Are you out of time? Read the summary.
Index 1. Decentralized content
6. Permission
We are constantly talking about the benefits of using DAM for the corporations, for field marketing, how artificial intelligence can improve your process and what are the DAM trends for this year.
But what about the money?
In reality, the budget is what matters to businesses. Is it worth having a DAM platform to manage digital assets?
Do the math and find out!
Our goal is to bring here several daily situations of the company in the management of digital assets and seek to understand how much one could save on each of them, annually, as an ROI.
The article will be extensive, so I will divide it into two parts. So we can go deeper into the topic.
Annually, a company has high costs trying to locate logos, images, videos, text files, documents and other types of digital content. I’m not even talking about potential copyright infringement that can cause lawsuits and not even the cost of refacing digital assets that were created by some agency (which may not even be on its vendor roll anymore), but that have now been lost. For these cases and many others that I will comment on here and in the next article, the price of a digital asset management platform can be justified.
As you analyze the situations that may be part of your reality, you’ll be able to get a clearer picture of how much it costs not to have a DAM platform.
In this first article we enumerated some very common cases in companies, where we can not measure for sure the cost behind the problem, solely and exclusively because it is diluted in the cost of the operation. For sure, something was left aside to solve it.
Let’s go to them:
1) Decentralized content
“The company’s content is spread across multiple platforms and devices. At all times people request the sharing of these materials”
How many times have you had to use content that has been shared by someone from your internal or external team by different means such as: We Transfer, emails, WhatsApp, links from cloud file storage tools (OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive, DropBox etc.), but that you never find?
Often the links or emails / Whatsapp get lost in the queue of numerous messages and add up from your field of view. When you search for a specific file or content, it can be on multiple people’s computers or cloud accounts. They may have been deleted or changed, people may be on vacation or out of the office.
To solve this problem you try to find out who made the content, call to see who has the file you need. The survey can take from one hour to seven days and can involve several people. If you add up how many times this occurs, not only with you, but with everyone in your team and your external collaborators, every year and multiply by the cost of solving this problem, whether trying to look for where you are, who has the content, or redoing it, it can give you an idea of how much you would save, time and money, by opting for a DAM.
The critical point would be if this content was of vital importance for some task, such as updating product image in your e-commerce, a campaign with a pre-set date, presentation for the meeting with your director, updated catalog of products for your sales team… I can stay all day enumerating common examples in your day-to-day.
If you want to know the difference between file storage platforms and DAM platforms read this article here.
2) File versioning
“Is this the latest version of this photo/image/file?”
How many times have you heard this question? This happens quite often, mainly with the field team who, on visits to customers or suppliers, need up-to-date information from product catalogs, images, price tables to use at a sale/negotiation meeting. Not having this in an affordable, fast and accurate way can often delay a sale or even lose it.
The wrong product logo or image is used in various external channels, own and partner, the external media agency or its field team use old material, or worse, even a proof is used instead of the final object.
To solve this problem, after discovering the error, your team sends a huge email with the latest material attached and asks people to use it. The problem has already happened. This is repeated quite often and the correction takes hours from some people to rearrange the correct versions, prepare and send the emails with the correct materials.
In the same way as in the previous topic, make the sum of how many times this occurs with your team throughout the year, multiply by the number of people needed to fix the problem and the cost/hour of those people. Ready. You already have one more item to add to the total costs.
3) Indexing and searching materials
“The search does not provide the results I seek.”
The search capabilities of file storage platforms are minimal and very limited. Typically, the resource provides the file name and there is no metadata. When you want to search for an image/video by some feature of it (object or person contained in it, or predominant colors or even place), you can not find.
To solve this problem your team manually organizes things into folders and subfolders, but still have to know the whole structure to locate countless digital assets of different characteristics. This requires time and dedicated resources for organizing materials and can mean that you have to redo photos/images/videos for not finding what you need. And there goes more resources to add to the total.
4) Access profiles
“Other people need to access the content, but today only my team meets all requests.”
Everyone who needs product/brand advertising materials sends e-mail requests to their team. Obviously there are delays in meeting these requests for internal and mainly external assets: only your team can search for and deliver these materials. Applications are accumulated, and applicants end up using outdated materials. His team turns “bottleneck”.
To solve this problem you need to run to meet all requests. And they can’t figure it out. Follow with the sending of the email with the updated material to the applicants. One more task in which they waste a lot of time.
But don’t lose count!!
5) Compliance and validity of materials
“We do not know if we have permission to use this image in this campaign”
Using advertising materials without legal permission can generate copyright litigation, the processes of which can be very expensive. Each digital asset may have specific permissions (printing purposes, Web use, use on certain devices, certain regions of the country) and some of them may expire on specific dates. Your team needs to know where you can use any asset and how much it costs, but you have no clarity about it.
It is very difficult to solve this problem today because, usually, it is a knowledge that is in the heads of people and many of them external (agencies). Occasionally, knowledge is lost or simply not available, causing the company to violate the rights to use a digital asset.
This account is easy, just add to your total the amount of the fine or compensation for copyright infringement.
6) Permission
“We were unable to control permissions for users at the required granular level.”
You need more control. Or maybe more arms. You have almost no control over who can see what and this causes a lot of problems. You need to be able to control who sees what materials and who has the right to edit or change those materials. As soon as they send them to a person, they are “in the wild” and out of their corporate control. They can be posted on Facebook prematurely, be sent to competitors, leaked etc.
To solve this today your team circulates hard copies of objects or keeps folders on open file servers: you have no way to control who can see what or who can edit anything. Maybe they have to manually encrypt the files. And whatever God wants!
Are you still adding up the total costs? I think you may already have an idea of how these very common problems can affect your budget. Often they are imperceptible as they are in their operational cost. If you want to know more real situations see my next article “How a DAM platform can bring “cost savings” to your area (Part II)“
Knowing how to calculate the costs of your day-to-day digital asset management problems, how about improving the management process and finding out how Yapoli uses these resources and can help your company:
An intelligent DAM platform that optimizes the management and distribution of digital files for the industry in a simple, safe, practical, fast and, above all, measurable way.