Your Dam Isn’t Just an Image Library

When most people imagine a content repository, they think of nicely categorized images with preview panes. Even though that’s a somewhat dated view, I still see a lot of brands fail to set the bar high enough for their DAMs because they aren’t thinking about the big picture of rich media experiences.

Do I notice a raised eyebrow?

The base requirement for a DAM has grown over the years from just storing images to including rich media experiences—graphic documents, office documents, video, 3D, computer generated imagery (CGI) and other files.

What do you do with all the other content that’s text-based, and doesn’t have a digital asset to upload along with it? Because if it’s text, you don’t want the added friction of downloading a document to simply copy and paste, you want that content to be active and usable.

The list of ‘no-file’ examples is long. It includes: usage instructions, disclaimers, claims, license agreements, copyright statements, product benefits, product family descriptions, safety statements, boiler plates, mission statements, campaign messages, promotional messages, tweets, blogs, and it goes on and on.

Everything is an asset—so manage it like one!

A lot of stuff being produced today isn’t managed as an ‘asset.’

Instead, this content sits in Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, email inboxes, or, worst of all, in a marketer’s brain—all of which make it impossible for your teams to easily search for and reuse content that could otherwise work perfectly for a new purpose or in a new channel.

Despite what you might think, you should expect your DAM to support rich media and text-based content that has file and no-file content objects. You should be able to model the metadata and the user experience around these content objects. You should be able to implement an automated lifecycle and decide what actions should be performed on them (renewal, expiration, update, etc.).

I like to refer to this as a truly contextual DAM experience.

The entire content lifecycle should be supported: creation, approval, management, translation, localization, and have an expiration exactly like your other file-based content.  Yet handling this no-file based content is often overlooked on many DAM requirements overviews.

 

Content liberty and full asset lifecycles for all

I’m a staunch supporter of content liberty: the ability to manage the lifecycle of any content you might have in your DAM. To truly manage all marketing content as a single source of truth, like every DAM promises, you shouldn’t have your editorial and brand text fragments separate from your product fragments separate from your typical file-based content. You should be able to search across content type, mix and match content, use different types of content in processes, and campaigns and have your content consumed through integrations and API’s, and if you choose, broken down in content blocks to maximize content findability and reuse.

This single source of truth for all customer-facing content should make it extremely easy to identify content, no matter the format, and easily reuse and recombine that content. That’s why I am so pleased to announce the availability of this functionality in Aprimo DAM and for you to be able to reap the benefits from a true content agnostic DAM.

If you want to learn more about how Aprimo works and what Aprimo DAM can do for your company, contact us for a product demo.