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Why a robust digital asset management solution is the cornerstone for your content business

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Why digital asset management matters in today's virtual-first world

Content is constantly evolving.

Consumers today are building new habits that involve more channels and more types of content than ever before. As a result, organizations and publishers are having to adapt and put solutions in place to help maintain control of their content processes.

Successful content businesses are those that reinforce a strong foundation to their content processes and workflows—and digital asset management is one key part of this. By bringing order to the creative process, prioritizing consistency and supporting collaboration among teams, putting a strong digital asset management solution in place now will ensure digital and editorial teams can focus on the future, and be ready for what’s next.

What specific problems does digital asset management solve?

For digital leaders—anyone from the chief digital officer and chief product officer to social-media specialists and project managers—the brand is their product. In setting out to establish a content business, these leaders need a system that effectively and proactively allows them to manage their brand narrative in a digital ecosystem. There are three key roadblocks to supporting that digital ecosystem that a DAM aims to help organizations and publishers overcome.

A good digital asset management solution solves chaotic creative processes

Amidst the pandemic, channels and formats are being consumed differently, forcing businesses to adapt where and how they’re reaching customers. Recent insights from Nielsen, for example, show that home-bound consumers have led to a 60% increase in the amount of video content watched globally, while engagement across social media, audio and podcasting is also on the rise.

Organizations and publishers today work with a variety of content types for everything they produce—including text, photos, audio and video—and these shifts are only expanding that list. A DAM solution aims to bring order to the creative process by increasing functionality for the digital and editorial teams working with these assets to produce content.

Often what we see with new customers and prospects is a “no DAM” approach—businesses rely on disparate files and locations distributed across the organization, with no good way to find, locate and reuse these assets. This not only leads to inconsistent brand output and disorderly creation, but it also gets costly. Things like stock imagery licenses can get pricey fast, while utilizing a proprietary, homegrown or legacy system that was built years ago and now no one knows how to update or change will also cost the business.

Inconsistent output is eliminated with the right digital asset management solution

In line with new channels and formats consumers are engaging with businesses across, many people say that they expect their new digital consumption habits to continue after the COVID-19 outbreak passes. One in five internet users say they expect to continue watching more content on streaming services, for example, and one in seven say they expect to continue spending more time using social media.

With the heightened number of channels to which content is being delivered, and disparate teams working on different projects behind the scenes, organizations and publishers can get lost in trying to achieve a seamless, consistent experience for every user. A DAM solution aims to act as a business’s central repository of assets, making it easier to ensure a uniform approach to content is being produced across channels.

A good digital asset management solution enhances collaboration across teams

Unclear and undefined roles and permissions create bottlenecks in the content process. Digital asset management works to solve this by supporting organizations and publishers in strengthening information sharing and collaboration amongst digital and editorial teams at every stage of content creation—from planning and creation, to review, version control, approval and license management.

What does digital asset management look like through Brightspot?

Brightspot’s digital asset management solution helps organizations and publishers manage and access all of their digital assets easily through a powerful and modern platform with federated search, workflow and editing tools all in one place. When it comes down to it, there are three key features that make Brightspot’s embedded DAM solution a strong choice to move businesses forward.

Brightspot puts the power of search at the center of the digital asset management experience

Brightspot makes finding assets easy and intuitive. Advanced capabilities like word proximity, diacritical-marks search and exact-phrase search make locating assets seamless for the user, while AI also drives intelligent image and video analysis to identify objects, people, text and activities.

Federated search is an especially powerful tool that comes with the Brightspot platform, and allows you to query a third-party database, like Getty Images, directly from our solution, saving time and making finding assets easier. Assets can be imported as a Brightspot content type, then edited, all without having to leave the CMS or rely heavily on IT support. One of the other possibilities through federated search via Brightspot is the ability to connect to another—often homegrown—DAM or storage location for assets.

These integration-ready capabilities are key to getting off the ground quickly, without having to start from scratch. Digital and editorial teams can also locate assets in Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Getty, AP or Shutterstock all from searching for them via the CMS. This drastically simplifies and cuts the time it takes teams to search for assets, increasing efficiencies for content creation.

Brightspot's embedded DAM lets users manage all their images and assets in one place

In line with integration-ready capabilities that make managing assets easier, Brightspot offers a more integrated editing system as well for image and asset management. Instead of needing to work between two systems—Brightspot and another third-party editing tool—Brightspot brings both of these together into one platform.

Through cropping, filtering and text overlay functionality, organizations and publishers can work more efficiently from one central place.

A critical part of what makes managing assets through Brightspot easy is the ability to utilize a brand portal. Brightspot's embedded DAM helps organizations and publishers create and maintain a brand portal, allowing them to unify and consolidate media libraries in real-time. Through the brand portal, businesses can manage access and permissions based on roles to ensure the right people get access to the right assets.

Equally as important is for digital teams to be able to create a set of assets—say, for a brand launch or a campaign—and group them by type, like logos, image assets, fonts and more. This way, marketers can make these brand assets available as a collection to different users in the brand portal.

Workflow tools extend to setting roles and permissions across all digital assets

Let’s hone in on what makes roles and permissions useful through Brightspot. Brightspot’s roles and permissions capabilities allow for granular access control through an intuitive UI. This makes it easy, especially for non-technical admins, to configure the settings and change them based on needs. If a brand manager, for example, needed access to a set of assets, but only for a limited time, you could grant specific permissions to those defined assets and then change them at any time. Others outside the organization, like journalists, can be made to see images as read-only – seeing just the caption and credit alone—while a photo editor can manipulate those specific fields to view additional metadata on their end, including exchangeable image files (EXIF) and International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC).

Brightspot also allows you to create unique transitions and statuses for your digital assets, including steps for reviews, edits and rejections. To keep the content process moving swiftly, Brightspot notifies users as assets move through the workflow.

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