Your company’s digital assets are a crucial part of your business. Each one costs time and money to make, and is a hard-working part of your brand identity. And digital assets can have a long lifespan. They can be used and reused any number of times on packages, labels, advertising, point of purchase, free standing inserts, in digital marketing, on customer’s websites: you name it. The problem is, they tend to pile up quickly, and when they’re not cataloged, they frequently get misplaced or lost over the course of time.
It’s like an Amazon warehouse manager just deciding to place products on the shelves in completely random order. Is anyone going to remember where they put the box of Kindle Paperwhites when somebody orders one? Probably not. Is this the way somebody should manage a warehouse? No. So why is it okay for you to let your digital assets wander off into the far reaches of your company? It isn’t, because when you let that happen finding these valuable pieces of your company’s collateral suddenly gets complicated, and those complications lead to needless costs.
Would you like an example?
Let’s take a look at how a typical company tends to get into a little bit of trouble when it comes to cataloging their digital assets, shall we? Let’s suppose your brand creates a logo lockup for a special breakfast cereal promotion. Your design agency creates the lockup, it gets placed on the box and the promotion is a resounding success. Everyone pats themselves on the back and goes onto other things.
Fast forward several months or years and your brand wants to use that asset again for a different campaign. All you have to do is track it down. Easy, right?
Maybe not.
Let’s say you’ve changed agencies since then and the project manager who worked on the packaging change was a contractor. She’s moved on to another company, and her laptop has been replaced. Or maybe it’s on a company server, but it takes you days to find it. In any case you’re looking at needlessly expensive scenarios. The first is that you simply can’t find the asset and you have to recreate it from scratch, costing you twice the amount of money in recreation costs for what is essentially the same asset, plus approval time. The second, let’s say you find that asset on a server, or on an employee’s hard drive, but it takes days. The time spent searching for that asset is also pretty costly. Then, if you take into account that you might spend time searching for an asset that is never found, you’re combining the cost of searching and recreation and suddenly the cost starts to hockey-stick.
Does this sound familiar?
For too many companies that aren’t working with a Digital Asset Management provider, this is the norm.
The solution to these headaches is a DAM that offers a centralized database that can catalog assets worldwide. With a centralized database a lot of would-be headaches, time and lost revenue virtually disappear into thin air. A mad scramble for an asset that’s AWOL can be replaced by a simple search that will yield immediate results. You can search via any number of parameters: file name, file type, term in the body copy of a file, ingredient on a package, what branch of the company it originated in, who worked on it, however you decide to configure your DAM.
A centralized database also supports brand consistency. That is, if you constantly have to recreate missing assets, they tend to change over time. Even minor changes over time can produce significant deviations from your standards over time, and your brand collateral shouldn’t be changing without an intentional decision for a redesign. To enable brand consistency, you must have version control, which allows you to know which assets are the most current. When you decide to update an asset, a DAM system can automatically record every version you create, in case you want to go back and release an older one. A good DAM system can serve up to you the differences between the versions.
Finally, like a jetsetter with TSA pre-check, a DAM helps you fly right past the time-sucking pitfalls that are all too common for many companies. This brings up a word that we all know and love, and that word is: efficiency. A DAM delivers efficiency. How so? Well, if you want to locate an asset, it can be done with a simple search. You can search by file names, file types, like .pdf, .jpg, UPC code, GTIN, or by photographer, talent, brand, etc. Depending on what you’re searching for, the searching of files can be very dynamic, based on the parameters you set forth for labeling files. You won’t need to put time and money aside to recreate missing files because you know exactly where they are. This also makes it easier to re-use assets by searching for when they were last used, what version they are and who approved them, which can eliminate a lengthy secondary approval process and get your products to market faster.
With a DAM, you’ll have total control over who downloads your assets and when. Remember the scenario from earlier about the agency who actually is holding on to a copy of your assets? You won’t have to go through a middle-man when you use a DAM. That’s because you can assign specific people to view certain files and you’ll even be able to set the time period that they’ll be able to see it in. This protects proprietary collateral or assets that you might not want to share with a large number of people. People will only see the assets in your database that you decide that you want them to see.
BLUE Software, the leading SaaS provider for Brand Lifecycle Management software, for Consumer Products, Life Sciences and Retail companies offers offers DAM software that is will protect and organize your digital assets. With the ability to integrate DAM with dynamic workflow and Vproof online proofing, BLUE is able to offer a closed-loop, high quality process.
Find out how Brand Lifecycle Management combines apps to support your DAM and help you get more value from your assets.
