When it comes to developing campaigns today, marketers can leverage a wealth of traditional and emerging content sources for inspiration. The problem is, while there’s plenty of creative fodder, those overseeing these campaigns are feeling overwhelmed when it comes to effectively managing and harnessing digital content to drive modern marketing efforts.
To elaborate, industry pros are increasingly leveraging standard digital assets (text, images, video, audio), along with more complex new formats featuring rich media (such as interactive multimedia banners with virtual and augmented components, gamification and live streaming). This variety offers great creative potential for many channels. Consequently, keeping track of assets and their context has become nearly impossible, with content spread across content lakes, ponds, and puddles across organizations, systems, and seemingly countless campaigns. Unfortunately, this causes resources to be wasted as digital assets kept in disparate and seemingly bottomless repositories are lost or forgotten about, resulting in content going unused or being re-created unnecessarily.
Analysts from IDC recently noted in a Technology Spotlight report, sponsored by Nuxeo, Rethinking DAM in the Age of the Connected Customer Experience, “two-thirds of the organizations we have surveyed report that they waste budget on duplicative content creation efforts because they lack a comprehensive view of their assets and/or assets are difficult to find. At the same time, marketers estimate that, on average, a third of the assets they create go unused or are underutilized.”
Getting Personal & Stepping on the Scale
It’s an understatement to say that delivering creative marketing campaigns at scale across varied channels is a challenge.
Teams today must manage the full creative lifecycle, ranging from ingesting and tagging content to creative review/approval to multi-channel distribution. Then there’s the slew of problems that can arise with entrenched organizational and client/vendor silos. For good measure, there’s the added complexity of coordinating creative talent internally and across agencies and regions. Generating and distributing tailored content to channels poses unique issues as well, further complicated by such things as rights tied to the usage of content or if there’s little visibility into where content is used and how it performs.
Then there’s the big modern day demand to segment and personalize communication to reach niche audiences and tailor their experiences to them. Marketers need to learn to work at a scale and speed beyond what they’ve managed historically, and it’s the stuff of nightmares.
How About Some DAM Control?
Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms have been around for a while. In fact, for more than a decade marketers have used the technology to organize, store, retrieve, and edit digital assets. It’s also been utilized to manage content rights and permissions.
Still, a new wave of DAM technology has emerged that is “not your parent’s platform.” This new class of tools is empowering marketers to efficiently and quickly produce materials targeting audiences with customized content on a global scale, driving greater sales impact.
Simply put, it’s giving marketers some DAM control.
To illustrate this, take a creative marketing campaign example of a simple bicycle. Until recently, if an agency created an advertisement – then decided they’d prefer a different person, backdrop, model or color – they likely would have to recreate the whole concept. In a series, the time and cost would naturally increase exponentially per piece, target group, and market.
Today, with the right DAM technology, a marketer can easily search a catalog of images for the exact bike they want. To change the setting to feature only domestic parks, for instance, they can quickly find an array of photos at locations from Yosemite to Acadia. They can then personalize the ad literally in thousands of different ways: 10 color options, situated in front of the top 50 outdoor recreational destinations in the U.S., with 10 different glowing male or female actors taking a respite alongside varied bike models.
With the right DAM platform, the time, effort, and resources previously needed to create a single ad can now generate hundreds in minutes. These ads can then drive a campaign targeting 50 different markets with personalization algorithms optimizing bike color, as well as age, gender or physique of the actor for the optimum individual experience.
While managing digital assets will undoubtedly continue to be more complex, next-gen DAM technologies can handle the scale, and do so right out-of-the-box. They can provide marketers with capabilities to meet the demands of the modern enterprise, all while maintaining existing assets and processes to overcome organizational silos and the limits they impose.
Here are some best practices for marketers looking to implement a DAM solution:
- Avoid creating another silo of content. Consider how existing content and the systems that manage content (make sure to look beyond marketing!) can connect to your DAM so you’re reducing complexity rather than adding to it.
- Keep user experience (UX) front and center – your DAM success and ROI depends on adoption across a wide range of users, from project managers to creatives to executives. If they aren’t excited to get their hands on it, you’re probably on the wrong path.
- Get some help – if you’ve ever tried to renovate a kitchen or bathroom, you know there are unforeseen twists and turns in the process. A well-functioning content ecosystem with DAM at the center of your organization is no different. And just like the costs of appliances and other hardware are less than half the cost of a home renovation, the costs of software are also a small part of an effective DAM solution. So do yourself a favor and get someone who’s done it before to help guide you.
Though growth may be exploding, a new wave of DAM solutions is covering marketers’ assets, enabling them to be controlled and leveraged. By harnessing these solutions, marketers can create campaigns that reach audiences with customized content, no matter what the scale, while providing marketers and their organizations greater cost-efficiency and newfound power.
Uri Kogan is Vice President of Product Marketing at Nuxeo.