Once you’ve decided on a new marketing campaign, you’ll be tempted to jump right in. Slow down! You’re missing an important first step: the creative brief. A creative brief is essential for getting all internal stakeholders on the same page before executing a project. All new creative endeavors should start with a brief, so use the tips in this guide to help you draft one that is clear, concise, and informative.

Regardless of funding, revenues, or company size, one of the strongest differentiators an organization can have is its brand. But brand strength doesn't happen on its own. It's a competitive advantage that needs to be earned. It takes organizational self-reflection, focus, and discipline to create a brand that customers prefer over competitors. That’s why brand management is important. The brand must have rules placed around it to be easily upheld and presented appropriately. And it needs to be considerate to a quickly changing world with numerous cultural nuances.

As a marketer, you know first hand how important it is for your potential and existing customers to feel good about your brand. It creates expectations around the quality and value of your offering, and what it will feel like to use your product or service. Those expectations impact what your market buys.

Which trends are marketing-driven organizations focused on? Inquiring minds want to know! If you said artificial intelligence, actionable data, customer experience, and building the right technology mix, you’re spot on. Connecting digital asset management (DAM) to these trends needs to be a priority for all marketing teams who want to maximize content value, create deeper emotional connections with their audiences, and improve the overall customer experience.

Sandra De Biasi is the project manager of digital assets and graphics at Varian, a Fortune 500 company and provider of radiation oncology treatment software and hardware.

At Varian, she manages their digital asset management system, which has played an integral role in managing the company’s brand assets during their recent corporate rebrand. Here’s her exciting story about how monitoring content analytics in their DAM system helped secure their valuable brand assets.

The connectivity between people, processes, and technologies allows marketers and creatives to perform their best and create incredibly meaningful experiences. But how? That’s what we decided to find out by talking with a range of professionals around the world about what’s behind true connectivity. Our team conducted and analyzed 32 phone interviews and 506 online surveys to generate the data.

The report explores how modern marketing organizations balance the power of technology with the familiarity of the human touch, and the role of connectivity in marketing operations, strategy, and business results. Among many findings, we discovered a significant gap between interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and understanding of that technology in marketing departments.

When engaging in digital business today, marketing organizations need several systems to guide their work functions like file sharing, data management and analysis, and project management. So it’s not unusual for the management of so many systems to quickly become overwhelming with multiple logins, functionality overlaps, isolated files and data, and project bottlenecks.

How Carnival Cruise Line uses content analytics to measure their sales communications performance

As businesses compete more on experience, sales teams face the challenge of communicating the experience. A great way to do that is with dynamic video content. But if your team creates content that goes against marketing conventions like “shorter videos are better,” how do you know if it’s working?  

JL Audio is a U.S. manufacturer of high-end consumer audio products. Great presentation of their products is critical for sales, so a considerable amount of their creative budget goes to photography — high-quality photography where the lighting, props, and layout are just right. These shots are divided into tabletop “catalog product shots” and more conceptual “beauty shots.”

Editor’s note: Deb Berard has moved to a new organization but her experience with DAM is still relevant to other DAMsters. Enjoy!

We caught up with Deb Berard, Senior Business Analyst and DAM admin at New Teacher Center, which is headquartered in Santa Cruz, CA. Here’s her take on the value digital asset management (DAM) brings to their team and business.