How to Sell DAM to Your Manager

The real workhorses of your Digital Asset Management (DAM) operation are the Creative and Marketing teams. While every department has a need to consume content, it’s the responsibility of Creative and Marketing to make sure the right content gets into the right hands, at the right time.

In order for each team to do their jobs like a boss, they’ll need technology and processes that move at the speed of business. Convincing your manager that DAM technology is necessary is the difference between you being just a Digital Collator vs. a Creative Professional. It’s crucial! Let us help with a few cases that could help persuade even the most frugal of managers.

The Case for Productivity

Take the simplest use-case as an example: the external request. Person at Organization B requests a logo from person at Organization A. So, what does person at Organization A do? Grab it off a shared drive, attach it to an email, and she’s just hit the easy button, right? Wrong.

This scenario will begin the inevitable and brutal email thread: “You sent me the wrong size”, “I need the jpeg”, “I can’t tell what your official RGB code is.” We’ve all been there. This is a time suck for anyone who’s ever lived it. DAM can solve this simple, yet oftentimes painful, use-case by providing a one-stop shop for collaborators to get exactly what they need.

Furthermore, your manager needs to be aware of the other tasks associated with managing your brand that can be substantially streamlined with a DAM platform:

• Creation: Here’s the fun part: designing the logo, selecting typefaces, producing videos, and designing web pages. But how do you manage the less-fun tasks, like commenting on works-in-progress, approving finalized assets, or knowing which version of the file is the latest? Without a DAM system in place, these ancillary tasks can cause confusion, frustration, and wasted time.
• Organization: When you’ve scaled your content story to terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of assets, how you organize them is as important as the quality of the assets. Naming convention, metadata, tags, and having one source of truth is crucial.
• Discovery: Finding a product image from three seasons ago when you’re not quite sure if it exists in the first place? Total nightmare. Having quick and easy access to assets makes Creatives happy.
• Augmentation: “Hey, can you send me that file in 800 x 600?” The owner of the assets spends a big chunk of time resizing and converting files to fit the requester’s use-case.
• Distribution: People inside and outside your organization will need secure access to thousands of assets. Oh, and they’ll need them in multiple sizes and formats.
• Monitoring: Understanding the context in which your assets are being used helps Brand Managers grasp the public’s perception of your brand.
• Enforcement: Finding and (most importantly) stopping trademark and brand misuse falls on the shoulders of the Marketing team.
• Analysis: Being able to analyze brand data is as important as analyzing customer data in a CRM platform.

By providing a single source of truth for people to grab exactly what they need, DAM platforms can streamline each aspect of this brand management process.

The Legal Case

The Interweb is a giant place and the opportunities for brand fraud run rampant. Stolen logos, product images, fonts, colors, and content plague almost every brand with a digital presence. The right DAM can monitor and protect the assets once they’re in the wild. Your legal team will NEED to hear this.

The Case for Creative Integrity

If you’re making your DAM plea to a Creative Director, this is your best bet. Once you send off that zipped up vector file, Johnny sales rep is taking a screenshot, stretching it to fit his social media flavor of the week, and voilá — your logo’s been given a haircut and the colors are way off on a presentation to 1,000 people at a marketing conference. Creative integrity (and maybe your manager’s job), gone! Not only will a DAM platform provide people with the correct logos and colors, but it will also ensure that people know how to use your brand assets in context.

The Case for Data

Analytics! What do managers and executives love more than data? Data takes the emotion out of decision making. A good DAM platform will provide useful analytics on who is using your brand assets, and when they’re being accessed. Understanding how your brand is being used and perceived in the wild can inform a Brand Manager’s next move.

Bring in the Experts

At Brandfolder, we’ve helped some of the most recognized brands on earth address their DAM needs with a platform built for Creatives, by Creatives. We can take you from a DAM mess to a DAM success in mere weeks. We’ll tell this story to your manager and give you status as a hero in your organization.

Check out the Brandfolders of FINIS, Slack, and BB-8 by Sphero for just a taste of what we can do for you. If you’re interested in learning more about how Brandfolder can make your life a whole lot easier, simply click on the banner below to get in touch.