What is DAM
In my previous blog post, I recalled the everyday life of a marketing designer some 10+ years ago, coordinating hundreds of different types of images that were used for various marketing purposes.
If you missed that post, you can read it here.
In this post, we'll delve a little deeper into these digital assets, which are vital to a modern business. What are they, and how do they differ from each other, from a management perspective?
One more look back at the past years..:
During the strong era of print media (ref. 1990s), it was mainly only photographs that were referred to as digital assets.
Sure, maybe layout files, brand identifiers such as logos, and other elements that make a brand identifiable - could fall under the same umbrella; but mainly the indication of digital assets surrounded around images and the storage of them.
This (storing) was also the need that the handful of DAM suppliers of the time mainly were responding to (the so-called image bank era, for lack of a better term).
Of course, videos as such were also recognized as digital assets even then, but the realizations were mainly productions for film and TV. Videos taken with a home camcorder rarely found their way into large repositories. 😁
How has the situation changed and why?
The wording "asset management" could of course refer to management of basically any type of asset (physical or digital) and its management. But in the days before channel fragmentation and technology explosion driven by digitalization, the term digital asset simply referred to different types of media content and their associated assets (so-called "rich media").
Perhaps one of the most notable drivers of digitization has been the vast quantities and different ways of how media contents today are both being produced and consumed.
I suppose that this is one of the reasons why Digital Asset Management (DAM) probably has continued to hold its ground when referring to the management of media assets.
Today, the term “digital asset” is generally understood to cover a very wide range of different types of content, from the familiar images and videos → to different types of documents and other specific file formats (such as code, social media content, and 3D productions). Each have their own unique use cases, plus places and ways of managing them.
As a system, DAM focuses mainly on the management of media assets and the processes involved in their production and publication.
Although file format constraints are less present nowadays, a DAM is not the right place to manage, for example, a code asset. Code assets have their own tools to do just that.
Why? For the simple reason that DAMs are not designed to be a code management tool and therefore do not support the unique needs of producing and managing code files.
Instead, DAMs are EXCELLENT tools for the production, management, and distribution of image, video, advertising, and marketing materials!
Of course, it is also worth remembering that different DAMs may still focus on these different topics with different levels of expertise and emphasis.
I have created a small compilation of the most commonly managed digital assets in DAMs.
This table will give you a good overview of the different types of media content assets and their management characteristics.
How to get asset chaos under control by using DAM?
You might be thinking: "OK; so there's an untold number of digital assets, they might be technically very different from each other (even though they serve the same purpose), and there's a steady stream of new ones being produced - where as the old ones are going sour faster than milk in my fridge. HELP!" 😱
How on earth is it possible for an organization to get a grip on the confused chaos, and really take control of the digital assets so that they actually serve their purpose in a scalable way, and so that they give more than they consume?
Not to worry - there are best practices that can be followed to tame even the biggest of asset chaos!
To measure the benefit from the (often quite expensive) content assets they create, organizations need to ensure that the assets are utilizable.
Assets need to be able to be utilized by people as well as systems (e.g. websites, automated social media and marketing activities, or even digital advertisement surfaces). The list is long and looks different for every organization.
To make use of an asset, you need to be able to find it - immediately when you need it.
And to make an asset findable, good governance is a particularly important procedure for those organizations that want to be able to provide and publish content to their consumers, efficiently and scalably.
In other words, the usage of digital assets is a very essential (though sometimes rather invisible and underestimated) part of our modern environment.
In following posts, we will explore the dimension of findability in more detail.
AKA; Metadata. My favorite topic! 🙋
While waiting for that however, you can download a compilation list I made, of the different types of Digital Assets and their administrative characteristics. 👇