In modern business, all organizations utilize and handle digital assets in all activities and departments, for example, document files, image and multimedia files/videos, licenses, website elements, and all sorts of media-related files. A digital asset management (DAM) system is highly recommended for handling all these files with efficiency and accuracy; not doing so wastes many man-hours and loses potential earnings from lost revenue and opportunity cost.
Searching for digital asset files, keeping up with consistency in assets for brand compliance, avoiding copyright infringement and licensing mistakes, and many other aspects need to be done automatically, efficiently, and by role-authorized access only. Multiply these by thousands to millions of digital asset files and we can easily see the challenges and unnecessary headaches that can happen.
A digital asset management (DAM) system takes care of these, and may also include advanced features such as systems integration with CRMs and SRPs, advanced AI, analytics, and event triggers that can be programmed to perform certain actions. This article will explain how to choose a digital asset management system.
How to Choose a Digital Asset Management Software Table of Contents
Have you ever tried to find specific files for use in your website or marketing campaign, only to fail or spend too much time? The files that you want are typically stored in e-mails, hard drives, mobile devices, online drop boxes, cloud storage, and offline storage in different regions or countries. There are often duplicates of files, or worse, duplicate file names that make file searches time-consuming and inefficient.
Source: Demandmetric.com 2022
Have you ever searched for your own company logo on Google? Fifty percent of marketers do this because they can’t find it easily on their systems. Are you constantly looking for the original version of a logo, template, or website icon specific to your branding and can’t find it? This happens when there is no identifiable single source of truth, and 41% are satisfied if they have that for each asset. Sixty-seven percent say they spend less time searching for assets with DAMS, and 50% think that their companies waste money recreating assets because no one can find them.
If this happens in your company regularly, you definitely need a digital asset management software system. This article will explain how to choose a digital asset management system.
Examples of Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software
What are some examples of digital asset management software? The current leading DAMs in the market are as follows:
monday.com
monday.com is a cloud-based platform that has multiple functions aside from digital asset management. It is highly configurable, allowing you to organize, catalog, track, modify, and deploy all of your digital assets throughout your organization. It uses automated tools, scripting, and intuitive dashboards to help manage your assets. You can efficiently manage all of your media assets for campaigns, websites, and product launches with both local and remote team members via its mobile-friendly platform. Its DAM functionalities are tightly-integrated with its entire business management platform suite, ensuring a smooth user experience.
Wrike
Wrike is primarily a complete project management platform that utilizes several modules and includes digital asset management. You can customize your DAM workflows to handle and catalog all your digital assets such as documents, images, videos, and other files. It helps provide employees with quick and accurate feedback on all aspects of content creation, proofing, and final approval of your assets. This allows you to quickly turn ideas into marketing and social media campaigns, automatically updating employees with the project status and events. It is very user-friendly with visual dashboards, reports, and interactive GANTT charts for both scheduling and asset management.
Cloudinary
Cloudinary is a cloud-based media management and deployment platform for rich media. It is an enterprise-grade platform that uses automation, AI, and advanced image and video processing capabilities, helping reduce manual intervention and errors in handling digital media assets. The platform is capable of delivering rich media and visuals at scale as your company grows. CDN global partners in many countries help increase the speed of content delivery worldwide.
Uploadcare
Uploadcare is a cloud-based platform built for developers and provides end-to-end content handling of digital asset files.
Uploading, processing, and delivery of assets are parts of the software’s workflow capabilities, and these workflows can be customized with powerful building blocks to handle all aspects of digital asset management with less coding. The platform has a network of multiple CDNs with the efficient routing of assets to distribute your content quickly and efficiently. Its security features are top-notch, including automatic malware scans that help eliminate malware, viruses, and malicious files that may have infected your digital assets. Flexibility and scalability are made possible by its pay-as-you-go scheme.
Filecamp
Filecamp is a cloud-based SaaS platform that efficiently handles and manages digital assets such as documents, media files, photos, graphics files, and many others. Its simple yet powerful interface helps in organizing and logging all of your company’s digital assets. It helps your team collaboratively review and approve projects in real time. Your team can design, distribute, and deploy company-branded materials and media while distributing assets and content to design and marketing teams. In the end, it helps delivers the right content to your customers through your omnichannel.
monday.com is a simple, powerful, and flexible platform that can be used for many projects and business goals, including the management of digital assets.
How to Choose a Digital Asset Management System
Choosing a digital asset management system need not be a difficult task, but one has to be aware of the needs of the company and its various departments. The following are some of the most important criteria on how to choose a digital asset management software and will depend on your overall requirements.
1. Go for Cloud File Sharing and Storage
You may have seen the limitations of online file-sharing sites such as Google Drive or Dropbox, especially for large organizations. These sites utilize a folder-based structure for files and are not designed for searching for assets using intuitive keywords.
Offline storage has its merits like privacy and limited access, but it is often trumped by its many disadvantages like the potential loss of files, file non-accessibility, and difficulty in finding assets that are decades or even a few years old. Non-redundancy is often the cause of permanent data loss.
Online archival backups are essential to companies with large collections of multimedia files, especially movies with multilingual versions and streaming content. Utilizing Local storage and local web hosting of petabytes of digital files is often not tenable.
Multiple redundancies for backups on fault-tolerant servers are ideal for these types of digital assets. Close to zero downtime is ideal and is pretty standard nowadays. For these use cases, the cloud is the way to go. Outages are more common than you think—96% of global IT decision-makers have experienced at least one outage in the past three years, and half of all outages and brownouts are avoidable. However, outages are also expensive, costing 16x more.
Downtime Statistics Experienced by Global IT Decision Makers
Source: LogicMonitor 2019
Designed by2. Make Sure There’s Room to Scale
As your organization grows and expands, more media assets need to be generated, processed, deployed, and stored, and scaling up quickly is not as straightforward as one might think. Here, one must choose a platform that not only scales linearly but has the capacity to scale horizontally across digital asset types.
Companies that have large media collections in the movie, music, and recording industries scale up really quickly and definitely need good DAM platforms. Along with this, many DAM platforms offer connectivity to content delivery networks or CDNs, which are networks in other countries that efficiently deliver content in their respective regions, speeding up asset delivery.
If you are a large enterprise, consider DAMs with proven scalability—look at their clients and how large their clientele companies are. If, however, you are a small business, you may not need enterprise-class DAMs. Perhaps standalone or simple cloud-based DAMs will suit your purposes well.
3. It Integrates with Key Applications
DAM integration with enterprise software platforms and third-party apps is quite important to upgrade your capabilities and/or to keep on working using familiar platforms and apps. Enterprise software is a crucial component of many large-scale companies, and how well DAM software packages integrate into these systems may be a top factor in your choice of DAMS.
Typical enterprise software platforms include content management systems (CMS), document management systems (DMS), web content management (WCM) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, product information management (PIM) systems, project management systems (PMS), and enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs).
Most DAM platforms can be integrated easily into such systems via APIs and programming tools, but versatility should be weighed against ease of use. Do you have an IT team that can do this for you, or would you rather pay higher customer support fees or outsource any API programming work? Your choice may come down to cost or time savings.
Another common option is DAMs that are integrally part of package suites, or you may choose stand-alone DAMs and integrate them yourself or with the help of customer support. Either way, you need to factor in time and expertise with opportunity cost to find the right balance for you.
The range of integrations and partners will also determine whether you can integrate existing platforms that you already use to avoid new learning curves with new applications.
4. It’s Compatible with Different File Types and Usage
Important determinants of your choice of DAMs are what types of digital assets you have and how you use them. These are highly dependent on the industry, and will also determine your storage and access needs. What kind of organization do you have, what work do you do, and what digital assets do you use and how?
Document-intensive organizations like legal firms or patent departments or organizations require fast and accurate optical character recognition (OCR) for image-to-text transformation. Finding information like legal precedents or other important legal facts instantly can make or break a case, so the management of electronic documents is essential. DAMs can be used in conjunction with DMSs (document management systems) in these situations.
Companies in the creative and media industries sell products based on digital assets in several forms, including movies, long-form videos, streaming content, stock photos and short videos, web page design elements, vector graphics, including SVG logos, fonts, and typefaces, UI and UX designs, graphics, animations, spreadsheets, PDFs, presentations, letterheads, games and gaming elements, and many more asset types.
Mission-critical systems in organizations like hospitals, centers involved in disease control or epidemic response, police, military and security organizations, and others rely heavily on infrastructure imaging, disease scans and X-rays, maps, chain of custody documentation, top secret digital assets, and more asset types that require a high-security, stringent, and highly-programmable DAM platform.
However, if you are a small company or have only one small business like selling stock photos to clients, a simpler, entry-level local or SaaS DAM system with cloud access and storage may be enough for your needs.
Your choice would really depend on the nature of your digital assets, their usage, and overall digital asset management strategy.
5. It Has Powerful Analytics and Reporting
Analytics measures how successful your website assets are in keeping customers engaged on your web pages, which are clicked the most or least often, and how your assets are being used, modified, and by whom.
Metadata, or data about data, gives a useful set of descriptions and classifications contained in several fields such as author, date of capture or creation, file type, file size, most recent edit, license type, license rights, user access control type, the application used to create or modify the asset, approval state, image size, resolution, color depth, file extension and type, location of the shoot, camera settings, etc. It is not just that, though—metadata connects these pieces of information together and determines the relationships of your data assets with all your other data.
In DAMS, all metadata are tagged automatically upon file import of the assets. These tags are used to find specific assets quickly—for example, when you want to find a photo of a celebrity that is high-resolution, has red and black colors, and is captured by a famous photographer, you can find several hits in seconds using those specific tags.
Most standard metadata types are known to be and handled by almost all DAM solutions, but their main difference lies in how many fields you can add, how customizable their metadata editor is, and the capability to automatically update metadata based on automated triggers and events.
Automated triggers are very useful in ensuring a fulfilling customer experience and in the data-gathering of factors that keep them engaged. For example, when a user is promoted to the next tier subscription service, corresponding digital asset changes include different website elements like icons and logos, media files (movies, music, etc.) the user can access, and legal documentation (updated license agreement, contract, extended warranties, etc.). A good DAM platform should be able to do this in the background seamlessly, responding to the triggers of the user’s subscription change, and without any manual input from your side.
Data analytics software integration can measure the effect of triggers which can be simply clicks on images and other assets on your website that drive customer engagement and purchases—your DAM software should easily track the most frequent clicks (or non-clicks), allowing you to adjust your campaigns and modify your web page elements to get more clicks.
Adobe Experience Manager Analytics gives businesses insights into the value of their content and member progress in real time, among others.
6. It Is Easy to Use
An intuitive UI is what will drive your users to be more productive and efficient. Visual dashboards help users see how folders, albums, groups, and personal collections are organized and accessed. Drag-and-drop functionality is pretty much standard in all DAM platforms.
Keywording and captioning are perhaps the most tedious manual tasks. Some useful features are drop-down menus of field value choices in form fields to lessen typing errors and increase data entry speed.
Automatic time stamping of file access, modifications, and file versioning are standard features among DAM platforms, helping eliminate manual errors. Preset templates also help in organizing your assets into meaningful groups and collections.
Most DAMS allow you to test-drive their software via free trials, so you can have your team compare them before you choose.
7. Gives You Rights Management Options
You can set which files can be used by different teams, branches in various geographical locations, and different service tiers, minimizing mistaken use of assets; for example, your Chinese branch should be able to use both Chinese and English versions of your logo, and the United States branch only the US English version.
Granular roles and permissions are also important if you want only selective access to confidential designs and campaigns for pretesting and evaluation by only a select group of people. Virtually all DAMs can do this as a standard function.
If you license or sub-license digital assets and derivative works from other companies, content creators, or freelancers, copyright and usage rights compliance is essential to your workflow before you can authorize their use within your organization. Most digital assets have expiration dates or EOL deadlines. It would be very challenging to find out which assets are legal for you to use and for what time duration without a DAM system.
Each instance of copyright infringement or unauthorized use—for example, on each web page you use that asset—can be disputed and fined, presenting legal and financial problems for your company. Even videos can be flagged—uploaded YouTube videos are notoriously prone to copyright infringement claims because of its strong automated content ID algorithm that can flag even short clips.
On the other hand, if your company is the one licensing content and assets, automatic watermarking of your images and videos for samples you can give to clients is essential to prevent theft and illegal use. There are some DAMs that can do this on the fly to save on storage space.
It is, therefore, essential for your choice of DAM system to automatically manage usage rights and copyright aspects of all your digital assets, eliminating manual intervention and manual errors and avoiding potential fines and lawsuits.
YouTube Copyright Violation Disputes, 2021
Of the total 3.7 million YouTube disputed claims in 2021 (1st half),
Source: Statista 2022
Designed by8. It Boasts AI Features
Artificial Intelligence (AI) software capabilities have been one of the most important improvements in DAMs, making tasks that used to take a lot of time and personnel to do quite easy to complete in just a few minutes. Additionally, most of these capabilities are built into the DAMs and their cloud architecture and are continuously updated for accuracy and speed. More features are also being added continuously, all with the aim of making your tasks easier, more automated, and more efficient.
Tasks that AI performs for images and documents include image file conversions, automated image classification, image-to-text or OCR conversion, handwriting-to-text conversion, photo manipulations, logo and typeface generation and editing, image morphing, and others.
AI tasks for video files include media file parsing, audio-to-text conversion, movie color corrections, movie trailer and preview generation, movie 4K/8K rescaling/up-sizing/downsizing, multilingual subtitle generation, generation of different director’s cuts, video editing, CGI tasks, and many more.
And regarding metadata management and data cataloging, AI has been used for automatic keyword generation and tagging, text sentiment analysis, multilingual keywording, language translation, and other tasks.
Each company offers its own AI capabilities, sometimes available in various pricing tiers for advanced features. For the media file types you handle, see what AI features best match your needs and choose the best pricing model suitable for your company.
Other Factors to Consider in Choosing DAM Software
As with many companies in the IT field, mergers and acquisitions bring with them a lot of issues in terms of changes in digital assets. Handling new branding elements, asset allocations per region or country, new logos and website designs, new documents, and many more changes will be quite difficult without a DAM system. Furthermore, different DAMS may not integrate well, producing asset access and rights management problems.
Artificial intelligence will continue improving in capability and will introduce new types of metadata and XML fields, giving your data a richer and more precise set of parameters.
Voice and facial recognition capabilities have also introduced new data asset types. Chatbots and AI “talking heads” are now becoming more popular for producing presentations and product videos. They present new types of digital assets you can use, with many more to come.
Getting a good handle on how to choose a digital asset management software is not an easy task, and for further research, you can look at this list of top digital asset management systems to increase your range of choices. For our overall choice, monday.com fits the bill for small and large enterprises.
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