How to Expertly Manage Your Digital Assets
Have you ever lost precious time trying to find product-related files and pictures? Have you ever attempted to get remotely located groups to collaborate and share information in real time without spending a fortune in communications costs? If you answered “yes” to either question, digital asset management (DAM) may be a solution for you.
For catalogers with a lot of branded intellectual property, DAM can be extremely useful. Also known as MAM (media asset management), RAM (rich asset management) and BRM (brand resource management), DAM has become an integral component of overall enterprise content management, which entails expertly managing Web content, documents and digital rights.
In essence, DAM is a value chain of product suites with logger software at one end, DAM software in the middle and digital delivery software and services at the other end.
Logger software helps in the actual ingest and archiving of digital assets (e.g., text, graphics, images, video) and assigning metadata, the data that describes the digitized assets.
The DAM software provides the management tools, including search and retrieval, browsing, collaboration, annotation, authorization, display, and repurposing of the assets.
The delivery part of the value chain, as the name suggests, is used to deliver the digitized assets.
As digital media applications have spread, the demand for DAM solutions also is increasing. What was once a niche product aimed at specialty vertical markets such as broadcasting, entertainment and advertising, rapidly is moving into the mainstream as corporate executives realize the need to manage their growing portfolios of digital assets. Increasingly, companies are using DAM solutions to help streamline their corporate and marketing communications.
No doubt, a significant amount of your marketing collateral (e.g., product pictures, specifications, copy) already is in digital form. If you have a lot of your brand equity and corporate communications stored as digital files, you need the ability to index, search, retrieve, ingest, browse, repurpose, annotate, collaborate and transport that data. And DAM solutions can help.
The Value Proposition
DAM solutions add value to your digital assets by creating a process for you to index, search and retrieve those assets using the metadata fields (attached to the assets) during the ingest process. This is a great time-saver when it comes to production, and in turn, it reduces your overhead costs significantly.
The process also enables repurposing of digital assets, a great value to merchants and their advertising firms that have huge repositories of brand equity stored as digital assets that must be cataloged. For example, instead of reinventing a product picture and its associated content for a catalog every time a new issue is mailed, your creative team simply can search and retrieve a master copy from a central repository; make or annotate changes made by others with their comments; and save it as a different copy or send it electronically to the people who need it.
Increasingly, enterprises have moved toward centralization of their assets, as they’ve found it easier to manage and track digital assets from a single location. This has created a great demand for efficient processes. Indeed, the cost of lost or misplaced work has become a major concern for companies. The cost savings that can be achieved by DAM through digitally archiving content with the ability to search, retrieve, reuse and repurpose the content is significant. Traditionally, most assets are stored in physical libraries, a process that boosts costs for physical storage and maintenance. This makes real-time access and collaboration for workgroups needing that asset almost impossible, thus lengthening the time it takes to get your offer to market.
This is why delivery of digital assets is fast becoming an integral part of the asset-management solution. With increased regional centralization of large functional workgroups in media production, the need for a high degree of collaboration between them to get the finished product has become paramount. By employing digital delivery services, your catalog’s graphic artists, for example, easily can access the same assets from different locations. In so doing, they cut the time it takes to get your catalog in the mail and your Web site updated. Your creative team’s ability to collaborate in real-time is a significant benefit to you over terrestrial forms of delivery where a request would be placed and then the physical asset would need to be shipped.
The Bottom Line
The DAM value proposition has become increasingly important now, because it leads to the main metric that most executives are interested in — return on investment (ROI).
Looking at ROI from a micro level, we use the rule of thumb that DAM can save one hour per day per frequent user:
Number of users x 260 (number of days worked each year) x total average cost per hour (e.g., salary, benefits, overhead)
For example, suppose you have a graphic designer working at $50/hour. Saving one hour a day translates into: 260 x $50 = $13,000 a year that drops to your bottom line.
Until recently, DAM-related ROI was a leap of faith for many, because the market was still in its infancy, and there wasn’t enough data to make a strong case. However, things have changed a lot in the past two years, mostly due to the economy. One global food-processing company that deployed DAM solutions found it could reduce the average cost of employee hours spent on marketing by a factor of five; fulfillment costs came down by a factor of 25; and time to market was reduced to half.
End-user Pain Points
End users for DAM solutions have gone through a lot of pain (along with the software vendors), because this market is relatively new and the vendors themselves are still learning. Many of the issues clients deal with emerge from prevalent internal practices or, in many cases, a lack of any coherent asset-management practice. Large organizations are just coming to realize the tremendous disconnect that exists within their various internal divisions causing duplication of work, a lack of homogeneity in message and an increase in time to market, all costing companies tremendous amounts of money.
Some corporations have experimented with in-house solutions or have had different divisions using various DAM solutions independently. When they decide to go for a company-wide deployment, they face huge hurdles in terms of creating a common taxonomy for the archiving system. Often the task of merging multiple and different databases used prior to implementing a single DAM solution creates massive problems both in terms of internal business practices and integrating with a single platform. With technology budgets cut, IT departments of many corporations have had their tasks cut out for them to manage digital assets on shoestring budgets.
One of the more successful strategies being employed by current end-users is to have a small pilot deployment in a single division. Once success in managing assets is realized in that division, further buy-in is sought from other divisions until the entire organization has been migrated to a single DAM solution. This makes it easy for the IT departments to get budgets realized, because the process moves in phases. DAM vendors that offer highly scalable and modular architectures are ideal for such step-by-step deployments.
Conclusion
The DAM market has come a long way from being treated as a nice-to-have solution to a must-have solution today. The testimony can be seen in the way the DAM market has weathered the economic storm and shown growth. Competitive forces in every market have increased, and the mantra for corporate survivability is efficiency and speed to market, while also reducing costs. In such a scenario, DAM is a very important tool that can help catalog companies achieve this goal.
Mukul Krishna is an industry analyst with the Information Technology group at Frost & Sullivan, an international consulting and management-training firm. His expertise includes digital media. Visit: www.frost.com.
