Digital asset management initiatives often originate within marketing teams, yet have the potential to deliver significant benefits to multiple departments.

A DAM has the power to accelerate major organizational initiatives, preserve the company’s legacy, remove organizational silos and reduce legal risks. While this can put a DAM initiative into the line of sight of the company’s key top executives, they’ll often view the project through the lens of their core responsibilities and focus.

When you’re building a business case for these executives, it’s important to address questions that align a DAM initiative with their primary goals. Here are some examples for each c-level executive:

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

CEOs need to understand how a DAM initiative will affect organizational compliance, efficiency and brand value. Highlight how a DAM will impact the CEO’s goals using the questions below:

1. Is there a risk of being exposed to litigation for improper usage of licensed images or the release of intellectual property? Has the company incurred legal fees for image rights infractions with the current content management practices?

2. Is the company at risk of loss of company legacy and high value digital assets?

3. Is the company able to engage effectively on the same digital channels as its customers?

4. Does the company have a future-proof strategy to use and re-use the content, assets and knowledge being created?

5. Could team efficiency decrease over time, as the volume of content and assets continues to grow? Are we getting the maximum return on the content investments already made?

6. Would teams know how to find and access business-critical digital assets if the current operations or creative personnel left the company?

7. How does the company’s digital technology stack compare with best-performing organizations in our industry? Are there lost competitive advantage because of legacy infrastructure and inefficient/non-existent digital asset management practices?

8. Are there delays in products and solutions hitting the market due to inefficient practices of content and creative asset production?

Chief Information Officer (CIO)

CIOs will question how a DAM initiative will affect IT support SLAs (Service Level Agreements), align with the overall technology roadmap and impact departmental efficiency and collaboration. Highlight how a DAM will impact the CIO’s goals using the questions below:

1. Are marketing-related storage costs (media, content, photography, digital archive) growing faster than the IT budgets, as large volumes of video and media content is consistently added?

2. Are IT support SLAs and support teams being stretched with marketing demands for new media format support, management and sharing?

3. Do users have an optimal experience previewing, sharing and collaborating on business-critical content? Are there technology-related bottlenecks preventing users from being productive?

4. Is total cost of governance increasing as new content and digital assets are being stored across personal storage and unverified cloud systems? What’s the impact of asset loss?

5. If the company’s digital assets contain sensitive information, are they managed and governed in a compliant manner? Are the company’s content and asset storage systems compliant?

6. Do you have redundant digital files (videos, media, images, content, PPTs, PDFs) across multiple hard drives and storage? How does this affect storage costs?

7. Is there anything preventing organization from using cloud-based solutions? Is there a preference on the type of cloud platform?

8. Which cloud platforms, AI vendors and integrations best align with the overall IT strategy?

Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

CFOs will look to understand how a DAM initiative will affect the company’s operational costs, legal compliance and risk of value loss. Highlight how a DAM will impact the CFO’s goals using the questions below:

1. Is the company wasting resources on producing new digital assets, media and content because of lack of discoverability?

2. Is the company running a risk of increased legal fees and litigation costs because of lack of image rights compliance across our corporate content? Do current rights related legal fees outweigh DAM project costs?

3. Are IT storage costs growing exponentially to keep up with growing business demands for video and media content? Are there more efficient ways to manage these assets and secure the company’s digital legacy?

4. Is the company at risk for not being compliant with industry regulations when it comes to storing, managing and sharing digital assets (such as using marketing content with customer information or imagery)?

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)

The CMO needs to evaluate and understand the high-level impact of the initiative on marketing goals and the overall business case. They’ll also likely decide on the scope of the project, determining whether it will be a single-team roll out, a multi-department system or a cross-organization implementation. Highlight how a DAM will impact the CMO’s goals using the questions below:

1. How does the company’s marketing tech stack maturity compare with the best-performing organizations within our industry?

2. Is the team creating future-proof ways to leverage content we are spending marketing budget on?

3. Can revenue-generating teams and partners (sales, resellers, agencies) find and leverage content and brand assets created by our team? If not, is there an impact on sales efficiency and generated revenue?

4. Are the design and creative production teams enabled to meet the growing demands for content delivery? Are project timelines jeopardized because of delays in content and creative production?

5. Is the brand at risk with the current content and visual asset management practices? Can we ensure that all content and channels are upholding the brand's visual and messaging standards?

6. Can we meet investor and board accountability requirements on content and creative budget allocation? Can we report on content and creative usage?

7. Are we at risk of high-value asset loss with our current asset management practices? Is there a risk of deleting or losing files?

8. Are we protecting our content investment and making content easily available to relevant teams? Have we experienced duplicate resource creation and unnecessary additional spending on content?

Building the Business Case for DAM

While these questions may get digital asset management to the table for your c-suite, you need a strong business case to prove the impact of your DAM initiative and drive the project home. To better understand the strategic benefits of a DAM and how it can impact the bottom line of an organization, use this Digital Asset Management ROI Calculator.