People will ask you “What do you do for a living?” If you work with Digital Asset Management on a daily basis as I do, there are a few ways you can answer this question.

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on October 6, 2009

People will ask you “What do you do for a living?” If you work with Digital Asset Management on a daily basis as I do, there are a few ways you can answer this question. You could:

• Explain what you do in some detail, sometimes boring and/or confusing the average person.
• Blab on and on, creating more hot air.
• Give your elevator pitch: a simple, concise introduction to what you do for a living.

Before I had a simple explanation meant for the average person, I also confused lots of people (which is unfortunately really easy to do nowadays). It took me a while to come up with this simple analogy. Here is how my DAM elevator pitch often goes whether I am speaking with an executive or someone I just met:

1. An inquiring individual asks the question, “What do you do?”
2. I reply, “I am a Digital Asset Manager. I work on Digital Asset Management.”
3. The inquiring individual often says “What is that?”
4. I say “Are you familiar with the iPod?”
5. They often say “Yes,” unless they admit living in a cave since 2001.
6. Whether that is the case or not, I quickly show them an iPod, scroll through its contents as I explain that “while this is meant for individual consumption of media (such as music, video, photos), I manage similar kinds of media (generally called assets). The big difference is we can share assets across an entire organization legally using a set of more sophisticated tools with a series of workflows, commonly referred to as DAM. This helps the organization save money by being able to search, find, use, reuse or repurpose what we already have in the DAM legally.” I show the how assets can be found using various information called metadata. With the case of music on the iPod by:

• Album
• Artist
• Genre
• Title

I answer any further questions they have, but that is my elevator pitch as to what I do for a living with DAM.

How do you explain what you do for a living with DAM as a user or administrator?