Giving A DAM to Your Asset Management Strategy Is Not Enough, Think Beyond

In May 2016, the discussion at the Henry Stewart DAM Conference went beyond the topic of just looking for unique features in various Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems. The conference was focused on how to implement best practices to align organizational need with executive-level support in order to modify changes among the business units aboard.

Digital content is precious for creating appealing experiences that pull in more and more people and build brand loyalty. At the current digital stage, files are usually strewed across multiple servers, clouds, and hard drives, which then challenge the control and delivery of content in real-time. A strong DAM system assists marketing/branding team of an organization to look for approved photos, illustrations, video clips on servers and clouds, incorporate them into campaigns. It’s imperative to grow visibility for branding. Leveraging DAM solutions, IT organizations can warrant the perpetual delivery of content across channels and fall into place within brand guidelines.

So, how would the DAM market unfold over the course of time?

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As a concept, the approach towards DAM and brand identities establishment has certainly got ahead in a short period of time. Technology, which originated as physical branding books in the 70’s, is now being bolstered up as an effective program platforms with advanced tools that allow the audience to experiment with brand strategies. Nevertheless, successful asset management strategy requires an inflexible linkage between marketed content and product information/content, and will always be contingent upon consumer’s response.

Metadata is incredibly powerful as it impacts customer experience and helps you to build content which is germane to your audience. Though we realize, but we interact with metadata every day. In real, a variety of metadata models exists, which again depends on the context of use. Think about a DAM system to manage photo, the intended use of content for an item and how it is displayed will decide its type. In last 2-3 years, this subject has become even more interesting as software surpass at reading and inferring searchable information from the reservoir of raw data. Moreover, marketers can be hugely benefitted from metadata as it enables them to focus on how they can associate their end users with given assets.

For example, Google’s image recognition software is not just limited to object identification, it will describe entire scene, background included. For Rights Management Metadata, a DAM system can use external services to seek information on ownership, restrictions, costs, and rights information. Another famous software for facial recognition guesses your age, mention racial characteristics based on gender. If you happen to wear specs, have beards, and smiling with mouth open, it will read every small detail of you. Such information is editorially useful. It makes searches like “show me smiling person with beards” a hard-nosed possibility, provided that was input when the photo was augmented by metadata. However, single DAM vendor might not meet all requirements at once, but you as a user could use a diversity of features on multiple platforms and maintain them at the state-of-the-art.

Metadata Opens Door, One after Another

Digital assets are robust and significant strategic assets if managed effectively. Organizations must lay down plans to enhance and stretch forth all of the metadata required for managing their assets. There’s a demand to scrap the old taxonomy to embark upon and start-off with the underlying information architecture and keep the metadata up-to-date.

So, here lies the challenge for today's brand-conscious troupe. The legion of data growing exponentially in and around business needs is creating a doubt about how can a firm possibly come up with ample tags and metadata to fulfill business needs? DAM can. DAM is capable of managing all kinds of rich media files within enterprise application architecture. Enterprise DAM yields important results when IT works closely with brand marketing groups to address the crucial business problems. A DAM system works on pre-defined meta-data, nevertheless, relying on predefined metadata to regulate digital assets, has its limitations. It is impossible to have enough metadata stored to acknowledge all possible uses.

Therefore, an organization obviously has to think beyond the boundaries or predefined metadata. Metadata is not once applied and done process rather it is essential to retain digital experiences across different platforms for multiple target audiences utilizing both the implicit and explicit metadata.

What lies beyond Metadata?

Undeniably, future for DAM depends on the skills to capture implicit metadata from various mobile apps, as well as contextual situations, and utilize the information to produce convincing germane branded experiences. Brand-conscious companies need to lead and account for some breakthrough development in metadata and DAM systems. Together, IT firms and business groups must blaze the trial to amplify audience’s digital experiences and work with line-of-business groups. In fact, it’s great that nowadays we hear about technologies around image recognition and machine learning that comes to market almost every month.

As we all understand, human-entered metadata will continue to occur for at least next few more decades, and those metadata will increasingly be fortified by automation.