Michael Waldron, Author at tenovos.com

Quick-Start Guide to DAM Integrations

By Michael WaldronBest-practices-guide, Blog, Integrations, multi-personas

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Every article or blog that talks about best practices in digital asset management (DAM) is going to highlight the importance of having a fully integrated enterprise technology ecosystem, within which your DAM will play an important role.

Great. So what does a fully integrated technology ecosystem actually mean? What technologies can you, and should you, integrate with your DAM, and what do those connections actually do? In this blog, we’re going to help answer those questions by listing the most common digital asset management integrations, with a short description of what those technologies will do for you.

If you want to know more about digital asset management integrations, read on!

Why Digital Asset Management Integrations Are Important

Some people might find this to be an obvious answer, but it’s worth mentioning anyway. Integrating technologies to your DAM serves a few purposes.

First, it makes everyone’s lives easier, and that’s important to increasing user adoption of your DAM. The most common reason DAM implementations fail is because users choose not to use the system. This happens for many reasons, one of which being that the DAM just makes their lives harder, not easier.

Integrating the right technologies solves this problem – it can reduce work, time spent on mundane tasks, and errors, letting users find more value out of the DAM and encouraging them to use the tool as it is intended.

Integrations are also important to creating a single source of truth in terms of your data, and your assets. If you can connect your technologies and allow them to share data, you help protect the quality and integrity of that data. The same is true of your assets – sharing them directly to other systems where they’re needed, rather than requiring a user to download and manually move those assets, reduces errors, protects your brand, and saves time.

The last reason we’ll mention here (though there are others) is to increase transparency across the enterprise, reduce data-lag through the organization and make sure all teams have the insights and content they need to execute at the highest levels.

Commonly Connected Enterprise Technologies

Let’s take a look at some of the enterprise technologies that are most commonly connected to digital asset management platforms.

Master Data Management Systems (MDM)

This technology helps companies coordinate their data across the enterprise. Companies have existing data stored in the MDM that needs to be attached to digital assets, so it’s common to have these systems integrated to the DAM. This connection allows the DAM to pull data from the MDM and attach it to the assets.

This is an important integration as it achieves two key things for the company. First, it removes the need for users to manually input data over and over into the DAM when it already exists somewhere else. This reduces the risk of human error corrupting the data, and keeps users productive on valuable tasks, not tedious data-entry.

Second, this integration protects your data. By leveraging the MDM as your source of truth, it allows you to manage that data centrally and trust that it will update the DAM, and other connected technologies, automatically.

Product Information Management (PIM)

Similar to the MDM, the PIM system manages all the data you need to put a product to market – things like SKU numbers, product specifications, tags, etc. Connecting your PIM to your DAM is one of the more common integrations you see, because it supercharges your ability to put products to market effectively.

This connection will allow you to match assets to a SKU in the PIM, and all that product’s vital information will be attached to that asset directly. Some DAMs, like Tenovos, will also share the asset back to the PIM so you can see the content within that system, too.

It also makes the assets in the DAM searchable by the data that is managed within the PIM, like SKU numbers or product specs. More than a quality of life upgrade, this connection will automate metadata for your content that is essential in use cases like ecommerce.

Project Management, Campaign Management & Workflow

These platforms, and others like them, are used by companies to manage different projects, tasks, marketing campaigns, content creation processes, and the list goes on. So, what happens when you connect these systems to a DAM?

First, the integration will create a direct link between the management or workflow software and the DAM library, providing searchable access to all the content in the DAM. This is a crucial connection for creative teams, for example, as they can attach brand assets directly from the DAM to the task in their workflow or project management system, work on those content updates, and feed the updated asset back into the DAM to be used in an upcoming campaign.

The integration will also feed data from the project into the DAM as metadata, which could include things like campaign names, product descriptions, task descriptions, comments – all important contextual metadata that ensures the proper use of the completed asset.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Licensing of content is a huge business, just ask our friends at Charles M. Schultz Creative Associates, owners of the Peanuts brand (Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang). So, how do you make sure that you’re either controlling access to your content based on license agreements, or that you’re only using the content you have purchased licenses for?

Well, if you do a lot of licensing you may manage those agreements within a digital rights management, or a licensing, system. This is a technology that helps you keep track of who you have purchased from/sold rights to, what the details of those agreements are, when they expire, and so on. Integrating that system with your DAM lets you automatically leverage those agreements to control access to content within your digital asset management platform.

Based on your license agreements, you can automate access of licensees (external parties) to the content they’ve purchased rights to, and pull that access when the agreement expires. Alternatively, you can automatically attach agreement details, such as approved use cases and regions, to the assets you’ve purchased rights to so that your DAM will only give you access to content you’re allowed to use based on those license agreements.

This is an important integration to protect your assets from unauthorized users, and to protect your own company from risk of misusing licensed content.

Creative Suites

Creative teams use specific tools to create and edit assets. Rather than asking these teams to manually download assets, work on them, and re-upload them to the DAM, these connections allow creatives to access their design tools directly from within the digital asset management platform.

These connections allow a reviewer to place comments on the asset and trigger a workflow that notifies the creative, who never has to leave the DAM in order to make the required changes. Not only is this a huge time saver for these teams, but it also helps improve version control of assets, and makes sure only approved assets are used in the creative process.

Business Intelligence (BI)

One of the main benefits of an integrated enterprise tech ecosystem is to provide transparency through data across the organization. Business intelligence tools let you build customized dashboards and perform analysis on data from across the enterprise using multiple data sources.

To put it simply, connecting a BI tool with your DAM lets you pull in asset-level data into those dashboards to include in your analysis. More advanced DAMs will also leverage data back from the BI tool to improve content analysis within the platform, as well.

Building an Integrated Tech Ecosystem

As a member of the MACH Alliance, Tenovos is committed to maintaining an open API architecture that facilitates the quick connection of our enterprise DAM to other technologies in the tech ecosystem.

This allows companies to leverage best-in-breed technologies to power their enterprise, while benefiting from the transparency and synergies these systems can provide.

In order to achieve this integrated vision for your organization, it’s important to speak with your DAM vendors early in your relationship to understand their ability to connect to different technologies. Involve your IT teams, and always ask for examples of how other companies have used similar integrations to power their DAM programs.

If you’re evaluating vendors currently, read our guide on how to choose the right DAM vendor for your organization, which includes details on integration capabilities.

Discover the Fast Track to DAM Integrations

Tenovos Connect offers near-endless DAM integration possibilities with low/no code, enabling brands to connect the technologies of their choice in just a few clicks.

Learn More

November 8, 2024

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Transform Your DAM From an Archive Into a Publishing Powerhouse

By Michael WaldronBlog, creative, Productivity-Reuse

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Let’s face it—traditional digital asset management (or DAM) software isn’t built with the needs of today’s modern marketing teams in mind. Most DAMs function primarily as an archive, providing a central place for you to store and share content. But once that content makes its way out into the world? Poof! It disappears off your DAM’s radar. There’s no easy way for you to see what’s been published, what channels your assets are on, or where there are content gaps. Like peering past the event horizon of a black hole, it’s just… gone.

This is all bad news for your creative team—and especially your designers—who are left scratching their heads over which assets are getting used most frequently and which have hardly been touched. Because you don’t know what’s working well, you can’t optimize to produce more of what’s resonating with your audience. All that unused and unsuccessful content is money down the drain. Research shows that marketers waste about a quarter of their budgets on ineffective channels and strategies.

There’s a better way. That’s why we created a modern DAM platform with the ability to not only manage your content, but also act as your publishing hub.

Intrigued? Let’s explore what the modern DAM looks like and why it’s so revolutionary.

Traditional vs. Modern DAMs

Traditional DAMs

Content archive

Download content from the DAM then upload to publishing channels

Doesn’t track where the content is published

Modern DAMs

Content library, workflow, and publishing tool

Publish directly to social and other channels from the DAM

Able to see all publishing destinations across channels

A traditional DAM acts as a storage facility. It’s one easy-to-access location for all your team’s content, like licensed images, logos, and infographics. Compared to a shared folder or drive, it’s a big upgrade. It makes content accessible to everyone on your team, empowers the design team to maintain control over your creative, and ensures that folks aren’t going rogue with your branding.

But there are issues with traditional DAMs too. It’s almost impossible to publish directly to your social, ecommerce, or web channels. You have to download assets from the DAM to pull into channels and campaigns, meaning that the design team is often left in the dark over how assets are actually being used. Unless you manually search for your content on each channel, your designers won’t know what pieces were published and where there are opportunities for content reuse. This means design feedback is slow and it’s challenging to optimize your assets for next time.

The modern DAM completely upends this paradigm by becoming a publishing tool. Instead of simply storing your assets, the DAM becomes a one-stop shop for curating, publishing, measuring, and optimizing your creative.

Rather than downloading your content to use in campaigns, the modern DAM integrates with your marketing suite so you can publish it directly to all your channels (social, ecommerce, etc.), easily analyze content gaps, and recall any outdated assets from publication so you can maintain a consistent brand.

This means when you pull an image from the DAM into a campaign, the DAM is quietly building a “context path” in the background so you can trace it and understand its full usage lifecycle. A modern DAM shows you an exact picture of what content is getting used, who’s using it, and what content is ripe for reuse.

Tenovos: The Next Phase of DAM Evolution

You’ve invested so many hours, resources, and effort into your content—we think it’s about time you were able to truly understand its impact on your business growth. With its open, cloud-based platform, and holistic view of content, we built Tenovos to be the modern DAM that marketing teams need.

Tenovos’ Story Activation feature lets you quickly publish content and track it across digital channels, allowing you to obtain real-time insights into your content investment. No need to toggle between all your different marketing tools. It’s time to stop publishing into the void, and start producing more of what your audience wants.

January 25, 2023

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Glossier & Sephora: Three DAM Thoughts On the New Partnership

By Michael WaldronBlog, creative, Customers

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Longtime direct-to-consumer beauty brand Glossier has launched its first ever partnership with a retailer – Sephora.

The move was announced in July, with the partnership set to get underway in early 2023. And while consumers are no doubt excited to be able to find their favorite Glossier products in any of the 2,700 Sephora stores worldwide – and its online store – Glossier still has some work to do in order to maximize this partnership.

Before we get into it, it’s important to understand the impact digital assets have in the world of online retail stores. Consumers make decisions based on the products they see – in images, in ads, through influencer content – meaning how your products are represented in this online environments is one of the most important factors in how well they sell.

The same is true for physical stores. Although the product is there and you can see it in person, its displays, the surrounding posters and images, and other branded assets in the store, all play a vital role in selling those products.

For the first time ever, Glossier is not going to be in full control of the point of sale, therefore how they provide Sephora with content will be an important consideration as this partnership moves forward.

With that said, here are three DAM-related thoughts on Glossier selling its products through Sephora.

Glossier Needs to Stand Out Through Its Content

Glossier has a powerful brand and a healthy community of consumers who enjoy their product. But while the benefits of selling on Sephora.com and in Sephora stores includes widespread exposure to new buyers, it also means increased competition with other brands and products for sale at those locations.

Sephora partners with 250 brands, selling more than 78,000 products on its website. If Glossier wants to make an impact, they’re going to have to make sure Sephora has immediate access to all their latest and greatest content, showcasing their products in a way that is impactful to the target buyer.

This new partnership is no doubt complex, so the last thing Glossier needs is another convoluted process to get assets to external partners like Sephora. Fortunately, modern digital asset management platforms like Tenovos offer easy solutions – allowing external partners to have secure, immediate access to content without any IT involvement or complicated platform customizations.

These asset portals – at Tenovos we call them Storyboards – can be populated with content automatically, and shared directly with external partners. This helps ensure there is zero delay in getting new content where it needs to go.

In the case of this Sephora partnership, that will increase speed to market for any new Glossier products as they launch, while also letting Glossier update existing content and resharing those assets easily.

Governance Will Be Crucial

Glossier is known for its community-led content strategy, but recently it’s gone a different direction by engaging with influencers to help promote their products.

Whichever type of content the brand goes forward with, ensuring Sephora is only using approved content that is licensed appropriately and targeted for the right buyers is going to be important.

Influencer contracts expire, and when they do, existing content may need to be pulled down or changed. Or, it could be Glossier has assets to promote its products most effectively in specific regions – like altering an image for a North American buyer versus a European one.

Digital asset management plays a big role here, as it will allow Glossier to control who has access to what content, where and how they use it, and directly pull in licensing and rights details to ensure compliance with any influencer or other licensing agreements to do with the assets.

Tracking Content to Augment Performance

As mentioned above, this will be the first time Glossier does not control the point of sale. It also means they’re reliant on Sephora sharing data with them to understand not just what products are selling, but what content is contributing to those transactions.

However, DAM offers a better solution. Tenovos, for example, can publish content and track it across digital channels. We allow companies like Glossier to have their content published to channels they don’t own (in this case Sephora’s e-comm and social sites) while still tracking where it lives and how it’s performing.

With insights from their DAM, Glossier would be able to see where their content lives, and how it’s performing there, all without relying on Sephora.

Why is that important? Speed, mostly. Relying on data from third parties means you’re slower to react. Understanding where content is being used and how it’s performing in real-time will let Glossier make on-the-spot decisions about what assets it should make next to maximize sales through Sephora.

Driving Sales with Digital Assets

As Glossier embarks on this new journey, it’s going to require a shift in how they think about their digital assets. From a fully internal approach to sales enablement to now leaning heavily on a third-party – in this case Sephora – it means making content available to a whole new group of users who are external.

That changes a lot, but it’s something that modern DAM platforms can solve for. And if Glossier can leverage their DAM successfully in this way, they will have the content insights they’ll need to arm Sephora with content that resonates with buyers, in order to maximize the value of this new partnership.

January 25, 2023

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6 Tips to Building Better Creative Workflows

By Michael Waldronart_reuse_content, Blog, creative, Productivity-Reuse, User Adoption, workflow-template

Reading Time: 7 minutes

We’ve all been there—your creative workflows are mired in endless delays, email threads, and confusing feedback. There are better ways to create more impactful assets and optimize your digital asset management system (DAM). The question is—how?

In this article, we’ll break down some uncommon tips to make your creative workflows (with or without a DAM) more efficient. Whether it’s doing a workflow audit, playing a bit of task tennis, or implementing points of no return—these tips will help you build better creative workflows so you can do more of what you actually enjoy—making cool content.

1 - Start With a Workflow Audit

To solve a workflow problem, you need to diagnose it. Look at the state of your processes. Ask yourself these questions:

What is holding up our approval reviews? Is it people (too many or too few), tech (endless email threads), or processes (obstacles that come up over and over)?
Are we efficiently using our tech stack to achieve our goals? Is our project management or DAM software helping or hindering us?
Do our freelancers and agencies feel overwhelmed or underutilized? Why?

Consider enlisting the help of a DAM specialist or change management consultant to help you diagnose the people, process, or data issues that are causing workflow delays or creative inertia.

2 - Define How Everyone Is Involved (and Protect Their Peace)

Sometimes you can’t help it—there are too many cooks in the kitchen and you’ve gotta prepare dinner anyway. When you’re managing creative teams all over the world and overlapping approval processes, it’s bound to get a bit crowded. That’s why it’s important to clearly define the roles of everyone involved in your creative workflows—from ideation, to publishing, to post-mortem.

Define each role using the RACI model—responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. Each person involved is categorized into these groups for efficiency and clarity. In fact, not every role needs to be directly involved in every project or task. Categorizing everyone involved under these roles will help you identify and solve for roadblocks in your processes.

A simple way to begin is to map out the current state of things on sticky notes and a whiteboard. Write each person who engages in your workflow and whether they need to be:

Responsible—those completing the project
Accountable—the approver
Consulted—often subject-matter experts
Informed—those kept apprised of progress

Then place them beside each step in the workflow they contribute to. Step back and evaluate—how is this workflow taking shape?

8 stages of creative workflow management

Place each RACI role next to its corresponding place in your own creative workflow. Where are you noticing overlapping responsibilities?
That could be a sign of inefficiency.

From time to time, the person who is accountable for a task may also be responsible for delivering it. But outside of that exception, each person in a process should only fall under one of the RACI participation types. If you’re noticing that someone is wearing multiple hats, it might be a sign that your process has some unresolved issues to iron out.

3 - Use 'Task Tennis' to Minimize Unhelpful Editing

There’s nothing that stifles creativity like opening a shared document, only to see an anonymous “badger” or collaborator’s icon staring down at everything you do. That’s why you should play “task tennis” in every creative workflow. The concept is simple—when anyone who is accountable, consulted, and informed is involved, those who are responsible sit and wait for them to “pass the ball” back.

Each party is completely hands-off until the other party communicates that the asset is ready to go through its next feedback round or review. Without this, if someone interrupts your editing to reply to comments or accept changes, you may miss important revisions.

Reviews also start from top to bottom, from those who are accountable to the project down to those informed, so everyone gets a say in order of priority. Task tennis ensures there is no overlap in collaborative documents, missed edits between revision rounds, and frustration from creatives.

4 - Alternate Between Adding or Subtracting Ideas

Every workflow reflects either an expansion of choices or a contracting of them. This idea stems from IDEO’s design-thinking approach to workflow, wherein those divergent phases are the periods of gathering ideas, research, and materials before the converging phase where the ideas are refined until the final form emerges.

It’s important to recognize this natural expansion and contraction in your creative workflows and create intentional space for those periods to flourish. If you interrupt them—prioritize one over the other, or remove either—you risk missing out on the insights those periods inevitably reveal.

Your review and revision processes will often align with these expansion and contraction periods

On the other hand, when it comes time to move on, you would do well to create boundaries that your RACI roles respect. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that an asset is “locked” from further edits or reviews, especially if you’ve communicated the expectations at every stage of the process. Determine how many “checkpoints of no return” you need and communicate with everyone involved before and throughout the workflow.

5 - Send Out Regular Workflow Updates and Cheat Sheets

For those with or without a DAM, communication goes a long way. When it comes to creative teams, everyone is likely too busy to see all the changes being made to your assets and how they’re being managed. Ask your DAM manager (or your brand’s equivalent) to send out monthly or quarterly email updates. If new branded PowerPoint templates are available for download or collections for a new campaign have been moved, you can ensure everyone finds them right away and can access the newest assets.

Similarly, if you have a traditional DAM or Drive, keep a cheat sheet with naming conventions and instructions for uploading content. Include best practices for naming files, common acronyms, and associated metadata. If your team knows exactly how to work in your DAM, it leaves them time and mental load for more creativity and less stress on your DAM manager.

6 - Invest in a Modern DAM With Real Workflow Features

If you’re still using a Drive or Dropbox to manage your assets, you already know there are some limitations—especially when it comes to your workflow. Today’s DAMs are expanding beyond being a static archive for your assets—integrating workflow management, intuitive search, AI tagging, and even publishing in the same platform.

Man wearing headphones with approval notifications

It’s hard to keep track of everyone in your workflows—not to mention, keeping them aligned to the same processes. In modern DAMs, approval workflows fit right into your existing system. Just ensure everyone working in your DAM has individual logins—instead of bestowing one “admin” access to your agency partners. This ensures your DAM manager can keep track of everyone contributing to your projects as they move through approvals.

DAM doesn’t just contribute to smoother workflows but also helps you quickly find assets, ensures your teams are using the right content (which saves review time), and automatically triggers the right people to collaborate in review rounds. By investing in a DAM, brand teams can focus their attention on creating better, more impactful content, instead of organizing assets and wrangling endless approval threads.

Creativity Flourishes in Functional Flows

A process is only as powerful as those who design it. Like anything, your workflows require some thoughtful planning to stay functional. So, define the RACI roles in your creative process and lay down the boundaries your team needs to create great work. In the end, when you deliver that next piece of awe-inspiring content, you’ll be grateful you took the time to build better creative workflows.

Now that you’ve got your workflows locked down, read our creative lookbook for inspiration on how you can reuse content like other top global brands.

April 22, 2024

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Assembling Your DAM Dream Team: Everyone You Need to Plan, Implement, and Optimize Your DAM

By Michael WaldronBlog, dam-manager, IDC_marketscape, User Adoption

Reading Time: 15 minutes

In the summer of 1992, the United States glided to a gold medal victory on the pure skill of their men’s Olympic basketball team, nicknamed the “Dream Team.” It featured a stacked list of professional NBA players like Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, and Larry Bird—to this day, it’s considered the greatest sports team ever assembled. The key to their success was selecting the best-of-the-best players for the right positions at the right time, each playing to their strengths.

When it comes to assembling a dream team, Kristina Huddart, Digital Asset Management (DAM) Specialist and Consultant, knows what it takes. In this article, she coaches us on how to create the kind of DAM dream team that wins gold—from the start of your digital asset management journey all the way through to optimizing your DAM and realizing its full value.

A DAM dream team consists of many people from inside and outside the organization, and Kristina’s breadth of knowledge will guide you through all their roles and what they can contribute. Plus, stick around until the end for a list of common DAM mistakes and Kristina’s advice on recruiting.

Building Your DAM Dream Team in Four Phases

When you’re beginning your DAM journey, the dream team is just a twinkle in your business sponsor’s eye. The business sponsor is the high-level employee—often a leader from marketing or IT—who is in meetings with the executive team discussing the objectives of the organization. They kick-start this journey by asking the right questions:

Do we have the tools, resources, and people to create immersive digital experiences?
Are we reaching our business objectives in marketing?
How can we get all our retail products to be available through ecommerce sites?

The business sponsor is usually the first one to consider a DAM as a potential solution and they are the catalyst for garnering support from the executive team to resource and invest in the entire DAM journey.

But the business sponsor only partly knows the needs of the organization. In order to assess how to best achieve their objectives, they invite the business analyst to investigate. The business analyst is usually a team member shared from IT who will begin the conversation with stakeholders in solving challenges set out by the business sponsor. The analyst talks with people across the organization to get to the heart of their pain points and priorities. Through these conversations, they compile a list of requirements and needs that the DAM solution should address.

This list prioritizes needs like robust metadata features and artificial intelligence. Or how the governance structures should be set up to ensure review workflows are more organized than they are currently. It’s important that the business analyst’s tasks are done early and with great attention to detail. The list of requirements they create sets the foundation for the rest of the DAM journey.

It’s at this point in your dream team draft pick that you recruit your DAM manager—your MVP. But as Kristina knows all too well, recruiting can pose some challenges.

“The reality is that most companies don’t get a DAM manager until much further down the road,” she says. “But the benefit of having them start early is so they can get up to speed and drive the process. Whether you’re hiring from within the business or externally, they may or may not have expert DAM-specific experience. So getting them started right away and familiar with the requirements and specific business objectives from the business analyst is key.”

The more consistency in your MVP, the better your DAM dream team will play together.

“The more consistency in your MVP, the better your DAM dream team will play together.”

– Kristina Huddart

They don’t need expert DAM knowledge right away—especially if you hire from within marketing, IT, or the digital web content team—but they will be the person driving the DAM journey from phase one onwards.

That’s why the support from an external DAM specialist is next on the roster. As an external temporary consultant, the DAM specialist offers expert knowledge on the industry.

“With my clients, I help them with the DAM selection and implementation process,” Kristina says. “That includes beginning to train, onboard, and share knowledge with that new DAM manager so they hit the ground running.”

The DAM specialist is a coach to your dream team. They offer industry-specific training, proof of concept for your leadership team, and pre-implementation support with your DAM.

Most importantly, they help set the vision for the DAM journey. If your business sponsor is the first one to notice your pain points, and your business analyst begins to define them, your DAM specialist finds the solutions. Kristina’s job is to help the DAM dream team build metadata, governance, and taxonomy structures well before they select a DAM system.

“Your specialist also sits down with your stakeholders to find their ideal workflows. Because the clunky 40-step workflow you have today can’t be dropped into your shiny new piece of tech,” she says. Together with the DAM manager and business analyst, the DAM specialist takes the list of requirements and the ideal vision for the DAM and offers their recommendations from a range of fit-for-purpose DAM vendors.

The DAM vendor is the partner to the DAM dream team. The relationship between the dream team and vendor is probably the most important, which is why choosing the right vendor with the support of your DAM specialist is imperative.

The DAM manager will be in ongoing contact with the vendor discussing new use cases, troubleshooting issues, and seeking technical support. The DAM vendor will also recommend a DAM integration partner to support the various integrations between your new DAM and your existing tech stack that happen in phases two and three.

Phase Two: Developing the Foundations

So, you’re about to launch your DAM system. The business sponsor is getting the executive team excited. The business analyst and DAM specialist are hosting therapy sessions with your potential users.

“Your stakeholders are tired of looking for assets in hidden folders and manually managing assets. This is the phase where you can assure them the business is investing in new technologies to support them and make their jobs easier. The DAM will free them to achieve their objectives and do the things they love, like being creative or building amazing content for the website,” Kristina explains.

In many ways, the job of the DAM manager is to wrangle all these moving pieces while taking on the role of change manager (although, a dedicated change manger would be ideal). If your business is putting in all the resources and time to implement this DAM, you want people to use it. “The end goal is to have the maximum number of users in the DAM regularly. Ideally, they love it so much they’re telling all of their colleagues about how useful and time-saving it is,” Kristina says. Change management starts as early as phase one with the business sponsor and continues through the DAM journey. The key to DAM user adoption is to create a network of DAMbassadors—the evangelists of the DAM who will be your cheerleaders and representatives through the process.

In phase two, the IT information architect also joins the DAM dream team. They are usually an internal team member (they could even be the same as your business analyst) who can validate your tech stack needs and integrations to ensure everything works as designed. They will set up single sign-on, handle technical hurdles in implementation, build helpful documentation, and manage security certificates. These internal tech supports will not be something your DAM specialist (or DAM implementation specialist, a consultant that specializes in DAM implementation, often the same as your DAM specialist) can manage in your backend, so you’ll need support from IT.

Phase Three: Building Maturity and Standardizing Operations

Hopefully, your dream team is running hard in the paint. Kristina says, “If you’re lucky enough to have IT and operations in-house, phase three is for continuing to standardize your DAM processes. Even if your DAM is up and running, it shouldn’t be operating as an island. It should be connected to your other systems.” This will require the support of your IT information architect and DAM integration partner to help you manage the technical issues that arise as you ensure your data moves seamlessly through your connected systems.

In this phase, you may also add a DAM coordinator to assist your DAM manager in continually improving the DAM, supporting stakeholders, and checking the quality of the content coming into the system. You may even consider outsourcing some of your DAM management to external organizations who provide DAM as a managed service. You’ll spend the majority of your time managing, improving, and utilizing the DAM in this phase. The DAM manager may invite the change manager or DAM specialist back in this stage to support refining processes, building better workflows, or strategizing DAM adoption.

Phase Four: Optimizing and Realizing Full Value

You can’t be in your prime forever—it’s three or four years into your DAM journey and you may have a different business sponsor or DAM manager. Entropy has set into certain areas of the DAM and users are beginning to complain about lost assets and confusing metadata. “I see this happen all the time,” Kristina says, “All it takes is a few issues—a business is between DAM managers and users upload 10,000 assets without metadata or the manager isn’t aware that their DAM has video capabilities for their new use cases.” This is a perfect time to invite the DAM specialist back for a health check on how the DAM is functioning.

In phase four, the DAM specialist’s diagnosis will consist of assessing people, process, tech, and data—what is the current state of the team and what can we do to get on track?

“Each time I do a health check on a DAM, the business will come to me with the assumption that they need a new system,” Kristina explains, “But often there are many things the DAM team can do that do not require a replacement of your existing DAM.” By understanding the maturity of the business, how the DAM is currently managed, and where the business wants to take it moving forward, the DAM specialist can help the DAM dream team optimize those areas and get everyone playing at their best again.

How Do You Do It? Four Frequently Asked Questions For Creating Your DAM Dream Team

1 – Should I recruit people from within my organization to be involved in the DAM?

Kristina: Yes! Beg, borrow, and (kindly) steal them from within your company. Most people will not work within the DAM full time, but they are still an important part of planning, implementing, and running the DAM. Determine how much of each person’s time should be spent on the DAM and ensure that all stakeholders are on board with their commitment to making the DAM the best it can be. You can recruit your DAM manager from within your business, just make sure they’re dedicated to spending 100 percent of their time on the DAM.

And consider recruiting support from across the organization. The times when I’ve seen things go wrong are when the DAM team is too focused on the marketing department and isn’t taking into consideration the needs of other teams. You need a network of people across the whole organization who are supporting the DAM, using it regularly, and contributing to improving it over time.

2 – What are the mistakes you see over and over when businesses are building a DAM dream team?

Kristina: There are two major mistakes businesses make over and over. Managing business sponsor turnover and choosing a ‘project management model’ for their DAM implementation. I’ll explain both in detail.

Business sponsor turnover—Typically, the business sponsor was the person at the beginning who chose to investigate a DAM solution, advocated for resources, and got buy-in from executive staff. When a new person enters that role, they may not be aware of their role in stewarding this process, and I’ve seen DAM management go awry or get defunded in those situations.

My advice is to get your business sponsor educated about the DAM and how their role is critical to its success as soon as possible. They don’t need experience with digital asset management but they need to understand how they can support the DAM team with resources, investment, and advocacy. They may even come in with new and exciting ways to improve the DAM—so don’t let that opportunity slip away.

Implementing your DAM with a project management model—Sometimes, in place of a DAM manager, companies will start out with a project management team to implement the DAM system. The issue with this approach is that a project management team is usually a technical team. They’re not implementing a thoughtful change management process.

So even if the DAM is launched quickly, when the project management team is dissolved, things will go wrong pretty quickly without a dedicated DAM manager. You have a new tool without anyone knowledgeable on how to use it or internal staff to support it. My advice is to avoid this model of implementation because it quickly turns your DAM into a dumping ground.

3 – We can’t afford a dream team! If it had to be pared down to the essentials, who is non-negotiable?

Kristina: Your absolute need-to-have DAM team is:

Business sponsor—Without the business sponsor—the DAM’s cheerleader to the executive staff—the DAM manager won’t be able to do much. Their support is essential.

DAM manager—A full-time DAM manager is the only way to run a successful DAM. And I do say dedicated because this isn’t a side project. I often think about a DAM like a website. You’re not going to throw a website at a developer and say, “Build us a website in 20 percent of your time. Keep doing the rest of your day job and once it’s built, you’re done.” That’s not how DAM works either.

DAM specialist—It’s unlikely that your business is going to have the expert knowledge of the entire DAM marketplace. Have a DAM specialist provide expertise and give that strategic direction when you need it. My role as DAM specialist is actually to work myself out of a job—I share knowledge, do training, offer best practices, and set things up for success. Then the DAM team takes it from there.

”DAM isn’t a side project.”

– Kristina Huddart

4 – What does the business stand to lose without a DAM dream team?

Kristina: It’s going to be hard to achieve the return on investment you want without having the right resources, the right skills, and the right people. Without that, you’ve got a very expensive piece of tech and nobody uses it. There’s a lot to lose.

Get the right people in place in phase one to avoid implementation delays. The last thing you want is a false start or endless DAM tech hurdles. DAMs are not cheap and most companies don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong. Get the right resourcing support and the right people on your team. You won’t regret getting it right on your first shot.

Gold Medals All Around

The key to the success of the U.S. Olympic basketball team was the skillful assembly of the best players in their prime, playing to their strengths together as a team. Your DAM dream team is no different. A DAM dream team consists of specialists, managers, IT folks, and vendors from inside and outside the organization who pool their individual skills to contribute to the success of the DAM. If you can assemble the best players from inside and outside your business, you’re headed for nothing but gold medals across the board.

Kristina Huddart is a Digital Asset Management Specialist and Consultant. She helps businesses of all sizes support their marketing teams to work more efficiently with digital tools, organize and leverage the flood of valuable content, and achieve operational efficiencies. Kristina works with the right people to improve and optimize processes happening in the business, and helps with implementing and rolling out the right technologies.

You can connect with her via her website: https://huddartconsulting.com/

July 11, 2024

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Understanding the Impact of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Digital Asset Management

By Michael WaldronBlog, dei-guide-related, Discoverability, multi-personas

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Over the last few years, most companies and organizations have had to reckon with major social and cultural upheavals, not only in relation to the global pandemic, but in response to surging movements addressing racism, income inequality, gender discrimination, climate change, and other pressing issues. In this volatile environment, it is more important than ever for organizations to define, uphold, and express their values around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

While the importance of DEI may be obvious when it comes to hiring, leadership, and compensation, the implications for digital asset management and metadata may not be as readily apparent. However, the teams who rely consistently on solid DAM — marketing, publicity, social media — are also the ones that shape and disseminate a company’s public-facing statements and programs. They are on the front lines of community and media relationships that can build — or damage — an organization’s reputation across a broad audience.

These teams need quick and easy access to images and content that reflects and appeals to diverse communities. If the metadata applied to these assets is out of date, inappropriate, or non-existent, they won’t be able to create the right content as quickly, or with as much confidence.

What Do We Mean by DEI?

Before we dive into how DEI can improve your DAM metadata, let’s take a minute to define our terms.

Diversity is the simple fact that people show up in this world in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, with a broad range of abilities, experiences, and needs. We tend to group people according to convenient categories such as gender, race, religion, etc., but there is a great deal of variation within each of these groups, and their boundaries and definitions continually shift and change over time. Being able to acknowledge, embrace, and celebrate this diversity makes our organizations stronger and more adaptive.

Equity is making sure everyone has access to opportunities to succeed. It is not the same as “equality,” which means that everyone receives the same treatment or resources. You may be familiar with this well-known image of three people of different heights peering over a fence to watch a baseball game. The image is divided in two vertically. On the left, each person stands on a box of the same height, but only two of the three can see over the fence. This is equality, but equal distribution of resources results in unequal access. On the right, the shortest person has been given two boxes, while the tallest receives none. This is equity, a result where everyone can enjoy the game. True equity counteracts the forces of discrimination and historical disadvantage that have made it harder for some people to succeed than others.

Image: Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire

Inclusion is the acknowledgement of diversity while striving toward equity for everyone. When we are inclusive, we acknowledge that we’re not all starting from the same place. Some of us have bigger challenges than others and inclusive behavior means actively taking steps to mitigate or remove those challenges. This may mean making sure your Zoom meeting has live captions turned on, mentoring students from communities that are underrepresented in your industry, or making sure your metadata accurately represents the people in your organization’s photos.

Why Is DEI Important for Digital Asset Metadata?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is first and foremost about people. If your DAM contains content about people, it is a platform for the representation of social identities, such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. Unless every image of a person in your DAM is a generic figure like those on restroom signs (and even those can express gender difference), you are managing data about social identity. There is no “default” or “neutral” person; we all have identities that make a difference in how we participate at work and in society as a whole.

By incorporating facets of identity into your metadata — in essence, making it DEI-informed — you respect the identities of the people represented in your content and those of the people who use your system.

Inclusive metadata reflects how people see themselves. It may require research; it may change the way you do photo shoots, or collect information about your clients, but in the long run it will help you avoid misrepresentation and make it easier for users to find precisely what they need in your system.

This is especially important when it comes to images. For example, you can’t always correctly identify a person’s race by appearance alone. Other identity facets such as disability or sexual orientation may be impossible to discern. It’s best to collect this information from the subjects of a photo shoot, rather than making assumptions later. With accurately sourced, DEI-informed metadata, underrepresented populations become more visible in your DAM. Users will be able to locate content that accurately reflects the communities they are interested in and deploy that content with more confidence.

They will also be more likely to see themselves and their own identities in your system. Your DAM may not be public facing, but harmful language is harmful no matter where it appears. Employees who see their own identities represented respectfully and accurately in the DAM will know they matter to the organization, which contributes to morale and a welcoming work environment.

How Does DEI-Informed Metadata Contribute to the Bottom Line?

Creating metadata that is respectful and inclusive can broaden your audience, make your content more appealing and respectful, and help your teams function more confidently and efficiently.

Let’s say you want to expand the audience for your products or services to include Asian Americans, a group that is currently underrepresented in your customer base. You need to create marketing materials that appeal to them and show that you understand their concerns and needs. You might already have assets in your DAM that could be used for this campaign, but perhaps they’re tagged with outdated, offensive terminology, like “Oriental,” or they may not have metadata about race and ethnicity at all. If assets aren’t tagged appropriately, you may waste valuable time sifting through hundreds of items. You may even spend time and money recreating assets that already exist. Tagging assets with terminology that aligns with how your customers describe themselves saves time and effort.

DEI-informed metadata also encourages your users to use respectful language in the resulting materials. If your metadata is DEI-informed, there’s less likely to be a surprise PR crisis because someone reproduced a problematic word they found in the DAM. If your users know the metadata in the DAM is as up-to-date and accurate as possible, they will be able to employ those assets and information with more confidence and with less time spent second-guessing.

In the end, DEI matters for DAM, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it can help make your communications more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective.

Sharon Mizota is a DEI metadata consultant who helps organizations transform and share their metadata to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has over ten years of experience managing and creating metadata for arts and culture organizations, including Walt Disney Animation Studios, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Judy Chicago Research Portal, Curationist.org, and Outwords Archive.

Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit her website: www.sharonmizota.com.

February 1, 2024

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What Mattel’s Content Teaches Us About Reusing Digital Assets

By Michael WaldronBlog, creative, Productivity-Reuse

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever re-watched old cartoons from your childhood just to remember earlier times, or if you still have a box of your old toys because you hope one day your little ones are going to play with them, too.

Mattel, the toy company responsible for Barbie and other timeless toy brands, is counting on those feelings as they relaunch three old toy lines from more than 40 years ago, including Major Matt Mason, Big Jim, and Pulsar.

Of course, it’s not the first time they’ve done something like this. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe have received similar treatments over the years, with new toys and cartoons on Netflix.

Just last week, Mattel posted a He-Man commercial mashup on their social media accounts using clips from the 80s and early 2000s, all to promote the brand’s move into the metaverse with Masters of the Universe NFTs. It’s brilliant, in that it taps into the nostalgia of older buyers (parents) while showing the brand’s evolution for kids today.

They’ve done it again with this new relaunch. Check out how they used old clips to showcase the new Big Jim, Pulsar and Major Matt Mason toys on Instagram.

The lesson here is simple: the digital assets you’ve safely stored away could still have real value for your business.

Digital Asset Management and Content Reuse

Mattel’s story isn’t the same for every company. They have decades of history making some of the most historic and recognized toy brands in the world. But their approach to content reuse is something all organizations can learn from.

It really starts with your digital asset management platform.

Once marketers have a campaign in mind, their first move shouldn’t be to request a new batch of content. Taking a page out of Mattel’s book means starting with a look into your existing library for assets you can reuse in creative ways.

Understanding your buyers and what content they engage with will help you here. Insights from your DAM should provide direction on what existing content you have that resonates with your buyers.

From there, hand those assets over to your creative team and let them run wild. With an understanding of what content works, they can either repurpose the existing assets into new content, or take direction from those assets to inspire new designs.

If you’re a toy company like Mattel, the result may be a nostalgia-filled creative campaign that touches the hearts of older buyers while inspiring younger audiences. For others, it might be an optimized asset that tells a meaningful story to the buyer that turns into a sale.

Get inspired by exciting content reuse campaigns from leading brands

Read the lookbook

Barriers to Content Reuse

Not all DAMs are created equal, and not all assets are easy to find. Reusing content isn’t always straightforward, thanks to some common barriers.

No Tools to Help

Depending on what industry you’re in and how long your company has been in business, you might have anywhere from a few thousand to over a million assets in your library. If you don’t have a DAM at that point, you might want to read our blog on when to start looking for a digital asset management platform.

Content reuse can be hard without the proper tools to:

Show you what’s in the library
Help you find the content
Tell you what’s worked historically
Share with your creative teams

Without technology, you’re going to be left guessing what assets you should use, when and where. You’re also going to miss a lot of great content simply because you have no way to really find it, or even know it’s there in the first place.

Outdated / Legacy Digital Asset Management Platforms

Older DAM platforms were never designed to facilitate content reuse. These legacy DAMs are primarily content archives that allow you to store and find content well enough, but they don’t provide the insights you need to decide what assets should be reused, or how.

Think of it this way; when any retailer brings an old product line back to market, they never do it on a whim. They look at various data points, including sales, to determine if that product line is worth relaunching, or if they should go another direction. So then, why treat your digital assets any different? You need a DAM platform that can provide you with those data points, and empower you to make good decisions around content reuse.

Poor Metadata & Keywords

Metadata and keywords are vital in DAM to help users find the content they’re looking for. It doesn’t matter what technology you have in place, it cannot overcome poor metadata when it comes to surfacing content.

If your DAM users are struggling to find the content they’re looking for, or can’t filter the library appropriately to narrow their search, it may be time for a metadata audit and new schema to be implemented (no easy task, we know). There are companies that can help with this specifically, however some vendors like Tenovos also provide expert support to help with these types of issues. Either way you go, your content reuse strategy can’t get off the ground until your metadata is in a good place.

Lack of Direction & Planning

Ok, so you’ve got the tools to help you store your assets, the metadata is attached to them so you can find the content you’re looking for… but how do you know what to make and where to put it?

Once again, you need a modern DAM to help. Too often companies publish content into a black hole. Once the assets leave the DAM they have no way to know where it really goes or how it’s used. But with modern DAMs like Tenovos, you can track those assets.

What does that mean for reuse?

Digital asset management platforms should tell you where your content lives, so you can quickly find gaps in your publishing, or see that one asset has been reused already while others have been left to collect dust. This allows for clear planning and direction to the creative team, giving them the information they need to make the right content for the right channels.

Rights & Licensing Issues

Reusing content does come with the risk that you may use assets you no longer own the rights to, or in a way that violates any licensing agreements you may have. This can sometimes lead to teams deciding it’s just easier to make something new rather than risk the financial fallout (and embarrassment) of a copyright infringement.

That’s why creative teams need digital rights management functionalities directly within their DAM. Your DAM should tell you what assets you have the right to use, and how you can use it. It should also alert you to any expiring license agreements so you can decide whether or not to renew them, knowing you may want to reuse that content in the future. These are features modern DAM platforms have built-in, but that are lacking in older tools.

The Future of Digital Asset Management

It may seem a little weird, but in a way the future of DAM is all about making better use of assets from the past. Companies today just don’t have the resources to make new content all the time… and as Mattel is proving, not all buyers even want that. Sometimes, the older stuff is best!

If your DAM isn’t equipped to help you reuse content effectively, it may be time to look for help elsewhere. Tenovos is a modern, data-first DAM delivered as a SaaS platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), built to help you make the best use of your content to drive value for your business.

As a platform designed and developed to leverage modern cloud-based (AWS) systems architecture, Tenovos customers experience unprecedented levels of performance, scale, security, and extensibility. Furthermore, with the power of AWS, content can be published directly from the Tenovos DAM to customer-facing channels such as social, web, and email, streamlining a historically cumbersome process.

Why do global brands choose Tenovos?

Learn more about the Tenovos Platform

July 22, 2024

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Why Creative Teams Need Digital Rights Management in the DAM

By Michael WaldronBlog, chapter2, creative, Productivity-Reuse

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Digital rights management (DRM) is the processes, systems and technologies through which brands control access to their digital assets, and it’s one of the more important factors creatives need to consider when they’re building new content.

The top 150 global licensors accounted for over $260 billion in licensed goods sold at retail in 2021, including companies like Disney, Mattel and Warner Bros. It goes without saying these companies – along with countless other licensors who may sell rights to their assets for non-retail purposes – spend a lot of time and resources protecting their valuable brand assets. And if your company has purchased rights to any of these assets, it’s crucial your creative teams have visibility into how they’re allowed to be used.

Digital Rights Management and Your Creative Process

Often teams will have thousands of digital assets stored in their digital asset management (DAM) system, and they’ll pull from those assets to create new content.

Maybe these are music files for a video, or images from a photoshoot – really whatever is needed. Shouldn’t it be as easy as finding these assets in the DAM, choosing the ones you like, and using them to create the content?

It should be, yes. But it normally isn’t.

That’s because today’s creative processes often involve manually searching for assets. Even when an asset is covered by a license agreement, it doesn’t always mean the creative team actually knows or sees that. This creates significant risk that the wrong asset will be used, or an asset will be used inappropriately leading to legal action.

If it can happen to Monster Energy, it can happen to you. Back in 2016 the company paid $1.7 million in damages for copyright infringement when they used music by The Beastie Boys in a promotional video – music they didn’t have the rights to use.

To try and mitigate these risks, companies will put cumbersome manual processes and reviews in place to ensure digital rights are respected, but these only create delays in the creative process, and don’t really solve the visibility issues creatives face when it comes to these licensing agreements.

Digital rights management should be a direct part of the creative process from the beginning, and not tagged on midway through. Does that mean, then, that companies should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new DRM system to control access to content? Or is there a better way?

Learn how to get more productivity out of your DAM.

Read the eBook

Digital Rights Management and Your DAM

Digital rights management systems come in different forms. Some proactively protect content and assets, like video game DRMs that restrict content access to only one linked account. Others can block certain activities with content, like copying images from websites, or place digital water marks on non-licensed content like pirated movies, songs and pictures.

License agreements are a form of DRM as well, as they, through legal means, protect the use of digital assets.

It’s important to note that even if you’ve purchased rights to an asset – and therefore have access through the licensor’s proactive DRM system – you still must adhere to the terms of the license agreement.

So then, how do you do that? These licensed assets are in your DAM and ready to use, but you need to know what’s available to you for the use case you have, or for the region in which you want to publish them.

Modern DAM platforms like Tenovos have built-in digital rights management features, and if you’re looking for a DAM today, this is something you absolutely should make sure is available in the system.

Why Built-In Digital Rights Management Is Vital in DAM

Apart from the obvious productivity gains of overcoming manual processes, your creative team is going to gain much-needed insights into how the assets they’ve purchased are actually being used, and where to spend dollars in the future. First, let’s look at some key functionalities of DRM in DAM, and then we’ll break down why that’s so important.

Digital rights management features in DAM should include:

The ability to ingest content in bulk and automate the application of rights restrictions, based on existing license agreements
Filter and search for content based on licensing permissions (ie. search for available content in a specific region, or for a specific timeframe)
List all assets that exist in the DAM under any given license agreement, or entity/licensor
System notifications for any licenses that are about to expire
Restricting access to assets with an expired license
Automate workflows for asset download requests if legal/other reviews are still required

Boosting creative productivity

As mentioned, one of the best outcomes of built-in rights management within your DAM is the productivity boost it will give your creative team.

Imagine knowing what you’re creating content for – region or use case – and being able to quickly filter assets to what’s permitted based on those specifications? Or knowing you want to use a specific license, like a Marvel hero image, and being able to immediately pull up all the relevant assets to that agreement? Right away, you’ve saved time in the DAM.

Now that you have the assets you want to use, you no longer need to manually send those for a lengthy review. If the license agreement is straightforward, you can trust the DAM to only give you access to approved content. If it’s more complex, you can trigger a review workflow that automates the process for you, notifies the reviewer, and sends back their response all within the system. In a world where speed to market is so vital to success, this productivity boost is a great advantage when working with licensed assets.

Reducing compliance risks

The last thing you want is a lawsuit to ruin your brand image and cost you millions. You also don’t want the embarrassment of having to pull products from shelves or cancel marketing campaigns because of a misused asset.

Built-in digital rights management helps to protect your organization by limiting access to only approved assets, based on the terms of use for the content. If you’ve only published distribution rights for Europe but your campaign is based in North America, those assets won’t be available to the creative team in the first place. That’s a powerful tool for controlling asset use and protecting your company from unwanted risk.

Measuring return on investment

As you saw at the beginning of this article, the industry for licensing is in the billions of dollars. It’s huge, and companies are spending a lot of money to buy rights to these assets for their own marketing and product purposes.

Great, but how do you know if the price you paid was worth it? Today, it’s again a manual process. You may have purchased rights to a hundred assets, but only used a handful. You’d have no way of knowing that, unless the rights are managed from within your DAM.

With built-in digital rights management, your DAM will tell you all the assets you own under a given license agreement. You can then easily see how many of those you used, how they were used, and how that content performed for your business. When it comes time to renew licenses for those assets, you’ll have a much better idea of how to spend your money if you know what worked for you, and what wasn’t worth the investment.

Digital Asset Management & DRM

Your DAM is a crucial part of your enterprise tech stack. Digital rights management can’t be overlooked in terms of its importance to your business, and yet many organizations are still managing this in a manual way.

Tenovos has built-in rights management features so your team can work more efficiently, and with a clear understanding of the ROI you’re getting from your license agreements. Learn more about rights management tools.

December 1, 2024

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Why choosing the right DAM can be a career-defining move

By Michael WaldronBlog, DAM-ROI, multi-personas

Reading Time: 8 minutes

There’s an old saying that goes something like “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

It came from the earlier days of tech where, maybe rather than taking a chance on something new or different, you could always just buy IBM products and trust they’d work well enough to get the job done. And if it got the job done, well, you wouldn’t get fired, would you?

But you probably wouldn’t get promoted, either.

And that’s because you wouldn’t really stand out. IBM got the job done, but it was also exactly what was expected, and the results were predictable. Then again, if you had taken a risk, saved some significant money for the company, or selected a solution that delivered unexpected beneficial results, well then you might be the company hero.

It’s no different in digital asset management. Today, you could use a similar saying for some of the legacy vendors out there. You know exactly what you’re going to get, but it’s been the same for years and years.

Or, you could choose a modern DAM platform, take a little risk sure, but know you’re selecting an innovative solution that could yield previously unrealized value for your business. And that could truly define your career as someone with vision who delivers great results.

Here are some of the things you can bring to your organization through modern DAMs like Tenovos, that will help define who you are in your company.

Productivity Gains

It goes without saying that DAM platforms (good ones, anyway) provide a boost to your productivity. It’s one of the main reasons why people buy DAMs in the first place. But modern DAMs go further than legacy solutions to boost productivity across teams, in multiple ways.

Traditionally you would expect a DAM to increase productivity by centralizing content and assets, and making them easily accessible to users. But where some DAMs still use outdated folder structures and static content tags (which, admittedly, can ‘do the job’), modern platforms go way beyond with things like:

Automated AI content tagging
AI image and video recognition
Modern and optimized UI for ease of use and speed navigating the library
Advanced search functionality (configurable search filters, user-based permissions, rights-based content access)
Automated metadata application during content ingestion (individual and bulk uploads)

You can also bring in a DAM that acts as a central part of your marketing tech stack. Integrations with workflow software and creative suites make it incredibly effective at automating processes, keeping your users in the DAM, transferring approved files between systems to speed up content creation processes, and so on. Your creative and marketing teams will thank you for connecting approved digital assets directly with the systems they use every day.

The results of these workflow connections alone are impressive:

Reduce missed deadlines by 50%
Achieve 150% productivity boost
25% faster project completion

Imagine being the person responsible for more than doubling a creative team’s productivity? That looks strong on any resume, and forces your current leaders to take notice of the impact you’re having to the organization.

Learn how to boost your DAM productivity.

Read the eBook

Partner Engagement

If you’re supporting a marketing team that needs to share content with external partners, then choosing the right DAM can have a significant impact on the success of those partner programs.

Marketing teams often have to ask their IT departments to provide system access to external parties, whether those are agencies, resale partners, or any other third-party. It creates delays, bogs down IT teams, and creates more paperwork than is necessary.

On the other hand, modern DAMs like Tenovos have built-in functionality to create secure access points to the DAM that don’t require IT intervention, and gives admins the ability to restrict third-party access to only the content they need or are allowed to use.

How long does that take? While in the past you might be looking at a week or two to get access for your partners, Tenovos admins (that’s you!) can do it in a matter of minutes. It takes a few clicks to create these access points, full of the content your partners need (and nothing they don’t!).

That ability alone significantly reduces time to market for partner related activities, letting you get your best and most recent content into their hands in record time. If you want to give them the ability to customize content using your approved brand assets, you can do that too.

This takes a load off your creative and marketing teams, while empowering your partners to succeed towards whatever goals they may have.

To recap, that means your creative and marketing teams are free to do more in other areas, while your partners are moving fast because they have your best and newest material the moment it’s published. That’s the kind of impact traditional DAMs aren’t known for, but you can be.

Tracking Content and Measuring Performance

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) only really care about a handful of things, one of which is the return on investment for their marketing spend, including brand, creative and content programs.

Traditionally, marketers have been very good at measuring ROI across their various channels, like paid and social. But at the content and asset level, that transparency into what’s paying off and what isn’t just doesn’t exist. Why? Because once an asset is used, or content gets published, it gets lost in a black hole.

Sure, teams have visibility into how a social post is performing, but the image attached to that post doesn’t have its own analytics to measure, nor can it be tracked in an automated way. So, as far as the CMO is concerned, was that image ever published at all? Who can say?

Well, you can if you choose the right DAM.

Modern DAM platforms are starting to publish content directly to channels like social, and can track where assets live today. They can tell you how the asset is being used, where it’s published, and how it’s contributing to the bigger picture of social channel performance, lead generation, and buying behaviors.

Those are the building blocks of being able to truly measure content and asset ROI.

Add to that the ability for creative teams to see what’s working and build more of that stuff, or easily identify opportunities to reuse content that’s working on new channels, and you have a truly powerful tool sure to increase the value of your assets by an order of magnitude.

Yes, you could buy the IBM of the DAM world, but then you wouldn’t be able to provide an ROI breakdown of your content and brand assets to the CMO. Or, you could be the person who helps to change the way your teams measure and think about content performance.

Reduce Risk to the Brand

Global brands spend millions of dollars each year acquiring the rights for various creative assets to use in ad campaigns, digital marketing channels, and social media. It’s almost staggering the number of licenses some of these companies are managing, and the sheer volume of content those licenses apply to.

It’s not really surprising, then, when someone gets in trouble for breaching a license. In 2014 (yes it’s an old example, but it’s a good one), Monster Energy was forced to pay the Beastie Boys $1.7 million for using a song without permission. It happened because one of Monster’s employees wanted to use an asset but didn’t realize they no longer held a valid license for the song.

Today, with brands taking to social media channels like TikTok and Instagram and moving so quickly to keep up with social trends, the risks are even higher.

Many organizations have a manual and complex process whereby anytime an asset is to be used, it needs to go through a legal check (among others). That just slows you down, and it’s prone to human error nonetheless as you need to trust the user at the end of the process to take the right actions.

Modern DAMs like Tenovos build in rights management directly to the platform, and can tie license agreements and restrictions to the asset itself. It makes it nearly impossible for users to pull the wrong asset (like the Beastie Boys example), because content can be filtered by license parameters like territory for use and media.

Are you going out with a marketing push in Europe? You can quickly see what licensed assets you can use in that region. If you’re creating a TV ad campaign, your creative team can see immediately what they can use for that media type.

Going back to the ROI discussion from earlier, it also gives you the ability to see what licenses are being used, where assets are being published, and then adjust what rights you purchase and license terms are worthwhile for you to invest in.

Make Your Career-Defining Move

Traditional DAMs (the IBMs of the DAM world) are background players. They centralize and organize content, and act as a repository for your assets. They don’t go much further than that, and often are just taken for granted as tools that ‘do the job’.

Today’s modern DAMs, like Tenovos, are more dynamic systems that offer significant value beyond the storage of content. They bring major productivity boosts, let you engage partners with content immediately, give your leaders a full view into content and asset ROI, and reduce your risk in today’s complex digital media environment.

Choosing the safe DAM may not get you fired, but choosing the right DAM can define your career. For help on how to do that, read our Vendor Evaluation Guide.

January 25, 2023

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Do I Need a Digital Asset Management Platform?

By Michael WaldronBlog, DAM-ROI, multi-personas

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Digital asset management software isn’t right for every problem.

There, we said it.

Maybe you checked your email this morning and there, at the top of your inbox, was the third email this week from the creative team asking where to locate those new images from last month’s photoshoot. In frustration with the challenges of storing assets in Google Drive, you throw up your hands and say “That’s it! We’re getting a DAM!”

While properly storing and surfacing content is a big part of DAM, that’s only one part of what the software can do for you.

Digital asset management goes way beyond content organization. Let’s start by looking at what DAMs really are.

What Is Digital Asset Management?

Digital asset management software allows users to store and manage their digital assets at a scale not possible with other tools like shared drives. From metadata and taxonomy systems to content tagging and categorization, DAMs attach data to your assets that let them be organized and found by the users that need them.

Modern DAMs like Tenovos go even further, facilitating workflows by integrating with project management software, automating review processes, and even publishing content to social channels like Instagram and YouTube. They incorporate built-in global rights management so only permitted assets can be used, and can make that content accessible to external third parties like agencies and retail partners.

Enterprise companies can have anywhere from 10 to 100, even thousands of users globally accessing and interacting with content each day. The scale can be mind-boggling, which speaks to the power of these DAM platforms.

Some key functionalities of digital asset management platforms include:

Centralizing large volumes of assets and content in one place
Organizing content and using metadata structures to make it searchable and accessible to the right users
Managing asset rights and user permissions so the right content goes to the right people, for use in the right places
Integrating with your tech stack to seamlessly share content and data across systems
Orchestrating creative workflows and review processes across departments, teams, and sometimes organizations (like agencies and retail partners)
Tracking content both internally and externally so you know where your assets are being used
Distributing and publishing your content to the partners, places and channels it needs to go

Ok, so we understand now some of the ways DAMs can make our lives easier. It’s time to break down the reasons you might want to start looking at digital asset management.

Download the Digital Asset Management Vendor Evaluation Guide

Download Now

Signs You Need a Digital Asset Management Platform

We started this article by questioning if helping users find content was, in itself, the right reason to buy a DAM. It’s one of the main reasons why companies do (and we list it as the first reason below, as a matter of fact), but there are many other signs that DAM may be the right way to go.

The software can achieve so much for your organization, that buying it to just achieve one goal may not be worth the price you might pay. Instead, look for opportunities to expand the use case of DAM in your business, which will help you to realize a much greater ROI. Below are some signs you should consider as opportunities to leverage DAM in your business.

Your internal and external users can’t find content or assets

If this is your reality, a DAM may be right for you. Yes there are other tools out there (even *shiver* spreadsheets) that you can use to index content for stakeholders, but DAMs are an elegant solution to the problem. For example, Tenovos lets users filter their search based on the content they are allowed to use (based on license/rights agreements, geographies, campaigns, or just role-based permissions), search using keywords and tags, and then share content with other users easily. No more frustrated emails or Slack messages asking for the location of new assets.

Your creative team is moving too slow

Finding assets can take a long time and derail your creative teams. Digital asset management makes it easy for them to find the assets they need (and should be using), and through integrations with the creative suite can easily be pulled into projects to build that gorgeous new content piece.

You have thousands of digital assets

Scalability is a big reason companies move their assets into a DAM platform. If you’ve got a few hundred images, it may not be worthwhile for you. But if your asset library is in the thousands, and you have hundreds of users trying to access it, a DAM is likely your best way to manage it all.

You don’t know where your content lives

Are you publishing content into a black hole? Do you stumble across content in public places where it shouldn’t be? Digital asset management software can help you keep track of your content. Tenovos enables you to publish assets directly from the DAM, and keep track of where it gets used, by who, and how. It makes it easy to identify gaps in your content, to reuse content on social channels, and to know what assets are more popular than others with your users.

You struggle to share content with external partners

Your retail, agency or other partners need content, but it can be hard to share those assets in a secure way. Many ‘content portals’ are publicly accessible if someone has the URL, which makes it a risk your company doesn’t want to take. Modern DAMs like Tenovos allow external partners to access your content in a secure way, while giving you complete control over what they can use.

Now, ask yourself: does digital asset management sound like it’s right for you?

If the answer is yes, you may be interested in reading our Vendor Evaluation Guide which will help you understand the DAM assessment process, what to expect, and how to pick the right platform for your business.

June 17, 2024

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Michael Waldron

Why Digital Asset Management Integrations Are Important

Commonly Connected Enterprise Technologies

Master Data Management Systems (MDM)

Product Information Management (PIM)

Project Management, Campaign Management & Workflow

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Creative Suites

Business Intelligence (BI)

Building an Integrated Tech Ecosystem

Discover the Fast Track to DAM Integrations

Traditional vs. Modern DAMs

Traditional DAMs

Modern DAMs

Tenovos: The Next Phase of DAM Evolution

Glossier Needs to Stand Out Through Its Content

Governance Will Be Crucial

Tracking Content to Augment Performance

Driving Sales with Digital Assets

1 - Start With a Workflow Audit

2 - Define How Everyone Is Involved (and Protect Their Peace)

8 stages of creative workflow management

Place each RACI role next to its corresponding place in your own creative workflow. Where are you noticing overlapping responsibilities? That could be a sign of inefficiency.

3 - Use 'Task Tennis' to Minimize Unhelpful Editing

4 - Alternate Between Adding or Subtracting Ideas

Your review and revision processes will often align with these expansion and contraction periods

5 - Send Out Regular Workflow Updates and Cheat Sheets

6 - Invest in a Modern DAM With Real Workflow Features

Creativity Flourishes in Functional Flows

Building Your DAM Dream Team in Four Phases

“The more consistency in your MVP, the better your DAM dream team will play together.”

– Kristina Huddart

Phase Two: Developing the Foundations

Phase Three: Building Maturity and Standardizing Operations

Phase Four: Optimizing and Realizing Full Value

How Do You Do It? Four Frequently Asked Questions For Creating Your DAM Dream Team

1 – Should I recruit people from within my organization to be involved in the DAM?

2 – What are the mistakes you see over and over when businesses are building a DAM dream team?

3 – We can’t afford a dream team! If it had to be pared down to the essentials, who is non-negotiable?

”DAM isn’t a side project.”

– Kristina Huddart

4 – What does the business stand to lose without a DAM dream team?

Gold Medals All Around

What Do We Mean by DEI?

Why Is DEI Important for Digital Asset Metadata?

How Does DEI-Informed Metadata Contribute to the Bottom Line?

Digital Asset Management and Content Reuse

Get inspired by exciting content reuse campaigns from leading brands

Barriers to Content Reuse

The Future of Digital Asset Management

Why do global brands choose Tenovos?

Digital Rights Management and Your Creative Process

Learn how to get more productivity out of your DAM.

Digital Rights Management and Your DAM

Why Built-In Digital Rights Management Is Vital in DAM

Digital Asset Management & DRM

Productivity Gains

Learn how to boost your DAM productivity.

Partner Engagement

Tracking Content and Measuring Performance

Reduce Risk to the Brand

Make Your Career-Defining Move

What Is Digital Asset Management?

Download the Digital Asset Management Vendor Evaluation Guide

Signs You Need a Digital Asset Management Platform

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Place each RACI role next to its corresponding place in your own creative workflow. Where are you noticing overlapping responsibilities?
That could be a sign of inefficiency.