Why DAM? A Digital Asset Management Business Case
Learn why Digital Asset Management (DAM) is essential for modern businesses. Explore the benefits and build a business case for DAM with HIVO.
Business Case
A business case can be defined as an investment analysis that justifies a purchase decision. In the world of digital asset management, we add to this basic definition the idea of a solution lifecycle. A Solution lifecycle can be thought of as the total estimated costs of buying and using a solution, which in HIVO’s case, is the cost of storing, collaborating and distributing digital, marketing and branded content to internal and external stakeholders throughout an organisation.
A key business case, or value proposition, for adopting HIVO lies in the distribution of content marketing programs—eBooks, infographics, presentations, and sales trainings—to market. General benefits include:
Prime-time hour savings:
Digital asset management platforms reduce or eliminate many account development activities and tasks, including:
- Preparation of presentations
- Development of proposals
- Assembly of promotional flyers
- Creation of social media posts
- Transferring multimedia explanations to resellers and partners
This means that marketing professionals and those surrounding the marketing function (eg. sales, HR and legal) can “reinvest” time savings into more strategic work such as: strategy, account planning, new business development and face-to-face interactions.
Cycle time gains:
For example, HIVO’s benchmarks reveal that digital asset management platforms can eliminate 5-15 days off a global rollout. In markets characterised by short product life cycles, aggressive competition, seasonal marketing windows, and promotional partnerships, cycle time improvements of just 1-2 days can translate into $10 to $20 million in incremental profit.
Markets where such cost savings could be made include:
- Consumer products
- Entertainment (movies, music, games)
- Financial services
- Pharmaceutical and life sciences
- Telecommunications
Activity automation
Digital asset management automation allow users to automate many activities and tasks that marketing, communications and field operations would usually have to perform manually.
Example activities and tasks include:
- Finding a presentation or proposal
- Locating and placing product images and branded assets into presentations
- Acquiring and distributing corporate logos of partners and prospects into a presentation
- pdating an individual slide or page in a document
- Procuring images from an advertising agency, or setting out the conditions of use
- Repurposing a promotion, social media post or advertisement
- Acquiring royalty-free video footage
- Procuring a supplier for video, photography, design or other digital production work
Digital asset management portals not only automate these and many more activities, DAM portals also enable a host of self-service capabilities for partners, stakeholders and customers around the world at any time of day.
Media technologies
Content service platforms such as HIVO rely on complex, rapidly evolving technologies such as:
- Imaging servers
- Multi-format playback servers
- File type conversion tools
- Lighting fast search engines with fit-for purpose filtering
- Specialised databases
- Video ingest tools
Media, entertainment and publishing firms have long invested in these and related media technologies. Their chief technology officers will attest that media technologies evolve faster than typical IT systems; the complexity of media technologies requires highly specialised and generally scarce labor resources.
For these reasons, many IT executives from media, entertainment and publishing recommend that their counterparts in general industry outsource media technologies whenever possible, securing a hosted content service with strong service level agreements and a proven track record for serving global marketing operations.
Time to Payback
he complete case for a digital asset management platform should answer one key question:
How long does it take a content services portal to payback its total investment?
Research conducted by HIVO of more than 1,000 marketing operations reveals more or less equivalent value (activities automated, days gained in time to market, improved relations with field operations and partners) among a variety of DAM media services platforms secured as an out-sourced service, deployed as an in-house departmental system, or deployed as enterprise content management systems.
Irrespective of their deployment status, content services portals for marketing deliver tremendous value. The total lifecycle cost analyses show that hosted DAM media service platforms cost 50 percent of a deployed in-house departmental system and will pay back the investment in half the time.
Enterprise systems for managing marketing content can handle tens and hundreds of thousands of users and cost four times more than departmental systems and seven times more than hosted services.
Which should you choose?
A good business requirements study will reveal trade-offs and criteria for determining your own fit for purpose best solution strategy. That said, digital management platforms will generally make sense for most enterprises interested in reducing chaos and improving operational efficiency when working with digital assets.