Digital Asset Management -indispensable for business transformation

As businesses increasingly push digital marketing to the forefront for success, so is content creation happening at a dizzying pace. With 2020 being a remarkable year fraught with disruption, this has propelled exponentially. The rapid proliferation of digital data often leads to assets being poorly managed causing inconsistencies, bottlenecks and unnecessary duplication of effort, all of which adds pressure to the marketers already strapped for time.

Business case for Digital Asset Management systems (DAMs)

Digital assets are not merely digital files. They are pieces of content that are valuable to your organization. Losing or misplacing them costs money, time, and energy. With multiple teams involved in producing content, you probably have content scattered across many disconnected solutions or lost in an email folder or even just saved directly to their computers, essentially marooned where no other teams can find it. How many times have your teams had to re-create content because they could not find what they were looking for, or did not even know that what they needed already existed?

“Re-creating content that already exists somewhere else is an enormous drain on creative energy.”

A recent study by Gleansters & GISTICS, revealed some startling facts about current state of asset management:

• 84% of businesses report that finding assets is the biggest challenge they have when working with digital assets.
• An average of $8,200 per person per year is spent on file management activities which include searching, verification, organization, back-up, and security.
• Creative professionals spend an average of 1 out of every 10 hours of their time on file management, mainly searching.
• The average creative person looks for a media file 83 times a week and fails to find it 35% of the time.

This trend of asset mismanagement is widespread irrespective of the magnitude (small, medium, or big) of an organization. The fact is, most are clueless about the impacts or simply overlook it. These side effects of mismanagement mean that DAMs become a huge priority for digital marketers, especially in asset-heavy or highly regulated industries like retail, media, and healthcare.

The DAM opportunity now

The opportunity ahead is clear - invest in this transformation and be part of the positive power of change. The benefits of DAMs are within reach. The question is why do we change?

• Change advances business maturity
• Change strengthens teams to better their performance

“Invest in people, processes and technology and work hard to make the complex simple.”

Businesses need to recognize the opportunity for DAMs to be seen as a critical component of the marketing technology ecosystem. DAMs are strengthened when working as part of an enterprise digital transformation strategy to deliver sustainable outcomes. This requires transitioning business models putting people and process at the center of digital asset management.

Technology is decidedly human. Defining a strong digital asset strategy involves collaborating with those who best know the systems, learn, and unlock value leveraging the power of DAMs. The primary tangent involving DAMs is streamlining and bringing a coordinated process for content production, workflow and distribution among internal stakeholders and end customers. Unless this cultural change is brought in, business will not be fully benefitting the power of DAMs.

What does the future look like?

It is difficult to predict the future accurately and what disruption might lie ahead, but businesses certainly can shape it. In order to remain competitive and responsive to future disruption, your digital strategy needs to deliver content when and where it’s needed, and this is possible only if businesses think and act differently and be part of the change that DAMs bring to the table.

The advancements in DAMs will also play critical role in shaping your strategy. We’ve already seen cutting edge AI advancements enabling speed and automation in key DAM functionalities such as data tagging, asset recognition, smart data organization, natural language processing for interpreting audio feeds, deep learning neural networks to break speech into words and sounds etc.

On the other hand, we have seen how the covid-19 pandemic has put tremendous pressure on marketing teams to scale. A latest Gartner report indicated that 44% of CMOs gained mid-year budget allocations for marketing technology spend further emphasizing the fact that modernizing digital marketing initiatives is a priority. DAMs for sure should top the list of marketing technologies to be onboarded.