Building a Digital Asset Management (DAM) System

Digital asset management can feel like it should be simple… until you’re 12 folders deep, searching for the “final” version of a file that somehow has six finals. And then Randy downloads the wrong logo, emails it to the entire company, and now you’re all rebranding against your will.

A digital asset management (DAM) system creates the structure teams need to organize, find, share, and reuse digital content, without the chaos. But building a DAM system (and the program behind it) is more than a simple tech decision. It takes strategy, alignment, and a process your team can stick with.

At Stacks, we’re here to make DAM easier and more accessible. In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know about DAM systems and programs, whether you’re just getting started or looking to improve what you already have.

We’ll cover everything you need to know about DAM systems and programs in the sections below.

Continue reading to learn: 

• What a digital asset management system is 
• Benefits of a DAM system 
• Whether you actually need a DAM system 
• How to build a digital asset management system 
• DAM system examples

What Is A Digital Asset Management (DAM) System? 

A digital asset management (DAM) system is the method and structure for organizing digital assets. It’s the technical process that defines where assets are stored, how they’re identified and labeled, organizational structures, and other details that impact efficiency. 

What Does A Digital Asset Management System Do? 

DAM systems are designed around platforms, which are the software or hardware storage solutions where assets physically live. Whether a specialized DAM platform, Dropbox, Google Drive, or a collection of hard drives, digital asset management systems establish standard protocol and practices for media asset organization. 

DAM System vs. Program 

In this resource, we refer to both DAM systems and programs. Though they’re distinct components of DAM, they share similarities and work together to establish efficiencies in managing digital assets. 

The key difference between is that a DAM system establishes the technical process for managing assets, while a program incorporates a human element. 

• A digital asset management (DAM) system creates guidelines and structure for managing assets. 
• A digital asset management (DAM) program establishes defined user roles and processes (including systematic processes) that align with organizational needs. 

Both DAM systems and programs should grow, change, and evolve, even if the technology (DAM platform) remains the same. 

Benefits of a Digital Asset Management System 

A digital asset management system enhances your creative efforts and pushes your business forward, creating efficiencies and reducing wasted time and money. 

Here are a few reasons why a DAM system is so important: 

• Creating efficiency. By establishing a sensible, strategic structure and clearly defining each step of the process, DAM systems make your overall process more efficient. 
• Increasing productivity. Maximizing the capabilities and features of your DAM platform reduces time spent on tedious manual tasks and frees up users to focus on more impactful responsibilities. 
• Maximizing your investment. Creating a DAM system pays off in the long run. It automates previously tedious manual tasks, reducing the time wasted and expediting the process. It allows your team to think less when navigating the process and spend more time focusing on their actual job. A system saves time and money, helping you get the most out of your investment. 

Giving consumers the best experience. With a DAM system, your creative, branding, and marketing initiatives have your full attention. You can do your best work and give the customers a unique, memorable experience instead of stretching yourself thin.

Do I Need A Digital Asset Management System? 

If you rely on digital assets for marketing and advertising, branding, legal compliance, or general business operations, then you need some version of a DAM system. Creatives and advertising firms rely on DAM systems to organize their robust library of work across numerous clients and projects. 

Just because you need a DAM system doesn’t mean you’re going to break the bank. If you invest time into creating an efficient system, free storage solutions like Google Drive provide everything you need for a basic DAM program. 

How to Create a Digital Asset Management System: 7 Steps to an Efficient DAM Program 

1. Identify the Need for a DAM System

Recognizing the need for a digital asset management (DAM) program and gaining awareness about its benefits to your users and organization is the first step towards making it a reality. Often, this process begins with a small group of content creators, marketers, or administrators who bear the day-to-day burden of managing digital assets.

To succeed at this stage, these DAM stakeholders must feel empowered to present their findings to leadership and decision-makers. If you are one of these people, keep going! Executive Champions can make or break your success. Learn more about how digital asset management can elevate your digital asset strategy and execution to the next level: Educate your potential Executive Champions and gain their alliance at all costs.

Goals & Activities

• Identify all bottlenecks, obstacles, inefficiencies, and risks that DAM could address
• Categorize issues into those solved by people, processes, or platforms
• Quantify the wasted time, energy, and opportunity costs of losing access to assets in a clear Return on Investment (ROI) Statement.
• Map out your current asset lifecycle, answering “Who? What? Where? When? and How?”
• Map out how this specifically contributes to your organization’s long-term success

Common Mistakes

• Failing to cultivate Executive Champions by demonstrating the benefits and ROI of a DAM program to the right people.
• Attempting to build a DAM program without support for and investment in a holistic view of DAM, including people and processes.
• Lacking proper authority, neutrality, and expertise on the team leading and executing the DAM effort.

2. Assemble the Team for Your DAM Program

Likely the stage most correlated to the success or failure of the DAM program: defining and assigning core roles and responsibilities within the DAM program and throughout the DAM journey cannot be overlooked. This involves identifying, equipping, and potentially hiring an internal team with whom the buck stops in regard to DAM. 

This team must include the proper mixture of authority, neutrality, and expertise to navigate organizational politics well, implement effectively, and ensure long-term adoption of the system. Without these factors or a team like this, more generally, any DAM-related projects will flounder, fall through the cracks, and eventually fail.

Goals & Activities

• Assign ownership of the DAM program internally. Where does the buck stop when it comes to DAM?
• Staff and equip the DAM team with the proper expertise, authority, and neutrality.
• Evaluate the ability of your DAM team to execute every stage of the project and manage the DAM program in the long term.

Common Mistakes

• Not designating a single DAM authority within the organization leads to groupthink and a lack of clarity.
• Assigning stakeholders to high-priority, DAM-related tasks who lack the time or expertise to execute them properly.
• Failing to balance competing departmental goals or visions for the DAM platform within the ownership group.

The Team You Need

• Tactical Execution. Launching, maintaining, and growing a DAM program requires the detail-oriented execution of tasks on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, encompassing activities from asset migration to regular ingestion.
• Governance & Management. DAM team members must understand the daily needs of the organization as well as its high-level strategy in order to ensure the success of the DAM workflows they help develop.
• Strategic Leadership. To survive and thrive, DAM initiatives need effective leaders. These staff members define and shape the structure of the DAM program, oversee its rollout, and continuously identify opportunities to improve the program’s effectiveness.

3. Learn More About DAM

Once you've seen a need for digital asset management, it's been prioritized, and the team is in place, you can get started defining your ideal DAM program based on organizational needs, goals, budget, and staff requirements.

This stage is about gaining a clearer picture of where you'd like to start in DAM, otherwise known as your minimum viable product (MVP). On day one of your digital asset management program's launch, what exists? What are the top priorities for you and your end users? When is it launched, and to whom?

Goals & Activities

• Identify your core stakeholder groups and determine the best representative from each
• Educate your stakeholders on the basics of DAM, its benefits, core roles, and foundational tools.
• Apply basic DAM principles to your organization. What’s possible? What are the ideal outcomes?
• Determine the next steps for building your program. What high-level tasks must be done?

Common Mistakes

• Focusing solely on specific departmental issues and/or short-term initiatives (i.e. “Tunnel Vision”)
• Defining DAM as only a platform or a one-time project instead of as an ongoing program that evolves and serves all end-users.
• Not aligning basic DAM principles with broader organizational goals and/or guidelines

4. Research and Evaluate DAM Platforms

Searching for and selecting a suitable DAM platform that addresses your needs is one of the guiding decisions that your DAM team will make when building a DAM program. While a DAM program is made up of people, processes, and platforms together, making the right choice in terms of technology for your team's needs can lead to increased return on investment down the road. 

The research, evaluation, and selection of a platform, however, have to be done in the context of the previous stages and those yet to come. Many organizations start here on their DAM journey, depending on the platform to do all the work, and end up regretting it.

Goals & Activities

• Identify your organization’s unique requirements for a DAM platform. Separate “Must-Haves” and “Nice-to-Haves”.
• Determine a clear budget and timeline for the full-scale implementation of the platform.
• Quantify the assets (number + storage), users, and administrators you’ll need for your MVP and beyond.

Common Mistakes

• Neglecting to begin the evaluation process with well-defined criteria for platforms to meet.
• Getting swept up by unique, low-priority features, a.k.a “Shiny Object Syndrome.”
• Not accounting for onboarding, migration, and integration costs during the negotiation process with potential vendors.
• Focusing only on short-term organizational priorities, excluding a long-term roadmap that may impact content workflows.

5. Build the Foundation of Your DAM System & Program

Establishing the framework for your DAM program, including processes, standards, platform configuration, and more, is truly the bedrock of a healthy and scalable starting point. It is critical, with your DAM platform selection in mind, to develop and document these foundational processes before getting down to implementation. 

These workflows and procedures will not only guide users through their experience in the DAM system, but also your team as they configure the platform, create training plans, migrate and enrich assets, and onboard new users.

Goals & Activities 

• Develop standards, workflows, and processes unique to your organization using DAM best practices. Focus first on metadata taxonomy, user groups, and core workflows.
• Configure the DAM platform to support your core workflows, including integrations with other systems.
• Document standards and processes clearly for reference by your end-users.

Common Mistakes

• Not spending sufficient time developing standards and processes tailored to your use cases and users.
• Failing to involve all stakeholders and/or end-users in the workflow development process, which leads to non-intuitive and hard-to-follow procedures.
• Skipping this step entirely.

6. Pressure Test Workflows & Standards

Conducting thorough testing and quality assurance before the launch not only ensures that what you created on paper works in the real world, but also allows you to include end users and stakeholders who will use the DAM program day in, and day out. 

This engagement not only allows you to launch to these users more confidently, but also ensures that they will use the system, generating a return on investment (ROI) from day one.

Goals & Activities

• Pressure test your standards, workflows, and processes within the DAM platform with your end users, collecting feedback and adjusting documentation accordingly.
• Ensure that integrations are working properly and have been debugged.
• Plan the rollout of the DAM platform, considering any downtime in systems or for the onboarding of new users.

Common Mistakes

• Failing to account for the time it takes specific processes to execute and standards to apply leads to unrealistic expectations and assignments of work.
• Neglecting to establish proper points of contact and lines of communication with platform vendors and technology partners to handle troubleshooting and questions from end-users.

7. Launch Your DAM System & Program

Roll out the new system, complete with assets, workflows, integrations, and trained users, confidently. If you've done your due diligence and put in the work to this point, the actual launch of the DAM program becomes one of the simpler parts of the project. 

To keep things on track, lean on people. These can include your dedicated DAM team, your core stakeholder group, end users who are bought into and excited about the DAM program, or external partners such as consultants or customer service managers. The stages preceding this one set the table for a large group of people who know their role in the DAM program and are excited to execute it. Your executive sponsor will come in extremely handy at this step. Use them to announce and champion this effort, which will help your program gain traction.

When making the DAM program a reality, much like moving into a new home, take the opportunity to start fresh. Don't rush things to meet an arbitrary deadline. Go slow, pay attention to detail, and do the in-the-weeds work now so that down the road you can go fast.

Goals & Activities

• Collect priority assets together and remove duplicates.
• Migrate assets into your recently adopted DAM platform and enrich them with new metadata throughout the process.
• Quality control migrated assets to ensure their proper organization and accessibility.
• Train your primary user groups and provide ongoing support for several weeks following the initial training period.

Common Mistakes

• Not seizing the opportunity to clean up, organize, and standardize assets and the metadata attached to them.
• Migrating all assets to the DAM platform, without considering their priority or relevance, creates clutter from day one.
• Not migrating or enriching at all and leaving it for “when you get around to it.”
• Conducting unspecific, generic training sessions with large user groups.

8. Scale, Expand, & Continuously Improve

Monitoring, measuring effectiveness, enhancing, and expanding the DAM program post-launch can be a full-time job. Without it, however, your DAM program is doomed to stagnate and lose relevance to end users quickly. In today's world, content strategies and marketing priorities shift in a matter of weeks. The program you use to manage the assets at the heart of those ever-shifting goals and strategies must be able to scale and change as well.

As you launch your DAM program, take a moment to celebrate. Pat yourself and the rest of your DAM team on a job well done. Once that moment is over, however, it's time to look ahead. Who else needs access to this program? How will you migrate their assets and onboard their users? Who will be responsible for ensuring the system remains clean? Where will users go if they have questions? How can you make things even more efficient?

Goals & Activities

• Track the efficiency of the program by setting up data and analytics dashboards, using the DAM platform or other systems.
• Collect user feedback within the first two months of launch, identifying any gaps or issues.
• Identify opportunities for program growth over the next 12-18 months.
• Expand the DAM program to other departments and teams, both internal and external.
• Consistently execute against your governance plan

Common Mistakes

• Neglecting to properly govern the DAM program over time leads to diminishing returns and the recurrence of old problems.
• Failing to provide support and resources for new hires leads to decreased adoption and increased mistakes.
• Relying solely on one or two key administrators to manage the DAM program leads to centralized institutional knowledge and risk.

DAM System Examples 

We’ve helped countless clients learn about, establish, or update their digital asset management programs. In the sections below, learn about some of the ways that Stacks created efficiencies in our clients’ DAM systems. 

Subaru 

Subaru of America, the company that markets Subaru vehicles in the U.S., struggled to manage over 250,000 historical assets stored on a 4TB hard drive. They needed a DAM system to organize and manage files, ensuring their brand integrity. 

After three workshops, Subaru and Stacks identified the necessary process and workflows for an efficient DAM system: 

• Removed thousands of duplicate assets
• Established a new set of taxonomy standards intuitive to the brand 
• Optimized the process for efficient and effective search
• Determined the best DAM platform for Subaru’s needs

Baltimore Ravens

The Baltimore Ravens, an organization in the National Football League (NFL), came to Stacks with an issue. They were generating thousands of beautiful and exciting photos at each game, but struggled to locate them in their DAM Platform.

Stacks and the Ravens sat down and developed a simple yet effective set of standards and processes in their DAM system: 

• Developing a customized list of keywords that used internal language and allowed for specific searches 
• Caption standards for each photograph to identify players, coaches, dates, scores, and locations 
• A file naming convention to allow for more intuitive organization without the need for a new folder structure. 

Build Your Digital Asset Management (DAM) System with Stacks! 

With the information laid out in this guide, you should have a better grasp of DAM systems. Specifically, you now understand exactly what a DAM system is and how it impacts your overall digital asset management process. You can also refer to this guide when researching, planning, and developing your ideas for a DAM system. 

We know DAM can be an overwhelming task for business owners, marketing managers, creative directors, and anyone who relies on digital files to push their goals forward. If you’re looking for a partner in developing your DAM system, Stacks can help! Fill out our contact form to get the conversation started.