Media asset management is the key to creating quick and efficient projects and marketing campaigns. In this fast-paced digital world, it’s more important than ever to produce and release marketing materials as quickly as possible to keep up with ever-changing trends and strong competition.
But that’s easier said than done.
Creating marketing collateral involves using hundreds of photos and videos and producing even more graphics and other assets. These will eventually add up to a ton of files in your system that you’ll have to organize and maintain.
In this article, we talk about what you can do to manage all these media assets to ensure the most efficient workflow for everyone on your team.
Let’s get started.
What Is Media Asset Management?
Media asset management or MAM refers to the process of storing and organizing multimedia files and the software used for it. Software is the instrument that provides a centralized and reliable system to store thousands of assets.
Any business that’s serious about marketing takes or uses dozens—maybe hundreds—of photos and videos each day. Artists also create infographics, charts, GIFs, and other assets needed for marketing campaigns across various platforms.
Without a proper management system, it will be impossible to hunt down a specific file for a particular campaign.
Companies also need these assets for internal use, for things like in-house presentations and pitches. They’re crucial for future reference and should not be deleted.
It’s not just a matter of organization. Marketing assets accumulate over the years, and you need the best possible infrastructure for storage.
Why Is Media Asset Management Necessary?
MAM achieves three simple goals crucial in creating marketing campaigns and work presentations:
Easy Collaboration
Every organization needs a centralized system to save and access shared files. Even those in different divisions should easily find what they need for a specific project.
The simplicity of a centralized system fosters easy collaboration among teams and ensures productivity across the board.
Quick Turnaround of Output
Because all critical files are stored in one central system, retrieval is quick. Consequently, employees can work on their projects whenever they need. This creates a domino effect within the organization.
For example, the company is organizing a fundraising concert. It needs to drum up interest in the event for sponsorship and attendance. This means advertising within their industry and their target audience. Marketing materials must be created and published as soon as possible because they’ll help gather sponsors while hyping up the event for the attendees.
Creating an effective marketing campaign across multiple platforms requires various assets: images, videos, graphics, illustrations, and more. Once these materials are developed and released, another department can begin to send out sponsorship letters. When the sponsors are on board, promotional assets can be created for them.
Media asset management ensures each step of this complex process remains smooth and efficient. Every person in each department has all the assets they need on hand for a smooth workflow. This saves so much time and energy. It will help you meet all of your deadlines, too.
Saves Money
Because you can keep all files accumulated over the years, there’s no need to purchase or repurchase assets. And if there are images or videos that you don’t own, you can easily track down the owner through the centralized system.
Key Use Cases for Media Asset Management
There are many critical uses for media asset management. Each is essential for organizational efficiency:
Centralized Storage System
With media asset management software, you maintain your own library that all team members can access from anywhere. So, if you have remote workers or offices all over the world, having a centralized repository of all assets is a must.
Ease of access also eliminates duplication when it comes to asset acquisition.
Discoverability
Through relevant keywords and a categorized system, all team members can easily look up and access what they need for their projects.
Sharing
Some organizations still share multimedia files through email or online file transfer apps. Unfortunately, these platforms have hard limits that cannot accommodate large assets for high-quality marketing materials. They’re forced to reduce the resolution of the images, which is not ideal. Videos need to be chopped up and sent in bits and pieces, which wastes a lot of time and energy.
Cloud-based media asset management means you can share large files with anyone on your team, wherever they may be.
Editing
Access to editing privileges can be limited to specific team members.
Distribution
Media asset management streamlines output distribution to save time and effort. This maximizes resources and improves productivity.
Security
Controlled access to your organization’s assets is crucial to maintain security. You can put systems in place to ensure that only those who are granted access can get to specific files.
Management or team leaders will have control over who can access certain files and when.
Management
It all boils down to file management to ensure productivity and efficiency on all levels.
What’s the Difference Between MAM and DAM?
Media asset management is often used interchangeably with digital asset management or DAM. There’s a reason for that—the differences between the two management processes are quite blurry.
It was easier to distinguish the two when MAM was used for just audio and video assets. However, over the years, still photos and infographics have become crucial for creating videos. So, MAM now covers various types of media.
DAM is essentially the process of managing rich media, which refers to functional and interactive assets. It also involves organizing photos, videos, music, and other multimedia. It’s also used to store and archive podcasts. Every input in the DAM system includes a detailed metadata or asset description and clearly outlines ownership and access rights.
DAM software is crucial among marketers and advertisers as the database also contains complete projects. Marketing assets saved in the DAM database can be repurposed for other ventures.
To better understand the difference, it should be noted that MAM systems are DAM systems, but not all DAM systems are MAM systems. MAM is generally focused on audio and video. You can integrate wide-ranging applications to create audio and video assets that are ideal for broadcast.
DAM doesn’t have as much capability in audio and video outputs. However, it has a more versatile approach as it stores and manages more collaterals, particularly brand and marketing materials.
Which Is Right for You? DAM or MAM?
Both are efficient and useful systems for asset management. You must examine your needs as an organization to choose which one best suits your needs.
DAM is great for marketing-centric organizations. Aside from managing marketing and advertising collaterals, you can leverage custom metadata. It also has an excellent capacity for history tracking and version control of multimedia assets, which can be easily manipulated into other forms.
For companies with heavy audio and video usage, MAM is the ideal process. It’s an excellent tool for storing and managing large-format files for easy access. MAM also has a fantastic workflow for video creation.
The Best Features of MAM Software
If there’s high demand for large-format audio and video outputs from your organization, MAM is the right process and software for you. However, not all MAM software is created equal—some are better than others.
Here are some tips to help you choose the right MAM system for your organization:
Customization
Software customization is crucial because you must have everything you need for a long-lasting asset management system. You should be able to choose the best-suited features that will streamline your organization’s workflow from top to bottom.
Controlled access is also essential, so you must have the power to create internal and external access for files through customized sharing systems.
Scalability
You don’t want to purchase a new kind of media asset management software every time the organization expands. The system must be able to grow with your business. Keep an eye on the number of people allowed to access the system at any given time.
Price
Check the prices of media asset management software on the market and choose the one that provides the best value for money. All functionalities and capabilities must make the price worth it.
Customer Support
Your management system should have a customer support team available to answer queries or help out in the installation process. While 24/7 customer support is incredible, assistance must at least be available during office hours.
Conclusion
Media asset management can make a load of difference for organizations that use thousands of audio and video files in high volume. The software creates a centralized library to store, manage, share, and archive multimedia assets for everyone’s use. Anyone with authority can access and edit files, streamlining the entire process.
If you’re company is looking to boost efficiency and productivity in your workflows, incorporating a MAM or DAM may be a worth-while addition to your MarTech Stack.
Looking for more ways to be efficient with your marketing? Take a tour of Mediatool to see how you can plan, measure, evaluate and improve your marketing campaigns, all from one unified platform.
