“I believe brands will witness a greater emphasis on DAM software vendors to help users with automatic rights management, ensuring that they remain compliant as rules and regulations become stricter.” says Bettina Isabelle Berntsen, CMO, FotoWare in an exclusive interview with TalkCMO.
TCMO Bureau: In an increasingly complex and ever-evolving world of data, how can brands organize and effectively manage their digital assets?
Bettina Berntsen: In FotoWare’s DAM (Digital Asset Management) Industry Trends survey late last year, it found that marketing teams managed thousands of assets (the highest figure mentioned in our research was 170,000). Against this backdrop, there is a need for a digital asset management (DAM) system to organize and speed up access to digital assets.
Key considerations when selecting a DAM system or software are: ease-of-use; ability to quickly find, share and reuse images, graphics, and videos; cloud-based where teams are spread out and with good rights and security features.
The ability to find assets and therefore increase their value is made possible through strong metadata governance and sophisticated workflows. Only with this are digital assets easy to find, reuse, and manage, so ensuring higher ROI (Return on Investment) for each asset, especially among large collections.
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By using DAM software, marketing teams can speed up and simplify the creation of campaigns, for example. It is important for marketers to establish good processes for implementing metadata by ensuring that the right terms are used across the company. These should be easy for employees to determine, for example, by using taxonomies. Teams should also be subject to set routines for uploading assets, ensuring quick uploading and correct use of metadata. By spending time structuring assets, it is easier to scale any digital asset library.
Furthermore, powerful and automated workflows can help to organize and manage assets. For example, image rights can be managed where assets are automatically revoked when a license has expired or in relation to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) when consent has been withdrawn.
TCMO Bureau: What steps can brands take to seamlessly share digital assets with multiple stakeholders without having to worry about security issues?
Bettina Berntsen: Marketers should provide their teams with the tools and technology to manage access rights, keep track of image rights and licensing, and enforce GDPR regulations when it comes to images, video, and voice. For example, when sharing the material for an upcoming campaign with an external agency, a secure link can be provided directly from the system.
TCMO Bureau: How can brands integrate digital assets on a dedicated DAM platform to fuel their ROI?
Bettina Berntsen: By integrating a Digital Asset Management solution into a martech stack, ROI is increased quickly. Being able to easily find digital assets by searching for keywords and other metadata significantly reduces time spent searching for files. Furthermore, it also enables people to use files correctly and legally while at the same time avoiding duplicates and thus, save storage space.
Large enterprises without a DAM solution have challenges with storage and duplicates. For instance: files are downloaded locally, edited and used in a campaign, and only sometimes uploaded into the organization’s cloud storage again, creating a duplicate. Not only does this increase storage use, but it also makes it difficult for others to find and reuse it later while at the same time knowing what can be used where.
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Furthermore, keeping control of licensing and image rights can save organizations enormous sums by implementing automatic workflows to avoid fines for breaching licensing terms.
TCMO Bureau: In an increasing cloud environment, how can marketers defend and secure their digital assets against ever-evolving cyber-attacks?
Bettina Berntsen: As more marketing teams work remotely, there is a need for stronger security. In our research around priorities and challenges in managing digital assets, 70% of respondents said that they are actively protecting them and fully aware of the importance of fundamental security measures, detailing strategies including mirrored backups, encryption access management, network segmentation, two-factor authentication, and VPN (Virtual Private Networks) management. Indeed 64% of respondents use Single Sign-on (SSO).
When selecting a DAM system, marketing managers may want to consider a provider’s relevant experience among high-security sectors (such as government and law enforcement), and by using a cloud-based system, they know that security measures are being updated and taken care of by the vendor daily.
TCMO Bureau: What do you think will shape DAM platforms in the future?
Bettina Bernsten: 2020 showed us how rapidly innovation and digitalization could happen. With more people working remotely, products and services bought online, and business conducted virtually, brands can expect to see noticeable growth in the number of digital assets and the need for supporting software.
Demand for cloud-based DAM software will grow. Choosing SaaS enables companies to scale easily and supports remote working, something that will continue in 2021 with the pandemic still in play.
Integrations will be critical as businesses today create more content; therefore, they are looking for DAM platforms that can plug-in into the business tech-stack easily. Mobile usage will also shape DAM platforms, with more users being able to access business-critical tools on their smartphones.
AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (machine learning) and automations (workflows) using metadata will be important with the exponential growth in content creation. Implementing AI and ML and training the models to enable you to make decisions based on massive amounts of data will be crucial going forward. Seeing it from a DAM perspective, being able to automatically tag thousands of assets by using AI proves direct ROI and enables people to focus on other creative tasks.
I believe brands will witness a greater emphasis on DAM software vendors to help users with automatic rights management, ensuring that they remain compliant as rules and regulations become stricter.
Digital assets have never been so important as marketers are under pressure to do more with less. With more use of cloud, adoption of best-of-breed DAM technologies and a focus on security and rights, the future looks bright for anyone managing multiple assets.
Bettina Isabelle Berntsen is CMO of FotoWare. She has worked within marketing and sales in the tech-industry since 2011 focusing on advisory, consultancy services and SaaS products.
