understanding the digital asset lifecycle

Understanding the Digital Asset Lifecycle:Defining and Connecting the Four Stages

Copyright © 2015 DigitalAssetManagement.com. All rights reserved.

2Copyright © 2015 DigitalAssetManagement.com. All rights reserved.


Contents

Introduction 3

Creation 3

Management 4

Distribution 5

Preservation 6

Conclusion 6

This whitepaper defines each step of the digital asset lifecycle, providing tips on how to best navigate your collection and how a DAM system can improve your everyday business strategies.



You’ve probably seen it happen at work. It might have been a slow creep or a sudden rush, but your team is dealing with lots of digital assets, like digital images, graphics, video footage and documents.

As the importance and volume of digital content grows, companies are reaching a “critical mass” of digital assets. Keeping digital assets organized and available is a top priority for efficient operations in marketing, creative or communications departments. They need systems to maintain, manage and distribute important files.

Understanding the digital asset lifecycle is a step towards getting the most out of your assets and the people that manage them. The digital asset lifecycle is comprised of four stages:

Creation

Management

Distribution

Preservation

Using a digital asset management (DAM)

system is one of the best ways to streamline the lifecycle, allowing best use of people’s time and quick, easy access to assets of all types.

This whitepaper defines each step of the lifecycle, provides tips on how to best navigate

your collection, and explains how implementing a DAM system can save time and money while increasing employee satisfaction.

Creation

The creation of a digital asset breaks down into four steps: defining necessary assets, generating ideas, planning and development.

An asset is often part of a greater call to action, such as a new product, special promotion or social media campaign. You might need assets like a logo, photos, graphics or a short video. You have selected the type of assets you will need, and it’s time to get into the details of design.

Now it’s time to start generating ideas, brainstorming and making decisions about how you want the asset to look and feel to users. You spend time developing a concept using brand guidelines and an idea takes shape. Timelines are established, the logistics are planned.

Creation happens! Graphic designers get to work at their computers and the videographer begins filming.



Quality digital assets take the time and effort of multiple people. Input and approvals are required at many junctures. That’s where a DAM system, like the Widen Media Collective, can really kick in and begin to streamline your process.

The Media Collective is a cloud-based DAM software that enables multiple users to view, download and manage your digital assets.

Give Creativity a DAM Boost

A good DAM system can foster creativity and idea generation by allowing users to quickly access assets used in the past.

Viewing old campaigns and assets gives a comprehensive view of what has been done before. If your DAM system provides analytics data, you can easily track successful content and gain insights for future creation. The Media Collective tracks analytics data at the asset level and site level, which can provide you with all the details needed to decide a best future course of action.

Management

Congratulations! An asset has been created! With the excitement of creation behind you, it’s time for the nuts and bolts of managing the asset. Approvals, logistics, versioning and roles and permissions are a few of the topics you might encounter.

Using a DAM system at this stage can organize content, making it easily searchable, and provide access to users at different levels, so that users see only what you want them to see.

A DAM system can increase efficiency by:

•Streamlining the approval process. A manager can follow a link to approve or comment on an asset. Once approved, the asset remains in the same location.

•Logistics are simplified and you can find what you need. Tagging or using collections allows efficient access even without filenaming conventions or metadata.

•Make versioning easy by keeping all iterations of an asset, with notes and comments, in the same place. Assets can be linked to websites and blog posts and will automatically update when a new version is approved.

A DAM system provides access levels to different types of users based on their needs -



for example viewing rights, upload abilities or approval.

A good system allows roles and permissions to be assigned to users so that they see only what you want them to see. That means that a project manager has access to approve the files for their campaign, a designer can upload new versions, and a marketing specialist can download the assets they need for their task at hand.

Providing the Right Kind of Access

Who gets to access what content is a big part of managing digital assets. Widen offers products that meet the simplest and most complicated access needs. For companies with many affiliates and a large marketing department, the Media Collective provides a scalable structure for efficient use.

For simple, easily downloadable asset groups, the stylized collection feature allows you to create clearly-branded asset collections for viewing or download.

Distribution

The point of every digital asset is distribution. Internally, an asset might move between departments, to affiliate partners, or be routed to salespeople. Externally, you may be sending to dealer/distributor networks, including them in a blog post or sharing via social media outlets.

Distribution hinges on providing your users easy access to the digital assets they need. DAM systems can deliver assets in various

“Once we implemented the DAM, we have a cute little workflow that shows it takes about two minutes for the customer to log onto the DAM, search for the image that they are looking for, download the image to their local desktop in the proper file format that they require it in, and then use it and implement it wherever they want to.

We obviously went from fifteen days for an image request all the way down to two minutes for an image request. That’s the biggest impact from a personnel perspective. It allowed us to free up one particular person in our creative department who spent all day fulfilling those image requests.”

Lisa Gauvin, Associate Marketing Manager at Yankee Candle Company

Watch the interview



file formats, resolutions and dimensions. A collection might include the necessary files for a complete campaign, such as high-resolution, poster-ready photos, social media-optimized images, and easy-use website headers.A savvy DAM system goes beyond downloading, providing links and embed codes that enable assets to be published directly to websites and blog posts or to social media.

Saving Time, Money and Sanity

Many companies have experienced a slow creep in file distribution, only to discover at some point that they have one or more people who spend almost all of their time emailing files to partners.

The Yankee Candle Company found themselves caught in a cycle where it took eight to fifteen days for a distributor to get the image they needed in the right format and size. By implementing the Media Collective, Yankee Candle associate marketing manager Lisa Gauvin says they improved asset delivery time with self-serve access that freed up staff to work on new projects.

Preservation

How long an asset remains in distribution depends on the asset. One video may only be relevant during a short marketing campaign, another describing a key aspect of your company will have much longer lifetime.

Preservation, or archiving, an asset and related document and versions is a key part of the lifecycle.

Keeping files organized and available when you need them saves time and money. A DAM system can provide a cost-efficient, archive-level environment where using management tools like tagging, you can access related files in seconds.

Some DAM systems, like the Media Collective, take it a step further by offering “low and slow” storage. A low, or deeper, preservation system is great for raw video, discarded photos from a shoot and other large amounts of data. These are the kind of files you don’t need at your fingertips, so they take a little longer to access.

Tracking Asset Performance

Gone are the days when you created an illustration or video and send it out for use, relying on sporadic feedback about the success of an asset. With optimization analytics, DAM software systems like the Media Collective can provide data about:

•Which digital assets are performing best

•Which assets are underused

•Which types of assets are more in demand by your users

•Which types of assets are not needed by your users

•Who your power users are



•What your users are (and are not) searching for

•Where assets are being embedded

Analytics information provides much-needed marketing data about how and where assets are being used and can help inform future asset creation.

Conclusion

Every asset navigates through the digital asset lifecycle of creation, management, distribution and preservation. Using an DAM system increases efficiency throughout the lifecycle as you develop, store, share and archive your assets. You can save time and money while freeing up staff who may spend long hours responding to emails.

A good asset management system can:

•Increase return on investment by getting more usage out of existing assets.

•Reduce time to market by quickly getting the right kind of digital assets to people.

•Save money by allowing creative and marketing staff to focus on growth and innovation instead of spending long hours replying to email requests.

•Provide employees at all levels with tools to streamline the digital asset lifecycle, from idea development to approval and distribution.

It’s no secret that in today’s information-dense, visual environment, digital assets are of increasing importance to companies and

organizations of all sizes. If you aren’t already dealing with digital asset overload, you’re probably looking at it for the future.

As you consider how you handle the digital asset lifecycle, it’s worth considering if a DAM system is the right way to organize what you have now and set up structures for the future.


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understanding the digital asset lifecycle

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