January 5, 2017 by MediaBeacon
We think the person who coined the saying “Don’t reinvent the wheel” was a creative. Maybe she didn’t know about Creative Suite or digital storage, but she knew the frustration of having to re-create an asset from scratch, unnecessarily.
That problem still plagues creative departments and their brands today, and it costs big: time, money, brand consistency and the opportunity for even better creative. But digital asset management (DAM) offers a profound solution.
These scenarios might be familiar to you:
One designer created the most recent file, and now another designer can’t find it.
Your agency designed a key visual element but forgot to forward you the definitive files – and now they’re too busy to hunt them up.
Your foreign subsidiary doesn’t have the file for a definitive mark, so it quickly remakes it – and breaks a bunch of brand standards, requiring an extra round of design and printing.
Enterprise DAM software solves all these problems.
It saves time in searching for digital assets.
It gives all the right people access to the right files without requiring hand-holding or frantic cries for help.
It encourages all segments of a company to use the definitive, approved assets - not to "go rogue"and make their own.
You and everyone else in your department spend way too much time searching for digital assets like photos, videos, infographics and logos that you know are on the server somewhere, if only you knew where. Oh, and what the filename is.
And since each of these problems costs your company money, DAM saves money, too. Which can be put toward making better new creative instead of reinventing old creative.
Let's pull the lens back a bit. Experts everywhere suggest that enterprise integration is crucial today. In "Seven Trends That Will Affect the Future of Marketing,"Professor Dominic Turpin writes:
"The marketing organization will increasingly move from digital silos to integrated teams. A few years ago you would have the digital team on one side and the marketing team on the other. It can no longer be that way. Digital has to be part of everything now so the two have to be fully integrated."
Where does DAM fit into this scenario? Everywhere, because it gives all parts of the company immediate access to the visual brand assets they share and must keep consistent.
"The marketing organization will increasingly move from digital silos to integrated teams."
Imagine this scenario: Because of time constraints and disorganization stemming from the lack of a DAM workflow, a brand manager hastily commissions a photo shoot to create visual assets that happen to exist already, unbeknownst to the brand manager and the department handling the creative. Such a shoot can cost five – even six – figures per day.
A fully integrated rich media indexing system could have made the pre-existing footage available to the creatives within minutes. And the money saved would easily have paid for the DAM system itself. In fact, with DAM, creatives can get in the habit of shooting extra frames and footage, knowing it will be stored where another creative can access it for another project down the road. Stock photo services are expensive, right?
Creatives don’t always make final software decisions for their companies. But creatives are in a unique, authoritative position to recommend DAM to the executives who are ultimately responsible for revenue, cost savings and brand vitality. A DAM system can grow all of these by making sure that visual assets of every type are never reinvented when they could be repurposed. This…
Chances are you’ve had the experience we describe above. It’s also possible that it’s happening right now. Many successful brands already know the time and money that a DAM system can save, money that you can reinvest to strengthen the brand. We at MediaBeacon would be happy to explain DAM more fully to you, so that you can recommend it confidently to your executive team…
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