Digital Media Management

Digital Asset Management is one of the hardest categories of software to evaluate because so many different vendors mean different things by Digital Asset Management. To communicate clearly the value of a full Digital Asset Management system, we will refer to the common set of core DAM features as Digital Media Management. You could also call this DAM-Lite, or Basic DAM. This forms the foundation of any digital asset management platform, but only the foundation. A system that manages all digital asset across their complete lifecycle and across all partners adds significant functionality.

The Complete DAM Feature Set

Digital Media Management is the core, basic functionality that any DAM vendor must provide- the centralization and categorization of rich media assets for subsequent search, retrieval and reuse. 

For companies of all sizes, digital media management provides significant benefits in asset distribution and reuse.

Core Features of Digital Media Management

• Ingest of assets
• Classification of assets - tags or full metadata
• Generation of thumbnails to aid browsing and searching
• Search
• Conversion of assets to required formats
• Support for the most common image formats
• Basic group security

Larger companies, companies with large numbers of assets, and companies with more complete media workflows require advanced features for Digital Media Management.

Advanced Features of Digital Media Management

• Multiple and cascading metadata models to support more groups and asset types
• High scalability to support thousands or millions of assets
• Distributed architecture to ensure performance across all locations
• Versioning of assets to protect assets and simplify collaboration
• Integration with creative tools such as Adobe InDesign and Photoshop
• Support for a broader set of image formats
• Broader support for video
• Advanced metadata based security

Companies move beyond Digital Media Management into full Digital Asset Management when they start managing the critical business processes for their assets. Typically, this involves management of assets across their entire lifecycle, and management of the creative, review, approval and distribution processes at each lifecycle stage.

These processes break down into five major categories in addition to digital media management:

Video Asset Management

Video has become a primary communication method with its own challenges that DAM needs to manage. In fact, DAM may be more important for video than still images since video isn't shareable via email, and many users don't have desktop tools for video editing. Learn more about Video Asset Management

Partner Collaboration

Partner collaboration has become more important as marketing departments become more “virtual”, outsouring more creative work to design and agency partners. A large part of the ROI for DAM for many companies is better control of assets created by partners through Partner Collaboration.

Creative Workflow

All the moving parts involved in the creation, modification, reuse, review and approval, and multi-channel publishing and distribution need to be coordinated in a flexible, user friendly manner.  Creative Workflow is essential to achieving success in more complicated marketing and communication workflows.

Multi-Channel Publishing

The rapid increase of online as the most important marketing channel has turned mult-channel publishing from a nice-to-have feature to a must-have.

The growing importance of the online economy makes it more important for brands to go global earlier or lose out in global markets. A  Multi-Channel Publishing strategy is essential for brand management and time-to-market in global marketing efforts.

Distribution

Finally, all of the above only works if you can move the finished content to it’s end destination quickly and easily. This means managing the relationships among all project files so that the updated end-content can be automatically generated, as well as the ability to convert to final content formats (PDF, web video, web images, etc.) and deliver that content to other information systems such as customer relationship management or web content management systems. The more of the digital asset lifecycle you manage and streamline, the more important Distribution of digital assets becomes.

For more information or a demonstration of TeleScope Digital Media Management, please contact one of our DAM experts.