The proliferation of marketing channels and globalization remain key challenges for every organization. Digital content continues to expand at exponential rates as new marketing channels surface. CMOs and marketing executives are looking for ways to deliver more than simple asset repositories with content management tools.
Recent research from the Aberdeen Group — “Marketing Digital Asset Management: Capturing, Storing, and Retrieving Digital Media to Deliver Strategic Value” — explores the strategic value of digital asset management solutions for marketing departments.
The study revealed a number of surprising results about how top performing organizations (Best-in-Class) leverage digital asset management tools in marketing. The research also explores top features and benefits Best-in-Class organizations receive from asset management tools.
What Is the Difference Between Digital Asset Solutions?
- Marketing resource management (MRM). This term is generally used by marketing automation providers. MRM technologies typically provide document storage and retrieval as a subset of a larger group of features supporting marketing operations activities (event management, campaign management, etc.)
- Digital asset management (DAM). Provides functionality to manage, store and retrieve structured and unstructured data. DAM is often used by marketing for digital archiving, document management and workflow (for collateral, text, photos, rich media, video, audio and more). Many DAM solutions integrate with creative tools to support the creative process.
- Marketing asset management (MAM). Provides DAM functionality that is exclusively focused on marketing applications and frequently integrates with collateral customization and marketing automation technologies to provide seamless asset management through content distribution workflow.
- Enterprise content management (ECM). Provides management for all unstructured information wherever that information exists in an organization. Suite providers of ECM help manage content for multiple business functions (sales, operations, finance, marketing, legal, etc.) Common functionalities include, DAM, Web content management, document management, workflow and business processes, and records management. Subsets of ECM may be used to support the marketing or advertising department.
- Web content management (WCM). These solutions typically provide functionality for managing and optimizing marketing content online. Web content management is usually a separate offering from DAM; however, many organizations leverage DAM or ECM as part of their overall Web content management strategy.
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March 17, 2008 at 1:52 pm
These systems have been relatively expensive to purchase and often require significant investments to integrate and implement. With the emergence of online software services (SaaS) digital asset management, collaboration and work flow software is being offered on a monthly subscription basis to small groups and even individuals. Looking to the future one can expect SaaS services to be mashed together with CRM and ERP services to create powerful low cost capabilities. Examples of these services are BpDAM, OmniDrive, BaseCamp, all dot coms.
March 17, 2008 at 2:34 pm
And on the eneterpise level Widens Appliance has been integrated with Salesforce CRM, Exact Target email, and Compendium Blogware, all integrated through Web Services.
When you take into account what Longjump and Rollbase are doing with DaaS and PaaS, it all looks very interesting.
March 17, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Yes, I agree that traditional DAM software is expensive and hard to implement, and that SaaS model is better delivery method. That is why Getty Images developed a SaaS solution for our customers.
However, software functionality alone is not a complete solution. Successful DAM requires thorough knowledge and expertise in implementing the right metadata schema, file formats, and staff to classify assets correctly so that marketing/production can control access and so that users can find the files they need. This is where a SaaS provider with many years of experience and in-house production teams can be a better option than emerging dotcoms.
March 17, 2008 at 6:45 pm
We are looking at different levels of the playing field here, once again the solutions will be Enterprise, SaaS, PaaS, DaaS, open source and Creative Commons, all have their markets.
Yet again it boils down to levels of knowledge, security and robustness. And hence the reason we have some healthy competition and innovation within this core part of the digital business.