Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems increasingly need to extend beyond their traditional internal content, website ops and creative teams to serve the wider enterprise. Analyst Liz Miller at Constellation notes, ‘The DAM has always represented the last mile that pulls everything together [because] it’s where the intersection of planning, assets, documents, etc. can meet and be deployed. In today’s world, [that means the] DAM has to be used everywhere, and available at scale.’
Why must DAMs evolve? Our virtual universe is becoming less text-based and more visual every year. There are now an estimated 14.3 trillion digital photos online. Google Image Search indexes an estimated 136 billion images. It stands to reason, then that the online “Visual Economy” is maturing.
Businesses deploy imagery and video in ever more sophisticated ways to attract, engage, inform and entertain their audiences. In a survey we ran last year, 37% of consumers said it was a top priority to view user-generated videos before making a purchase. At the same time, more than a quarter stated that branded videos were essential.
The above numbers add up to a staggering amount of visual content for brands to harness, access, manage and publish. That’s why it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about DAM systems for merely storage instead of what they should be focused on – that crucial last mile.
Legacy DAMs were engineered as simple content repositories. Today modern DAMs automate and optimize every stage of the visual media lifecycle. They are shown to significantly boost productivity, lower storage and delivery costs, and improve customer experience (CX).
DAM impressive business outcomes
My company cares deeply about this evolving space. We launched our DAM in 2018 and have learned a lot in seven years. Crucially, what are actual customers achieving with a modern DAM?
- lastminute.com has slashed the time to modify images on new travel website offers from weeks to minutes
- PUMA ensures its +10 million images fit any size device display while automatically converting to the lighter AVIF format. It also automatically changes background colours and sets the 100% best quality for any product image.
- Babolat, a leading racquet sports brand, streamlined 17 storage systems into a single DAM. It achieved major workflow efficiencies and a smooth B2B-B2C transition across eight separate markets.
- Mecum Auctions, the world’s largest online and live premium vehicle auctioneer, doubled page load speed times and cut 2000 image uploading person-hours
What defines the ‘modern DAM’ anyway?
First and foremost, a modern DAM has built-in intelligence to automate many manual tasks in the end-to-end asset lifecycle at scale. For example, intelligently analyzing and automatically tagging huge volumes of visual content so that people can easily find what they’re looking for.
It might sound unbelievable, but global companies, in particular, often lose entire image and video collections that are extremely valuable, which then need to be reshot. This can happen for several reasons when there’s no ‘single source of truth’ DAM for storing and managing visual assets across distributed teams. Hard drives fail. Mobile devices and laptops get lost or stolen. Employees and contractors exit companies without documenting the location or status of key media assets.
A modern DAM can also, for example, help moderate and control the visual content you publish, including user-generated images and video. Crucially, they include specific capabilities for video, like autocropping, subtitles, and autotranslations. These features help brands speed time to market and maximize ROI by allowing re-use across markets.
Turn to a Modular Approach for your DAM
When companies switch to modern DAMs it is often part of a considered migration off an inflexible, ineffective, and expensive monolithic ecommerce platform to a composable ecommerce tech stack. Here, the cross-industry MACH Alliance is leading the charge and explaining how MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless architecture) underpins modern ecommerce and web architecture.
Designed for seamless integration, CTOs are reaching for this kind of modular approach. It empowers businesses to detach from legacy tools and freely choose the best-in-class technologies available.
Only a headless or composable approach allows you to easily plug in (and out, if needed) complementary systems like a new PIM (product information management) system, CMS (content management system) or DAM. Otherwise, things really slow down and you’re spending far too much time paying off your technical debt, patching or playing with middleware than accomplishing real business goals. This pluggable approach is also what enables you to be best-of-breed and continually renew your platform.
Modern, composable DAMs are also much better equipped for the future. In a recent survey we found that 86% of more than 400 DAM users across marketing, IT, and executive leadership we talked to confirmed they see integrability with other solutions in the tech stack either “extremely” or “very important” — and are counting on automation and generative AI to help them overcome these challenges.
Where does the DAM go next?
The evidence is overwhelming that future DAMs will ever increasingly harness practical applications of AI to drive automation, reduce time and costs and maximize ROI of content. More AI integration, automation and interoperability with a growing ecosystem of digital tools means that benefits will extend well beyond marketing and studio teams, throughout organizations.
Future DAMs will need to adapt to new types of content and channels that evolve with the visual economy. In the near term, for example, they will need to provide scalable solutions for real-time asset delivery and personalization across new AR and VR use cases.
What won’t change is the importance of DAM’s power and capabilities in that ‘last mile’ for driving global efficiency, productivity and great customer experiences.
Cloudinary is the image and video platform that enables the world’s most engaging brands to deliver transformative visual experiences at global scale. More than two million users and 10,000 customers, including Adidas, Bleacher Report, Etsy, Fiverr, Grubhub, Minted, Paul Smith and Rivian, rely on Cloudinary to bring their campaigns, apps and sites to life. Backed by an ecosystem of more than 300 partners, integrations and plug-ins, Cloudinary’s AI-powered image and video solutions offer a single source of truth for brands to manage, transform, optimize, and deliver engaging visual content to anyone, anywhere. As a result, brands across all industries are seeing up to a 203% ROI with benefits including faster time to market, higher user satisfaction and increased engagement and conversions. For more information, visit www.cloudinary.com.
