DEAR DR. DAM: My name is Andy and I work in administration at a company that manufactures parts for a wide variety of machines. The company sells and distributes products throughout the United States of America and Canada. For the past twenty years, most of our marketing used catalogs filled with images of our products. Sales representatives also gave demonstrations when visiting potential clients and at our factories. Such demonstrations have always proved to be very useful for marketing but many of our newer and most valuable products are just too big for field demonstrations.

DEAR DR. DAM: This is Sandra from Minnesota. I am in a fix because we have so many high quality, high resolution digital assets. The company should be having problems because we don't have enough assets but ironically, it's the other way around! When I took the position of assistant head of marketing, I never would have imagined that having too many high quality marketing materials could be an issue but here we are!

DEAR DR. DAM: Hello, my name is Julie and I am one of the managers of the marketing department for a food and beverage distributor on the east coast. Our wide range of products has resulted in the compilation of a huge corporate image library and marketing database. We have literally tens of thousands of images, many of which are high resolution, and a growing catalog of high definition videos. We have invested in these quality digital assets because we believe that much of our success relies upon the ability to showcase our products in fine detail.

DEAR DR. DAM: My name is Fred and I run a growing company that retails furniture sets over the Internet. We maintain warehouses but stopped selling from brick and mortar establishments once Internet based sales dwarfed anything being done with our original store. Much of our success is based on our excellent marketing team and good reputation. Once we switched over to being an Internet based business, marketing quickly convinced us of how important it was to produce and use high quality digital images and video to showcase our products.

DEAR DR. DAM: Hello, my name is Wendy, and I help manage the marketing department of a company that distributes footwear across the country. We got on board with DAM some time ago because it was the only way to work with our truly vast corporate image library. To say that we deal with a large number of items is putting it lightly. We literally distribute thousands of shoes, sandals, sneakers, boots, and more to hundreds of dealers. We used to send out printed catalogs but these have been replaced by greener, cheaper electronic documents and websites. In addition to catalogs, I would estimate that our marketing department puts out maybe 5,000 images per week. I say all of this because I want to give you an idea of our situation and why we so desperately need better digital asset management tools.

DEAR DR. DAM: Hi, my name is Stephen and I am one of the marketing managers for a mid-sized company on the east coast. We are in the process of expanding the business and have opted for increasing the number of dealers that sell our products. I know this is going to be a good move for us but we have been running into some serious problems regarding our video content (although “I” have been the person feeling the stress). I suppose the main problem is that with our present system used to manage marketing assets, among a bunch of other annoying issues, it just can’t deal with video content. In fact there is no video content management at all and that is the basic problem!

DEAR DR. DAM: My name is Phil and I am in charge of the marketing department of a company that manufactures a wide range of apparel items. We have recently expanded into a number of markets and expect to continue growing at a steady pace for the foreseeable future. As a result of this expansion, we have been increasing our online presence and it was during this process that we began to run into marketing related problems. We require literally thousands of high resolution images of our products because we make a wide range of items that need to be shown in a number of ways. It was surprising how quickly our in-house servers became bogged down with marketing materials and so we came to the realization that we needed some sort of digital image management that included off-site hosting.

DEAR DR. DAM: Hi, this is Al and I am a marketing executive for a large company. We already have DAM software but the program is simply so difficult to manage and use that a number of our marketing people have opted for building their own local drive repositories. They claim that this is more efficient than trying to figure out how to work with the digital asset management tools on hand. As you might imagine, the challenges related to our DAM system have also been taxing for our IT people. High numbers of large file transfers in particular have been a problem.

DEAR DR. DAM: This is Tom and I work in management for a food processing company located in the west. Because we work with a well established client base that has been gradually built over the course of four decades, we didn’t see much need to establish an online presence until a few years ago. That was when analysts linked negative trends in revenue to competition with other companies (some of which are international) that also happen to have a strong web presence for their brand.

DEAR DR. DAM: Hi, this is Tina and I work in the marketing department for a second tier university in Texas. A lot of folks don’t realize this but universities require a lot of attention to marketing. Each department has to more or less try and sell itself to potential students and therefore requires different sets of materials. For example, you wouldn’t believe the number of videos requested by the university relations department while even the information services department is putting in requests for dozens of high quality images. You see, there is a lot of competition for getting a good education in this country and just like other schools, we have had to constantly improve our digital asset library and adapt to online marketing that makes use of social networks.