What is Digital Asset Management? All Benefits at a Glance

According to Statista, 181 zettabytes of digital data will be generated worldwide in 2025 alone (Source). This means that digital productivity has more than quintupled in 7 years. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to manage the amount of emails, documents, and other data and store them where they can be quickly found later.

The result: many important assets in companies remain unsorted and are scattered across networks in a decentralized manner, so that a lot of time is lost searching for and researching files. In the worst case, they have to be recreated. According to a study by Sapio Research, more than 10,000 media files are lost per team each year.

A well-organized handling of digital assets can save a lot of resources and, in extreme cases, even mean a competitive advantage.

In this article, our guest author Michael Stuetzle shows you what digital assets are, what is meant by digital asset management, why you need it, who uses digital asset management solutions, what advantages it offers, what concrete examples of use are, and which tools are particularly suitable.

What are "digital assets"?

Digital assets are non-physical assets that can be stored on hard drives or servers. They carry an identifying combination of letters after a point, e.g. .doc, .jpg, .pdf. Digital assets are valuable files, the purpose of which can vary greatly and which can cause (high) costs in companies. Due to the associated expenses, assets are also referred to as capital goods. The most common asset categories include:

• Text documents (.docx, .txt., .rtf, .pdf)
• Photos and graphics (.jpg, .gif, .svg)
• Video files (.mp4, .wmv, .mov)
• Audio files (.mp3, .flac, .wav)
• Tables and databases (.xls, .csv)
• Presentations (.pptx, .xml)
• System files (.exe, .html, .js)

How many file formats exist worldwide cannot be said precisely. A good overview can be found on Wikipedia.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Perhaps you know the problem: each department stores their files in their own folders, for which you don't have access permission. Or the files are in inaccessible email inboxes of your colleagues.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the automated, central organization, storage, and provision of digital content. DAM is a special form of content management and can be compared to an interacting library of multimedia content, which ensures intelligent and structured cataloging and delivery on all relevant assets. But be careful: while Content Management Systems are meant for writing, publishing and optimizing (SEO) digital content and accessing assets, a DAM system pursues other intentions, as you will learn in the following section.

Front end of the DAM software by Bynder

Why do you need Digital Asset Management?

One goal of DAM is to make important files such as logos, sales presentations, product images or videos quickly findable and accessible to every authorized stakeholder (internal employees and external service providers). Because only if an asset is findable does it have value for your team and your organization.

Another goal is the avoidance of duplicates by automatically or manually generating and changing unique binary information and properties using meta-data. These can be data related to authors such as the name of the photographer, item numbers of the depicted product or regional descriptions.

You can also use a DAM system to automatically combine, archive and version your files using AI. This packaging makes searching and comparing with similar assets easier for you.

Who uses Digital Asset Management?

DAM systems are interesting for all organizations and companies that have a high volume of valuable files. Digital Asset Management becomes particularly relevant when you generate your value mainly with digital content. In these cases, efficient and professional organization of assets can actually create a competitive advantage, whether you are an innovative one-man agency or employed in a medium-sized company or a globally active large corporation.

Large companies profit from DAM because different departments as well as external partners and service providers can serve themselves in a central library. Due to strict security standards and corporate guidelines such as corporate designs, DAM systems are now standard in many corporations. They ensure a consistent brand experience towards the outside world, even when thousands of employees work with the assets every day.

In small companies like start-ups, ideas often need to be validated and implemented quickly. A centralized file management provides a smooth workflow through secure and collaborative work, without having to bother with tiresome research or approval processes.

Further examples of application and best practices can be found further down in the text.

Advantages of Digital Asset Management Software?

As you can probably imagine, DAM is a real productivity booster for your team. Countless file versions and duplicates with names like "PraesentationFertigkorrFinalFinal.pptx" are a thing of the past thanks to DAM software through central storage and clear meta-description. In addition, your organization saves expensive server capacities or costly multiple purchases.

Through the automation of work and organizational processes such as approval workflows or the inclusion of watermarks, not only efficiency increases, but also the creativity in your team. Because if you have to deal less with tedious administrative tasks, there is more freedom for creative work and focus on essential tasks.

The seven main advantages of a DAM software are:

• Saving storage space and working time by avoiding redundant files and less time searching for current versions through central storage
• Fast finding of "related" assets, regardless of the file type through intelligent tagging, combining, archiving and versioning of files
• Ensuring data security, brand guidelines and copyrights through the controlled management of access rights and usage rights
• Increase in creativity and motivation in the team through the automation of work processes and collaborative use of individual files from anywhere
• Investigation of unusable or no longer necessary files through usage analyses
• Low installation effort and immediate operational readiness, as many DAM systems can be integrated into existing content systems via interfaces (APIs).

Application examples of Digital Asset Management systems

In principle, there are two ways to implement a DAM tool in your organization:

1. Cloud-based SaaS solutions: This alternative is particularly suitable if you do not want or cannot integrate a DAM system into your IT structure. Depending on the degree of adaptation, all functions of a DAM tool are available to you and you do not have to worry about issues such as data backup and software updating. In return, you have to do without individualizations, such as a web-based CMS. In addition, there is a regular subscription fee for usage. Cloud DAM tools are becoming increasingly popular and are the first choice for most companies.

2. On-premise solutions: Here, the DAM system is installed locally as an internal data server and is usually purchased once. This single-source approach is much more complex in its installation and therefore initially more expensive. Besides, you must consider that scaling is not easily possible and you must take care of system updates yourself. In return, you can individually combine and adapt the system with your existing databases and interfaces. In addition, you can directly transfer and monitor your standards for data security with an internal implementation.

This graphic from Bynder clearly illustrates the main advantages of both solutions once again:

On-Prem vs. SaaS, illustration by Bynder

If you cannot decide, there are also solutions that combine both approaches. In this article the chairman of Otec Solutions, Jim Jezioranski tells you how it's done.

To make the advantages even clearer to you, below are a few real best-practices:

• Mid-sized creative agency: For an agency client, a DAM tool can be used to set up a central media library that can ensure access to the agency's media productions. The DAM system makes it possible to easily exchange essential assets such as customer logos, pictures, and product descriptions and allows viewing of the finished works.
• Football Bundesliga club: At every game, club and press photographers generate thousands of images. With the help of a DAM software and its facial recognition function, all images can be assigned to certain players and scenes. This is particularly important when press releases have to be published promptly. For external press agencies, the DAM system allows temporary releases for specific shots and determines which images were actually accessed and therefore charged for.
• Large Corporation from the Energy Sector: In an international large corporation with several tens of thousands of employees, there is a large demand for media files every day, be it for presentations in sales, images for the intranet or product information for the webshop. In addition, there are usually dozens of freelancers who deliver photo and video productions on behalf of the company. With a DAM-software, the corporation can guarantee a stringent and high-quality brand experience on all its channels. The asset pool is always up to date so that layout templates, logos, and fonts are consistent in all publications.

The following video of the provider Canto illustrates the use of Digital Asset Management and summarizes the main use cases and advantages:

These Digital Asset Management tools are particularly suitable

You are convinced and want to test Digital Asset Management in your organization? Most DAM tools offer you a free trial period. Which providers are and how they are rated by customers, you can find out, for example, on our platform OMR-Reviews. Below we introduce you to a few cloud-based tools and their providers, which we recommend:

1. AdmiralCloud: The multiple award-winning DAM provider from Berlin convinces with its SaaS solution especially through a user-friendly interface and many helpful features, which can be easily implemented and used without IT knowledge.
2. Frontify: The brand management platform from Switzerland covers the entire brand journey. In addition to Digital Asset Management, Frontify offers a template system for the consistent creation of digital and print templates as well as possibilities for teams to work creatively together using central project folders and workflows.
3. Kontainer: The Danish company offers comprehensive Digital Asset Management, which apart from intelligent tagging, also provides converters, user rights management or individual search functions.

Professional solutions like these can be easily set up in your existing systems and are characterized by high user-friendliness. Prices for these DAM solutions range from 150 Euro to over 1,000 Euro per month depending on the range of functions, with significantly higher subscription prices being due for larger organizations depending on the degree of individualization and complexity. On our platform OMR Reviews, you will find more providers with their reviews and short profiles.

Conclusion

Digital Asset Management is being used in more and more companies. The reasons are not only the growing digital data volumes but especially the requirements associated with the decentralization of teams due to home offices and interdisciplinary projects. Once introduced in your organization, you will find that time- and nerve-consuming search queries for files are minimized within a very short time, leaving more room for creative work and focusing on the actual value creation in your company.