If you’re a marketing and advertising professional, juggling all of your brand’s digital assets can be a Sisyphean task. This is where a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can come in handy—although newer, AI-powered solutions (like SmartAssets) can be even more helpful.
We’ll get to those alternatives later, but first things first. What the hell is a DAM?
In a nutshell: A DAM system is a centralized solution designed to store, organize, retrieve, and distribute digital assets. These assets can be anything from images, videos, graphics, documents, to marketing collateral.
Think of a DAM as your personal assistant, keeping everything neat, accessible, and ready to use at a moment’s notice.
There are several common, key uses for a DAM system.
Coordinate complex campaigns
Imagine that you’re launching a new marketing campaign for your line of organic wool dog sweaters. This campaign will have a ton of moving parts: Instagram posts, blog content, video ads, designs for your booth at SweaterFest 2024.
A DAM system can store all these assets in one place, allowing for easy searchability, and ensuring that the right team members have access.
Maintain brand consistency
Maintaining brand consistency across platforms is critical. It looks pretty unprofessional if some colleagues are sending out materials with an outdated logo, or if they’re building ads using earlier versions of image assets that have since been edited.
A DAM lets you stockpile current brand guidelines, logos, and approved images in one central place. That makes it easy for everyone—from graphic designers to social media managers, CEOs to interns—are pulling from the same bank of correct assets in order to maintain brand integrity.
Make client collaboration smoother
If you’re an agency working with multiple clients, a DAM system can make this less of a headache. Share specific folders with clients, get their feedback directly on the assets, and keep the project moving smoothly without endless email threads and random attachments.
An old-fashioned DAM system has some perks for your brand. For instance:
While a DAM system can be convenient for managing assets, it’s not a perfect solution for everyone. A few things to consider:
If you don’t want to give a traditional DAM a try, there are alternatives.
Cloud storage
Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive provide basic storage and sharing capabilities for marketing assets. There are fewer bells and whistles, but this may be a good solve for a smaller team with a limited budget.
Project management software
Platforms like Trello, Asana, and Monday.com are used to manage project workflows, and often include features to make file storage and asset management easier.
AI-powered solutions
When the power of AI is linked to the functionality of a DAM system, things really get interesting. GenAI can automate asset tagging, elevate search capabilities, and offer insights on asset performance.
Which brings us to...
SmartAssets, part of the Stagwell Marketing Cloud family, can do what a DAM system does, plus a lot more. Consider it an evolution of digital asset management technology, supercharged by GenAI.
For instance, the platform is able to intuitively tag assets at the creative-component level, for both video and static images. This automated categorization means you can search past campaigns and assets by creative tag, campaign success, seasonality, and other parameters.
But SmartAssets is more than just a replacement for the organizational power of a DAM system. It also allows you to leverage AI to predict the performance of specific assets before they’re deployed—recommending key changes and tweaks that are likely to improve a campaign’s impact, and using AI to make those creative edits in-platform.
That’s a lot better than wasting time, energy, and resources on endless A/B testing.
Interesting in learning more about how SmartAssets works? We'd love to show you. Click the button below and choose "The Media Studio" from the pull-down menu.
