When talking with Brand Owners and Media Agencies from all over the world, the same statements and demands are repeated again and again:

• Any new platform must enable our company to work more efficiently and securely.


• Any solution should result in a more streamlined and manageable production setup.

To respond to these requirements, enterprises often invest in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) application to enable the relevant people to search, preview and download files and documents. But the content in these DAMs often ends up as only final and approved materials that are stored there for some indefinite time. In other words, your DAM application becomes an archive of approved media – just like a fileserver might.

This limited type of DAM also means that Designers and Graphics people continue to work just like they would on a fileserver infrastructure - with limited security controls and less-than-perfect search capabilities. Further, there are no workflow controls or version controls built into the system to improve efficiency and ease-of-use for those involved.

Not so great, right?

So while such DAM infrastructures have made a first step through better searches, they are hardly ideally suited to the complex needs of a modern agency or marketing department. Missing are many things, including: company-wide process controls, a platform to set and reach goals, approval cycle tools, robust security, the ability to measure and guarantee results, etc.

Creating a DAM solution that address the two key requirements

Any DAM solution that meets the needs of brand owners and modern agencies will start by bridging the divide between designers and creatives on one hand and business users on the other.

That's not so simple. And the solution will also have to enable the creation, management and delivery of your media assets in a controlled and secure way while reducing time-to-market and ensuring a more cost-efficient productivity.

The solution you require then must meet these three requirements:

Step 1 - You need a DAM that ensures your employees can keep on working in their Comfort Zone: Microsoft Office for most of your business users and the Adobe Creative Suite for most of your Creative Professionals.

As the Desktop Publishing Department will always be involved in the creation, management and delivery of media assets, by default, any artwork or media library absolutely needs to be accessible from within Adobe Creative Suite. Whether this is Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, running on Mac or Windows machines shouldn't make a difference.

But business users will also need access to resources and so any digital assets produced will also need to be accessible from within Microsoft Powerpoint (think illustrations for PowerPoint, logos and diagrams for Word etc.)

Step 2 - Your DAM needs to make it easy to distinguish the woods from the trees for users by making sure they only have access to relevant data. By enabling extensive user and rights management, you make sure Mike who is creating a brochure for Product A won't see the assets for Product B, while Charlene designing a brochure for the Italian market won't get lost in a labyrinth of US-specific assets.

Step 3 - Last but not least, your DAM should guarantee that users only access content at the moment they need to become involved in the project. For example, there is no point in your client accidently seeing content that is not finished. To implement this type of staged access requires a solution that can define when and who will be invited to add, change or approve artwork. In short, it means your solution should have an integrated Business Process Management Solution (BPMS).

In summary

For a DAM solution to increase Brand Owner and Media Agency efficiency, you'll need a core DAM system that can store a single version of the truth in the central repository like the state-of-the-art ADAM Media Library. But, on top of that, you will also need a solution that helps to design and enable a streamlined process by creating jobs or projects for the work in progress in your preferred Comfort Zones. And this solution should also provide tools to monitor the status and progress of these projects constantly. Relevant people should have easy and instant access to an overview of what is going on in the creative department.