In recent years, with the topic of digital transformation (DX), people have gradually begun to hear the term DAM. The concept of DAM is becoming more and more popular. So what is DAM? DAM stands for Digital Asset Management, which is the abbreviation of Digital Asset Management. Then immediately someone will exclaim, "Oh, I know, it's enterprise cloud storage!" In this case, I am often willing to talk more, because these people have a deep-rooted concept of enterprise cloud storage and a vague definition of the boundary between DAM and enterprise cloud storage. They are just one step away from entering the field of DAM based on enterprise cloud storage.
Image source: "What are we talking about when we talk about DAM in the marketing field?"
In my opinion, there are three fundamental differences between enterprise cloud storage and DAM:
1. Private storage or collective sharing#
Enterprise cloud storage is primarily private storage, and then consideration is given to whether it needs to be shared with others, while DAM is the opposite, it is primarily collective sharing, and then consideration is given to private storage. This difference in perspective determines that there will be many inconsistencies in the subsequent design concepts of enterprise cloud storage and DAM. For example, DAM manages the digital assets of the enterprise, so based on the different organizational structures of the enterprise, different levels of perspectives and permissions for digital assets will be established. When a person enters DAM, they should first see the enterprise digital assets shared at their level, and then their own private storage. Some companies don't even set up personal directories. On the other hand, enterprise cloud storage primarily considers private storage, so the design of the system often revolves around the end users. Their data is stored privately until they choose to share it. We often see companies that have implemented DAM, but a large amount of data is still stored in personal directories. When checked, there are thousands of shared links in the system. In this case, the users' essential needs are actually for cloud storage, not DAM. True DAM mainly shares digital assets through organizational structure and permission management, and shared links are just auxiliary means. For example, when an employee leaves the company, enterprise cloud storage allows them to delete their own data, while DAM does not delete data because it contains enterprise digital assets, not personal private storage. Some DAM products even have a one-click handover feature for employees leaving the company, which reflects this point.
2. Metadata#
What is metadata? "GB/T 36073-2018 Data Management Capability Maturity Assessment Model" defines it as: data (which may include its data description) about data or data elements, as well as data ownership, access paths, access rights, and data volatility. In simple terms, metadata is a type of data used to describe data, and it can be understood as a description of the characteristics of data content, attributes, records, and relationships. Typical elements of metadata include tags, categories, catalogs, titles, summaries, sizes, times, and so on.
Tags are the most commonly used metadata. For enterprise cloud storage, since it is primarily private storage and each person's individuality can vary greatly, and the amount of content is not large, it is mainly managed through folders, and the importance of tags is not that high. However, DAM is different. DAM serves a collective, a group of people with different habits and values. In the face of massive digital assets, a multidimensional tagging system needs to be established to achieve unified definition, positioning, and browsing of digital assets. For example, for media files such as images, audio, and video, the content cannot be indexed, and there is no better way to search other than through tags, such as file names and storage paths. Tags are an extremely important part of using DAM, and they make DAM different from the folder-based management of enterprise cloud storage. In the context of digital marketing, DAM based on tag management makes the retrieval and classification of materials more flexible, activating the digital media resources within the enterprise DAM and maximizing their value.
An ideal DAM often has good tagging capabilities in NLP and image recognition technologies as well. For example, by combining professional corpora, the tags of professional articles can be more closely related to the dimensions of professional fields, accurately pushing the tagged articles to readers who are expected to read them. In terms of brand management, image recognition technology allows DAM's tagging capabilities to have endless possibilities, including tracking the copyright of brand-specific elements and logos to prevent infringement, and helping teams manage and circulate brand material resources through the recognition and tagging of material elements.
Image source: "When AI meets brand marketing content: image edition"
3. Open API#
The purpose of enterprise cloud storage is private storage, so it is a relatively closed and independent space. On the other hand, DAM, as the gathering place for enterprise digital assets, solves the separation of business and content by connecting with business systems as much as possible. For example, the financial system and scanned invoices, it unifies the unstructured data of the enterprise, avoiding the spider web-like distribution of content, and enables continuous circulation of content, such as repeatedly forwarded email attachments.
In summary, enterprise cloud storage can be regarded as an intermediate product between personal cloud storage and DAM. In theory, it should not exist, but on the one hand, enterprise cloud storage brings the convenience of mobile office, and in small-scale companies, it can come close to the functionality of DAM. On the other hand, to truly be a DAM with real value, there are still many technical bottlenecks to overcome in terms of collaborative work, large-scale user concurrency, granular control of permissions, and process management. Currently, it cannot fully realize the value of DAM. Therefore, if it is only about storage, analysis, retrieval, and consumption of content, enterprise cloud storage can temporarily play the role of DAM based on personal cloud storage through optimized permissions. However, in scenarios where the value extraction of digital assets and the linkage between business and content are high, professional DAM is needed even more to accomplish these tasks.