Use Your Creatives’ Time More Effectively With a Next-Generation DAM

For a full digital experience, design matters — probably more than ever before. Either your digital visitors feel that your asset was the best thing ever — better yet, they didn’t even realize they were so engaged — or, they click on to your competitor’s site.

The Nest thermostat is a great example of design and functional elegance. While you can set it and forget it, it is so enticing that you want to get involved with it more through the mobile app. German industrial designer, Dieter Rams — who is known for his 10 commandments of design — believes that “Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.” I think that great design is your enterprise’s secret weapon.

Do You Have the Brainpower to Create Great Digital Experiences?

You can’t fully devote the brainpower you need to create great digital experiences if you are still getting a handle on managing your digital assets. Yet, probably 70 percent of businesses still have no system in place for managing them, and they still pass pictures and thumb drives over cubicle walls to the next requestors, sometimes with catastrophic results.

The content explosion in the digital world creates stress — that can quickly dampen creativity — for the creative department. Creative workers feel they are under pressure to create assets and deliver campaigns more quickly, and many feel that they are creating over 10 times more assets today than before to support increasing numbers of channels.

Marketers and creatives are limited by their “content velocity.” The faster a creative can deliver personalized, relevant content to the marketer, the more responsive and effective their campaigns will be.

Digital-asset management (DAM) systems can help mitigate stress, end duplication of effort, eliminate difficulty in finding assets, reduce costs of creating assets, and even trim costs overall.

Digital Assets Are Being Repurposed How Many Times?

Do you know how often a digital asset is being repurposed throughout your organization? Keeping track of that straightforward metric provides a major clue about which assets are worth further investment. This is one of the many metrics a DAM system can provide.

Ever Used a Search Engine to Locate Your Own Digital Assets?

So many organizations find themselves sending inconsistent messages across their branded assets because they lack the ability to track and monitor them. And legal-rights management is an issue that has cost many companies dearly. You may have the right to use an image on a postcard mailing; however, unless you have someone tracking that limitation, a coworker could find the asset and use it to design a global campaign, potentially resulting in legal action and hefty fines.

We discovered in a poll that, on average, two workdays per week are wasted by creatives for administrative tasks related to DAM. Files are spread out on internal and external drives, cloud services, personal computers, and thumb drives in desk drawers. How many of you have used a search engine to find your own digital assets?

The benefits of digital-asset management include:

• A foundational platform for creative teams,
• A common system for all business units,
• Consistency in brand aesthetics (globally),
• Analytics for all digital assets,
• Efficiency in creative processes, and
• Legal protection regarding rights management.

Users of Adobe Experience Manager’s digital-asset manager tell us that they get a significant return on investment:

• 79 percent increased revenue by 10 percent or more
• 9 percent reduced asset-creation costs by 10 percent or more
• 86 percent reduced risk by 10 percent or more
• 97 percent increased productivity by 10 percent or more

How to Be Successful at Digital-Asset Management

• Select the right DAM solution.
• Select the right partner. The Adobe partner portal can connect you with reputable, vetted providers of a vast array of services.
• Get a consultant who knows the landscape and has the right experience.
• Keep customization to a minimum. You can customize later, but keep it simple while you are getting your digital-asset act together.
• Get buy-in from end users (security, legal, brand standards).
• Consider everything when you are designing workflows.
• Address the right tagging strategy for assets within your organization, the appropriate internal workflows, and adjusted roles and responsibilities.
• Consider — when designing workflows for projects with which you use outside agencies — how you will share assets and migrate data and what adoption criteria and success metrics you will need.

At Summit, Brad Rencher, EVP and GM of Adobe Digital Marketing, said, “We are all of us in the Experience Business … we are now at the cusp of a tectonic Enterprise shift.” Managing your digital assets is a critical step if your organization is going to create the amazing experiences necessary for capturing the attentions of your next best customers and for turning the ones you already have into the evangelists you need.

You can listen to the session S 813 recording and download the presentation for more information.