Digital Asset Management
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the effective management and distribution of digital assets such as images, documents, creative files, audio and video clips. It allows organizations to seamlessly deploy multi-channel marketing, control their brand, manage and process rich media, and deliver assets through a user-friendly web interface.
Fig: What goes into a DAM solution?
Challenges
Traditional print and online channels have already created a large challenge for global organizations to manage valuable content. New channels such as cell phones, PDAs, and Podcasts are sure to only add to the complexity– not to mention that these new media types are increasingly expensive to produce and manage. Digital asset management (DAM) solutions enable enterprises to control these costs, maximize the value of rich media assets, and manage the digital rights to this content.
Benefits
- Cost Reduction: Reduce or eliminate costs associated with CD or DVD replication, agency fees, shipping costs, and file transformation.
- Cost avoidance: Content is recreated because it is lost or otherwise mismanaged. Avoiding such costs can contribute to earning returns.
- Revenue generation: The accelerated delivery of marketing materials means that sales teams, retailers, and distributors can respond faster to revenue opportunities.
- Brand and messaging continuity: Built-in revision control, asset repurposing, and approval processes ensures organizations maintain consistent use and re-expression of digital assets, from brochures and corporate videos to web content.
Who can use a DAM?
- Education: Most departments within educational institutions have a wealth of digital archives that are often not used to their full capacity. DAM can open up access and creates new learning opportunities as well as possible revenue streams that may otherwise go untapped.
- Brand / Retail: Companies that have a strong retail brand presence have historically been among the first to implement Digital Asset Management solutions because of unique requirements for managing the workflow related to product imagery and related materials.
- Advertising / Interactive Agencies: Ad agencies, marketing firms, and interactive agencies managing the brand assets of their clients marketing mix require a DAM solution that facilitates a collaborative work environment. DAM is increasingly seen as a value-added service requirement.
- Museums and The Arts: Museums, galleries, art schools and cultural institutions have a wealth of digital media and information associated with their collections.
- Industrial Manufacturers: From product images to color samples to updated sales materials to training videos – the best industrial manufactures gain competitive advantage by embracing DAM technology to manage and the digital media associated with the products they produce.
- Government: All government agencies — from the central, state and local levels, to the political organizations related to them — have an ever-increasing archive of digital images, documents and video that facilitate their mission.
- Non-Profit / Charity: From archiving event images to managing fundraising materials to creating and distributing viral web videos — the digital media associated with non-profit and philanthropic organizations are just as critical to facilitating an organization’s mission and message as any business in the private sector
- Print, Pre-Press & Publishing: Companies in the business of creating publications deal with large volumes of imagery for multiple projects.
- Architecture, Construction, Engineering: For architecture, construction and engineering firms, maintaining an up-to-date library of drawings, maps, charts, planning documents and photographs of completed projects is critical to demonstrating credibility and attracting new clients.
Solution
Asset Repository
- Central repository of Documents, Images, Video, Audio and all types of files
- User, Group and Role based Security and Access control
- File Version management
- Meta-data, Indexing and tagging support
- Extract XMP, EXIF and IPTC tags for file metadata and attributes
- Search based on Index fields and Content
- Audit Log of all actions – file-wise and user-wise
- Support for all types of files including
- Images - jpg, gif, eps, psd, tiff, pdf, ai and more
- Video - mpeg, avi, vob, dat, wav, wmv, cda, mpg, 3gp, mov, flv, rm
- Thumbnail extraction of Images and Video
- Conversion of images and video to browser-viewable version
- Convert from any supported format to another
- Support for Bulk upload of Assets
Fig. Repository of Digital Assets - Images, Media, Scanned images and Documents
Asset Viewing
- Image preview as a slideshow
- Ability to re-purpose (resize, scale, crop, watermark and transform) the images
- Download original file or converted to another format and download
- Zip and download
Search
- Easy search using meta-data and tags
- Content search for documents and OCR’ed images
- Preview search outputs before downloading
Creative Workflow and Collaboration
- Tracking system for Asset creation through creative agencies
- Brief submission process
- Asset Approval process
- Status tracking of all creative jobs submitted to agencies
- Markup of comments using annotation tools
- Comparison of different versions of assets
- Version tracking as assets go through modifications
- Watermarking capability before download