Digital Asset Management (DAM) is essential for organizations to maximize the value of marketing content by improving productivity, ensuring easy access, and managing assets effectively throughout their lifecycle. With increasing digital marketing expenditures, organizations are required to streamline asset production, storage, and repurposing, while ensuring compliance and risk management. Choosing the right DAM solution involves evaluating features, total cost of ownership, and implementation partners to enhance brand value and marketing returns.

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Maximize returns from your
marketing assets
Srividya Kannan
Marketing assets are expensive to produce and store. It is therefore imperative to
ensure that the right content is not only available to users on the platforms that
they choose but also ensure that content consumers are met with consistent brand
messaging. Marketing users are continuously looking for ways to improve their
productivity via automated collaborative and workflow solutions, easy search and
retrieval of content, easy repurposing content for consumption across multiple
channels. With Digital Asset Management, enterprises can immensely enhance
workplace productivity and brand value since rich media content is now more
efficiently managed across its lifecycle from creation to multi-channel and multi-
platform consumption and preservation.

2. Need for a DAM
Marketing and brand assets carry an intrinsic value that is far more than the
cost of production of the asset. Most mid to large organizations spend an
average of 6-10% of their revenues in the form of marketing dollars. With the
increasing adoption of mobile and social media, CMO’s are increasing looking
for ways to best leverage digital marketing channels to accelerate cycle time
to reach to their end customers and engage with them more effectively. In a
2013 US Digital Marketing Spends Survey by Gartner, digital marketing was
found to consume about 25% of the CMO’s overall marketing spend. Mobile
advertising continued to make great strides with spends more than doubling in
2013 vs. 2012.
The cost of the rich media asset is one of the biggest marketing costs for an
enterprise. The lifecycle of new products is only reducing and marketing is
expected to launch new campaigns with supporting materials in a rapid way.
Organizations are continuously creating several types of content such as
corporate videos, podcasts, e-learning modules, infographics etc. Any asset
that has a purpose, value, history and future is considered a digital asset.
Effective management of these assets is a business imperative to maximize
return from these investments. On the one hand, the cost and time taken to
production should be brought down, and on the other hand, these assets
should be readily accessible and re-usable as much as possible for future
campaigns. A marketing campaign may be repeated years after its original
production with only updates to the format rather than re-creating the
campaign all over again.
Assets should be catalogued and securely stored. Business users, creative
agencies, and stakeholders in the CMO organization should be able to search
and retrieve these assets when required. They should be able to collaborate
and work on an asset during the creation process rather than working in silos.
It should also be possible to quickly transcode assets into various formats for
dissemination across multiple channels. Users should have visibility into
Copyright license lapses and legal compliance at the time of usage of an
asset. Assets should be only available to trusted users so that they do not get
corrupted due to misuse.
Choosing the right DAM
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution effectively manages the whole
lifecycle of a digital asset. DAM software is available in various flavors
including on-premise and hosted solutions but the CMO’s needs to consider
various parameters in order to choose the best DAM solution for their
enterprise.

3. Some of these are:
- Identify goals and create a blueprint - The DAM solution should be rich
with features that are in line with your goals for this investment. It is
important to evaluate which features take priority over some others
based on the goals that enterprises set for themselves. Importantly, it
will help put together a roadmap that supports in a phased wise
approach to implementation
- Total Cost of Ownership – including cost of software and related
maintenance for license, recurring support costs, hardware costs,
network bandwidth costs and change management costs
- Choosing the right implementation partner – This is a very important
element in getting you DAM solution right. Not all services
organizations are adept at understanding the unique requirements of
the CMO organization. Enterprises should therefore be careful to
choose the right partner who has consultants with the right expertise to
sell, implement and support the DAM solution.
Benefits of DAM
Some business benefits of a DAM solution include:
- Cost savings and improved productivity: DAM supports costs savings
by:
o Enabling faster cycle time in asset production
o Finding the right asset when the business user needs it based
on his / her usage rights
o Ensuring that licensed assets are not downloaded repeatedly by
business users but only downloaded based on needs
- Enables new revenue streams: Increasing the usage of the asset
across multiple distribution channels ensures that all revenue channels
allows new pricing and packaging options that was hitherto non-
existent
- Compliance and Risk: This is significantly brought down as a result of
ensuring that copyrights / license right lapses are considered. Also only
authorized users now have access to the content.
- Analytics: Usage patterns and trends can now captured for enterprise
rich media content, thereby supporting the CMO planning cycle.
Summary
DAM is a strategic investment area for most mid to large enterprises. A DAM
increases the value of your brand, maximizes returns from your marketing
investments and if implemented correctly can be a long term, valuable asset
for any enterprise