In Focus: DAM Gives Way to Broader Marketing Management ProblemsIn Focus: DAM Gives Way to Broader Marketing Management Problems
Revenues for the entire digital asset management (DAM) market totaled little more than $200 million in 2003, according to IDC research, so why does this tiny market seem to get so much attention? Enterprise content management (ECM) vendors, for one, spent the last two years snapping up many of the leading DAM vendors, with Documentum purchasing Bulldog, Stellent acquiring Ancept, Interwoven buying MediaBin and, last summer, OpenText buying Artesia. Surely these companies had bigger visions on th
Revenues for the entire digital asset management (DAM) market totaled little more than $200 million in 2003, according to IDC research, so why does this tiny market seem to get so much attention? Enterprise content management (ECM) vendors, for one, spent the last two years snapping up many of the leading DAM vendors, with Documentum purchasing Bulldog, Stellent acquiring Ancept, Interwoven buying MediaBin and, last summer, OpenText buying Artesia. Surely these companies had bigger visions on the horizon, right?
Indeed, DAM is spreading its wings into larger implementations. But it's also part of a bigger need that cuts across a range of marketing activities.
Strictly speaking, DAM provides advanced management control — check-in/check-out, versioning, multimedia transformation, reuse and basic rights control — over rich media such as graphics, photos, logos, video and audio. This challenge alone is going "enterprisewide" — or is at least outgrowing the bounds of creative departments — as companies recognize the need to access, share and reuse digital assets across the company and with partners such as distributors and retailers.
Product manufacturers, for example, spend millions developing logos and product photography. Yet without an efficient means of sharing these resources, many have discovered that distributors and retailers end up recreating these materials and charging creative costs back to the manufacturer all while coming up with substandard, unapproved materials.
Thus, many manufacturers are adopting DAM to ensure that they can share approved, high-quality materials with internal departments as well as partners around the globe. Even the remaining independent DAM vendors, such as Canto and Chuckwalla, are touting the broader enterprise footprint of their latest systems, with easier interfaces for business users and ever more sophisticated tools for the creative types.
On a broader scale, however, the goal is to address a range of marketing activities that are increasingly difficult to manage without technology.
ECM vendors, for example, are coupling their collaboration, Web content management and workflow technologies with DAM to address the entire marketing operations management challenge (also known as marketing resource management or enterprise marketing management). Whether it becomes known as MOM, MRM or EMM, this wider discipline encompasses everything from planning and budgeting campaigns (which demands collaboration) to creating content and automating workflows (DAM, Web CM and workflow challenges) to executing and analyzing worldwide marketing efforts (which requires everything here plus analytics — but let's not get into the business intelligence angles just yet).
In 2005, expect to see yet more convergence around marketing activities, with vendors such as Aprimo, Unica and DoubleClick (SmartPath) partnering and otherwise joining forces with ECM vendors to solve problems and meet broad marketing challenges that begin with content.
Then stay tuned for the next step toward convergence in this space, which will surely involve analytics, as measurement is consistently identified as the top challenge in marketing.
— Doug Henschen, Editor, Managing Content
Resources:
http://www.transformmag.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15100002
http://www.unica.com/documents/research.html
http://www.artesia.com/html/webseminars.html
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