Clients are at the heart of every agency’s business—but as an agency, standing out can be a challenge. This post explains how digital asset management benefits ad agencies by helping them to build long-lasting relationships with their clients.

As marketing and creative agencies work with a growing amount of digital assets, many are finding that they need professional support in effectively storing, managing, and distributing these massive amounts of client assets. In searching for this support, it is important to note that being able to efficiently communicate, quicken turn-around times, and provide immediate access to project assets are differentiators that can help build long-lasting relationships with customers.

If your agency is looking to stand out from their competition you need to improve client experience. The key? Digital asset management software is the perfect solution.

What is Digital Asset Management?

A digital asset management (DAM) system helps agencies manage, organize, share, and distribute digital assets from one central library. It improves productivity and increases the ROI of content and creative programs. Additionally, it helps top agencies improve their creative asset management process and efficiently manage and distribute projects to clients.

Most agencies that are currently not using a DAM struggle with similar issues:

• They are storing client information in multiple locations, making it hard to find what they need,
• There are challenges with giving clients access to assets in a timely manner,
• Finding assets is taking up way too much time, which is slowing down projects, and
• They don’t feel their assets are truly secure.

We’ll look at the different reasons agencies should consider DAM as a long-term solution to these pain points. We also review the additional benefits that agencies see from implementing one.

How Digital Asset Management Benefits Ad Agencies

According to a this Forbes article: “Many brands lack an enterprise-wide system to manage their creative assets, which reduces a marketer’s ability to produce effective, timely campaigns at scale”. DAM solutions tackle these challenges head-on, giving agencies that use them a major competitive advantage.

Here are 3 specific reasons why agencies should consider a DAM:

1. To Improve Client Delivery

Providing a single source of truth for client assets, including source and final files, solves a variety of agency problems. DAM allows for agencies to organize all clients’ current and past projects into one, easily accessible and searchable library. No more time wasted tracking down assets in various locations. Additionally, you can create granular access for each client, using custom permissions, user rights, and structures. This allows clients to have direct access to their asset library, while keeping other clients’ projects secure.

2. To Accelerate Creative Production

The efficiency gains of using a DAM free up time for teams to work on other projects. By eliminating time spent on tedious tasks, such as searching for assets or trying to share large files unsuccessfully, productivity levels increase—meaning more creative production. A DAM ensures accessibility to assets from anywhere, at any time—making everyone more efficient at their jobs, meaning more work gets done. Plus, creative integrations allow designers to synchronize work-in-progress assets between their desktop and the DAM while providing access to source material from within platforms they’re already familiar with.

3. To Optimize Re-Use

By storing all past and current assets in one, easily accessible location, DAM gives agencies and its clients the opportunity to repurpose and reuse the content they have already produced. Agencies can easily find and use source files, b-roll and archived assets that otherwise would have been buried and almost impossible to dig up. We all know how expensive producing visual content is, so the ability to reuse this content for future projects represents huge cost savings.

6 Critical DAM Features for Ad Agencies

If you’re not yet convinced that DAM is the total package for agencies in search of the perfect solution, here are 6 critical features of a DAM that we know will help.

1. Organization: Manage multiple clients’ content in a single location using a multi-library structure.
2. Enhanced Search: Easily find content by client, keywords, categories, AI-tags and more.
3. Accessibility: Enable clients and teams with self-serve access to a library of current and past projects.
4. Distribution: Preview and share collections of assets, regardless of file size or type.
5. Uploading: Enable photographers, videographers, and other contractors to upload files from anywhere in the world.
6. Security: Secure client marketing collateral with enterprise-level security and asset recovery.

Stand out with a DAM

Agencies should consider implementing a DAM not only to increase efficiencies throughout their own organization, but also to improve their client experience. They can get ahead of the competition with functionalities that allow projects to run more smoothly and ultimately, make their jobs easier. Not to mention the time and money saved on repurposing previously produced assets.

How Award Winning Agency bb Blanc Uses their MediaValet DAM

As an award-winning agency, bb Blanc partners with companies, agencies, and third-party planners to deliver 5-star, innovative solutions for events across Canada.

• bb Blanc is using MediaValet to manage critical assets for pre and post-event promotion,
• Their newfound efficiencies in connecting employees with final marketing collateral, and
• How they’ve used the DAM to improve business and attract new clients.

With solutions covering audiovisual, staging, and live entertainment, their visual media assets and DAM are central to showcasing the incredible work they do. Since implementing MediaValet, bb Blanc has seen their events reach new levels of success. We spoke with Cierra Colelli, bb Blanc’s Social Account Manager to understand how the ad agency is using DAM to their benefit.

You can recreate bb Blanc’s DAM success within your own organization!

With a DAM, agencies can build better, long-term relationships with their clients simply by doing their best work. Interested in learning more? Check out our DAM demo today!

Last week, we shared how excited we are that Margaritaville’s iconic brand has joined the MediaValet family. We often say that we’re inspired by the creativity and innovation of our customers and their marketing strategy. Margaritaville is a company that captures the hearts and minds of millions of customers and continues to engage them every day through a brilliant marketing strategy that leverages impactful visual experiences and keeps those touchpoints consistent across every single channel.

Here, we share how Margaritaville leverages DAM to tell its story.

Margaritaville’s Lifestyle Brand

As a lifestyle brand dedicated to bringing singer and songwriter Jimmy Buffett’s carefree spirit alive for vacationers across the globe, Margaritaville takes an innovative approach to marketing.

The company heavily uses rich media images and pairs those images with fun and enticing captions to inspire the desire to stay at their hassle-free tropical resorts, eat at their award-winning dining establishments, and, when not on vacation, continue wearing all of the Margaritaville fashion products in memory of good times and relaxation with a little tequila, salt, and lime.

Where is Margaritaville?

When this company explains the answer to the question: “Where is Margaritaville,” they always say it with an image:

“Where is Margaritaville? It’s in the tropics somewhere between the Port of Indecision and Southeast of Disorder, but no parallels of latitude or longitude mark the spot exactly. You don’t have to be a navigator to get there. Palm trees provide camouflage, ocean breezes bring seaplanes and sailboats, tourists, and travelers. Passports are not required. Island music rules. No waiting lines for anything. There is a beach and a thatched roof bar perched on the edge of the turquoise sea where you can always find a bar stool. There are lots of lies and loads of stories. It’s a comical concoction that blends together like tequila, salt, and limes. Where is Margaritaville? It’s in your mind.”

At all touchpoints, Margaritaville doesn’t just tell you, they show you that you can experience a tropical way of life anywhere on the planet because Margaritaville is a state of mind.

Building a dream of a tropical vacation with visuals

Margaritaville’s team members are experts at tapping into their audience’s desire to escape to a tropical paradise. Their photos resemble the ones you would see from one of your photographer friends that just came back from a great vacation: stunning beaches, sunsets, white sands, palm fronds – all with just enough character to show what a fun time they had.

Margaritaville’s close-up of a palm frond gets paired with a witty caption on social media: “We get by with a little help from our fronds.”

This promise of a fun, carefree spirit, and quick wit are a huge part of Margaritaville’s culture, which is consistently reflected through their brand. When you are on vacation at one of Margaritaville’s resorts or even having drinks at one of their restaurants, you know you will be a part of a party paradise with like-minded people that are there to enjoy every moment. The company’s collection of iconic photos, videos, and marketing materials that evolved and grew over the last 30 years represents the depth of value held in Margaritaville’s brand. Investing in a technology that would help the team leverage that value to its full potential made a lot of sense.

One brand voice across multiple lines of business

As Margaritaville grew from a retail store and single restaurant in Key West into a global lifestyle company that includes consumer products, restaurants, retail shops, resorts, casinos, vacation ownership properties, a national radio station on SiriusXM and more, the marketing team needed to find scalable ways to grow and leverage their asset collection and speak in consistent voice across all product lines and digital channels. Not only did the team do an incredible amount of work organizing and structuring their extensive collection inside MediaValet, but they’ve also created a solid foundation for scaling their content and visual strategies. This innovation will allow them to make the most of existing assets and enable the graphics team to focus on creating new brand experiences rather than spending our searching and resizing existing items.

Collaborating across the world

Using all their photos, videos, and other digital asset files stored in a single DAM solution, Margaritaville has created a central library of marketing and branding assets. With this central library, every single team across the world – whether it’s a branded resort, casino, restaurant, brewery, or any other Margaritaville business – has instant access to all approved images, videos, audio, and any other type of marketing or advertising file. The crucial word here is “approved,” which means that administrators can set up permissions for specific teams to have access to assets and categories they need for their day-to-day work. This reduces the risk of using the wrong logo, an image with expired rights, or any outdated marketing material. The whole Margaritaville team can share collections of images or collaborate on projects while tracking versions and updates- all in real-time even with the largest files imaginable.

Keeping it easy and fun

Having a fun and easy-going attitude is not just part of the brand messaging for Margaritaville, but is also a part of day-to-day life and a team’s approach to doing business. And of course, the system that would be used by employees and partners would have to be simple to use and combined with a DAM partner ready to have fun and share a friendly attitude at every turn.

One of the greatest benefits of a cloud-based DAM solution focused on user experience is an easy-to-use interface that does not require high levels of technical skill to master. Employees and partners who require access to Margaritaville’s digital asset library are specialists in hospitality or food service in their local communities. They need quick, easy, and straightforward access to applicable files. DAM provides that to them and thus builds fun team synergies into marketing workflow processes.

With their cloud-based digital asset management solution, Margaritaville has created an online resource accessible from any web browser that affiliated businesses across the world can search, download and share.

Speaking of margaritas and things we eat, get more details on DAM for the food & beverage industry and learn easy tricks and tips for using photos to grow a restaurant in How DAM Can Bring Home the Bacon for Food & Beverage.