Digital Collaboration
Philadelphia is home to over 100 museums. Their collections of artifacts can each span from a few hundred to over 240,000 works of art, including artists and cultures all the way back to pre-historic eras, the stone age, the renaissance, and up to modern day. Each year, a museum can attract more than 800,000 visitors and virtually share their collections with more than 10 million.
Museums are not the only company housing vast amounts of physical and digital data. While media companies are the obvious for producing and storing creative assets, other industries large and small curate digital content on the daily. Sports franchises record game footage, snap photos of players in action for social media and sponsors, and re-surface media from dusty archives of the early days of their leagues. Hospitals keep careful and confidential records of their patients, store data from x-rays and MRI scans, and create visual stories to share with donors.
Marketing any brand requires videos and photos, graphics and logos, social media tracking, and collaborative work platforms. With so much digital content being created and stored, how is any company supposed to organize and manage their content for their employees and their customers?
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system provides companies with a solution to store and organize all their assets in one location, preserving them digitally and creating a single source for locating, viewing, and sharing. But companies today need their assets to do more than just be stored, and the right DAM vendor can provide capabilities that will help brands get the most out of their media. While the task of moving entire catalogues of digital and physical assets into a single system can seem daunting, Athena has helped both major Fortune 30 companies and other organizations not only find their dream DAM system but implement it.
Picking the Right Platform
While many companies can have similar goals, they have different strengths so their path to achieving their goals varies widely. The same is true of all the DAM systems on the market. With so many options available to companies, taking the time to evaluate the pros and cons of each system and how they fit with an organization is a vital process.
It is important to analyze the needs of a company against the capabilities of different DAM platforms. Initiating conversations and relationships with multiple vendors can help promote a better understanding of what their DAM has to offer. And it’s just as important to understand how a company and their team can build workflows to include and optimize these platforms. An expert eye throughout this process is crucial since you are assessing both technological capability and personnel workflow to determine mutual compatibility between the two. It’s a tricky match to make, but it’s a beautiful thing to connect the perfect pair.
Enduring Enhancement
DAMs are an important conversation for businesses, especially in a post-covid era where more digital content is being accessed now more than ever. As a company grows, so does its assets and a properly managed DAM system will stand the test of time, allowing assets to live in one central location where system operators and general users have access well beyond the tenure of the initial administrator. This access to company assets allows organizations to build a repository of historical and present-day assets that tell a story that otherwise would be lost with time. A system that can continue to grow, be accessed, shared, and enhanced despite loss through regular employee turnover or changes in company vision and goals.
DAM systems also empower their users to efficiently navigate and find the best assets a company has to offer, avoiding hurdles and delays in knowing and accessing pre-approved versus confidential content and significantly reducing simple user error. Technology and creativity go hand in hand. In the 21st century we shouldn’t shy away from technology, but rather lean into it and recognize it as a tool to expand and share our creative boundaries. The right DAM system enhances efficiency, accessibility, and imagination.
Taking the Next Step
This is why finding the right DAM to meet your company’s needs requires major introspection.
- What types of assets exist in the company?
- What do I need these assets to do?
- How many assets and where do they exist?
- How can they be organized to maximize search and usability?
- Who needs to access these assets?
- Which assets are confidential?
- How can I license these assets to other companies?
- How can these assets reach customers?
- Are customers responding to these assets?
And the list goes on. These are the questions that motivate a DAM system discovery process. The right partner will help ensure that the DAM system your company chooses meets your specific needs.
Athena brings together teams from all over the company to really understand what the needs are, where the pain points might be, and design a plan that sets a company up for success. Adoption is key to onboarding any DAM system, which is why it is important to have a partner who is willing to understand and design a plan that meets your needs and takes your capabilities to the next level.
So, whether a company needs to market their brand’s history and abilities, organize their libraries, share their patient’s stories, promote their players and sponsors, or share previously lost historical treasures with the world, the right DAM system can accomplish all this and more with Athena at the ready to help each company bring these assets and stories to life.
Real Time Monitoring is another one of Athena’s core service offerings. For more about our Data & Optimization capabilities, check out our partnership with leading customer experience management platform, Sprinklr.