When was the last time you thought about storytelling? Perhaps while binge-watching your favorite streaming series or when you were inspired by a shopfront’s window dressing? While browsing your and other websites?
With viewers glued to screens most of the time, creating compelling, visually rich stories is becoming more and more important. Regardless of the products or services on offer, every brand must tell riveting stories with imagery and video because static or bland experiences lead to disenchantment, reduces conversion, and, ultimately, devaluing a brand. Even well aware of all that, many companies spend little or no time on visual storytelling. Why?
It’s easy to blame that scenario on the explosion of content required to feed today’s digital-first world, countless channels and properties, and the many “one-off” versions of every image and video. True, companies are under constant pressure to deliver new content fast with little time to consider the overall audience journey. Time and resources being scarce, the priority is often to “get it on the shelves and tune it later if time allows.”
Chances are that your favorite brands have become a favorite because of great storytelling, replete with coordinated and well-planned emails, websites, and social messages. Also, no matter the size, all companies are creating numerous asset variants.
How do leading brands find the time to do all that and still build captivating visual stories? With large teams or armies of Photoshop artists? Through outsourcing? No, they do that by automating the mundane and tedious asset-variation process on a Digital Asset Management platform, called DAM for short. Creative teams are then freed up to focus on what demands innovative talent: helping customers unearth new products and services, attracting visitors with dazzling content, and boosting the audience journey and buy flow.
By avoiding the asset-variation trap with a modern DAM, you’ll likely become a more inspiring and, most important, more efficient storyteller. Read on to find out how DAM can help you act as the ultimate brand ambassador.
Creative or not, DAM makes it easier to locate content and kick off fresh ideas. Rather than developing ideas from scratch, your team can revise material fast by accessing a collection of content that worked well before. With robust metadata, previews, and compilation of successful assets, inspiration is only a few clicks away.
Your collection of the most hits can continue to grow in value.
Even though search is a key need for DAMs, more nuanced, different capabilities are required for effective storytelling. Besides meeting all basic search needs, modern DAMs also enable color search so that you can easily find and choose assets that match a certain color theme or campaign.
Swatch-based color-search combined with other metadata makes it a snap to find the right asset.
Finding the image of the right person or model can be difficult in most DAMs. If the object you’re looking for is not tagged, a lot of manual searching ensues—maybe even necessitating a reshoot or stock purchase. As a solution, cutting-edge DAMs feature facial recognition, making it effortless to locate the ideal image to help you build your story.
AI-powered facial recognition automates the process of selecting the right image.
Just as leveraging past content as jump-off points and quickly locating fresh assets is important for story crafting, so can compressing workflows speed up your operation. With Digital-first Asset Management, anyone can generate net assets on demand, skipping the request procedure and wait time.
With a single final asset, DAM users can create an unlimited number of variants by changing the colors or size, by cropping, or by overlaying logos.
Now you might have most of what you need to tell an eye-catching story—except for a few new assets. Finding the right ones can involve many steps: leave the DAM, log in to your stock account, search, find, purchase, download, and then upload into the DAM. With a modern DAM, you can accomplish all that without leaving it.
Advanced search abilities and a tie-in to your favorite stock companies make it simple to find the media you need quickly and efficiently without leaving the DAM.
Because building stories is a collaborative process, you must involve all the key players, which is a cinch through DAM. The right DAM accords immediate access to chosen files for internal teams and can seamlessly extend that privilege to agencies, writers, and others. That way, the entire team is on the same page as the players do their part in constructing a consistent visual story for a key campaign or ensuring compliance with brand guidelines.
Because all employees are brand ambassadors, they must have the right tools to help develop, maintain, and promote the brand. Not only does a modern DAM give everyone key asset-management abilities, it also removes the burden of creating asset variants and brings to bear powerful features to help spin off unique, visually engaging stories.
It’s time to tell better tales online.
