With building, growing, and maintaining a strong digital presence being a top priority for all brands, high-quality visual content is paramount. In fact, consumers are 40 times more likely to share visual content on social networks than on other forums. Plus, a recent study from Wyzowl found that 84% of consumers made purchase decisions after watching a video, which explains why many brands are adding more and more visual media to their sites.
However, the complexity and lengthy process of the day-to-day work associated with content creation and delivery can feel like a treacherous uphill battle. Not to mention that resource bottlenecks and the constant demand for “more content now” could cause brands to lag behind. Reality is, in light of the costs and missed growth opportunities, brands can no longer rely on antiquated tools and processes.
That’s where modern Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems come into play, with which enterprises can store, organize, search for, retrieve, share, and publish digital content through a centralized digital library. Because those systems also offer flexibility, automation, and scale in the management of media-related tasks, adopting one is a must to facilitate the creation of effective, scalable, customizable, and easy-to-use workflows.
Below are the key aspects of DAM, reimagined.
Modern DAM Systems Meet Evolving Media Needs
State-of-the-art technology is now available to reimagine DAM, eliminating redundant, low-value tasks and freeing up teams to focus on creation, innovation, and business growth. Essentially, that’s a “one asset, many variations” single-file approach with AI-powered features for streamlining workflows.
Here are the other aspects of reimagined DAM:
- A digital-first focus, which centers on management of digital formats and experiences.
- Support of work-in-progress (WIP) workflows, which enables teams to work simultaneously on variations of an idea until it is ready for delivery.
- Robust, well-documented APIs and SDKs, with which teams can access, transform, optimize, and deliver images and videos in a simple yet comprehensive manner, assured of a smooth connectivity and integration with other key business systems.
- Single-source delivery and optimization capabilities, with which teams can generate an unlimited number of asset variations during delivery.
As the digital landscape continues to morph, the above features are key to creating asset variations and keeping pace with the competition.
Automation of Asset Management Spells Ease and Scalability
Creation of online content has exploded over the last few years, with 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared daily. However, many organizations are struggling to constantly churn out new, immersive, and meaningful content by creating, transforming, and customizing innumerable different assets to meet the demands of various properties, touchpoints, devices, and campaigns. As well, they must make changes on the fly and figure out how to render one-off assets transparent across departments. No one appreciates fire-drill tasks that burden creative professionals, especially if consideration of potential variation needs could have occurred earlier on in the workflow.
Intelligent automation is the answer to meet those needs, in particular in defining the transformations required for producing full-sized assets for all channels, devices, and platforms—in mere seconds only. Modern, automated DAM saves a tremendous load of money and time for product launches and campaigns alike.
Modern DAM’s Customization Features Serve Brands Well
Nowadays, because brands must extend their DAM features, including the ability to economically and efficiently customize assets, to meet unique workflow requirements, traditional DAM systems no longer fit the bill. What will serve those needs are bespoke, API-based, and future-proof capabilities that support a range of key file types.
Modern DAM systems offer customization features for preset renderings of multiple assets. That is, with one click, teams can immediately create and process bulk assets in addition to being able to efficiently craft single-step or multistage processes. Needless to say, low-effort, no-support, minimal-cost, and long-lasting customizations invariably boost efficiency, value, and adoption across teams and channels.
Teams Need to Be Able to Easily Define Pesky Metadata Rules
Manually defining metadata rules is difficult and tedious. Not only must the values be correct and consistent, but teams must also be able to manage the various metadata types and populate them correctly.
For a solution, brands can customize metadata with conditional rules and establish new rules as needed while building a campaign. A huge help would be a modern DAM system, through which brands can intelligently search for relevant assets with AI-generated tags, attributes, colors, faces, and such.
Modern DAM Systems Are Geared to Meet the Needs of Today and Tomorrow
For brands to stay ahead and relevant in today’s digital-first world, they must embrace a modern DAM system to publish engrossing visual content.
Cloudinary has reimagined DAM with a focus on flexibility, intelligent automation, and scale to meet the many diverse needs of the present and future. By capitalizing on Cloudinary’s modern DAM system, brands can launch dynamic visual experiences in short order, unifying teams on one platform sans complexity and functional silos. That’s speed, efficacy, productivity, and peace of mind incarnate.
For a unique perspective, check out our ImageCon 2021 session Reimagined Digital Asset Management Powered by Intelligent Automation.
