Introduction to Digital and Media Asset Management
Digital media - photos, audio files, video clips, Flash animations, games and banner ads, and PDF documents – have become an increasingly significant part of our everyday experience. They may be used as part of a marketing campaign to reach a specific audience in a specific form, such as a brochure, a weekly circular, an e-mail promotion, a movie trailer, or a website landing page. Or the digital media tool may itself be the product, such as an album, DVD, video, or electronic magazine, book or catalog, which the enterprise wants to distribute in a variety of formats or forms.
To produce these products you need to create, organize, find, and utilize pieces of digital media: images, graphics, photos, layout and design files, video segments, Flash files, and audio files. In some cases, you need to add textual information like copy, descriptions, and product data. Finally, you have to put it all together in the right format within the specific production process or workflow. Upon completion, you’ll want to distribute and track all the product components, as well as any changes or versions over time. Additionally, you’ll want to know how the various audiences use or consume the product, in both digital and non-digital (e.g., paper, CD, and DVD) formats.
The management of digital media throughout its lifetime -- regardless of final output medium -- is the general domain of digital asset management or DAM. We also use the term MAM, or media asset management, which fits under the same larger DAM umbrella.
Digital Asset Management is related to, but distinct from, other content management tools and disciplines, including Web Content Management (WCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM). ECM primarily concerns itself with processing information; Web Content Management primarily concerns itself with publishing information; Digital Asset Management spans both, with more emphasis on the processing side and special focus on metadata management and the transformation and assembly of assets for distribution to multiple mediums (print, web, DVD, and others).
While in the Web content management world "content" tends (broadly speaking) to be something that has the potential to convey information, in the DAM world, content is a bit more abstract: it's something with value, hence an asset. The distinction is subtle but important. In DAM, a piece of content does not become an asset until it has been classified, indexed, versioned, secured, stored, possibly reformatted or canonicalized in some way, and (typically) assigned a lifecycle state, a unique ID, and an owner. These are the things that make a piece of content an asset.
Key to making it all work is metadata, or information about the content. Simply put, content + metadata = an asset. A digital asset management system provides a secure repository that facilitates the creation, management, organization, production, distribution, and potentially monetization of media files identified as digital assets.
We analyze DAM tools across three dimensions:
- Creation & Management Services, which includes the ability to ingest assets into a system and manage them through a life-cycle
- Assembly & Delivery Services, where assets are aggregated into a final “product” and delivered to a final output medium for publication
- Architecture & Administrative Services, including the underlying architecture and user interfaces
To learn more about Digital and Media Asset Management and review an independent evaluation of Digital and Media Asset Management vendors, consult the Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008.