What Is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Is your company struggling to manage its digital assets effectively? Digital Asset Management software might be the answer your team needs to efficiently locate, store, organize, retrieve, and distribute its entire digital content collection from a single, reliable source.

What is DAM?

Digital asset management (DAM) is a software platform designed to centrally store and manage digital content. It is user-friendly and quick to implement, offering internal and external stakeholders controlled access to all their digital assets, such as photos, images, creative files, videos, audio, presentation decks, documents, and much more. Crucially, DAM systems enhance campaign productivity and maintain brand consistency.

The best DAM systems organize your digital assets to maximize their value for your brand. They offer features like workflow automation, asset licensing expiration dates, and customizable user access levels for files, folders, projects, and entire campaigns. With built-in analytics, DAM software can also provide insights into the performance of creative assets.

When files are scattered across various devices and platforms, they often become underutilized. A cloud-based DAM consolidates all of a brand’s assets, enabling users to securely collaborate on content from any location.

As workflows occur within the platform, feedback is directly linked to ongoing projects, ensuring communication is clear and not lost in translation or buried in emails.

What Functions Does Digital Asset Management Software Serve?

DAM software boosts a brand's operational efficiency in seven key areas related to digital assets: creation, organization, collaboration, distribution, storage, and performance measurement.

Let's explore how DAM enhances each of these aspects.

Creation

Teams utilizing DAM can expand projects by integrating with creative tools such as Adobe Creative Suite, built-in video editors, and project management applications like Smartsheet, allowing them to develop new assets seamlessly without switching between platforms.

Organization

Brands are generating more digital assets than ever before. DAM software serves as a centralized hub for organizing and managing this digital content.

It enables the use of tags, filters, and advanced search features—like in-document search and image recognition—to swiftly locate files within asset libraries of any size.

Platforms like Brandfolder also offer the ability to add metadata tags to any file type, monitor version history, set access levels and permissions, establish collection expiration dates, and utilize AI to identify duplicate asset uploads.

Brandfolder’s custom approval rules maintain the integrity of assets.

By implementing custom approval settings, you can minimize redundancies and guarantee that assets are always distributed correctly.

CASE STUDY: Discover how P.F. Chang's global marketing team efficiently manages their digital assets in bulk using Brandfolder, saving valuable hours each month.

Collaboration

Once assets are uploaded, users have the ability to comment, add annotations, and make edits, thereby simplifying the entire review and approval process.

Team members and clients can comment on files and communicate within the platform.

Collaboration encompasses all types of assets and media content, including PDF documents, design files, and videos. Organizations can access and modify files from any location, enabling teams to work together with the appropriate individuals regardless of their geographical location.

Distribution

A DAM system allows assets to be published from a single cloud-based location. You can distribute assets directly from your DAM using public or private links, with the option to set expiration dates for added security.

Embed assets directly into your website, ensuring that visitors and media outlets have access to the latest logos, bios, and brand imagery. Whenever an asset is edited or a new one is added, it is automatically updated at the distribution point.

Storage

A DAM provides agencies and brands with comprehensive digital asset storage for limitless files of any size, all within a secure, cloud-based environment. This is especially important for storing larger assets like high-resolution images, videos, and audio files.

Features such as file backups, customizable user permissions, and rights management bolster the security of these stored assets. Although storage capacity is unlimited, users can assign expiration dates to assets to minimize unnecessary digital clutter.

Assets stored in Brandfolder

Performance & Measurement

Brandfolder’s asset usage insights.

Traditional on-premise and cloud-based storage systems offer limited insights into asset usage.

In contrast, a digital asset management solution delivers comprehensive analytics and insights regarding asset views, placements, and interactions. This allows you to track activity trends over time and utilize that data to more precisely evaluate the return on investment of your brand assets.

Easy Integration

A DAM system can be connected with various tools and cloud-based platforms, including project management software, content management systems, and image editing software.