Digital asset management

What is digital asset management?

Digital asset management (DAM) is the practice of administering, organizing, and distributing media files. DAM software enables brands to develop a library of photos, videos, graphics, PDFs, and templates that are easy to search and ready to deploy.

DAM originated in the 1990s when marketing went digital. As the volume of media files exploded, they became siloed in individual computers or mazes of shared folders. Marketing teams struggled to find and distribute their content for product launches and campaigns.

So, DAM pioneers studied the information management techniques used by librarians and applied them to media files. Widen was on the front edge of this trend. Our answer to these challenges was the Widen Collective®, an enterprise content management platform built around DAM. Today, more than 650 of the world’s most respected brands use our enterprise DAM tools to:

Centralize media files in a single platform

Automate time-consuming processes like metadata tagging and content distribution

Collaborate on content creation, review, and approval

Share assets through self-service portals

Analyze content performance and usage

Repurpose assets to maximize the return on investment

Protect brands from inconsistencies and image rights violations

Integrate marketing technology (martech) tools into one, content-centric stack

Benefits of digital asset management

Saves time at every step of the content lifecycle. DAM users can find, tag, clip, embed, convert, share, or publish assets with a few clicks.

Protects the brand by controlling access to content. Only approved, up-to-date assets will reach your social marketers, salespeople, and partners.

Eliminates bottlenecks by letting collaborators search and browse brand assets on their own. Nobody on the marketing team should have to spend all day emailing files.

Create once, publish everywhere, or COPE, with embed codes. If you alter a master file in the DAM platform, every instance of that asset on the web will automatically update, too. How cool is that?

Improves ROI on content by providing analytics on searches, downloads, views, usage, and engagement. You’ll know what to repurpose, what to retire, and what to create in the future.

Minimizes busywork by plugging DAM technology into other martech systems. Social marketers, salespeople, and others can access and search assets in the platforms where they normally work. No more downloading and re-uploading files.