Adobe Advances in DAM Industry Report

The Forrester Wave: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q3 2016 highlights new analytics integration, roadmap for next-gen automated tagging and content marketing.

“Eighty percent of the content we create comes from your tools. And each year, we create almost twice as much content as the year before.”

Earlier this year, we met with a retail customer who made this claim. While it was a remarkable data point, it also points to why customers look to Adobe as the logical choice for a single place to manage all of their amazing content. For this retailer, having a single source of truth for product shots and marketing content will help drive an ever expanding and complex global business.

A couple of years ago, we significantly ramped up our investment and accelerated our strategy in Digital Asset Management (DAM). Our goal was to transform DAM from a siloed enterprise application to a mission-critical foundation that manages and transforms our customers’ creative investments into digital experiences at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

Adobe has just been recognized for this investment by being named as a “Strong Performer” in “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q3 2016,” report released Aug. 15.

Enterprise Customers Have Deeper, More Complex Requirements
Far from fancy photo libraries of the past, today’s DAM solutions need to add value to business strategies, have a way to measure asset performance, and be accessible to serve and receive assets across the enterprise. For example, a global luxury brand manages millions of assets among thousands of global users and agencies. AEM Assets is able to manage the scale and workflow, automate time-consuming tasks, as well as improve access and use assets at any point in the customer journey — from building brand awareness to enhancing post-purchase experience.

As a core enterprise business system, DAM must easily connect to other enterprise technologies and ecosystems to drive a positive customer experience. Adobe has worked with more than 50 software partners to develop pre-built connectors to Adobe Experience Manager to make it easier to connect to your best-of breed enterprise systems for commerce, publishing, translation, rights management, and broader content marketing needs.

Powered By Machine Learning And Valuable Analytics Data.
When you begin to manage assets in the millions, and even billions, finding the right asset could be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Imagine the experience of a global auto manufacturer, whose complex business has both B2B and B2C requirements that must be satisfied. As a result, they have a wide variety of digital assets: billboards, campaign content, manuals, product shots — all of which need to be shared and accessed by a complex web of partners, resellers, and employees. With this much content and complexity, businesses will need the help of machines and technology to drive better automation and business decisions. Here are two areas where we have driven innovation into the core of DAM:

Next-generation functionality with automated tagging. Later this year, all customers will be able to enjoy the magic of SmartTags — a trained algorithm to automatically and predictably tag assets with a variety of descriptors including photo type (macro, portrait, etc.), popular activities (running, skiing, hiking), certain emotions (smiling, crying), popular objects (car, road, people), animals, popular locations, primary colors, and more. The algorithm also may add new tags to previously tagged images to make them more discoverable, increasing their value across the organization.

Actionable asset insights. Customers now can track usage of rich media files to obtain data on how assets are utilized and how well they are performing. This easily accessible data allows the everyday marketer to gain immediate insights and use that information to optimize their investments in creative that drives marketing campaigns.

Adobe Continues To Innovate
We believe the benefits our customers see are the real reason for our recognition as a strong performer in the Forrester Wave. Adobe will continue to help customers reimagine how they want to manage and deliver digital assets at scale. We’ve created hundreds of new features in the past two years, and that’s just the start. We’ve added more global content and DAM experts, shared more best practices, and continue to fuel a strategic roadmap for ultimate customer satisfaction. AEM Assets will continue to address challenges of growth, governance, and the broader need for content marketing within the enterprise. Brands will have all content in one system to drive campaigns and sales, and support lines of business at all points in the customer journey.

Today, a customer’s investment in DAM is an investment in their top-line growth and in their consumers’ experience. By extending content across channels in highly scalable ways — dynamic personalization, device-agnostic asset formatting, direct integration with creative tools, and support for high-resolution images and rich media — the DAM becomes a foundation of the customer experience and can therefore have a direct effect on consumer engagement, response rates, conversion, brand consistency, and satisfaction.

For more information on how Adobe Experience Manager Assets can help your organization manage a growing amount of content that comes with personalized marketing, view the latest webinar and see more details on how to improve your content marketing.