rights. We thought it was important to kind of separate those processes and acknowledge that it's often different people managing the rights than the people who are generating the creative.
Kathleen Cameron: Video tends to be the most complex set of rights that I'm getting. Sometimes you've got a famous director, multiple actors, sometimes you've got multiple music tracks, and then voiceover. And then, of course, voiceover for every country in lots of languages, which means that there are lots of files as well. You want to create relationships between those files. And then, of course, we get the source file and then we get cutdowns, and then we have to manage those relationships as well.
We know who our stakeholders are. I think that's really key. Where the content is originating from or where the idea is originating from. We know there can be lots of handoffs. Sometimes a producer is shooting and managing one set of rights, but maybe it goes to a post house, and the post house is just negotiating the music. So now we're having to get rights from multiple people. Who's got the source asset? I think people struggle with that. Who's got the final asset, and what else are you collecting? Are you collecting the mixes and splits and all the voiceover tracks separately, or are you just collecting the whole enchilada?
I think that concept of relating your content within the DAM to a set of rights becomes really important. Sometimes you get cutdowns with different music tracks. That's where it becomes really complex very fast.
Kathleen Cameron: That is going to be huge for rights management as well. I mean, we get multiple wins out of that. If a logo's detected and maybe it shouldn't be there, then we can recall that asset pretty quickly and run it back through rights review to say, "Hey, you missed a logo."
Speech-to-text is huge for us, especially using AI tooling, because sometimes we get regulations from various countries and we have to pull content down because of the way a word is used or a feature is described or whatever. And that's just going to help us get to those assets faster. I think with some of the new tooling that's coming out, those quick iterations are able to happen much more fluidly than they had in the past.
Kathleen Cameron: We just pulled our numbers for 2024, and one of the things that's been a huge win for us is sending email alerts when an asset is about to expire. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, it's expired and you don't get to use it anymore," because we don't know all the places those assets actually end up.
So when somebody has downloaded an asset, we're collecting a little bit of information through the shopping cart, which helps us understand whether or not they can or cannot use the asset for their stated purpose. That's one gate we have in place. And we've stopped some misuse because people are like, "I want to use it for this," and you're like, "We don't have the rights for that. You just click through and read."
We feel like we've saved quite a bit of money, but our rates are so variable, we don't have a really good metric for that. But because we send alerts, we send one automated email at 90 days, and then another at 60 days, and another at 30. So they get three emails, if they've downloaded the asset or if they've uploaded the asset, as a reminder that that asset is about to expire and they may need to pull it down, or they need to negotiate rights and extend the rights.
For that, we think it's probably saved us close to $4 million. We sent over 11,000 email reminders last year. And that's just huge, right, to say, "Hey, you know, you've got to pull it down, otherwise we're going to get fined for misuse, for violating our rights." That's a lot of money.
And it seems like such a simple thing. Quite honestly, we've iterated on it over the years. We started with just 30 days, and we got feedback that that wasn't enough time. So now they get three emails. Nobody's complaining about that.
Kathleen Cameron: We have sort of a generalized rate card, and that's what we're using. We roughly know what things cost. We know that's highly variable. So when I say $4 million, that might be low, to be fair. I don't know. But that was our best guess based on the information we had.
If you have those costs, like what it costs for you to do a digital ad campaign versus a print campaign versus whatever, then yeah, absolutely, use that for your ROI. We just have so many variables, it's been hard for us to kind of lock down a great average. But we have a good average.
Kathleen Cameron: We've taken what you had out of the box and expanded that. Being able to add that level of complex rights was something that's added a lot of value, and we've been able to do that in Orange Logic.
We create what we call rights projects for every project, and then we have automations within that that step people through their processes. Again, kind of realizing who our key stakeholders are and having defined roles really helped. We know there are creatives. We know there are business affairs people managing rights. We know there are people that need to then go through and QC all of that.
What we did was create a CSV template that those rights negotiators can start to fill out as they're finalizing rights. Then that can get uploaded into that rights project. It parses that information out, and then that data is accessible to us. We keep that data locked down, but then we have sort of a summary of rights information that our users can get to, so they can know what they can and cannot do within limits.
The users like being able to see the status of where they're at in the process. That helps a lot, too.
Kathleen Cameron: This is the template we share out, and it looks really complicated. We have some controlled values so that we can have consistency with our controlled vocabularies. And this has been huge for us. This kind of got us to the next level in our DRM program.
We want a rights designation on each of our assets. All of our assets go into a project, and then this is applied to the project. We're probably going to have a visit with Orange Logic soon to talk about getting rights on the asset level. But right now we're fine at the project level. That's working okay.
Whoever is managing the rights, we know it's not always the creative person. Sometimes it is. So if we're doing an in-house production and we've hired a photographer, that photographer probably knows what the talent rights are. Not always. Sometimes they have a person on their team negotiating that. If we're working with a creative agency, there's usually a designated person managing rights at a creative agency. So then they would be filling this out.
The creatives who are building the assets don't always know what the rights are. They're too busy in the creative headspace. So we ask them to upload the assets. We ask whoever's managing the rights to upload the rights. We then have a little QC process to make sure that the correct rights got associated with the correct assets. And then we go through an approval process.
Kathleen Cameron: No, we don't. Mainly because we don't want to collect all the contracts. The rights we're getting, the contracts we're getting for creative, are coming from a lot of different places.
If the content is coming from a creative agency, those contracts live with the creative agency. And then we have a smattering of in-house producers. So no, we don't have it integrated with our contract system.
Kathleen Cameron: Change is hard for everybody all the time. We took the approach of focusing on our creative agencies first and only focusing on final creative, not work-in-progress creative. I want to keep those separate because they're a little bit of a separate workflow for us.
And we put together a lot of training documentation. We translated a lot of our training documentation, and that has helped a lot. So we dedicated a lot of training in that first year, and we find that, for the most part, who we've trained have adopted it well. There's always resistance. I mean, in any situation, we've had good adoption rates.
I think creatives always are going to see DAM as an extra step. We've added a layer of complexity. However, that layer of complexity comes with a lot of value. If we can say we're saving $4 million because we prevented misuse, or we're able to pull assets down that are in use that need to come down, otherwise we're going to get fined, that's good for the business.
And so that added value has taken a while for people to really accept. But now we've got enough use cases to say, "Yeah, look, you know, if you had another DAM, we're going to help you." So that's helping a lot.
Kathleen Cameron: Yes. We do have scenarios where assets are getting denied approval because creatives didn't look at usage rights.
I have another presentation I've done where it's Kristen Bell going grocery shopping. She's just clearing out all the potato chips in the grocery store aisle, coming into our cart. And we find creatives love to do that. Like, "I need 400 assets. I need 400 assets."
We also find that in order to get to that summary of rights that's available to everyone in our DAM, they have to click the thumbnail. People don't click thumbnails. So then we're like, well, if we put some information on the mouseover, will they read that? And then, you know, a little visually cluttered, but yes. People don't read the rights. And so they will put them into their shopping cart, and it'll get flagged. And they're like, "Why can't I download this?" And then we have to explain, like, you can click through and actually get more information.
So yeah, they get denied. We don't have a lot of denials because people are starting to get used to it. We had a lot of whinging when we first introduced the shopping cart. Like, "I don't want to fill out my fields to tell you I'm going to use this asset." And we're like, all right. But now they've gotten used to it as we've proven the value of them not misusing our assets.
It's really helped us explain to them this is what's right for the business. We are helping protect you, and we're helping to protect the business. Because it's not just monetary. Sometimes it's also a brand hit.
And it does create frustration and bottlenecks, especially for those creatives that are like, "I want to download more than 25 assets at a time." Or they don't realize they can put 25 assets into the cart. We limited it because we have had creatives like, "I need to download 400 assets." And it's like, you're just going to download them and put them on G Drive.
So manage that change. Yes, there was a lot of frustration. Yes, we've had to do a lot of therapizing on one-on-one calls with some people to just say, "We hear you, and this is why we're doing it."
Kathleen Cameron: This is how we think about access when we put together a plan for gating downloads. People go to the cart, and this is how we think about what assets can get auto-downloaded once we have that information, and what assets will then go into an approval queue.
The content owner then gets to make the choice: yes, this can get downloaded, or no, it gets rejected.
Kathleen Cameron: We don't own all the content that I collect. And so what I do ask for on the teams that are getting content from game developers or collaboration partners, they have to have some sort of agreement in place with terms of use. And it can be lightweight. It doesn't have to be dense. But "I grant you permission to..." There should be lots of examples, but I don't have one off the top of my head.
We don't have an API to input the rights information at this time. We launched this rights process almost two years ago. And again, change management is slow in an organization this size. We're definitely looking at ways to improve that process, and that's definitely on the table, but we're not engaged in that yet.
Kathleen Cameron: I think really understand what rights you have to your assets. We're using DRM functionality within Orange Logic. What kinds of rights? Where are the rights coming from? Are you managing the contracts? Is there a connection to a contract management system?
You don't have to make it complicated, but understand for your use case what rights information is the most important for you to track. Typically that's start and end date. When does it expire? How can it be used?
Even if you're just collecting that, you may not need a DRM system. You may be able to just manage that as metadata fields. I have done that previously as well.
Kathleen Cameron: I think it's important to gather as much information from as many people as possible ahead of time. Get it built as close as you possibly can. But know that you're never one and done in this space.
So how do you take your learnings and then evolve? And I think we're at that stage.
Kathleen Cameron: You and I have talked a lot about that level of personalization. I'm a social media marketer, then it should automatically know that. Show me assets that I'm going to relate to, and then have most of this prefilled out, and I can go and make adjustments.
Nobody loves the administrative stuff.
Kathleen Cameron: Having those rights helps us determine what can and cannot be used in different types of AI and machine learning models.
And I wonder if the increased attention on DRM is because of all the AI technologies coming online. Because if you don't understand what your rights are and you're oversharing, which happened in the early days when the web exploded, there was a lot of sharing. A lot of upset photographers and videographers because their stuff was just getting lifted and used. And it's because everyone thought, "Oh, this is publicly available. It's on the web." Like, no, it's not how it works.
We're seeing that, and we're feeling like we're well positioned to say, "Yes, you can use these assets," or "No, you can't," in AI creative tools because we've implemented DRM.