DAM: Why It’s the Best Way to Create Content from Start to Finish
globaleditAbout
Since 2003, Globaledit has been a trusted partner to major brands in retail, fashion, health & beauty, entertainment and ecommerce. Our creative asset management platform creates efficiencies in photo production workflows and processes, making it an essential collaboration platform for Globaleditcreatives.is
part of the CoCreativ. CoCreativ is a Creative Content Agency Studio Network dedicated to providing scalable creative solutions through Content Agency strategy, creativity, and execution. We serve the industry, along with their brands and agencies, by delivering end-toend Content Agency solutions to create and run programs at scale, more efficiently.
Table of Contents WhyIntroductionDoYou Need DAM for Content Creation? Production Problems Solved with DAM Storing Your Digital Assets Collaborating and Communicating with ManagingStakeholdersApprovals for Assets Distributing Assets to Partners How Do You Delay the Digital Doomsday? Ideation & Discovery – Storyboarding and IntakeBriefing&Storage – Single Source of Truth Seamless Creation – Collaborate and FastCommunicateApprovals & Version Control – Eliminate AutomatedRedundancyDistribution – Share Right Assets with Right People Scale for the Future 1066457789911111213
Introduction
The answer lies in a Digital Asset Management solution (DAM) that can help you scale towards the future with your content. The rapid changes in consumer expectations and technological advancements are redefining the digital supply chain. Creating and distributing engaging and on-brand content for an ever-evolving market is more complex than ever. Rich media assets like video are not only dominating marketing campaigns but are also morphing into next-gen content formats. With concepts like the ‘metaverse’ catching traction and retail and software giants leading taking the plunge, these developments are straining content production pipelines to a breaking point. Left unchecked, organizations are heading towards a digital doomsday wherein current systems and processes will be unable to manage the content demands of the modern digital economy.
4
Why Do You Need DAM for Content Creation?
Today’s organizations have to not only shoot top-notch content but manage and curate it for multiple channels and consumer segments. The margin for error is simply non-existent. Content creation workflows are complex processes involving multiple stakeholders and a lot of moving parts. Successfully managing them from start to finish requires a solution wellequipped to deal with the challenges of both today as well as tomorrow. That’s where DAMs come in—helping you store, access, edit, and distribute
5
Althoughcontent. traditional DAMs offer some useful benefits like a central asset repository and search capabilities, they’re still far too rudimentary for the demands of the modern creative workflow such as rising content needs, complex production processes, parallel projects, and market demands.
6
Production Problems Solved with DAM
Delivering content that’s effective, fresh, and always on-brand is no small feat. Too often, companies find themselves struggling to keep their head above water; dealing with parallel workstreams and multiple vendors, agencies, and freelancers. From ideation and discovery to production and distribution, there are innumerable instances for things to fall through the cracks. Without a capable DAM, creatives can easily end up frustrated—searching for the right assets and trying to work with multiple departments. Let’s look at various challenges you could face during each stage of content creation. Storing Your Digital Assets It might come as a surprise but even basic requirements like having unlimited storage space and fast access to heavy images and videos are sometimes asking too much. With the explosion of social media and the penetration of quality content, your content storage is bound to get filled up with high-resolution rich media assets. Without a DAM that’s built from scratch to offer fast and secure cloud storage ensuring your creatives always have relevant assets at their fingertips, your teams are bound to run into roadblocks. Manual uploading of assets, enforcing taxonomy rules, and refining search capability are only some of the prominent challenges you will encounter in absence of an automated and well-structured solution.
Production Problems Solved with DAM
Collaborating and Communicating with Stakeholders
7
Getting retouched assets approved by key stakeholders is one of the most time-consuming stages of the content creation process. Some assets take as much as 2 to 3 rounds of back-andforth reviews before being approved for the next Creativesstages.haveto not only keep track of all versions of an asset under editing but also ensure the right assets are shared with the right people for review. Manually managing this entire process takes away valuable time from your team which could have been used to complete projects faster and free up bandwidth for taking on additional projects.
The real magic happens when your team of extraordinary creatives transforms your captured assets into full-fledged campaigns ready to be launched to the market. Collaborating with various departments across a myriad of tools and software poses fundamental challenges to the entire production workflow. Creatives are known to spend 16 hours a week on routine tasks like searching for the right assets or responding to never-ending emails. In the absence of a well-integrated production platform that brings together editing and communication tools, your projects are prone to duplication of efforts and delayed timelines.
Managing Approvals for Assets
Maintaining version control needs a structured approach from start to finish to make sure only the correct assets are shipped out.
8
Distributing Assets to Partners Distributing finished assets and projects to agencies, vendors, retailers, and your own website and social media accounts is a crucial step in the content marketing process. With numerous channels and stakeholders to manage, while also maintaining brand consistency across all content being shared out, it can get confusing quickly. It’s downright impossible to ensure 100% brand compliance – expecting everyone who has access to your brand collateral to always use the correct shade of your logo’s background color or the correct resolution of the tweet banner is hard when version control is not a thing.
Production Problems Solved with DAM
9
How Do You Delay the Digital Doomsday?
Many organizations still don’t find enough reasons to onboard a DAM solution that’s tailored to their unique workflows and challenges. With content volumes and frequency not showing any signs of decreasing anytime soon, continuing without a DAM will lead to an inevitable crisis, with severe disruptions to content pipelines. The modern DAM needs to not only streamline creative workflows and take cognizance of dynamic developments in the industry but also find a way to allow any number of stakeholders, remote and otherwise, to work together. There are enormous benefits to be had by investing in a suite of integrated and highly intuitive tools that work in sync to help you stay on top of all your workstreams and be prepared for any challenge.
Ideation & Discovery – Storyboarding and Briefing
From the moment a project hits your workflow, your team needs to get their creative juices flowing. Ideating the direction the project should take and creating briefs for the downstream team members is rarely a smooth process. But it can be. A robust DAM that is laser-focused on making the entire creative workflow as seamless as possible, you will find yourself running from pillar to post trying to standardize your briefs and finding past collaterals. Modern DAMs harness reusable templates and automated briefing processes to make life easier for all parties involved in the ideation stage.
10
How Do You Delay the Digital Doomsday?
Intake & Storage – Single Source of Truth In this day and age, managing upload and discovery of digital assets manually is a sin. Not only do you expose yourself to the challenges discussed above, but you also give out a message that you don’t take your business seriously enough to invest in a technological solution that can rapidly increase productivity and ROI for your Withorganization.toolslike globaledit Sync, you can enable real-time, automated ingestion of your rich media assets to the cloud and also ensure they remain secure and always available, irrespective of your location and device. For fast and accurate asset discovery, Metadata can automate bulk metadata tagging of assets, so your creatives instantly find what they’re searching for, eliminating the inadvertent creation of duplicate assets. They can easily locate assets based on date, location, type, etc. using natural language search instead of being crippled by strict search rules.
11
How Do You Delay the Digital Doomsday?
Fast Approvals & Version Control –Eliminate Redundancy
Seamless Creation – Collaborate and Communicate Managing more than one production platform should be an instant red flag, but sadly that’s exactly what many organizations are still putting up with.
Freeing up precious bandwidth for your creatives needs to be a priority if you want to increase your bottom line. Highly productive teams not only bring in more business but also take pride and joy in their work, contributing to overall positive employee morale. Getting version control right goes a long way in eliminating the risk of using outdated or unapproved assets. Versioning allows you to have multiple versions of the same asset, each with its own edits and retouches easily visible in a side-by-side format, while always ensuring creatives have an easy view of the latest version of any asset.
All your favorite content editing tools need to be well-integrated and allow seamless exchange of data for the production process to be rewarding and well, productive. With globaledit’s DAM, all your production tools are integrated on a single platform, and your DAM becomes a content hub and is no longer crippled due to siloed workflows. And with tools like Markup Editor, your team can leave outdated editing and communication platforms behind, leveraging granular collaboration directly on your assets.
Tools like Collections allow you to share curated asset folders with the desired internal audience and Pinpoints lets you share finished projects with agencies, vendors, and retailers.
12
Tools like Approvals give reviewers unprecedented control when comparing multiple versions of an asset and allow instant ‘Approve’ or ‘Kill’ functionality, reducing approval cycles and project completion times. Automated Distribution – Share Right Assets with Right People Automation plays a huge role in greasing the wheels of content creation. When your teams aren’t bogged down by manually curating assets every time they need to go out to a different digital channel or outside stakeholder, they can focus on putting out the best work faster. And the rest is taken care of by your highly intelligent DAM solution.
How Do You Delay the Digital Doomsday?
13
With steady growth come additional challenges requiring a clear vision and excellent execution for your organization’s content and marketing strategy. A DAM that is built to scale with your growth offers you to unlock your organization’s hidden potential. Customers value their brand experiences like never before and the customer touchpoints for your organization are not only increasing in number but also getting highly dynamic in nature. A DAM that is able to provide your team the tools to deliver highly engaging experiences through seamless collaboration with all stakeholders is the need of the hour. Request a demo with us today to discover what our suite of solutions can do for your content management needs.
Scale for the Future
