A digital asset management project can often get over-complicated. With all the available integrations and add-ons, it’s common to get caught up in the potential scope of your DAM and forget about its primary purpose: to help you better manage your digital assets.

From industry analysts to a multitude of customer use cases, it’s been proven that adopting a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to a DAM project ensures the success of an implementation in the short and long term. This gradual approach provides a critical foundation for organizing existing assets, drives quick wins with the initial implementation and creates a long-term vision for DAM through integrations and expansions.

In this post, we share expert opinions on the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach and explain how we use it to ensure the success of our customers.

The Crawl, Walk, Run Approach: Insights from Industry Experts

Bryan Yeager, Senior Analyst at Gartner

At the Gartner 2018 Digital Marketing Conference, Bryan Yeager emphasized the growing complexity of the digital asset management landscape and the sprawl of features and capabilities expected from DAM platforms. In addition to common capabilities, such as library services, data management and search capabilities, DAM is often marketed as a “catch-all solution” under many different names: marketing asset management, brand asset management, content productivity platform, sales enablement, just to name a few. This has created confusion for buyers and often pushed DAM projects to expand to a large-scale transformation solution, driving multiple purposes and involving an ever-increasing number of stakeholders. That’s also why a lot of DAM projects stall or fail, with the fear of implementation complexity overtaking the promise of tangible results and quick wins.

One of the key take-aways from Bryan’s session is to first focus on the use cases for the team with the largest pain points. From there, you can build a roadmap following the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach, defining short-term goals, a vision for the DAM and a roadmap to get there.

Theresa Regli, DAM Expert and Past Analyst at Real Story Group

Theresa Regli, a DAM strategist and a recognized industry thought-leader shared a similar idea in her webinar on “How to Select a DAM System”.

The way she puts it: “Everyone wants a Millennium Falcon” or, in other words, organizations want the best and the most powerful tools. Most enterprise companies are looking for full-scale, complex solutions before they even have the abilities or tools needed to use them or successfully implement them.

In Theresa’s example, she emphasizes that organizations need to start with “riding a bike” and only then start upgrading to the Millennium Falcon. In DAM terms, this means auditing and organizing assets, implementing a strong taxonomy and spearheading initial adoption, which can take up to 18 months for a large company. Organizations need to implement the core components of a DAM platform first to build a strong foundation, before connecting to workflows or introducing integrations.

Theresa also brings up the issue of a “scope creep” as one of the challenges in a DAM buying process. On one side, there’s confusion between different types of systems, such as MAMs and file storage systems, who claim to have elements of DAM. On another side, there are organizations that want DAM to be an all-in-one solution, with DAM that does too much at the same time. This has diluted the existing use-case for DAM and created an endless list of requirements and customization complexities that prevent a DAM project from ever succeeding or staying on time and on budget.

MediaValet’s Approach to “Crawl Walk Run”

At MediaValet, we know that everybody’s “Crawl, Walk, Run” path is different. It depends on many factors – your company’s size, digital maturity, existing technologies, partner ecosystems, just to name a few. We take all of these elements into consideration to help you define the final vision for your DAM project.

After you’ve defined a vision, we help you develop a roadmap that will get you to that goal, keeping an achievable scope for each phase. Our Customer Success team will help determine the teams that will benefit most from an immediate roll-out of DAM and help facilitate the change management process to ensure early success within these teams. During this stage, the team can also recognize any concerns, issues or gaps that can be improved for the rollout of future groups and identify potential internal advocates.

The Customer Success team will then help define the teams to include in the next wave of implementation, ensuring that the value of the system is maximized. This is one of the reasons we provide unlimited onboarding and training – to allow for a gradual rollout and ensure that any personnel change or new teams do not negatively impact DAM adoption.

Once adoption is high, we’ll focus on your growth and help you make the most of your investment.

Here’s a rough outline of the Crawl Walk Run approach:

1. Outline business requirements and overall implementation scope
2. Create a mission statement for the DAM project
3. Define the roadmap and key milestones to achieve overall mission
4. Define the core team and key technology integrations involved in the initial roll out
5. Define next teams, technology platforms or development requirements involved in the later phases and outline desired timelines
6. Complete initial onboarding, defining taxonomy and best practices
7. Deliver training to teams and roll out adoption strategies
8. Evaluate first phase success and define expansion plan and next steps

Crawl, Walk, Run Use-Case: An Alberta-Based University

One of our customers, a Canadian higher education institution in Alberta, leveraged the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach for their DAM approach. They broke down the DAM implementation into three phases:

• Phase one – enable the marketing team to complete a re-branding project and distribute newly created brand material.
• Phase two – expand the DAM to additional departments, auditing and organizing all assets actively used by the teams.
• Phase three – complete digitization of the school’s historical media and photo archive, auditing and organizing all remaining marketing assets.

The success of their re-branding initiative was accelerated by the DAM platform and paved the way for the following phases and increasing overall DAM adoption. The re-branding project also helped to prove a business case for the DAM and improve organization-wide support.

Ready to get started with the “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach? Get inspiration for teams to include in your roll-out plan with these 3 Categories of Users to Consider.

Digital asset management initiatives have a profound impact on creative and marketing operations and positively affect multiple teams and stakeholders. But, DAM projects often have multiple phases and moving parts and, thus, potential opportunities to get derailed.

To drive your DAM initiative to the finish line, you need to be prepared to address challenges that could stall your project or halt it completely. In this post, we’ve highlighted the most common ones, so you can be prepared with counter-attacks.

Here are 5 factors that could be stalling your DAM project and how to stay on track.

1. Budget Reallocation
2. Competing Project Priorities
3. Lack of Buy-In
4. Resistance from IT
5. Internal Change

1. Budget Reallocation

A change in budget is the number one project staller we hear from companies looking into digital asset management. It’s also the one that’s hardest to control as budgets get overspent, unexpected opportunities are presented and competing priorities are introduced during the quarter. Two-thirds of those investing in marketing technology don’t have a clearly defined budget, so when it comes time to sign-off on pricing or approve a proposal unless specifically allocated to DAM, the budget may no longer be available or may be pushed out to the next quarter or year.

Staying on Track: Find Budget for the Future

To avoid budget reallocation, work with your team to find where digital asset management will fit into the budget and try to get approvals specifically for the DAM project, separate from the overall marketing technology budget. (Smartsheet has 12 free marketing budget templates if you need help). Sometimes your accounting team will also allow annual payments for SaaS technology to be budgeted as a monthly expense across the entire year, making the spend easier to justify in proportion to the yearly budget.

You can also do an audit of your existing programs to see if there are any that can be retired, have overlapping functionality or have not been adopted, finding ways to reduce existing spend rather than having to justify technology budget increase in order to add DAM in your marketing stack.

2. Competing Project Priorities

With nearly half of marketers (43%) using between 6 and 10 different martech solutions, we occasionally hear that another project or a different marketing technology is taking priority over DAM. Competing priorities can be the nature of a marketing team, especially within larger organizations where different initiatives have to compete for a limited budget.

Staying on Track: Prove DAM ROI

When you’re competing against another piece of marketing technology, the key is to prove that a digital asset management system is a priority, and part of this is proving ROI. There are plenty of ROI calculators, like this one, that can help you show the value of DAM, including benefits, quantifiable ROI value and growth opportunities. You need to use ROI as an offensive, rather than a defensive tactic. Once the decision has been made to prioritize another project, it can be difficult to pivot.

It can also be helpful to highlight DAM as a foundational technology that speeds up other marketing initiatives, so it’s often beneficial to implement a DAM first. By auditing and organizing content or brand assets first, rebranding, website updates, marketing automation or other projects can be completed faster and at a lower cost.

3. Lack of Buy-In

When trying to get a DAM system approved, it’s important to have buy-in from multiple stakeholders, especially from ones that would benefit from its implementation. Digital asset management isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, so it’s important to consider use cases from different user groups and ensure that their needs are met. Omitting functionality that is key to a specific user group can introduce obstacles into both vendor selection and approval stages, which can cause a DAM project to quickly go to ruins.

Staying on Track: Recruit Advocates

There’s strength in numbers – especially if you’re hoping to get a digital asset management project approved. A DAM initiative is set to gain more traction if you involve stakeholders from key user groups right from the get-go. It allows every party involved to share what they’re hoping to achieve with the system, creating a truer scope for the project and narrowing your vendor options. Start by identifying the groups that will likely be impacted by the DAM and get them involved in the decision-making process (here are three categories of users to consider). Ensuring that your DAM requirements match stakeholder use-cases will ensure that you get support from these groups and strengthen your DAM case, leaving less chance for bumps down the road. Here’s a helpful guide for getting key stakeholders involved.

4. Resistance from IT

IT can be resistant to a digital asset management project if they feel it will significantly increase their workload or endanger corporate security protocols. Their concerns come down to three things:

1. How the technology integrates into their existing technology roadmap?
2. Does this new technology introduce the level of risk that’s acceptable to the organization?
3. Will it help business users?

As the department responsible for planning, operating and supporting the company’s overall technology infrastructure and enabling business users to carry out their roles efficiently and securely, IT is looking to analyze if the DAM is safe to implement and if it will reduce overall costs from the corporate perspective.

Staying on Track: Build a Business Case

What IT needs is cold, hard proof that your DAM initiative will increase user efficiency while decreasing risks, and that often boils down to a business case. You’re looking to prove that you’ve done your research, calculated the potential risks and built a project plan that will work. In our recent interview with Microsoft’s Global Channel Marketing Lead, she suggested running a pilot/trial to prove the use-case for your own organization and give IT a realistic sandbox to test. Workzone built out a great post on making an exceptional business case, that can help you start on your own for digital asset management.

5. Internal Change

The final factor that we frequently see stalling a digital asset management project is an internal change, such as a change in leadership, organizational restructuring or even an acquisition. Each one of these factors introduces an enormous amount of change to the organization, leaving many active projects on the backburner.

Staying on Track: Start Smaller

If you work within an organization that frequently reorganizes departments or product lines (some even do this every fiscal year), or if you’re in an industry that experiences a lot of consolidation or acquisition activity, you need to be strategic about how you approach your DAM initiative. Part of this means simplifying the scope of the project to reduce the project complexity and introducing a phased approach. Integrations and add-ons can often make implementations more complicated, lengthen the project cycle and threaten overall budget allocation.

We often recommend a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach to digital asset management, where organizations roll out the “core DAM” before adding on any extras. It not only ensures that the implementation runs smoothly, it also gets the DAM rolled out before internal change can stall the project.

While this isn’t a definitive list, we hope it prepares you for potential stalls that come your way and helps you confidently lead the charge for your digital asset management project.

Heading into a digital asset management demo? Don’t forget to ask these important questions to ask on a DAM demo.

When you begin evaluating digital asset management vendors, you often face a varied landscape of designs, features, and configurations. While it can be difficult to navigate these options, there’s a group that can help provide clarity: those who will be using the system.

There are three categories of users that should usually be consulted when evaluating possible DAM vendors: creative, technical, and business users.

A successful adoption often depends on satisfying these users and their interests, so they should be top of mind when selecting a DAM system.

Creative Users

Your implementation’s fate largely lies with the power users in your creative department or those that create your content. For this crucial stakeholder group, one thing matters above all: speed.

Today’s creatives often face production demands that stretch them to the edge of their ability and this pressure is only increasing with the growing amount of content distribution channels that require tailored content.

Considering this, it’s understandable that creative users have no tolerance for unnecessary disruptions to their processes. No matter how sophisticated or feature-rich a DAM is, their feelings about it boil down to one thing: Does it interrupt their workflow?

Neglecting this concern is a mistake you don’t want to make.

While a DAM is designed to help creatives keep organized, store, and share files, if it slows down or interrupts a creative user’s workflow, they’ll resort back to their own methods of storing and managing content without speed delays. At that point, the DAM isn’t being used and the implementation has failed.

To ensure that this doesn’t happen, your DAM provider has to solve a very sticky problem: physics.

A large file requires time to render when it’s downloaded from the cloud. This latency isn’t long by most standards – only a second or two – but these seconds aggregate over the course of a day and it’s time that your creative users don’t have to lose. If content development is an intrinsic element of your business model, it’s critical to ensure that the vendors you’ve shortlisted can minimize or eliminate any delays your creative team may experience due to the DAM.

Technical Users

Your company likely has a technical strategy related to a cloud provider like Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. Aligning your DAM with your overall technical strategy will streamline implementation, integration, and maintenance. Ultimately, it will make your IT team happy.

Your first question may be: How do you know if you have a technical strategy? Look at your suite of applications.

For example, if your organization uses Microsoft Office, you likely have a Microsoft strategy. Microsoft applications are typically backed up on Microsoft cloud infrastructure and provide access to the cloud storage service, Microsoft Azure. Any other separate SaaS applications or systems that you employ, including a DAM, that are also hosted on Azure should easily integrate into your Microsoft applications.

This alignment with a technical strategy also streamlines implementation from a security perspective. Since your IT team will have already audited your current cloud provider for other applications, they know the security of the cloud platform well. This familiarity can fast-track your implementation and speed-to-value.

Business Users

Your business users are the marketers, salespeople, and external partners that need to be able to easily find content for their PowerPoint presentations, product briefs, or promotional material. While they aren’t power users, they remain one of the most important DAM stakeholders. Like creatives, business users value the ability to access any file format, size, or resolution quickly, so that they can concentrate on hitting their deadlines.

However, the greatest value a DAM can provide to these users is the ability to facilitate asset discovery and ideation. These users need to be able to quickly find what they’re looking for through reliable and user-friendly search capabilities. This allows business users, who are sometimes geographically distributed, to be able to independently find the assets they need at any time.

Customer Use Case: The Stevens Institute of Technology

The Stevens Institute of Technology, a private research university in New Jersey, took great care in incorporating and considering users during their digital asset management evaluation process.

Here’s what Jay Boucher, their Graphic Designer, had to say about their experience:

“Something that was very important to us was to do interviews with users to find out how they used our old system and what they expected from the new system. We wanted to understand their workflow and what their pain points were.

This information was then used to create a list of our DAM needs, the features that were absolutely necessary, and expectations for the system. From there, we could narrow down our list of potential vendors and only include those who offered the features we needed, but who was also in our price range.

By performing this exercise, our team was able to come together and make a final decision on a DAM vendor and present our findings to upper management”

For Stevens Institute of Technology, considering their users was extremely valuable to the success of their DAM implementation.

By considering these 3 user groups throughout your DAM selection process, you can start on a good foot to establishing high adoption and having a successful implementation.

Understanding the requirements of your users is one of the three major considerations when selecting a DAM. We’ve discussed the other two – Strategy and Configuration in the ebook: “Choosing the right DAM”. You can get a full copy of the ebook here.

While Blockchain is a hot topic, it can be a challenge to find examples of implementation other than through cryptocurrencies.

Jean Lozano, the CTO of MediaValet has presented his take on Blockchain and how it can transform the DAM industry at the DAM New York conference, and more recently during a webinar with Henry Stewart Events.

During his presentations, he discussed the intricacies of Blockchain 2.0 and how it can transform the Digital Asset Management industry. While there’s still work to be done in order for blockchain to be available in the DAM industry, let’s discuss the benefits of Blockchain in Enterprise DAM when it’s leveraged, and its challenges and considerations.

Benefits of Blockchain in Enterprise DAM

• Governance: Enable companies to create a distributed and decentralized system of record for digital media
• Rights Management: Concrete media asset ownership rights and provenance can be established
• Rights Transfer and Licensing: Content and ownership can be transferred to other parties, and content licensing and publishing can be facilitated by distribution companies
• Content Creation Attribution: Allocate and enforce the stake of content creators to produce content
• Digital Lifecycle Management: Facilitate and keep track of digital media assets, through each stage of their life cycle
• Security: Ensure security with blockchain cryptography

Considerations and Challenges

With benefits, it is still important to consider other factors and potential challenges of implementing blockchain.

1. Blockchain Technology is new and rapidly evolving

With Blockchain 2.0, blockchain technology has matured but is still in a state of change and will require continuous development of the decentralized app (dApp) for Digital Asset Management.

2. Establishing use cases with proven success

Successful blockchain use cases with proven success, outside the cryptocurrency space, still need to be established. These success cases also must tell a massively transformative story to justify the investment and implementation risks of this technology.

3. Need for Talent

Developers with high expertise in blockchain are in high demand and scarce, which can affect the pace of technology development and adoption.

Steps to Leverage Blockchain

While blockchain is still in development, what can you do to prepare for implementation? Here are some steps you can take:

Step 1: Implement Foundation Technologies

It’s important to centralize your existing assets, establish rights management for taxonomy, and invest in audits and data quality initiatives. We recommend also identifying your high-value digital assets and establishing provenance for them and tagging new assets that are ingested. These initiatives will create a strong foundation to implement new technologies and will aid your success.

Step 2: Analyze your Digital Asset Supply Chain (DASC)

The digital asset supply chain can be broken down into activities and will include various participants from inside and outside of your organization. The nature of these activities ranges, therefore will become more complex as the supply chain gets closer to the consumer of the content. It is recommended that you start your analysis from the commissioning of the work.

Step 3: Establish Use Cases

Identify use cases from the activities you identified from your Digital Asset Supply Chain (DASC) that will benefit from the blockchain implementation and evaluate their impact on your business. This includes their ROI and associated risks. During this step, it is also important to consider any legal implications or contract changes you may need to prepare in advance.

Step 4: Develop Talent

Ensure you have an internal team with individuals who have a growing understanding of blockchain and its applications. In addition, training should be provided to other core members of your team. It is also recommended that organizations identify consultants or partners, who have experience with DAM implementations as well as Blockchain expertise.

Step 5: Build a Minimum Viable dApp Product (MVP)

Work with a vendor or with your team to build a minimum viable dApp product for your selected use case. Take the time to implement and revise as needed. Use this as an opportunity to learn from nuances of the implementation, as working with blockchain technology will deem to be an iterative process with incremental improvements.

Step 6: Evaluate and Expand

Once you have implemented a successful MVP, plan for the expansion of the dApp to tackle other use cases within your DASC.

If you’d like to learn more about blockchain, and how it can benefit the DAM industry, download the presentation slides from our “Blockchain and the Future of DAM” webinar.

When implementing a digital asset management system, your users’ ability to quickly and easily find their assets is critical for high adoption and overall satisfaction, and creating a sound metadata strategy and a set of best practices is the first step to ensure that assets are discoverable.

As a part of your metadata, your keywords give you the power to label your assets in a way that’s relevant to your unique business needs. Keywords hold great power, but can also hinder the efficacy of the DAM if used incorrectly. Below, we share some best practices to help you build a successful keywording strategy.

1. Be thorough, but use keywords sparingly: Find the balance between too many and too little keywords – just enough to highlight the who, what, when and where (and why, if it’s relevant).

2. Don’t make your keywords too specific: If you get too specific with your keywords, it could prevent people from finding the assets they need. Instead of keywording STILETTOS, PUMPS and PEEP-TOES, just stick with HIGH HEELS to cover all three.

3. Don’t make your keywords too broad: If you find you’re using the same keyword over and over again, it’s likely too broad. For example, if you work at a jeweller, the keyword JEWELRY would likely make it into a majority of your assets, and should be eliminated entirely.

4. Be consistent with your abbreviations (or avoid them altogether): While it’s best to not use abbreviations at all, if you need to, be sure that you’re using the same style across all keywords. This tends to become a problem with locations, for example, UNITED STATES vs. USA vs. US.

5. Be consistent with how you phrase verbs: Do you prefer to use SURF or SURFING? Both are fine, but pick one and keep with it (although SURFING may be the better choice, as it will likely come up when you search for SURF, as well).

6. Don’t double-up on synonyms to describe the same thing: It’s common to want to keyword different synonyms, such as FELINE, CAT and KITTEN, however it’s better to pick one and use it consistently.

7. Be consistent with plurals: Decide if you want to keyword assets in singular or plural tense – and stick to it! For example, do you want to say CARS or CAR? Keeping it consistent will make it easier to find assets in the future, without having to use advanced search capabilities.

8. Be literal with your keywords: While an image might suggest a LADIES NIGHT, using literal words, such as WOMEN, DANCING and NIGHT CLUB, makes it much easier to find later.

9. Be careful when using trendy words: It’s tempting to use words that are trending at the time you upload the image, but while the word SELFIE might be relevant now, the keyword could be useless down the line.

10. Avoid homonyms and homographs: The keyword BAND could refer to both a music group or a ring. Only use homonyms if it has a clear context with your business (for example, a jeweller would only use BAND in the context of a ring).

12. Choose your language and stick to it: Be sure to use the same language for all of your keywords. Also consider regional spelling, such as American (COLOR) and Canadian (COLOUR), and ensure that it’s consistent.

11. Avoid regional and slang words: Only use keywords that will be understood across different regions and groups. For example, in Canada the word TOQUE is used to describe a HAT worn in WINTER, and a BUNNY HUG is used to describe a style of SWEATER.

13. Keyword for your business: Keywords will be used to make searching easier for the end user, so it’s important to think of context. Consider an image of a couple walking on a beach. For a dating site, they’ll likely use more keywords to describe the couple, while a travel company will be more concerned about the location.

14. Watch your spelling: Most importantly, be careful that there are no typos in your keywords – it will leave the asset almost undiscoverable later.

Your keywording strategy is at the heart of your whole digital asset management initiative. It’s important to take the time to create keywords that are consistent, clear and have the end-user in mind.

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.

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!