Digital Asset Management: What is it and Why is it needed

Editor's note: The following content is adapted from the author's book "Digital and Marketing Asset Management: The True Story of DAM Technology and Practice," published by Rosenfeld Media and copyrighted by Real Story Group.

Since the turn of the century, digital media of all kinds have become an increasingly important part of our everyday experience. Every day, we consume and interact with photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, interactive ads, streaming movies, and even experiential marketing, all gaining a digital edge with the rise of virtual and augmented reality.

The digital media boom is driven by a combination of trends and innovations: affordable and powerful digital cameras and camcorders (even as part of mobile devices); Increase network bandwidth; Reduce storage costs; Low-cost, high-performance processors; Large capacity solid state memory; Affordable cloud services; And the necessary digital media infrastructure.

Navigating all this digital media poses challenges for consumers and businesses alike.

Consumers want to organize the experience and consumption of digital media files. They want to be able to find them, sort them, and use them when and where they want. — They want to do all of this on multiple devices.

Meanwhile, businesses and content marketers have similar but broader wish lists. Of course, they want to be able to find their assets easily, but for the most part they want to use digital media. Products throughout the &; To reach out to potential customers. They can use digital assets as part of marketing campaigns to reach specific audiences in specific forms, such as digital or physical brochures, email campaigns, movie trailers, or website landing pages. Digital media can be the product itself. — Music collections, streaming TV series, videos, electronic magazines, e-books or catalogs & MDash; — Distributed in various formats or forms.

To produce these products, you create, organize, find, and use digital media: not just the individual images, graphics, photos, video clips, and audio files that make up the elements of the product, but also the layout, editing, and design files that provide structure. In most cases, you also need to add textual information, such as copies, descriptions, and product data. Finally, you must put everything together in the right format in a particular production process or workflow.

When you're done, you want to distribute and track all product components, as well as any changes or releases over time. In addition, if that's not enough, many digital files have restrictions and rights that must be monitored and respected.

This is the raison d 'etre of digital asset management.

Businesses and content marketers need to manage each part of a brand story, campaign, or product independently, or in addition to managing the whole.

This digital media management throughout its life cycle is the general domain of digital asset management.

What is Digital Asset Management?

As a discipline and technology, DAM is about the control, flexibility, portability, access, and reporting of digital assets among organizations, customers, partners, and suppliers. (Digital assets are documents that have intrinsic or acquired value during their lifetime.)

DAM focuses on delivering the right content to the right people on all devices, mostly in real time, with the ability to track and measure digital asset engagement across the enterprise and its potential global reach.

Technically, digital assets are more than just media files. To realize the value of a file (or collection of files), you need to know additional information about the asset. In short, you need metadata.

For most DAM purposes, assets are defined as media content and its metadata. This metadata can be as simple as a file's name, author, or creation date, or as complex as the rights and fees associated with extracting speech using images or converting from video to text. Content becomes a usable asset only when metadata is associated with it.

Metadata is critical to managing these assets and provides useful information about the content, such as: & LDquo; Elderly woman holding baby, photograph by Phil Smith, January 5, 2008. ”   This information makes the content accessible and searchable, provides context, defines usage permissions, displays the usage history of the asset, and can be used to determine the value of the asset over time.

What does the DAM system do?

Although DAM is first and foremost a discipline, it is also a technology. In its simplest form, a digital asset management system provides a secure repository that helps create, manage, organize, produce, distribute, and potentially monetize media files identified as digital assets.

Like other content management technologies, DAM systems provide a basic library service: a common (and often centralized) secure place to store, organize, and retrieve files. It also provides core process services, including specific facilities for managing, manipulating, transforming, securing, moving, and processing rich media files and their metadata. Most DAM systems can now be integrated with other tools and systems, which can be particularly useful for content marketers. No more wondering if you're accessing the right version or the latest version of the logo or asset.

How does DAM fit into the big picture?

It's not always obvious. Choosing the right tools for overall effective digital marketing is no different from making a complex cocktail: you have to find the right balanced combination of ingredients that works for you. What works for one organization may not work for yours, just as one person likes martinis and another likes negronis. Both of these drinks contain absinthe. — Just as both organizations might have DAM systems. — But it's the mixing with other ingredients that means the results could be completely different.

As a digital marketer, you need to think of yourself as the corporate tech bartender, working with your colleagues to come up with the right mix. While DAM is clearly on your list of ingredients, it is equally important to understand the role each technology plays and the potentially different priorities or goals that other users may have. Otherwise, your cocktail will be a mess in the glass and no one will come back to your bar.

How does DAM operate in a digital marketing framework?

Although & other; Digital Marketing Technology & RDQuo; (or & other; Martech”) The term is widely used in the industry, but marketers often disagree about what it means. In a broad sense, digital marketing technologies are a collection of digital systems (another cocktail, anyone?) that marketers use to collect, nurture, and nurture prospects and customers. .

Traditionally, these systems reflect how marketers want to represent a brand or product line. However, as marketing becomes (or aspires to become) more customer centric, marketers increasingly realize that new approaches must pay more attention to customer preferences. — Including their browsing and purchasing history. — And in the channel of their choice (mobile, Internet - store, catalog or other). Digital assets can help make this happen.

The most obvious example is AD tracking: when someone views a product on one site, only to see a promotion or banner AD for the same item on another site a few hours later. Not all potential customers like the repositioning, as sometimes sales associates seem to chase them down the street after they leave the store. But it's not just advertising content. DAM technology can help other systems personalize the content offered to return visitors based on their previous activities.

The best performing organizations have recognized that superior customer experience is intrinsically linked to the quality of their digital channels. Companies selling tangible products are increasingly effective at combining in-store and digital shopping experiences (omnichannel marketing). With the right assets and metadata, and the perfect blend of DAM and Martech, you can deliver targeted content to prospects and clients.

这就是DAM Core value: If you do it right, your assets can become targets. They have the right metadata to meet the right content and target customers in the most efficient way. This should make any content marketer's job easier.