White Paper Digital Asset Management Guide for Marketers 1 Introduction to Digital Asset Management

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1 White Paper Digital Asset 1 Introduction to Digital Asset Overview This document provides an introduction to digital asset management from the perspective of the marketing function. It describes basic digital asset management concepts and types of systems that are available. Analysis - What is digital asset management? - What are the benefits from digital asset management? - What kinds of digital asset management systems are available? Action Marketing organizations can derive significant benefits from digital asset management systems. 2002,2003 MarketingPilot Software LLC, all rights reserved. Page 1 of 5

2 More and more promotional opportunities means ever greater demand for logos, brochures, web pages, images, photos, power point presentations, etc. Every logo, graphic and web page takes time to create. If you use an agency to design them, you have to pay for them. Copy needs to be written, edited, formatted, and proofed, too. Digital Asset What s the difference between a factory and a logo? Not much, if you think about it. Both are valuable to your firm, and both took time and money to create. The factory is a brick-and-mortar asset; the logo is a digital one. How much do you spend on digital assets? Take a step back and tally up how much your team spends on digital asset creation. How many people are devoted to creating digital assets? How much of your time do you spend managing them? Don t forget the costs of the Macintoshes running Quark Express and Photoshop, the servers where the files reside, the CD-ROMs and Zip disks used for file archival, etc. You probably spend more than you think. Take the 12-person marketing department for a leading software company. The department s staff includes 2 graphic designers, 2 copy writers, and a 4-person web design team. Of the 12 people in the department 8 spend most of their time creating digital assets. Everything they create needs to be routed, edited, and approved more resource devoted to digital assets and more information to keep track of. In the case of the software company above, the payroll costs alone exceeded $700K per year; hardware and software costs a rounding error of about $25K per year. Digital Assets are Valuable Valuing digital assets is akin to valuing stock options; you can make things simple or complicated. While the original logo designed for Nike Corporation is rumored to have set the founders back $25, the Swoosh is certainly worth a lot more. On the other hand, many of the assets created never get used. But it s hard to argue that the $725K our colleagues in marketing at the software company is spending creating digital assets isn t real money. Guess What: You re Already Managing Thousands of Digital Assets Ask your creative staff how many files they manage. Industry experts report that each marketer typically manages more than 5,000 files spread across a number of storage mediums. 2002,2003 MarketingPilot Software LLC, all rights reserved. Page 2 of 5

3 Ask your creative staff how often they search for files. Marketing professionals report that they spend a lot of time searching for, filing, retrieving, organizing, backing up and sharing digital assets. Industry experts have found that the typical marketing professional performs more than 10 searches a day. And, more than a third of searches are failures wasted time and potentially, the beginning of a redo. According to GISTICS, a leading consulting firm specializing in digital asset management, creative professionals spend 10% of their time performing file management activities, of which one third is spent on searches alone! Digital Asset Digital Asset Systems Save Time and Money Research indicates that the payback from a digital asset management system can range between 7 to 15 times its costs. And that payback comes fast, too. Most savings from digital asset management come from time saved: - Searching for assets. - Organizing assets. - Backing-up assets. - Securing assets. - Avoiding recreating assets that can t be found. There are additional benefits, too. Digital asset management systems can: - Help identify which creative is the most effective. - Enforce a consistent workflow, avoiding errors and wasted time. - Ensure that only approved brand elements and versions are used, and that they are used in the proper context. - Foster better collaborative relationships between workers by facilitating the sharing and dissemination of assets. - Provide the ability for clients or other departments to observe creative works in process. The Breadth of Digital Asset Solutions Digital asset management software is just a tool for organizing digital files for storage and retrieval. As you begin the process of considering digital asset management solutions, the first step should be to identify your objectives: Is there a specific problem that needs to be solved? Are the designers unable to find assets? Is routing a huge bottleneck? Is copy approved by all the editors in a timely manner? The digital asset management marketplace offers a broad range of solutions, ranging from inexpensive desktop software, to powerful enterprise-wide systems. Gaining agreement on the priority of your needs will enable you to identify potential solutions more easily. 2002,2003 MarketingPilot Software LLC, all rights reserved. Page 3 of 5

4 Digital Asset Desktop Systems Desktop digital asset management systems are the simplest. They typically serve the needs of individual users with relatively small collections of assets. Some desktop systems can be extended to offer networking options. Desktop systems are most commonly used by designers to manage one type of asset, such as Quark files, or Photoshop images. Desktop systems are typically installed by the end user, like other desktop PC or Mac applications. While desktop systems allow for creating descriptions and profiles, typically they only catalog thumbnails of the assets and references to the actual files, as opposed to storing the files themselves. In desktop systems the digital assets usually remain located in a shared folder on a workstation or file server. Desktop systems are designed to be accessed by a couple of users at one time. Desktop systems can typically handle up to ten thousand digital assets. Costs range from $200 to $500 per user. Departmental Systems Departmental digital asset management systems are more complex, and are typically designed for use by the entire marketing department. Departmental systems typically reside on a file server, which may be dedicated to digital asset management, or not. Look for more powerful features such as version control, security, routing, approvals, and annotations. Typically, departmental systems are easy to install, setup and run. They typically require a minor amount of IT support. Departmental systems catalog thumbnails of the assets and store the files themselves in a central database. Departmental systems are typically designed to be accessed by many users at the same time. Departmental systems can typically handle up hundreds of thousands of digital assets. Costs range from $500 to $1,000 per user. Enterprise-wide Systems These systems are the most powerful. These systems often include very sophisticated features, and are highly customizable. Implementing an enterprise-wide digital asset management system is a complex process, requiring a substantial amount of marketing and IT staff time. Enterprise-wide systems are designed for access by hundreds or thousands of users at the same time and can store millions of digital assets. Costs are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and up. 2002,2003 MarketingPilot Software LLC, all rights reserved. Page 4 of 5

5 Conclusion Digital asset management is a mature technology with proven benefits. Digital asset management is widely used, by thousands of companies. There are many vendors who provide systems for small, medium and large users. Choosing between a desktop, departmental or enterprisewide system is fairly straightforward. If you aren t using digital asset management, you should consider one: they have an ROI that is easy to determine, and hard to beat. Digital Asset Look for the rest of the series at - Media Catalogs Versus Asset Repositories (Part 2) - The Next New Thing In DAM (Part 3) - Planning for Digital Asset (Part 4) This document was prepared by MarketingPilot Software, a vendor of marketing information systems. MarketingPilot manages critical marketing knowledge, and provides collaborative tools to manage campaigns, events, projects, jobs, media, digital assets, budgets, and expenses. Marketing teams use MarketingPilot to improve productivity, reduce costs, and to track and improve results. MarketingPilot Software LLC is located in Evanston, Illinois USA and can be reached at or at ,2003 MarketingPilot Software LLC, all rights reserved. Page 5 of 5