When it comes to digital asset management (DAM) systems, it’s interesting to see how every media library is truly different. DAM categorization and taxonomy create a media library that is tailored to its users, where everyone speaks the same language. Its categories enable organizations to easily organize a library to meet their unique business needs, making assets easily discoverable with advanced search functions and stopping the growth of costly duplicates. In addition to these benefits, DAM categories help increase ROI on the assets that took companies valuable time and money to create. But that’s not all—MediaValet has a lot more to offer when it comes to categories.

In this post, we’ll cover these three highly beneficial features of our categories:

1. They’re unlimited,
2. They’re customizable, and
3. They automatically turn into keywords.

If you’re curious to learn more about MediaValet categories and what exactly they add to the value of our DAM, let’s take a closer look at these features below.

1. Unlimited Categories

Included in a MediaValet subscription, there is no limit on the number of categories that you can create when organizing your media library.

Every library needs structure in order for its users to properly understand how to use it. Unlimited categories allow you to structure your library in a way that makes sense for your organization, so everyone can seamlessly enter and exit with the assets they need and are approved to use. This feature allows you to:

• Increase organization,
• Streamline productivity, and
• Improve scalability.

With unlimited categories, your library becomes thoroughly organized, and tagging for specific assets becomes much easier.

2. Customizable Categories

Customizable categories ensure you can manipulate and organize your categories in a way that is specific to your team’s needs. You won’t be hindered by having to use a certain set of categories designed by someone else.

This is a huge advantage for teams to be able to build out their DAM so that it’s perfectly aligned with their workflow. Essentially, you are customizing your categories in a way that makes sense for your team and how they’ll use the DAM. This feature allows you to:

• Improve your workflow,
• Increase DAM adoption and usage, and
• Implement feedback from the team.

With customizable categories, you can bucket any categories together as you see fit, with input from those who are using the DAM.

3. Automatic Keywording

When a category is created in MediaValet it automatically becomes a keyword, and every asset that is placed in the category will have that keyword attached. Keywords are used for searching for assets, and automatic category keywording helps you to find what you’re looking for with ease.

There is less manual work for the team. Without this feature, someone would be responsible for adding that keyword to each asset. This feature allows you to:

• Avoid manual keywording,
• Eliminate inaccuracies in the DAM, and
• Improve ease of use for the team.

With automatic category keywording, you’re able to save time and eliminate inaccuracies—which improves search functionality and makes the DAM that much easier to use.

Other Category Features

The expanded functionalities of MediaValet categories don’t stop here. There are many more capabilities that keep your assets safe and easy to use—ensuring the whole team remains on-brand:

• Watermarks: MediaValet allows you to add watermarks for specific categories. One of the simplest ways to safeguard your assets is with a watermark—a visual cue that the asset is out of commission. Watermarks keep your assets safe from misuse, screenshots, and web scraping.
• Role-Specific Access: There will always be some assets hanging around that are not really meant to be discovered by everyday users of your DAM. With custom access permissions, you can keep those assets out of sight while still being able to store past campaigns, photoshoots, and videos in MediaValet.
• Partner Enablement: The MediaValet DAM admin can create a category that is exclusively for external partners to access brand logos, product imagery, spec sheets, and brand fonts. Exclusive and specific categories help to ensure that your partner agencies only have access to the relevant assets required for the product catalog.

The category features available with MediaValet help enable your team to customize your DAM in a way that works best for your organization. Keep your assets safe and in the right hands, allowing easy access for those who need to work with your assets.

Make Your Digital Asset Library Work with You

Your media library should reflect your organization’s digital assets and how you work with them. The features offered with MediaValet’s categories allow you to organize them in a way that makes sense for your team while still providing plenty of breathing room. To learn more about MediaValet categories, and everything else we have to offer, check out our product page, here.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

Partnerships are a major part of our growth strategy here at MediaValet. In order for our customers to maximize their digital asset management (DAM) adoption, we count on our partners to help us to optimize their workflow across technologies, all over the globe.

Our partner, FFW, is a global digital agency focused on ensuring their clients’ success grows with the speed of digital innovation. With experts across 17 time zones, FFW closely collaborates with world-leading organizations to build integrated and tailored digital solutions that deliver immediate impact, while overcoming the challenges of achieving digital scale.

We spoke with Ricardo Osuna, the Senior Director of Partnerships at FFW about the benefits they can bring to MediaValet customers.

First off, can you tell us a little bit about FFW?

“FFW is a global digital agency that partners with the world’s leading organizations to effectively scale their digital experience platforms. Our interdisciplinary, partnership-driven approach to experience design, technology implementation, and data optimization empower our clients to conquer complex challenges and nail aggressive goals. Over 90% of our engagements are with those who’ve already worked with us because we’re committed to making sure that every step of every engagement exceeds expectations. FFW is a global team of over 625 digital experts seamlessly collaborating across 17 time zones, with North American headquarters in the New York metro area.”

Tell us about your background and your role at FFW?

“My name is Ricardo Osuna and I’m the Director of Partnerships at FFW. I’ve been working in web, digital content production, and marketing for over 10 years. Throughout that time, I’ve become increasingly more fascinated with the connection between technology, people, and the collaboration that happens at that intersection. My role at FFW means that I get to spend my days building effective connections between FFW, our technology partners, our clients, and a practice to support that collaboration.”

Can you give us an overview of the types of organizations you typically work with?

“We work with organizations that need a scalable digital experience platform to sustain or grow their business. This spans across a variety of industries; from a major US broadcaster that needs their digital experiences to scale for major events that drive peak traffic, to a Fortune 500 tech company that needed a digital platform to scale across over a dozen distinct business units and their unique audiences.”

When people come to you, what are the top challenges they’re usually trying to solve?

“Many of our clients are facing challenges that come with digital scale. Scale is a complex problem, with a variety of dimensions to it. How can you make sure that every single person that engages with your brand digitally has an equally great experience? How do you balance consistency with flexibility, especially across many brands and touchpoints? What has to be done to ensure that digital experiences—and the platforms that power them—scale into the future?”

Can you walk us through your typical process with a customer?

“Our entire process is based on an approach that values partnership, collaboration, and above all else, our clients’ success. We take a holistic approach. We listen, take the time to understand our client’s organization and the specific challenges they are facing when it comes to their digital experiences, and how it affects their ability to achieve success. We bring together our expertise across experience in design, technology, and data to recommend and implement, solutions that will set them up for success. Both for success today and for success tomorrow. We look ahead with our clients and create a roadmap that allows them to scale into the future.”

Why did you see value in partnering with MediaValet?

“We saw close alignment between our approach to the work we do and value for our clients in MediaValet. More specifically, we were impressed with MediaValet’s ability to integrate with other systems, as well as how MediaValet has optimized your pricing structure for driving wide adoption across an organization.”

What benefit can FFW bring to MediaValet customers?

“We help MediaValet customers look at the entirety of their digital experience, the platforms that are powering it, and work with them to ensure that those experiences and platforms will scale. The key to doing this is building a strong digital experience practice, which we help organizations to do by providing services across experience design, technology, and data. Ultimately our goal is to empower organizations to drive higher returns from digital investments by building integrated digital practices and maintaining long-term sustainable success through deeper client applied understanding and effective utilization of their digital platform.”

What are 3 things organizations can do today to improve their overall digital experience?

1. “Listen to your customers. It is important to undertake initiatives like user research to understand what is delighting your customers when they interact with your brand through digital channels, as well as what’s frustrating them.
2. Take stock of the current state of how you manage your digital experiences. What is working? And what’s not working? In addition to your customers, be sure to consult other stakeholders internally at your organization. An effective digital practice requires buy-in and collaboration from across departments.
3. Make a plan for the future. Having a roadmap to guide your initiatives is key to being effective in driving continuous optimization of your digital experience.”

What’s the biggest mistake you see customers make when approaching a digital transformation?

“One mistake that I’ve seen is launching into a “digital transformation” project without first defining exactly what that means to their organization, and what a successful transformation looks like. “Transformation” may be the buzzword that we all hear and use, but a lot of times organizations may find that success looks more like digital optimization than transformation. There are likely aspects of your digital experience and platform that work well – so it’s important to build your digital future on top of that strong foundation.“

To that point, do you have one piece of advice you’d share with MediaValet users looking to begin a digital transformation?

“Make sure to address the different aspects of digital scale in your initiative, both during planning and execution. At FFW, we think about digital scale as having three overarching dimensions that organizations need to be conscious of:

1. Scale across touchpoints: How do you power digital experiences across all the channels that matter to your customers?
2. Scale across an organization: How do you drive internal adoption of a technology stack?
3. Scale into the future: How do you ensure that the investment you make today scales with your business into the future?

There is no single “right” answer or solution to each of these big questions. The answers will always depend on specific business needs and context.”

Final question, where’s your dream vacation, and why?

“My favorite thing to do while traveling is to eat my way around a place I’ve never been before. I love learning about the culture and identity of a country or city through the food that the people there prepare and eat. Food is a living and constantly evolving expression of culture, which I absolutely love. And it’s delicious! A couple of the places currently at the top of my bucket list are Spain and Japan.”

Explore FFW and MediaValet

Is your organization looking to drive higher returns from your digital investments? Learn more about how FFW partners with MediaValet to effectively scale your digital experience, here.