The case for Digital Asset Management

According to Martech.org, this checklist</a> can tell you if your organization needs Digital Asset Management.

Marketers often struggle to find and deploy the right imagery and videos for marketing campaigns and personalization programs, turning to outside agencies to recreate visuals at great expense. While some of the most sophisticated enterprises have figured out how to effectively manage assets, some of you are just starting out on this journey. So, could you benefit from the functionality Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems were built to provide?

There are three major rationales for investing in a DAM tool. At a high level, enterprises face pressure to do the following:

• Reduce costs and risks;
• Generate new revenue opportunities; and
• Improve market or brand perception and competitiveness.

So, how do you know if you need Digital Asset Management technology in your enterprise? How many of these challenges resonate with you?

• You can’t find an image, video, or a piece of media that someone else needs right now.
• Your asset production or distribution process — or some large part of it — isn’t streamlined.
• Too many silos of disconnected, localized “libraries” don’t work together.
• Systems for managing the particularities of video — especially high-definition (HD) video — are lacking.
• Multiple informal systems duplicate or complicate efforts to manage at an enterprise level.
• You can’t readily share media across projects, groups, divisions, partners, or channels.
• Your marketing messages aren’t presented consistently across groups, organizations, verticals, and target markets.
• Your logo is misused, or your brand is inconsistently displayed.
• You want your social, web, mobile, and email marketing channels to work off the same set of base assets for a combined campaign, but they cannot today.
• You have a rich set of images but want to just find those with a particular shade of, say, orange.
• The collaboration, review, and approval cycle is slow, inefficient, and manual; the material isn’t in a form that everyone can review, especially partners or legal reviewers outside the company.
• External or internal specialists frequently re-create content, artwork, layouts, slides, presentations, and assets — starting from scratch even when something already exists.
• Your team can’t respond rapidly to partners, distributors, customers, or clients who need your assets to help you drive revenue.
• Tracking revisions of works in progress or finished works is difficult — are you working with the latest approved version?
• You need multiple different renditions of an asset but don’t have time to make them manually.
• You can’t propagate changes to a source asset to all the derivative variants.
• You can’t track asset use — where it’s used, who is using it, and how frequently it’s used.
• Confusion reigns around the (manual) tracking of licensed photos, images, or other assets.
• Your firm was docked or fined for violating the usage rights of a licensed asset because no one knew the rights, which weren’t attached to the image, and couldn’t be readily looked up.
• Product imagery is showing up differently in your e-commerce (or related) platform compared to the rest of your digital properties.

The author says if you checked more than eight of those twenty bullets, you probably need a DAM platform or to revisit your current DAM implementation!