Driving Brand Marketing Processes with DAM

How centralized collections of brand marketing assets and the automation support of marketing communication projects increases operational productivity of marketing, sales, Web production and creative teams.

Growth-oriented firms with increasingly diverse and demanding marketing operations now need more effective ways of engaging potential buyers across multiple markets, communication channels and collateral presentation formats. This means that marketing operations must cover online and traditional print, broadcast, packaging, in-person and point-of-purchase brand/customer touchpoints.

Efforts to develop more effective global multichannel market communications often run into two operational barriers: the lack of a centralized collection of marcom assets (finished material, reusable media components and publishing templates); and inadequate or outmoded automation support of marcom projects. This support extends beyond email with attached documents for the conceptualizing, producing, reviewing and publishing of marketing content to their global multiple channels and customer segments.

In practice, increasing productivity of marketing operations entails the automation of redundant, manual procedures as activities and offline tasks that marketing staff and vendors perform over what we call the "marcom assets lifecycle."

This monograph examines how effective automation enables brand marketers to speed the localization, customization and personalization of marketing communications to particular market segments and customer requirements, achieving higher levels of engagement and sales conversion. In particular, we will explain how the reuse of visual marketing assets—images, designs, presentations, spreadsheets, documents, PDFs, videos and animations—in the production of Web marketing content and finished marketing materials delivers solid economic returns.

Enterprise DAM in Marketing Operations
The figure on the adjacent page (Page 7, Best Practices in Digital Asset Management or please see PDF version) depicts the transformation of technical functions—what we call solution fixtures—into three forms of performance results: productivity gains, operational gains and economic gains. The data shown represents an exhaustive multi-year benchmarking study, by GISTICS, of 400-plus enterprise digital asset management systems (EDAM) including Interwoven MediaBin and comparable systems.

Economic gains. Economic gains come in four forms. Our benchmark of EDAMs indicate that on average global enterprises realize the following of total value realized:

• 50% in the form of cost reductions—less money spent on consumables, creative services and external purchases;
• 30% in the form of process improvements—less time and hassle expended in efforts to find, reuse or customerize existing marcom assets;
• 10% in the form of increased sales—faster time-to-market with promotions and new product launch support that effectively adds extra days or weeks to a product sales lifecycle; and
• 10% in the form of intangibles—greater brand consistency, lower risks of brand misuse or regulatory infractions and broader use of brand imagery by staff and partners.

While these figures may provide high-level support of the case for enterprise DAM in global marketing operations, often senior management requires deeper, more granular proof of value.

Operational gains. Economic gains of EDAM spread throughout an enterprise. The figure on the adjacent page also depicts five areas in which enterprises realize operational gains from total value realized of EDAM:

• 39% in the area of workgroups—small groups that spend less time and effort communicating, interacting and collaborating within their groups across many time zones and business entities (creative staff as well as advertising agencies, printers, etc.);
• 31% among individuals—members of marketing, sales, Web production and creative teams that find needed materials in less time;
• 15% in the area of departments—fewer meetings and miscommunications among marketing, sales and online;
• 10% in the area of enterprise—overall more gets done with the same level of staffing, measured in reduction of time-to-market with revenue-producing projects of online offerings; and
• 5% in the area of value chains—overall higher productivity and lower transaction or hand-off costs among upstream suppliers, value-adding consultants and partners and downstream sales and service organization.

The totality of operational gains from EDAM not only translate into economic gains previously explained; these operational gains also result from productivity gains.

Productivity gains. Economic gains of EDAM come from doing more with less time, energy and cost—higher productivity! The figure also depicts five types of productivity gains of the total value realized of EDAM:

• 38% in the form of higher asset utilization—achieved from the reuse and re-expression of pre-existing media and text components, publishing and presentation templates, finished and ready-to-tweak presentations and proposals and on-demand production of customized graphics, brochures, signs and catalogs;
• 24% in the form of shorter time-to-market—achieved by adding days or weeks to sales lifecycles, exploiting short-lived sales opportunities and locking-in more accounts with the same or fewer number of sales resources;
• 24% in the form of greater stakeholder participation—achieved by reducing
  barriers to direct access to brand-marketing assets as well as improved communication, interaction and collaboration among primary and secondary users of brand-marketing assets within an organization and external partners;
• 14% in the form of risk reduction—achieved by lowering the number of inappropriate uses of brand identities and premature or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information and content; and
• 6% in the form of brand governance— achieved by reducing the number of off-brand communications and increasing the number of on-brand messages and communications with customers and other stakeholders.

Solution Fixtures of EDAM
The figure also depicts 20 solution fixtures—logical groupings of key functions of an enterprise DAM system that produce 95% or more of the total valuerealized with EDAM. While most EDAM systems contain 3,000 to 9,000 function points, most organizations use 100 to 300 of these functions and derive most of the economic gains from 30 to 80 of these functions.