Digital Asset Management, or DAM, refers to the management of all corporate marketing and communications content. It provides a single repository for all the visual creations and content a company owns: photos, videos, audio, print or various digital elements. It supports and structures the creative processes of teams and agencies, and encourages sharing across the company. As a result, Digital Asset Management is seen as a tool for enhancing the value of all marketing and communications content for companies.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is much more than just a photo library. Of course, a DAM (Digital Asset Management) can be summed up as a simple photo and media management solution if that's all your company needs, but some Digital Asset Management solutions go beyond that, offering a host of possibilities to take your media management and branding to the next level.
One of the main Use Cases of Digital Asset Management is to help manage and harmonize brand usage.
The aim is to simplify the management of brand identity by providing a brand portal, and to ensure that marketing and communications content is consistent.
At the heart of a company's Brand Management strategy, it connects your creative network with your best Brand content and best practices.
A brand-name portal to guarantee ease of use
Setting up a brand portal is a good practice for ensuring the proper use of your brand. It's the reference platform for finding all your brand content, and offers all the files you need to create content: logos, visuals, iconography, fonts, templates for office documents or inDesign documents...
The portal can also be used to disseminate Brand Guidelines, graphic charters and best practices for brand use. Through dynamic web pages, documents or video tutorials, the brand portal provides an educational response to brand usage.
The Brand Portal allows you to filter the distribution of content according to your targets. Each internal, external or agency team will benefit from identified access and will only be able to access the necessary content.
Digital Asset Management meets the following needs:
- Streamlining: A single solution for digital media across your organization.
- Interoperability: automated connections between the DAM and your company's entire ecosystem (e-commerce site, creative software, etc.).
- Return on investment : Collaborative modules for more efficient creation or validation projects.
As you can see, the DAM is designed to increase the value of your multimedia content tenfold.
But how does Digital Asset Management work?
Centralize and organize digital media in the DAM
Bring together all your organization's images, videos, audio, web and print content in a single space. You simply offer your employees and service providers up-to-date versions of all your digital files. The DAM application is available anytime, anywhere. This media and content management guarantees the quality and accessibility of all digital media, which everyone can find in a matter of seconds.
Digital Asset Management also offers efficient digital media indexing and search capabilities to find the right media, whether for regular or occasional contributors. Contributors integrate new content in minutes, and can add media data efficiently.
Distribute media securely in the DAM
Digital Asset Management offers a wide range of distribution functions that can be adapted to your specific needs. So you can keep control over the traceability of your content distribution. You can choose precisely who will have access to your content, and add conditions of use for each document: image rights, authors, models, music, etc. This way, you protect your company from misuse.
What's more, for impeccable distribution, a Digital Asset Management tool will enable you to store all signed contracts in the solution, and link them to your media for easy retrieval.
The history of all your actions is also linked to this content. This makes it possible to trace all uses, to better manage any disputes that may arise.
DAM integrates into your ecosystem
The DAM can be integrated with your information system tools to distribute your content to your websites, e-Commerce platforms, PIM, social networks and more. Your distribution links are updated in real time in the event of version changes, for compliant and up-to-date media on all your distribution channels. E-commerce sites and PIM solutions rely heavily on DAM management capabilities for media distribution, and thus offer the best user experience.
Digital Asset Management for e-commerce
You can drastically reduce the time-to-market of your products by automating the process of collecting images, videos and 3D files for all your products. Efficiently manage their lifecycle and simplify the multi-channel distribution of your product media.
The first challenge of Digital Asset Management for e-commerce is to drastically reduce the cost of managing product images.
A Digital Asset Management platform allows you to centralize all your products' digital media: pack shots, promotional videos, 3D files, ambient visuals, instructions for use. It should also enable them to be automatically distributed to eCommerce sites.
Digital Asset Management for e-commerce is designed to considerably reduce product media publication times. The automation of collection, validation and distribution processes speeds up the delivery of validated content to sales channels.
The DAM must also be able to automate the collection of content produced by content producers, and automatically retrieve visuals produced via APIs or repository hotfolders.
Store large files in the DAM
You benefit from the indexing power inherent in DAM tools, while ensuring optimized storage with a cloud hosting provider. What's more, some DAMs allow you to adapt storage by classifying files according to their frequency of consultation and access. Your DAM's business model is constantly being optimized.
Ensuring rich media governance in the DAM
By 2025, 70% of all media will be produced and distributed from cloud platforms. We're talking here about platforms such as Vimeo, Dailymotion, Youtube, Canva, Acast, Deezer, Spotify, Ausha, Google Drive, Office 365, Sketchfab, Matterport, Monday, Apple Music, Flickr, Souncloud, ...
The difficulty is that all the rich media produced on these platforms escapes corporate governance. The DAM of the future will have to offer the capacity to centralize, manage and distribute all this content.
Use DAM to collaborate effectively with your entire company
The DAM is above all a collaborative tool. You free your teams from email exchanges and share large files via secure collaborative spaces on the DAM (goodbye .zip and other wetransfer files that get lost!). Some DAMs offer chat rooms, annotations, tags, comments and even voting.
How do I know if my Digital Asset Management tool is effective?
Your Digital Asset Management tool needs to provide you with all the data and statistics you need to monitor your DAM's traffic, feed and usage levels. This data enables you to identify which media are performing well with your audiences.
You can identify unprofitable content that no longer needs to be produced, the most searched-for and downloaded media, the most active users, whether external users are taking full advantage of your access portal... These are all metrics that will enable you to develop your DAM for a better ROI.
Identify rarely-used content and optimize storage costs. Finally, you'll be able to effectively animate your network of communicators, agencies and other external contacts, with sharing options adapted to every use case.
You control the duration and modes of sharing, and keep perfect traceability of usage.
So what are you waiting for to switch to Digital Asset Management?
