As your company grows, management of digital assets can quickly become an overwhelming task. To ease this burden, consider adding a digital asset manager to your team. This chapter describes what a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution does, how they can benefit your business, and the role Cloudinary plays in helping manage digital assets.
The Role
Digital assets are binary-format files with usage rights. Assets include media files, such as audio recordings, videos, and images; and text files, such as blog posts, ebooks, and marketing copy. Digital asset managers are responsible for acquiring, cataloguing, managing, and protecting an organization’s digital assets. They often perform these tasks using a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. Digital asset managers often administer the DAM system, serving as asset librarians and curators.
Digital asset managers oversee the following:
- Efficient naming, storage, and maintenance of the usage rights of the related files.
- Management and monitoring of the access and use of digital assets, ensuring brand consistency, compliance, and copyrights.
- Promotion and optimization of the use of assets.
Digital asset managers are involved in governance, research, guidance, enforcement, and even tool development. They collect the company’s assets in one place, organizing and rendering media searchable and ready for use by various teams and asset creators.
The Skills
Digital asset managers must be skilled in a variety of technical, analytical, and personal arenas.
Technical
Besides being comfortable working with metadata, taxonomy, digital rights, search facets, and web-publishing processes, digital asset managers must also have the following skills:
- Familiarity with Content Management Systems (CMS), ticketing systems, project management tools, Product Information Management (PIM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) skills.
- Working knowledge of markup and programming languages, such as HTML, CSS, and resources on the Windows, Linux, and macOS-based operating systems.
- Good knowledge of marketing stacks, vendors, integrators, and resellers.
Analytical
Digital asset managers must be capable of:
- Prioritizing tasks and assets.
- Implementing efficient and effective systems.
- Applying meaningful metadata tags to assets according to a consistent methodology.
- Collecting and managing digital assets so that they are functional and readily accessible.
Personal
On the personal side, digital-asset managers must:
- Work well with customers and colleagues, some of whom are not tech-savvy, both as a teammate and as a leader.
- Clearly explain usage conditions and access procedures for the company’s digital assets.
- Patiently and empathetically enforce compliance with the related guidelines.
The Responsibilities
DAM solutions can help digital asset managers automate organizational workflows to improve productivity and efficiency company-wide. The table below highlights a digital asset manager’s key responsibilities.
A Centralized Repository of Assets
Maintain a library with accurately catalogued assets, accompanied by details of the usage rights, current usage, and context.
Consistent Branding
Ensure that relevant and up-to-date versions of digital marketing assets are easily searchable and that only authorized personnel can change access permissions.
High Productivity
Establish efficient mechanisms for easy search and application of digital assets. Publish up-to-date and clear usage and licensing data.
Uniform Content Usage
Achieve uniformity of content usage by applying timestamps, automating content expiration dates, restricting channel assets, and enforcing company-wide compliance with content creation and distribution policies.
Informative and Timely Reporting
Analyze and report regularly on metrics that pertain to demographics of access, usage, and lifecycle of digital assets, including statistics on audience engagement.
Compliance with Licenses and Copyrights
Ensure that correct licensing and copyright information accompanies the content. Automate the deletion of published content upon license expiration.
Accurate, Descriptive, and Consistent Nomenclature
Ensure that the file names for digital assets are descriptive, accurate, consistent, and reflective of how the assets relate to the other files in the system.
Tagging of Metadata
Tag digital assets with the relevant details— such as the creation date, file name, file type, and file category—in the form of metadata for enhanced organization and ease of search and use. Verify that the IPTC metadata is saved in the file.
Problems in Traditional DAM solutions
Digital asset managers must tackle a slew of challenges when working with traditional DAM solutions.
Operations
- A large volume of digital assets across numerous devices, channels, and locations
- Different storage-sharing processes in use by different teams
- The need to repurpose the existing assets to save time and resources
- The time gaps between asset management and delivery, which result in inconsistent customer experiences
Creative Channels
- Tagging of assets during upload for retrieval by other teams
- Uploading and creation of multiple versions for each and every asset
- Collection of feedback on work-in-progress assets
Marketing Channels
- Manipulation or customization of assets for different marketing campaigns
- Publication of assets in different channels
- Access control for sharing with stakeholders
- Dependency on creative and technical personnel
Development
- Bottlenecks in development that result from manual tasks
- Slow and bloated legacy systems that don’t scale well and are difficult to maintain
- Responsive adaptation of assets for delivery to various devices
- Integration with the existing systems
What’s Next?
The role of the digital asset manager is vital to an effective digital strategy. With a DAM system, digital asset managers can create a single source of truth for use across your company. They can enhance the value of your DAM system and are the best advocate for managing content in context.
Notwithstanding the significant benefits accorded by DAM solutions, the digital asset manager plays the most important role in managing your digital assets through processes that save time and money for the entire organization. Be sure to hire the right person and acquire the right tools for that job. In particular, experienced DAM managers are equipped with the expertise to do the following:
- Optimize the DAM implementation.
- Identify changes to the business and reflect them in the implementation.
- Ensure that the implementation remains current, relevant, and consistent with the business needs.
Not surprisingly, the DAM manager’s role is transitioning into a professional career and no longer simply assigned to a product manager or creative studio manager as an additional task.
DAM With Cloudinary in the Era of Dynamic Assets
Today, thanks to dynamic DAM solutions, digital asset managers are much more productive and efficient than before. They can automate workflows and numerous manual tasks, such as creating asset variants, tag with AI, and seamlessly collaborate with dedicated tools.
You can integrate dynamic DAM solutions with existing workflows and systems through robust APIs as well as into MarTech stack systems. The right DAM system can create peace of mind for all: product managers are free to work on assets in Product Information Management (PIM) systems; editors in CMS; and developers can hardcode assets into websites or apps.
The following characteristics of modern DAM solutions deliver compelling benefits:
- The systems are cloud-based, according one central storage hub for access by all stakeholders, whether on site or remotely.
- The systems are end to end, encompassing the entire asset lifecycle, including creation, storage, categorization, manipulation, optimization, approval, search, and delivery.
- Powered by AI, the systems automate workflows and deliver assets at scale, saving time, bandwidth, and effort.
- Media libraries are searchable with auto-tagging in multiple languages. Assets are dynamic and you can automatically adjust resolution, file format, and delivery device through an intuitive, simple interface.
Cloudinary is a stellar example of a dynamic DAM system. Do check it out.
