Enabling Engaging Web Experiences

Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms are playing a critical role in marketing departments. Since more companies have turned to the Web as the primary marketing channel to accelerate revenue and build brands, managing a growing mountain of digital assets has become a challenge.

Once considered a simple application that operated as a vault to store corporate logos and images, DAM has evolved into a higher value, revenue-generating marketing activity designed to reach new audiences, increase engagement and generate demand with rich media.

Marketers must break through the day-to-day noise of the Internet to reach multiple customer segments with attention-grabbing and fresh content. As a result, organizations have created digital assets at a breakneck pace with the hopes of delivering an engaging and relevant experience.

Marketers are well aware of the value of delivering relevant and engaging experiences; however, managing and placing these assets in front of prospective customers can be difficult. Finding the right asset can be a challenge; rich media assets such as images, videos and animations are now sprawling across multiple Web properties, backend systems and organizational silos.

In many marketing departments, DAM started as a centralized location to store high-value logos and corporate images. At this early stage, DAM was used like a library. It was highly revered, but often ignored and rarely visited.

In some extreme cases, only a few key stakeholders within an organization were trained to access the system, which severely limited its widespread adoption. As a result, the majority of marketing assets were created, managed and utilized outside of DAM. Digital assets were expensive, slow to produce and often duplicated unnecessarily.

As marketing campaigns generated more content, marketing teams saw the need to work more efficiently and collaboratively. Marketers began to take advantage of DAM platforms that operated well within an interconnected system of applications, rather than standalone.

The goal of the system was to unify all of an organization's rich media assets and workflows under one roof to accelerate marketing activities. Backend IT systems such as Web Content Management (WCM) platforms, e-Commerce systems, Marketing Resource Management (MRM), enterprise content management (ECM) and creative tools were often integrated with DAM.

When the use of DAM spread within marketing departments, marketers began to interact more efficiently with internal and external teams when producing a digital asset.

A typical marketer can collaborate with creative professionals, Web producers, content licensing teams, application developers and many others in a single marketing campaign or product launch. By unifying digital assets under a single roof, marketers can connect with colleagues and drive seamless and interactive content production and delivery workflows.