DAM as a career

the path may be winding, but it will never be dull

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

If you talk to anyone who works in digital asset management, the answer to “How did I get here?” will be as different as the person you ask. I have been lucky enough to hire many people into DAM roles and their background varied from photographers, art students, marketing majors, IT professionals, and many more directions.

As for myself, I may have one of the more linear paths. I always loved art - taking classes through high school at colleges in Boston - but had a more practical side too. So when it came to applying to universities, I looked for those that included more jobs-focussed skills, and lucked into Syracuse as a filmmaking/art major. We learned how to paint, draw, design, sculpt, photograph and write along with our concentration, plus academic courses like art history and electives across the university. The mix of studio - 5 hour classes where we physically created - and classrooms where we read, wrote and discussed with classmates of varying specialties - was a good primer for actually working in the field after graduation. Once we moved into spending more time within filmmaking, I loved the collaboration of working on each other’s (mostly terribly overwrought and cringy) films, from writing, storyboarding and casting through to production, developing and editing.

I joined others in my class to move to New York after graduation. A few went straight to Los Angeles, but I wanted to check out the indie film and documentary scene in NYC for a year or so. Well, a year turned into…now, so I’d say I liked it.

While interning at a well-known independent film company, I needed to earn rent money. I started working as a stock video researcher. So much video and photo work was moving to TV and digital and I found myself moving that way too. Luckily I also found plenty of roles helping launch the photo direction for websites, then photo editing and producing photo shoots. As I grew in seniority, that meant helping other creative people develop, then developing processes to help us both.

Before I knew what it was called, I was working as a digital asset manager. Building naming conventions, folder structure and collaboration methods before we had the platforms to do it at scale. I really enjoyed figuring out how to classify the chaos, reduce our design team’s time spent searching for assets and our project’s time to market. I continued to shoot photography on the side, but as my career grew, I moved that into "the “things I like to do even if not paid” column of my life.

Not coincidently, the rest of my life grew along with my career. I married, had a couple of children and many more home & job moves. I have been full-time in-house salaried, freelance and project-based, hybrid in-office and remote. There was that blip of a pandemic when my whole 100+ person department was cut & I was lucky enough to find a great new role sight-unseen before our time was up.

Along the way, I have grown in tech knowledge as well as skills in communication, collaboration and people management. Before this sounds like a cover letter, my path also taught me some things I don’t want to repeat. People I shouldn’t have trusted, chances I should have risked, and definitely trips I should have taken. But the positive always won - I believe digital asset management has been as good a path as any through the changing landscape of the technology, marketing, digital, photography, creative, operations and editorial teams I have joined. It is a path unique in how it touches each of those teams, and the ability to communicate well across these sharply-defined silos has served me better than the (still important!) technical DAM skills I’ve picked up along the way.

Would I recommend DAM for new hires? Yes, but it depends. What I have found is that this can be a very heads-down, hyper-focused work if you allow that. If you don’t learn from your colleagues, you will only solve the problems you know about, resulting in a tool that causes more frustration than engagement. The skills that helped you early in your career - attention to detail and rule-following especially - will hold you back professionally.

Do you always want to be right or do you want to be happy?

• H. Jackson Brown Jr

A hard quote to hear, but I believe it. DAM is really a service, no matter how you rank in your team. You may devise the perfect workflow, but if no one follows it, it’s not perfect. If the asset strategy you created can’t scale when your company acquires a competitor, be flexible and humble enough to ask questions until you can make it work. If you find someone who passionately disagrees with you on a decision, understand this is a gift - most people will be silently resentful or passively pleased with the changes you are making. And most importantly, recognize that the things that make DAM so vital also make it scary to your coworkers. Will AI replace a designer? Does adding tags at the source at a photo shoot mean we need to move a day from post- to pre-production? Who should decide on file structure when photos/date/location is as valid as photos/location/date? With each decision needed to have a successful DAM, a conversation has to take place. The best part is that these skills can transfer to creative director, content lead, operations chief, department head, IT manager, creative services director and many more roles since you have experience with change, budgets, assets, and most importantly how these affect people on your teams. If you enjoy that type of collaboration - along with the hyper-organized, nerdy part of your day - digital asset management might be the right career path for you.