By Rahul Nanwani, Co-founder and CEO, ImageKit
These unprecedented times have pushed businesses to innovate not just to survive but to thrive. As a result, we can see the landscape of industries changing drastically to suit the socially distant and increasingly digital world. One such shift has been the move from physical to online. Whether it is shopping, consuming content, payments, communication, every activity has gone digital.
A study showed that about 43% of customers now shop online for products they had previously bought in stores. In addition, retail industry data in the US showed that online retail sales increased 32.4% year on year in 2020 and are up 39% in Q1 2021.
With brands focusing on delivering great visual experiences online, the creation and consumption of digital assets, mainly images, and videos, is rising exponentially. And it is not just on the brands’ own website or app. Other customer interaction platforms like social media, emails, push notifications, digital ads, etc., have all come together to become an essential part of running a successful online business. This multiplies the number of digital assets and their variations that a brand generates to keep its audience engaged.
To add to this, content and marketing teams don’t sit in the same office anymore, forced by the pandemic. Teams share creatives and feedback via email, Slack, Google Drive, and a myriad of other tools. Since these digital tools are not primed for sharing and collaboration on digital media, execution, and iterations on new campaigns and promotions take longer. This is not ideal for any business looking to move and grow quickly in an increasingly competitive online space.
Another major trend that we can observe in the last couple of years has been the increase in the production and consumption of videos. A live example of this is videos coming to center stage on all social media apps. Better data transfer speeds, better user devices, and tools that have democratized video content creation have aided this transition.
The role of Digital Asset Management System now
Digital asset management systems help counter the challenges of a large volume of digital assets produced, their variety, and the collaboration between distributed teams.
According to an industry report, the DAM industry was worth USD 3.15 Billion in 2019. It is projected to reach USD 10.2 Billion by 2026 at a CAGR of 18.3% (from 2021 to 2026). The pandemic has acted as a catalyst to the above growth.
A good DAM system should help you solve the following challenges.
1. Simplify organization of assets
Simply organizing files in folders may not be sufficient in the modern context. You need to organize content by multiple factors like format, platform, device type, campaign, use case, SKU, etc.
2. Locating specific assets
Once the content has been organized basis different factors, it should be easy to locate a specific asset using these different factors. Searching by file or folder name alone would make it difficult to locate assets as your content repository grows.
3. Collaboration between different teams
Sharing feedback for an asset across teams or iterations over email or Slack can lead to longer content development cycles. Or worse, some feedback might get missed altogether. A DAM system should bring this all on a single platform to enable better collaboration.
4. Access control between different teams
Teams should have access to only the assets they need to work on. For example, the sales team should have just the final decks or case study PDFs that help them close a sale. Similarly, the tech team need not know about the iterations on a particular banner but the banner that is supposed to go live on desktop or mobile websites.
If you do not have a DAM in place, you should use alternatives like Drive, Sheets, Dropbox, or email for the same.
How DAM systems would evolve in the future
With the changing industry and technology landscape, DAM systems will need to adapt to continue adding value to businesses in the future.
1. Increasing adoption of AI
Like every other industry, AI would play an important role in DAM systems. Inferring the actual content of an image or a video file and allowing users to search based on that content, search based on the speech in a video, and intelligent cropping of files for different placeholders are some of the use cases of AI in DAM that will become common in the near future.
2. Targeting niche industries and modern content forms
Industries like health care and Fin-Tech have very different requirements on digital assets for security and access control. Such industries, and more that come up in the future, will see, if not already, niche DAM systems developed for them. Additionally, with live images and AR / VR content possibly coming into the picture in a big way in the future, DAM systems would adapt to support such modern forms of content.
3. Closing the loop with optimized delivery of assets
With multiple platforms to deliver the content on, DAM solutions will provide an easier way to export, or better – directly deliver, optimized assets out of the box. DAM systems would no longer offer just the management of assets but would also complete the cycle of delivering high-quality, optimized experiences to the users across devices.
Conclusion
Selecting a suitable digital asset management system can unlock your teams’ potential to execute better campaigns in lesser time. And with the explosion of digital content and the physically distanced world we need to learn to operate in, they will become an essential part of every business looking to scale online