Digital Asset Management & Licensing Specialist
Summary
The Digital Asset Management & Licensing Specialist will be a critical contributor to the asset supply chain, ensuring the timely, compliant, and efficient acquisition, ingestion, and cataloging of Royalty-Free (RF) media and internally-created intellectual property. This role owns the RF procurement process, is the primary steward of metadata and asset integrity within the DAM system (HIP), and actively contributes to the governance and improvement of asset management workflows and tooling.
Key Responsibilities
RF Procurement & Licensing Compliance
- Own the end-to-end procurement and intake process for all Royalty-Free (RF) asset requests from business teams.
- Validate the scope of requests, ensure no duplicate purchases, and confirm usage of only approved photographers/sources.
- Source assets exclusively through approved RF vendors, managing the approval workflow, processing invoices, and accurately tracking spend against budget.
- Ensure strict license compliance for all purchased assets, including distribution rights, duration, sensitive-use restrictions, model/property releases, and editorial use limitations.
- Maintain and manage approved vendor lists, agreed rate cards, and preferred-use guidance, escalating issues and negotiating resolutions with vendors as needed.
- Maintain and enforce ordering Service Level Agreements (SLAs), standardize request templates, and ensure clear status visibility for all stakeholders.
Ingestion, Metadata, and Cataloging
- Ingest all purchased RF assets and all intellectual property created by the internal Photo Studio, work-for-hire photographers, and artists into the HIP DAM system.
- Perform thorough Quality Assurance (QA) on all ingested files, checking for integrity, correct formats, and necessary renditions to ensure timely availability.
- Apply and/or refine taxonomy, controlled vocabularies, and relationships (e.g., versions, variants, collections) to enhance discoverability.
- Utilize AI-assisted cataloging tools (e.g., image recognition, OCR, similarity matching, deduping) to accelerate and validate tagging, reviewing and correcting outputs as necessary to maintain quality.
- Collaborate with downstream systems teams (IPS/OneCMS/SharePoint) to ensure successful discovery and re-use of assets across platforms.
Metadata Integrity & Governance
- Enforce DAM governance standards, including file naming conventions, required metadata fields, and accurate rights metadata.
- Manage retention and disposition rules specifically for RF assets to ensure long-term compliance.
- Support the creation of new user accounts within HIP.
- Assist in testing and implementing HIP system enhancements.
- Develop and maintain dashboards/KPIs to deliver regular metrics on asset usage, spend, and process efficiency to management.
- Conduct training for internal teams on RF request best practices, licensing do’s/don’ts, and HIP search/citation standards.
- Produce and maintain quick-start guides, job aids, and knowledge base articles.
Processes & Tooling
- Document and continuously improve the asset lifecycle workflows (request → purchase → ingest → publish), actively working to remove bottlenecks and hand-off gaps.
- Recommend enhancements to the HIP/DAM platform and vendor portals based on user feedback and emerging operational needs.
- Pilot and evaluate new AI cataloging features, defining acceptance criteria and quality thresholds for production deployment.
Communication & Collaboration
- Maintain proactive and clear communication with all key stakeholders, including requesters, approvers, Legal/IP, Finance/Procurement, and external vendor partners.
- Provide clear status updates and surface risks early with proposed resolution options.
Archiving Administration Support -Provide non-archival support to archive teams, including metadata research, request triage, and submission backlog management (status hygiene, prioritization, coordination).
- Perform tasks to break down product files (PDFs, images, A/V) into reusable components.
- Batch-extract text, images, and captions; run OCR; and normalize formats/file naming to meet established standards.
- Perform deduping/variant detection and integrity checks, and document reproducible processing pipelines.
Qualifications & Skills
Minimum Qualifications
- 3+ years of experience in digital asset management, content licensing/procurement, publishing production, or a closely related field.
- BS/BA in a related discipline or equivalent professional experience.
Technical & Professional Skills
- Proven experience with DAM platforms (e.g., HIP or similar), including hands-on work with taxonomy, metadata standards, and rights/usage metadata.
- Working knowledge of RF licensing terms and associated risk areas (e.g., sensitive use, distribution limits, releases, attribution).
- Familiarity with AI-assisted cataloging capabilities (e.g., auto-tagging, OCR, visual similarity/dedup) and the ability to review, QA, and improve their outputs.
- Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite (Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint) and general knowledge of Adobe tools (InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat).
- Experience with procurement and invoicing systems and basic budget tracking.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; strong stakeholder management and vendor-negotiation skills.
- Demonstrated project management capability to prioritize multiple time-sensitive requests, drive adherence to SLA, and deliver high-quality results.
- Holistic, data-driven problem-solving approach with strong attention to detail and follow-through.