Ahh….Baseball.

The crisp smell of freshly cut grass, the loud roar of the crowd, and the satisfying crack of the bat making contact with the ball. There’s nowhere in the world you’d rather be than this stadium…

But….wait a second! Snap out of it! You’re not watching the baseball game. You’re watching your computer screen – waiting for your graphics department to send you the brochure file you needed 40 minutes ago. If you just had access to the content you needed, you wouldn’t be in this mess!

It’s time to stop daydreaming and start taking action! You need a digital asset management system.

Implementing new technology is a lot like being a coach at a sports game – you need to align your key players, have a game plan, allocate your energy and resources, and, of course, keep your eyes on the prize. Here are 8 game-changing insights (disguised as sports analogies) that can turn your DAM implementation into a home run.

1. Don’t Get Hit Below the Belt

The best way to start a DAM project is to get to it before it becomes an urgent priority. If you start looking into a system when you’re already drowning in assets, you tend to rush the research process and ultimately get stuck with a system that might solve your immediate issue, but won’t support you in the long run. To make sure you don’t take a surprise blow below the belt, keep an eye out for these early warning signs:

• Too many hours spent finding assets
• Too many user requests for images, photo cropping and file size updating
• Too many bounce notifications from trying to send files over email

These are just a few examples of signs to look for (more here), but they’re key in indicating that you probably need a DAM system.

2. Have Someone in Your Corner

Digital asset management is a team sport, not a solo performance. One of the main factors that leads to a successful DAM implementation is having multiple stakeholders on board. Each use case is different, but we commonly see CMOs, CIOs, VPs of Sales and Creative Directors as heavy influencers on a DAM project.

Show each stakeholder what’s in it for them and get them excited about the benefits a DAM system would bring. There’s strength in numbers, and your manager is much more likely to understand the urgency when it’s coming from a team, rather than an individual.

3. Don’t Pull a Blindside

Building on the last point, when there are stakeholders that you know will be impacted by a DAM implementation, it’s important to get them on-board as early as possible. No one likes to feel blindsided, and getting everyone on board earlier on in the project will help you find the best vendor and also improve buy-in from important teams in the company.

In particular, if your IT department is a key decision-maker for tech purchases, make sure they understand your intentions and your pain points. The last thing you want is to get a contract through the door, only to have IT point out that a critical component is missing from your selected vendor.

Be strategic about getting your key players on board early to help you push your project forward.

4. There’s No “I” in Team

It’s common for a DAM project to start with one department feeling asset pains and making it a priority, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the project has to stay within that silo. In many cases, when the discussion is opened up to other departments, you’ll find that they’re feeling similar pains, or they have another way that they could benefit from a DAM.

To get the maximum benefits from a DAM system, see if you can get other departments involved. Not only can you find new use cases, you can also potentially find one or more departments to share the cost with.

5. Keep Your Eye on the Ball

From discovery calls to demos, all with multiple vendors, finding a DAM can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. It’s easy to get impatient and decide to bench the project for a time that’s more convenient. Here’s a secret – there’s never going to be a perfect time to take on a new system and the longer you wait, the more desperate you’ll become to pick a system quickly (see Point 1).

Once you get your team’s buy-in on the DAM project, develop a project plan with key milestones and specific timelines, and keep everyone accountable to meet them. This is especially important if you have an upcoming deadline attached to a DAM, like a website re-brand launch or an international expansion.

Working through a sequence of steps helps to reduce the complexity of the project, and complete it on time and on budget.

6. You Have the Home Advantage

As you learn about various DAM systems, it’s hard not to get distracted by the different bells and whistles that each vendor has to offer and to stay focused on what you truly need. It’s important to remember throughout your vendor selection process that you’re the one with the home advantage and the only one that truly knows your actual pain points.

Find a vendor that will take time to understand your challenges, and tailor the process to your unique needs, rather than knock you out with a multitude of features and add-ons.

7. Go for the Hat Trick

As you learn more about each different vendor, it can be hard to differentiate between them, and understand each vendor’s unique selling propositions. While it is important to make sure that your system resolves your unique challenges, make sure you evaluate each vendor with these three points in mind:

• Usability: How user-friendly and functional is the system? How do the vendor’s integrations align with my business needs? Where and how can I access my assets?
• Security: How safe are my assets in the system? What backup and emergency protocols are in place? Do they meet the necessary compliance regulations?
• Scalability: Can the system handle an increase in assets or users? How will pricing be affected by these changes?

At the most basic level, you need a DAM that handles all three of these factors, but after that, it’s about deciding what’s most important to you. There’s no right or wrong here – just different priorities for different use-cases. There are also other considerations to take into place, such as support, price and integrations.

8. Run It for a Touchdown

While your digital asset management implementation needs a solid, MVP quarterback to take the project across the goal line, the benefits of the system are felt by the rest of your team and even your entire organization. Your marketing team’s productivity will increase, your graphics team will be able to focus more on creative work, and your resource updates will be so much easier to manage. You will know you’ve made a real difference for your team and set them up for success in the future.

In the marketing world, your brand is gold. It sets you apart from your competition and encompasses everything you promise to your current and future customers.

Creating a brand portal with your logos, brand guidelines, approved media and fonts is a common best practice of implementing a DAM. But, what often gets overlooked is making sure that the digital asset management system itself is properly branded.

But don’t worry! Getting your DAM to feel like home doesn’t need to involve any new graphics or extensive HTML coding. Here’s how to brand your DAM system with 4 quick and easy customizations.

• Include Your Company Logo
• Customize Your Highlight Color
• Register a Custom URL
• Name Your DAM System

Include Your Company Logo

Your logo is at the heart of your brand, so it only makes sense to make sure it’s present in your digital asset management system. In MediaValet, your logo is displayed on the login page and in the upper-right corner of the library itself.

While we suggest keeping your logo consistent between these two sections, both of these areas are ultimately yours to play with and make your own. For the best results, we recommend using a landscape version of your logo in a high-resolution PNG format.

Customize Your Highlight Color

Color is tightly aligned with the recognition of and connection to your brand. Another way to brand your DAM is to customize your system’s highlight color. Typically, customers will select a color that’s present in or complimentary to their logo. This color is visible on hyperlinks and when hovering over clickable objects (such as search filters).

To update your highlight color, select a hex color that best represents your brand and send a message to your customer success rep to let them know you want to update it. They’ll take care of the rest!

Register a Custom URL

Nothing feels clunkier than sending a URL link to one of your partners that has no connection to your company (such as a DropBox link). With a digital asset management system, it’s possible to create a custom domain name to match your brand. Usually, companies pick a URL based on their DAM’s name (but we’ll get to that next).

To get your new custom URL, purchase the domain name from your chosen web development site and MediaValet will build your DAM onto that page.

Name Your DAM System

Much like buying a car or boat, a DAM system doesn’t quite feel like yours until you’ve picked a name for it! Creating a name for your DAM makes the system seem more inviting and easily conveys the purpose of the new system, helping with user adoption. Some of our customers choose fun, quirky names, while others are right to the point. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

– [Company]’s Media Library
– [Company]’s Creative Toolkit
– The [Company] Brand Centre
– The [Company] Asset Manager

When you make the decision to adopt a DAM system for your marketing and brand assets, taking a few minutes to pick a name really helps it become a part of your brand! If you need some extra ideas, our customer success team is always happy to help you think of something!

Ready to Go!

And there you have it! All it takes is 4 quick and easy steps to successfully brand your DAM system!

If you haven’t made your mind up about what DAM system works for you, make sure you check out our scorecard to compare your favourite vendors here.

Bad Habits.

They’re impossible to avoid and seem to follow you everywhere. It starts as a one-time short-cut you had to do to meet a deadline, and the next thing you know you’re falling into that habit time and time again.

In digital asset management, the true and tested rule is “Garbage In – Garbage Out”. Skipping a few minor steps here and there might seem harmless, but when they develop into these 5 major bad habits, the result is detrimental to success of the entire DAM system.

In this post, we’re going to break-down these 5 “DAM-Destroyers” one-by-one, and show you how to snap out of your worst habits, and get back on track to smooth DAM sailing.

1. Putting Everything Into One Category

The Habit
You’re used to jumping straight to the search bar to find your assets. Typing in a few keywords and getting the results you need right away is quick and easy, so you decide that rather than having to manage keywords AND categories, it’s so much easier to just dump all of your asset into one category, and only rely on keywords. If you can find everything you need using the search bar, why even waste your time building a category structure, right?

Why It’s a Problem
While initially, you can probably get by using this strategy, in the long run as your team and company grows, it will be a problem. Using keywords is easy enough when you’re looking for a very specific asset (like a picture of a MAN with BROWN HAIR wearing a BLUE SHIRT), but if you’re browsing for a non-specific image (like one from your Christmas party last year), it can be much easier to browse a few related categories to find what you’re looking for.

Not using categories also reduces your flexibility with setting up access permissions. At some point, you might decide that only your marketing team should have access to the unedited set of your Christmas Party photos, but without having a separate category for the marketing team, this is nearly impossible. Having isolated categories for different teams and functions enables you to easily set it up the permissions you need.

How to Get Back on Track
Take the time to think through what you want to accomplish with your categories. There are so many options when it comes to a category structure, and taking the time to make one that works for you can make or break your DAM system. We suggest talking directly with your DAM customer success manager, and working with them to build out a category structure that meets your goals.

2. Using Non-Descriptive File Names

The Habit
After a big day out at an event, it’s time to get the photos off your camera and into your corporate DAM system. You drag-and-drop the photos directly from your camera file and start organizing them with the appropriate copyright, category and keyword details. Right before you hit the upload button you notice that all your photos from the day have the same generic “IMG_12345″ title. You know in your gut that this isn’t the best system, but you can’t be bothered to go through and re-name all the files, so you go ahead and upload them – with metadata, your employees will be able to find them anyways.

Why It’s a Problem
It’s true that with a good keyword and category system these assets will still be able to be found, but by taking out the title of an asset, you’re making the process much more difficult. On a small scale, titles can be no big deal – you can narrow down your search to 2-3 assets, do a quick browse to find the one you’re looking for and that’s all there is to it. But when you have thousands of assets in your system, even highly specific search terms can still bring up 20 or so results. This is where a descriptive title can be the difference between finding your asset in 5 seconds or 5 minutes.

Your asset title is also what’s used when it comes time for other employees to download the file onto their own system. So, while you may know that “IMG_12345″ came from Sports Day in December 2017, anyone who downloads that asset onto their computer has lost the ability to link that asset to a time and place.

How to Get Back on Track
Create a standard file naming format for each type of asset that typically comes into your DAM system. It can be as simple or complex as you need it to be – for example, “2017-SportsDay-1″ or “Man-In-Blue-Shirt-2017″. Set a strict approval process based on that file name format, and reject any assets for re-submission that don’t meet the title requirements.

3. Not Keywording Right Away

The Habit
You have a few new brochures to add to the library and your boss needs them ASAP! You’re about to start adding keywords, but you’re feeling the pressure of getting them out right away, so you decide you can add keywords later and skip right to uploading them.

Why It’s a Problem
The upload process is designed to help you speed up your asset keywording and processing, and by choosing to do this later, you’re eliminating your ability to bulk-add keywords. In the long run, you’re just making your job more tedious and difficult.

On top of that, there’s also just a large possibility that you’ll forget about the assets completely, leaving important brand material sitting in your DAM, unable to be found.

How to Get Back on Track
This is a bit of an obvious one, but seriously – just keyword your assets right away! You’ll thank us later. Also, schedule regular asset upload reviews. You’ll be able to notice any inconsistencies in uploaded data and know if any contributors need additional training or best practice reminders.

4. Uploading Files in Multiple Sizes & Formats

The Habit
You often get asked for files in different sizes and file types, so to cover all your bases, you upload your logos, documents, and photos into your corporate DAM in every format and size you could imagine needing. The last thing you want is your boss to come after you because they couldn’t find a logo in the right format for an investor deck they needed yesterday. Providing every format is a no brainer!

Why It’s a Problem
By adding multiple versions of the same asset, you’re cluttering your DAM system and leaving your co-workers confused about which asset they should be using. Down the line, it will also lead to more issues when it comes time to update an asset (such as a brochure), and you now have to make changes to 5 different assets, rather than just the one.

This way of operating also costs your company in the long run. As DAM systems typically have a pricing structure based on storage usage, each asset that you add is costing your company money, and by uploading multiple versions you’re increasing their costs 10-fold.

How to Get on Track
A DAM is designed to resolve this exact issue, using asset rendering to quickly alter your assets to meet your size and file type needs. Moving forward, we recommend only uploading your highest resolution version of a file, in the most flexible format. For our logos, we upload high-resolution Adobe Illustrator files, so that we can convert them into PNGs or JPGs. And for documents, we upload Office Word files, so that we can easily edit them in our Office 365 tool and convert them to PDFs when we need them. There’s definitely an element of trust you need to have in your DAM system, but trust us – it’ll work perfectly!

5. Giving All Users Access to Everything

The Habit
When you first got your DAM system, you were excited about all the potential that permissions would hold. You could give access based on location, department, seniority and more – the possibilities were endless! But as time went on, no one seemed to be satisfied. Sales wants access to the Marketing category, and your office in Japan keeps asking if they can have access to the same brochures as Canada – you’ve had enough! Eventually, you give in, and just give everyone access to everything.

Why It’s a Problem
Eliminating your permissions essentially defeats the purpose of why you chose to adopt a DAM system in the first place. A DAM is about having control over your assets and by giving free access to everyone, your control goes right out the window.

How to Get on Track
There can be a bit of fine-tuning when it comes to permissions, and it starts with understanding everyone’s needs. Does Sales truly need access to Marketing’s whole category, or do they just need a few assets to be added to their own category? And why does Japan want access to Canadian brochures? Meeting with key leaders makes them feel heard and ultimately helps you update your permission structure to keep everyone happy.

Time to Break Your Bad Habits

Bad habits don’t have to haunt you! Do you think you’ve fallen into the trap of one of the 5 “DAM-Destroyers” above? Contact your customer success manager to get back on track!

Ok – so you’ve decided that it’s time to find the right digital asset management software.

You’ve done your research, set up a few demo requests and you’re ready to tackle the world!

You’re feeling confident as you jump into your first call, but about two minutes in…you know you’re in trouble.

“Meta…what?

“What’s a lightbox?”

“What do you mean I need the Cloud?!”

Listen, we’ve all been there. At one point or another, every single person working in digital asset management, or any other industry for that matter, has had no idea what digital asset management was, let alone any of the jargon that goes along with it.

That’s why we’re here to help you out.

From hundreds of calls, demos, and emails, we’ve been able to gather a pretty good grasp of the words and phrases people understand right away, and what might need a little more explaining. Below is a list we’ve compiled of the digital asset management terms we get asked about the most frequently, along with a simplified explanation of each.

Tip: Looking for a specific term? Either scroll through the alphabetical list or use the CTRL-F function to jump to the term you’re looking for.

20+ Digital Asset Management Terms Everyone Needs to Know

API
To put it simply, an API (application program interface) takes the requests you make to your computer, tells the system what you want it to do, and then returns with the response that you were looking for. It’s the “behind-the-scenes” hero that hosts the interactions between different apps, data, and devices to make your systems work.

This video from MuleSoft explains what an API is in more detail, and offers some great examples of how an API works.

Boolean Search
This type of search allows you to combine keywords with modifiers such as AND, OR and NOT to narrow down (or expand) your search results.

For example, if you’re looking for an image of a cat, but you don’t want any orange cats, you would use the Boolean search “Cat NOT Orange”, and it would return assets with the keyword “Cat”, but not with the keyword “Orange”.

Cloud
The “Cloud” is actually multiple cloud platforms offered by the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. These cloud platforms allow software producers (such as MediaValet) to build, host, and offer their software “as a service” to their customers from the cloud platform they’ve chosen. In our case, we chose Microsoft Azure as we feel it offers the highest level of security, redundancy, scalability, and accessibility.

Data Migration
This is a process that takes place during your onboarding, that involves bringing your assets from your previous storage solution onto your new digital asset management system.

Digital Assets
Traditionally, the term “digital assets” referred to videos, photos, graphics, and audio files. More recently, the term has also covered documents, 3D files, and more.

Faceted Search
This kind of search uses guided navigation to help you narrow down your results when searching for an asset. It can be used within a category or after a keyword search, and is basically a “search refiner”, typically using dropdowns or checkboxes, that allows you to more efficiently find the asset you need.

For example, think of the last time you booked a hotel online. After selecting the city you’re traveling to, you used checkboxes to filter by star rating, amenities, neighborhoods, and price to find the perfect hotel for your vacation. Sound familiar? That’s a faceted search.

Ingestion
This is a broad term for the process of uploading your digital media into your digital asset management system and adding metadata so that it’s searchable.

Keywords
These are the words or phrases that you add to an asset to make it easy to find and identify. Usually, these words will describe what’s found within the asset, for example, dog, running, ball, outside, park, etc.

Lightbox
Lightboxes are like personalized categories where you can group assets to be shared, downloaded, or used for a specific purpose like an upcoming project. A common use for lightboxes is to share groups of assets with an external digital agency.

Metadata
Metadata is information that describes other information. Metadata includes information like keywords, descriptions, geo-tags, creation date, file names, file size, file type, etc. This information is used by digital asset management systems to make it easier for users to find the assets they are looking for.

Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenancy allows users to share cloud resources while maintaining a highly secure virtual environment for each individual “tenant” or customer. Microsoft Azure is the most advanced and mature multi-tenant cloud offering today, providing the highest level of scalability and performance available.

On-Premise
An on-premise system is one that’s hosted on servers located within a company’s offices. Many organizations feel more secure having their system behind their own firewall, but an on-premise solution is invariably less scalable, less secure, and less accessible than a system hosted on an enterprise cloud system, such as those offered by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. It also tends to have higher operational costs than its cloud counterpart.

Redundancy
You’ll often hear DAM vendors talk about dual or triple-redundancy. This refers to how many duplicates are made of each asset in your system. These duplicates act as backups in case one or more copies become corrupted.

Renditions
More advanced DAM systems allow users to choose the format, size, resolution, colour spectrum (CMYK or RGB), etc. when they download and share assets. The end result, in each case, is a rendition.

SaaS
Standing for “Software-as-a-Service”, SaaS is a software licensing model. Under a SaaS subscription, a customer pays a periodic fee, usually monthly or annually, to use the software and the software provider provides the software via a hosted model. Software maintenance, support, and updates are usually included in the periodic subscription fee. SaaS is often confused with, or interchanged with, the term “Cloud”; Simply put, SaaS is a pricing model and Cloud is a hosting model.

Taxonomy
A taxonomy is the combination of categories, keywords, attributes, and other metadata used to organize and describe a group of digital assets. A well thought, implemented, and maintained taxonomy maximizes the search effectiveness of a DAM system. There’s no right or wrong way to approach your taxonomy, but there are best practices for most use cases. Be sure to ask your DAM provider.

For example, some users find it makes more sense to have general categories and rely more on keywords to find specific assets, while others have specific categories (into the 1,000s) with fewer keywords, and primarily use category names to find the assets they need. Both work well for different use cases. The goal in setting up a DAM is to devise a taxonomy that enables users to find the assets they need, when they need them, quickly and reliably.

UI (User Interface)
The UI of a software system covers look and feel as well, as overall and specific functionality. Companies that put a lot of thought into their UI tend to have happier, less frustrated users, as their system is easy and enjoyable to use.

UX (User Experience)
UX applies to an entire company, referring to the overall experience that a user has when they interact with all aspects of the company. This includes the software the company produces, as well as all touchpoints a customer has with a vendor, including sales, support, accounting, etc.

Watermarking
This is the process of applying a translucent graphic, usually a logo, on top of an image in order to safeguard its use while sharing. Stock houses commonly provide watermarked versions of their images for use in creative mockups.

We hope you find this list helpful! If there are any other words you’d like to see added to the list or need some extra clarification, please give us a shout here. We’d love to chat!