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When
you stand back and look at your company's marketing operation, do
see these issues?
- Demands from upper management for better control of the company's
branding and messaging.
- Pressure to speed time-to-market initiatives.
- Increasing accountability for marketing expenses.
- A need to organize time, projects and priorities more prudently
to achieve maximum productivity.
No surprises here, of course, but at the core of all of these issues
may actually be a bigger underlying problem: how your company's
brand assets are organized and being used, and who is using them
and where.
By now, you might be scratching your head in bewilderment, but
brand asset management could be the key that obliterates the nagging
issues just listed above. After all, just think about all of the
digital assets that marketing and marketing communications professionals
create, which now probably reside in a host of various locales.
Among these include advertisements, photographs, brochures, posters,
direct mailers, PowerPoint presentations, among many more. Your
marketing operations management (MOM) surely considers these as
mission-critical assets. Yet, do they know where these assets all
reside? Are they easily accessible? Can they be shared easily and
quickly with the company's counterparts such as channel partners,
branch offices or divisions? If the answer is "no" to
all of these questions, then the issues stated earlier will only
linger.
Branding Consistency is Goal
The power behind a brand can be phenomenal. Just look at the powerhouse
brands that exist in today's marketplace. Brands like Proctor &
Gamble, General Electric, Phillips Corporation, etc., have become
embedded in our daily lives, and each of us no doubt has, over time,
bought an item attached to one of these brands, and probably still
do. But these brands didn't earn their place in our psyche overnight.
They became consumer sweethearts through carefully planned and managed
digital asset management (DAM), a compelling process through which
hundreds of marketing digital assets (the electronic files of a
business enterprise) are hosted on the internet and centralized
on a secure server to help end-users access, use and share immediately.
The concept of DAM may sound new, but it's actually been practiced
by the corporate titans named here, among other big brand leaders,
since around 1993. These brand leaders understood well by this time
the importance of controlling branding and messaging, the consistency
needed to make their brands established in consumers' minds, and
how creating a centralized digital brand asset repository was the
key to this all. They further realized the benefits to be derived
from practicing digital asset management so early-a primary one
being that their employees and divisions would use and share the
digital brand assets. And, as anticipated, this process rippled
out further to a company's extended family of channel partners,
distributors, resellers, and their vendor channel.
Boost for The Balance Sheet
By having a centralized digital brand asset repository, a company
sets itself up to be successful and to compete in today's global
arena. How? Because a marketing "asset" really exists
in a kind of static environment. You see it all the time. A brochure
or direct mail piece is created, used once or twice for its intended
purpose, whether this involves a specific promotional campaign,
trade show, or a product launch, and then the asset fades into oblivion.
Conversely, a "digital asset" is vibrant and relevant,
with a much longer shelf-life since it can give repeat performances
with its usage. It soon achieves what is called "Return on
Asset Investment (RAI)." The point is that with this RAI, the
once-sedentary asset is now one that is part of a communal asset
repository from which the company's employees may use for a multitude
of purposes. Furthermore, the asset, now really an electronic file,
or a digital asset, is considered one of the corporation, and, ultimately,
can have a positive effect on the balance sheet because it can make
marketing efforts more timely, effective and cost-efficient.
Rentable Solution That Tracks Activity
Until now, digital asset management was the private domain of the
giant corporate elite who could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
building their digital asset repositories. No more. Now, thanks
to emerging DAM providers such as Digital Brand Asset Management,
Inc. (www.d-bam.com), a serious contender in the digital asset management
ring, based in San Jose, Calif., small to mid-size companies can
now create their very own asset repository and enjoy the same bounty
of benefits as their larger corporate brethren. One of the first
few players in today's new and improved digital asset management
sector, D-BAM, Inc. organizes a company's electronic files, then
hosts them on a secured central repository accessed via the Internet.
The company accomplishes this process by employing "rentable"
software modules, all tailored to the client's needs and co-branded
with the client's company feel. The service is extended to clients
having both domestic and international operations.
When a small to mid-size company considers adopting digital asset
management for its assets, here are a few of the benefits it will
soon experience
- DAM will keep track of who in the organization is using what
assets, when, where and for what purpose.
- DAM will identify what changes are being made to an asset (photo,
advertisement, brochure, even a PowerPoint slide deck).
- The DAM repository enforces Marketing Operations Management
of brand and business standards.
- DAM tracks copyrighted material and other time-sensitive information,
and assign rights to individuals on what they can access, modify
and use as part of the digital asset library.
The beauty of digital asset management as it has evolved today
for smaller organizations is that it accomplishes the same two major
goals that were originally achieved by large companies with established
brands:
- Faster cycle time for delivery of their marketing services
- Lower costs through labor reductions and fewer external expenses.
If you're still not quite sure about how DAM can be a positive,
time reducing, money-saving process for your organization, you might
consider these two questions:
What would it mean in production time to have your printing vendor
be able to access graphic files for reproducing a printed piece,
while assuring your company proper brand reflection and usage? Or…
What would it be worth in additional sales if your channel partner,
reseller or distributor had one extra day in the sales cycle just
because he could access marketing materials as needed?
That's the power of digital asset management.
Allan Linden is CEO & President of Digital Brand Asset Management
(www.d-bam.com),
a San Jose based Application Services Provider (ASP) that offers
a managed service helping marketing operations organize their electronic
files, and hosting them on a secured central repository access via
the Internet.
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