Unlike a river, flowing in one direction, a DAM can serve as a hub in the middle of upstream content and downstream output, only to have new assets derived from the first asset added in upstream again. Unlike a real stream, that second asset can be more even more valuable if it retains the metadata from the source asset as well as adding its own. How do we avoid drowning and harness the power (uh oh, we are verging on DAM = dam territory) of this enhanced asset?
If your team is used to seeing the DAM as a separate system from a creative process not incorporating the DAM, it is a change. For example, I have had teams where the DAM is a library of finished work. If we wanted to make it a work-in-progress DAM, both the technology and the process would need to change. Since platform integration is constantly improving, systems set up only a couple of years ago might have made this change difficult to support. But now, more DAM vendors have seen that our teams bring value to the upstream (image creation, doc writing, libraries of logos & other outside partner content, templates, etc.) input into the DAM and output (traditionally CMS, but also social, print, brand portals and other ways of sharing assets) from it that they are supporting better integration into the full MarTech stack.
Yes, but what does this mean in real life and is it foolproof? Well, nothing is foolproof, but we can do our best. In real life, an example of the DAM as a hub would be in a creative studio. There you’ll have art buyers purchasing stock images and motion assets from agencies, partner logos to keep current, InDesign templates for repeated graphics, and pdfs of finished work to organize for the inevitable awards submissions down the road, plus website images, documents, and video. The site assets are the most straightforward - the creative team creates them, saves them using your naming convention, uploads them to the DAM, tags and assigns other enriching metadata as needed, and publishes them to appear on your website. One direction, one flow, one stream.
When it comes to source assets like logos and stock images, the situation becomes more complex. Take a partner logo - the design team will review it and rename it while including anything the partner specifies is needed (for example, the full company name or tagline), then upload it to the DAM, and enrich it with tags for easy searchability then publish to use on the site’s partner page. But unlike a site asset, this is a source asset that will have a broader application.
With source assets, part of their value is in reuse in other designs and outputs. It will be included in collections of other partner logos, shared via a brand portal to external agencies, inserted in documents, shared via social platforms, and possibly even embedded in videos. What if the company updates its logo and you want to make sure any documents, images, or videos that contain the logo can be found and updated? Including the references where the logo itself is published on the site is a start, and DAMs have included this in their properties to help us. But a logo is often used within an image or doc that might not include that reference.
In that case, ensuring that your teams understand the value of adding the source image information as a reference in subsequent designs can save you a lot of headaches later. If you have created a tag structure that includes the full list of logos, categorized by industry, campaign, or region, people can apply that tag to any assets containing the logo when they upload them into the DAM. With AI, we will see more image recognition of logos that can help catch those not tagged or will be able to apply the tags similar to how AI currently can “describe” images.
What are some other uses for enriched, tagged, and searchable assets like this mythic logo? How about when a team that creates several language versions of social meta images containing your DAM assets? That output stream is extremely valuable and time-saving and can stretch your budget if it means reusing paid imagery or increasing the ROI on photoshoot images by extending their reach, but only if you can find the approved asset.
By thinking through the upstream and downstream applications of our assets in the DAM, we have already enriched their value. Then by using the ever-increasing tools at our disposal to enrich the assets each time they are used, by adding the subsequent campaign, region, industry, or other tag classes along with adding the new images made using the source asset, that 1 logo file has a huge impact. And your DAM has changed from an asset repository to a hub connecting several teams’ streams.
If a logo is updated, it’s not a simple 1-to-1 switch. Now all assets that include that logo need to be updated. This might risk crossing the streams (and you can’t say Ghostbusters didn’t warn us) so communication now becomes much more important. Crossed streams can mean a social post goes out with the new logo but the link viewers click brings them to a site page still using the outdated one. Less than professional, but quickly fixable. But what if an expensive print piece is in review at the printer and no one has checked the linked file to make sure the latest logos are being used? If those linked files are stored in your DAM, the piece would be updated, saving time and money.
A better outcome? You have prepared by making the DAM the one source of truth, the hub, the keeper of the one true logo. You can search for the assets created that included that logo, alert the teams who added those assets to the DAM to the change, and search to check that all affected assets are sporting the new logo. Happy partner; happy team; one fewer exploding Stay Puft Marshmallow Man or other headache thanks to your DAM.