Using DAM To Integrate Marketing Activities
Last week, CMSWire published an article by Mohan Taylor, from North Plains: DAM Goes to Market(ing). This is one of the better argued pieces I’ve read about handling the marketing use-case in DAM:
“I fundamentally believe that the software solution is only as good as the DAM processes that the organization adopts. For the marketing use-cases, the process of good digital asset management is the vital step in improving the content workflows. Using DAM as the foundation allows the whole ecosystem to be managed and simplifies the reporting and analytics that are needed to show ROI and drive future business decisions.” [Read More]
The basis of the item is that your DAM should be the central element or hub that connects all of your other marketing activities together and I would agree with Mohan 100% on that. As well as the quote offered above, there are a few other good points raised.
From the wider perspective, I’m not sure now that there are many who do not understand the necessity to avoid having assets in multiple non-integrated silos. The debate seems to be moving more towards the strategies for how to achieve this. A further complication in a commercial environment is that a number of market participants want to post-rationalise their decisions to take products (or methodologies, in the case of consultants) in a given direction and then cannibalise a recently formed industry-wide consensus view to try to assert the credibility of their approach. For example, I have seen some vendors propose that rather than integrating repositories together, you move everything to their solution instead (which is basically another silo). The other route seems to be a form of horizontal integration where the firms concerned move downstream through the digital asset supply chain, but then neglect the core DAM solutions so they end up doing nothing very well. If we’re going to collectively make any progress with the issues Mohan describes, these kind of tactics will need to be taken to task and the folly of them exposed.
My own view on how to solve the issue of integrating DAM with marketing is not so much that DAM itself needs changing, more that an infrastructure-oriented services architecture should be at the core of what is offered and then layers are added to allow each use case to be addressed (marketing included). With technology issues, you usually discover before long that you need at least two of everything and DAM isn’t likely to be a lot different in that respect, but perhaps that’s another article for another day!
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