Who Needs Digital Asset Management? The Industries and Teams That Use It

Key Takeaways:

• An organization needs digital asset management when many people reuse the same images, videos, and brand files across several channels and partners. That workflow matters more than the industry itself.
• Ecommerce, media, travel, agencies, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and nonprofits feel the need most, each for a different reason, such as large product catalogs, fast publishing, or regulated review.
• Inside a company, creative, marketing, developer, IT, legal, and sales teams, plus external partners, all work from the same DAM. A small team publishing to one channel can often wait.

Any organization that creates, reuses, and publishes more digital assets than its people can keep track of needs digital asset management (DAM). The need is strongest in ecommerce and retail, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, marketing agencies, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and nonprofits. Inside those organizations, it is marketing, creative, developer, IT, legal, and sales teams that depend on a DAM every day.

Most businesses now manage logos, headshots, product and editorial photos, raw footage, short video clips, social posts, and campaign elements, often in several versions for every channel. Keeping all of that organized and easy to find is hard to do by hand, which is why many organizations turn to a DAM to store, find, and deliver it.

A digital asset management system stores, organizes, and delivers those files from one place, with the permissions, version control, and search that shared folders lack.

This guide covers who uses digital asset management, which industries need it most, which teams use it inside a company, the signs your organization is ready for one, and when a DAM isn’t necessary yet.

In this article:

• Signs Your Organization Needs a DAM
• When You May Not Need a DAM Yet
• Which Industries Need Digital Asset Management?
• Who Uses a DAM Inside an Organization?
• Do You Need a Digital Asset Manager?

Signs Your Organization Needs a DAM

Industry matters less than how an organization works with its assets. A business in any sector is likely to need a DAM when several of these are true:

• Assets are reused by many people. More than one team relies on the same logos, product images, or videos.
• You’ve outgrown shared drives. Assets are spread across personal Google Drive or Dropbox folders, laptops, and email threads, with no shared metadata or permissions.
• Content is published to several channels. The same asset appears on a website, in an app, on social media, and with retail or marketplace partners.
• External partners need access. Agencies, franchisees, resellers, or press regularly request approved files.
• Time is lost searching. People ask colleagues where files are, or recreate assets because finding them takes too long.
• Old versions get used. Outdated logos or superseded campaign creative still appear in live materials.
• Rights and licenses matter. Some images or videos can only be used for a limited time, region, or purpose.
• Assets are prepared by hand for each channel. Someone resizes, crops, and exports the same file repeatedly.

When You May Not Need a DAM Yet

A DAM is not the right purchase for every organization at every stage. If a small team works with a modest number of assets, publishes to one channel, and has no external partners who need controlled access, shared cloud storage with clear naming conventions can be enough. The case for a DAM grows as more people, channels, and partners depend on the same assets. When that point arrives, our guide to DAM for small business covers how to choose a first platform.

Which Industries Need Digital Asset Management?

Almost every industry has a use case for a DAM, but the reasons differ. This table summarizes the industries that rely on one most and why.

Ecommerce and Retail

Online shoppers can’t feel fabric or turn a saucepan over in their hands. Retailers make up for that with high-resolution photos, 360-degree product viewers, and product video, which means managing several assets for every SKU and keeping them consistent on the website, in apps, and with marketplace and wholesale partners. Retailers with large, visual catalogs, such as fashion, furniture, and home goods brands, feel this most. Our guide to DAM for retail covers catalog scale and marketplace formats in more depth.

Many retailers also add user-generated content (UGC) to product pages and personalize imagery for different customer segments. Both add more assets and more variations to manage. A DAM keeps those variations tied to the original, and supports A/B tests that show which visuals improve conversions. For specific workflows, see these use cases for digital asset management in ecommerce.

Two examples:

• A racquet sports brand was storing its media across 17 separate storage solutions. After moving to a single DAM platform and automating its workflows, it launched a brand website in eight countries.
• Mecum Auctions, the world’s largest collector car auction house, manages more than two million unique images. Automating image uploads saved it more than 2,000 working hours, marketing now prepares ad images in about 1/100th of the time it used to take, and its pages load twice as fast.

Media and Entertainment

News sites, publishers, studios, and streaming and sports brands all publish constantly, and their visuals change as fast as the stories do. They need to crop, resize, and transcode media for every device without slowing down publication. A DAM with AI auto-tagging, structured metadata, and fast search helps editorial teams find the right photo or clip while a story is still breaking. Organizations whose libraries are mostly long-form video often pair this with media asset management, and our guide to video asset management covers how to organize video libraries.

Ad revenue raises the stakes. Sites with millions of monthly views need fresh, fast-loading media on every page to keep readers engaged.

Bleacher Report, the digital sports media brand, used to transcode and optimize video highlights by hand for each device and connection speed. After automating that work, it began delivering highlights within minutes, saw a 25% increase in monthly video views, and a 350% increase in video views within its gamecasts.

AMC Theatres optimizes more than 7 million movie-related images for its mobile-first website and app. Automated image transformations saved its team 90% of the time previously spent on images, and visually rich emails drove 178 million customer engagements in three months.

Ticketing, Live Events, and Experiences

Ticketing platforms and event marketplaces sell through imagery. Every event, venue, and city needs listing images, short videos, and landing page assets, often supplied by organizers and published on tight deadlines. When those files sit in personal drives, assets get lost and launches slow down.

Fever, the live entertainment discovery platform, outgrew Google Drive as it expanded to more than 80 cities. After moving to a DAM with AI auto-tagging, it onboarded every department in two months. More than 300 users now share over 80,000 assets, and the team uploads around 10,000 new ones each month.

Travel and Hospitality

Travel, tourism, and hospitality brands sell an experience before the customer arrives, which makes imagery and video central to how they earn bookings. Visuals of rooms, amenities, destinations, and restaurants shape decisions at every point of the planning process, and they have to look right on every booking site and device a traveler uses.

Hotel groups with many properties face an extra problem: the local team and the corporate team often hold different versions of the same photos. A DAM gives every location one current set. Travelers also trust reviews and photos from past guests, and a DAM can apply consistent sizing, cropping, compression, and formats to that content as well.

Xanterra Travel Collection, which runs lodges, resorts, and tours in national parks including Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Zion, operates 14 property websites and keeps adding content through acquisitions. After ingesting more than 7,000 assets into a DAM connected to its WordPress sites, its web team edits images directly in the CMS instead of downloading and resizing them by hand, saving 30% of the time it spent managing visuals.

Marketing and Advertising Agencies

Agencies manage assets for many clients at once, each with its own brand rules, approval process, and deadlines. A DAM keeps each client’s assets separate and permissioned, gives clients a place to review and approve work, and makes it easy to hand over final files without a trail of email attachments.

Education

Universities, schools, and training providers manage large libraries of photography, lecture recordings, course materials, and event video, often produced by many departments. A DAM helps admissions, communications, and learning teams find and reuse that content, on or off campus, while controlling who can access material that shouldn’t be public.

Manufacturing and Consumer Goods

Manufacturers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands produce product imagery, technical diagrams, CAD files, datasheets, and packaging artwork that have to stay accurate across distributors, dealers, and retail partners. A DAM keeps the current version of each product asset available to every partner, searchable by SKU or product ID. That matters when specifications change and outdated materials can cause real problems.

Trek replaced its previous DAM and migrated more than 500,000 assets, covering 20 years of product history, in a matter of weeks. Its archive has to stay usable because older images support customers with lifetime warranties on discontinued bike models, and its retail partners rely on the same assets.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

Hospitals, health systems, and pharmaceutical companies produce patient education materials, service-line campaigns, physician profiles, and product content. Much of it goes through medical, legal, and regulatory review before it can be published, and some of it can only be used in certain markets.

A DAM supports that process with approval workflows, role-based access, expiry dates, and an audit trail of who approved what. It’s typically used for marketing and education content, not patient records, so compliance still depends on the organization’s own review process and policies. Our guide to DAM for pharmaceuticals covers regulated review in more detail.

Financial Services and Insurance

Banks, credit unions, insurers, and wealth managers have to keep brand and regulatory language consistent across branches, advisors, and digital channels. Campaign creative often needs compliance sign-off, and disclosures or rates go out of date. A DAM records approvals, sets expiry dates on time-sensitive materials, and makes sure advisors and branches only download the current version.

Real Estate and Construction

Real estate firms and builders rely on listing photos, virtual tours, floor plans, and 3D models to attract buyers. Those files are large and come in specialized formats, and agents, partners, and marketing teams all need them quickly. A DAM stores them in one library, generates web versions automatically, and lets agents pull approved materials without waiting on the marketing team. For 3D files specifically, see our guide to 3D asset management.

Building products companies have the same problem with a wider audience. James Hardie, the fiber cement manufacturer, serves hardware stores, builders, property developers, architects, and homeowners, and its photo shoots used to land in scattered folders with no shared naming. After centralizing its images in a DAM with an agreed tagging framework, its Australian business halved the time from photo shoot to publication. Sales teams now share collections of approved project images in customer meetings, with usage permissions attached.

Franchises and Multi-Location Brands

Franchisors need every location to use current, on-brand promotions, signage, and local marketing templates. Without a central source, franchisees often create their own materials, which drift off brand. A DAM gives each location access to approved assets that are relevant to its region, with permissions set centrally. Many pair it with a brand management platform for locked templates and guidelines.

Nonprofits

Nonprofits engage donors, volunteers, and the communities they serve, and they need digital experiences as engaging as those of for-profit companies with far fewer resources. Staff and volunteers often work off-site, and campaign photos and videos end up scattered across personal drives.

Emotion plays a larger role in nonprofit content than in most industries, because connecting people to a cause is central to the mission. A DAM removes much of the manual asset handling, so small teams can spend more time on storytelling. Organizing assets by campaign, region, and year also helps them reuse strong visuals long after the original campaign ends.

PetRescue, Australia’s most visited animal welfare site, hosts a library of 25 million images and videos, with 80,000 new pet listings a year uploaded by shelters and rescue groups. Its developers used to write background jobs to resize images, and new uploads could wait in a processing queue for up to half an hour at busy times. After moving the library to Cloudinary, the team can apply changes across all 25 million images in one step, and its web developers spend more of their time on the charity’s mission.

Government and Public Sector

Government agencies publish reports, public service announcements, photography, and educational content, and they need strict control over what’s internal and what’s public. A DAM provides permissions for internal material and a searchable, public-facing library for content the public is meant to find.

Who Uses a DAM Inside an Organization?

Within an organization, a DAM is rarely used by one department. It’s valuable because it connects the teams that create assets with the teams that approve, publish, and share them. When every asset passes through one system, teams stop losing time on handoffs, version confusion, and requests for files that already exist.

Creative and Marketing Teams

Most assets start with photographers, designers, videographers, and copywriters. A DAM doesn’t replace design tools, but it gives creative teams one place to store campaign components and work in progress, and it can produce channel-specific versions automatically instead of by hand. Our guide to creative workflow management covers how work moves from brief to approved asset.

Marketers need the same library for a different reason: they assemble collateral from approved assets and share files with agencies, internal stakeholders, and media contacts. With review, comment, and approval controls in the DAM, they can collaborate on work in progress with internal and external stakeholders while deciding who sees what. A brand portal lets people outside the company search and download approved assets without asking for them.

Developers and IT

Developers who build, transform, and deliver visuals online need access to assets at every stage, without spending their time on manual resizing and uploads. A developer-friendly DAM typically offers:

• A REST or GraphQL API for uploading assets and querying their status and metadata
• Documented SDKs for common languages and frameworks
• Prebuilt integrations with PIM, CMS, ecommerce, and CRM systems
• Embeddable image and video viewers and widgets
• Asset URLs that can be edited to transform and deliver media on request

IT teams own the platform side: single sign-on, permissions, security reviews, and integrations with the rest of the stack. They’re often the ones pushing to move teams off unmanaged cloud drives, where there’s no metadata, no access control, and no record of which version is current.

Legal and Compliance

Before marketing, creative, or development teams publish new assets, legal teams often need to confirm that images and videos follow company and brand guidelines and that the organization has the right to use them. That requires digital rights management fields, flags that route assets to the right reviewer, and a place to attach model releases, licenses, and usage terms. A DAM keeps those records with the asset itself, which supports digital asset management governance and reduces the risk of publishing an expired or unlicensed file.

Sales, PR, and External Partners

Sales representatives put together presentations and proposals at every stage of the pipeline and need final, approved assets fast. Metadata search gets them to the right file quickly, and they can share it with customers and prospects directly from the DAM. PR teams use the same library for media kits and press requests.

External agencies, freelancers, resellers, and distributors are users too. Instead of sending files back and forth by email, they upload finished work into the DAM and download what they need from approved, permissioned collections.

How Teams Share One DAM: Atom Tickets

The movie ticketing platform Atom Tickets shows how these roles fit together in practice. Its content team receives posters, stills, and trailers from studios and uploads them into the DAM, while a nightly job ingests partner assets through the API. Marketing publishes sponsored placements from the CMS through an integration, and the editorial team manages images for blogs and fan event pages in the same library. At any time, more than 6,000 images, posters, and videos are attached to active movie titles, and every team works from the same current version.

Do You Need a Digital Asset Manager?

“Digital asset manager” can mean the software or the person who runs it. Organizations usually hire a dedicated digital asset manager once their library becomes business critical: tens of thousands of assets, several brands or regions, and many contributors inside and outside the company.

That person owns the taxonomy and metadata standards, permissions, governance rules, user onboarding, and reporting on how assets are used. In smaller organizations, the same responsibilities usually sit with a marketing operations, creative operations, or brand manager as part of a wider role.

Matching a DAM to How Your Organization Works

The organizations that need a DAM most share a pattern: many people reusing the same assets across many channels, often with partners or regulators involved. Ecommerce teams need it for product catalogs, media and events companies for publishing speed, and healthcare and financial services for review and audit trails. Inside each of them, creative, marketing, developer, IT, legal, and sales teams all rely on the same library.

If several of the signs above apply to your organization, start by mapping which teams create, approve, and publish assets today and where the handoffs break down. That map becomes the basis for your requirements, and a DAM RFP can turn it into a fair vendor comparison.

Cloudinary Assets combines a DAM with image and video transformation and delivery, so the teams that manage assets and the teams that publish them work from one platform. Sign up for free to see how it fits your workflows.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Types of Businesses Need Digital Asset Management?

Businesses that create and reuse large volumes of images, video, and brand content across several channels benefit most, including ecommerce and retail, media, ticketing and events, travel and hospitality, agencies, education, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and nonprofits. Larger organizations often also hire a digital asset manager to run the system once their library becomes business critical.

Who Uses a DAM System in a Company?

Creative and marketing teams are usually the heaviest users, followed by developers who deliver media to websites and apps. IT, legal, sales, PR, and ecommerce teams use it too, along with external agencies and partners who upload or download approved files.

Do Small Businesses Need a DAM?

Not always. A small business with few assets and one channel can often manage with shared storage. A DAM becomes worthwhile when assets are reused by several people, published widely, or shared with partners.

Is DAM Only for Large Enterprises?

No. Enterprises have the largest libraries and often need enterprise DAM software, but the problems a DAM solves, including lost files, outdated versions, and manual resizing, appear in organizations of any size once assets are shared widely.