What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management (DAM) can refer to both a business process and a form of information management technology or a digital asset management system. DAM functionality helps many organizations create a centralized place where they can access their media assets.

The digital asset is a key component of the DAM process. It is any file type of value that is owned by an enterprise or individual, comes in a digital format, is searchable via metadata and includes access and usage rights. There are many types of digital assets, including but not limited to:

• Documents
  
• Images
• Audio files
• Video content
• Animations
• Media files
• Graphics
• Presentations
• Any digital media that includes the right to use

A DAM solution streamlines asset management and optimizes the production of rich media, particularly within sales and marketing organizations, by creating a centralized management system for digital assets. It enables brand consistency through automatic asset updates and reinforcement of brand guidelines, providing a single source of truth within businesses and a more consistent user experience to external audiences.

Modern digital content management teams and marketers also rely on DAM to repurpose creative assets, reducing unnecessary production costs and duplicate workstreams with its invaluable search features.

Given the high visibility of brand assets and marketing assets through digital channels, such as social media, brands must remain consistent in imagery and messaging to build brand authority and generate business growth. As a result, it’s no surprise that digital asset management platforms are becoming critical components of digital transformation efforts.

Several steps are involved in the use of a digital asset management software:

1. Creating the asset: Standardized templates and file formats prepare digital files for encoding even before they are created. This standardization improves the ease of document search and retrieval.
   
   
2. Encoding and indexing: To simplify the search for assets, metadata enables the identification of digital content through attributes such as asset type (for example, white paper), version (for example, new), media type (for example, video) and technology used (for example, Photoshop.). These identifiers create an index, grouping assets that have common tags to improve searchability.
   
   
3. Workflows: This indexing can then be used for rule-driven workflows, enabling task and process automation.
   
   
4. Version control: Version control becomes increasingly important to automate workflows, as it ensures that the latest, most up-to-date asset is being used within an existing workflow. As new workflows are established, it also sets expiration dates, ensuring that only the most current version is accessed and carried forward for review and use.
   
   
5. Governance through permissions: Governance through permissions ensures that only those who have been granted access are able to use the asset in the manner in which it was assigned to them. This capability protects organizational assets from theft, accidental corruption or erasure.
   
   
6. Auditing: Internal audits help organizations evaluate the effectiveness of DAM and identify areas of improvement. Likewise, regulatory bodies can audit a DAM solution to ensure an organization’s technology and processes comply with regulations. Both types of audits occur regularly in highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare.

Organizations can implement a DAM solution on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid topology. Cloud-based asset storage, management and delivery can be a cost-effective, secure, scalable and flexible option for organizations of all types and sizes.

Effective digital asset management provides several benefits, including:

The centralization of assets within a DAM system enables organizations to find and reuse assets, reducing production costs and duplicate workstreams. Reduced costs encourage the allocation of resources in other areas of the business. The resulting efficiency gains help to bring assets and solutions to the market faster.

DAM provides users with a clear, comprehensive view of digital assets, creating a positive impact on project management, content planning and execution. It can increase collaboration across various stakeholders or introduce more impactful workstreams through the elimination of redundant projects.

When businesses organize content appropriately based on the user’s stage of the buyer journey, they can serve on-brand content and marketing materials at the right time for their target audiences. DAM enables organizations to personalize the customer experience, establishing and nurturing stronger relationships. This process helps move potential customers and existing customers along the buying cycle faster and more effectively.

DAM helps to ensure that messaging, positioning, visual representation and other means of brand adherence are consistent. With DAM, functional areas and business units can re-use creative files and other assets to gain efficiencies and present a single truth to the market.

Licenses, legal documentation, archives and other assets can play key roles in meeting industry-driven or governmental regulatory compliance demands. The ability to organize and rapidly retrieve these materials can save organizations time and money and mitigate the disruption of core business processes.

The emergence of desktop publishing in the late 1980s enabled printers, publishers and advertisers to digitize text, graphics and photography. Too large for most internal hard disks, these files were transferred to external media with simple metadata labels. They were placed in simple, hierarchical files and folders.

In 1992, Canto Software released Cumulus—one of the first DAM systems. It was an on-premises, stand-alone solution, featuring thumbnail previewing, metadata indexing and search capabilities. While early DAM solutions made assets easy to find, verify and retrieve, files were still not easy to share.

By the early 2000s, server-based DAM enabled file-sharing over the internet. Shortly thereafter, cloud storage offered another way to store, manage and distribute digital assets.

DAM quickly evolved into integrated libraries able to deliver content to various devices, systems and repositories. Application programming interfaces (APIs) enabled assets to plug into different applications and meet specific requirements quickly and efficiently.

Now it is common for AI capabilities to be embedded into DAM—intelligently tagging and cross-referencing assets, including video recognition and voice recognition. Using machine learning, DAM systems can anticipate content needs and make recommendations to users. These marketing tasks are performed within minutes or less, enabling organizations to respond in near-real time and gain a competitive advantage.

When looking at DAM platforms, it is important that organizations evaluate whether the solutions they select provide capabilities that support both current and future needs. A successful DAM solution provides the following capabilities:

• Asset lifecycle management and role-based permissions: A DAM solution should enable an organization to manage its digital assets from idea to conception and throughout their lifecycles. It should also provide access rights management and permissions with the granularity that the organization needs to preserve the integrity of its assets.
  
  
• Integration: A DAM solution should integrate with the solutions that the organization currently has in place, such as asset creation and distribution, and any systems the organization plans to add in the future.
  
  
• Bidirectional flexibility: A flexible, agile DAM solution provides the flexibility to search for assets in any direction. Bidirectional flexibility enables organizations to search metadata, such as brand, to find an asset, or search specific assets to find metadata. This capability supports the search and repurposing of assets by other functional groups within an organization.
  
  
• Import and export capability: A DAM solution should not create an isolated island of data. The ideal solution should include the ability to share digital assets as well as search results and other data.
  
  
• Stable storage and transfer infrastructure: The DAM solution an organization chooses is just as important as how and where the assets are stored, and the ability to share files and transfer the assets wherever they are needed. Whether an organization chooses on-premises software-defined storage or cloud-based storage, it should consider the reliability, flexibility, scalability, performance and recoverability offered to protect its assets.
  
  
• File transfer efficiency: Speed and efficiency of file transfer are important because they directly affect the speed of business. The ability to share assets and use them when and where the organization needs them will help to define the effectiveness of the chosen solution.
  

The benefits of digital asset management are visible across industries anywhere digital assets are involved. Here are two examples of the use of DAM:

Patent offices typically manage large volumes of digital assets in various stages of completion. As updates are made through the asset’s lifecycle, transferability, version control and access rights features are critical for maintenance. Other features such as search functionality also enables processes within patent offices to scale effectively.

Technology companies use DAM in many different departments, often across multiple locations. DAM centralizes the assets for access and use. Functional areas within an organization use DAM for different purposes. Some examples include:

• HR uses DAM to manage employee records, benefit subscription and status, hiring requisitions, holiday and vacation requests and payroll receipts.
  
  
• Procurement uses DAM to store preferred vendor contact details, invoices and specifications.
  
  
• Development teams use DAM to store proprietary product design and development plans, planning materials and images.
  
  
• Sales teams and marketing teams use DAM for brand management, marketing campaigns and to maintain assets created and used across the organization.

Many team members across these organizations need to access, use, edit and track the assets, making access permissions critically important. Access control might be based on business unit, functional department and role. They can restrict access of some assets to internal employees.

Permissions can also extend access of other assets to external constituents such as partners or customers. For example, an organization might provide access to logos and engagement proposals that can help support partnership and ecommerce.