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DAM no longer back-office
Continuing my predictions for 2023, here are two further propositions focused on the more mundane topic of Digital Asset Management (DAM):
- Modern DAM administrators are no longer just assets managers, they are supporting the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey.
- The DAM is a cornerstone of digital marketing. Which means that the DAM process is now a high priority for the whole marketing organization.
DAM did used to be a backroom process that most marketers do not concern themselves with directly and cynics would say, “A DAM is where our creative assets are sent to die” – it was, historically, just a repository for photographs and other static images. And the people managing it were the ultimate geeks. But things have changed.
Which means that my new Vendor Selection Matrixtm research on DAM is going to be more useful than ever for potential buyers of that software. DAM software is being bought in three separate project categories:
- Stand-alone DAM is being bought to replace one or more older-generation systems with a more performant and extensive solution. Indeed, 74% of the respondents to our survey are consolidating their DAM, PIM (Product Information System) and other content management systems this year.
- More mature marketing organizations who want to personalize the offerings they render to website visitors as much as possible find they must replace their DAM to achieve their goals.
- Companies in industries most affected by the new demands of digital marketing, eCommerce, and customer preference systems, such as manufacturing, healthcare and business services must upgrade their DAM systems accordingly as part of a larger project.
As usual, as the report reflects the view of the market, 1500 business decision-makers reported their opinions and ratings for the DAM vendors they know. That is quite different than the standard research reports from my old colleagues (remember, I am ex- Gartner and ex-Forrester) that focus on an analyst’s rating of the product. Buyers much prefer to hear what their peers are saying about a solution, I would suggest.
Depending on how much you believe the claims, there are nearly 500 vendors with DAM solutions. These are the Top 15 vendors as selected by 1,500 users surveyed based upon their rating of product, company, and service quality (listed alphabetically): ADOBE*, APRIMO*, BRANDMAKER (now called UPTEMPO), BYNDER*, CANTO, CELUM, CENSHARE*, CLOUDINARY*, CONTENTSERV, DIGIZUITE, HYLAND, NUXEO, OPENTEXT, SITECORE and WIDEN (part of ACQUIA). These vendors* form the Top 5 in the matrix.
The vendor landscape is stable with several well-established independent DAM vendors now being challenged by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Adobe, Sitecore, and OpenText who sell larger digital marketing software portfolios including a DAM solution. We estimate that 35-40% of companies have automated, or will be automating, parts of the DAM process in 2023.
The link above connects you to the public version of the report, with the alphabetical list of market leaders and shorter vendor profiles. Watch out for several versions of report in full detail over the next months as several vendors distribute their licensed reprints.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
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Buyers look for more than DAM
Just a few more days to go before I publish our Vendor Selection Matrixtm on Digital Asset Management (DAM)– the vendors are currently fact-checking the report details.
This year’s survey has made one point absolutely clear: modern DAM systems must support the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey, with real-time retrieval even needed for resource-intense media assets like video, even virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) images. Over 55% of the 1500 business professionals we talked to confirmed “We are now very focused on optimizing the customer experience and this requires change in the DAM process” as Very True.
We also asked, “Which three key anticipated benefits are driving your investment in the Digital Asset Management automation space in the next 12 months?”. After Improved Performance, the respondents chose Brand Management, Customer Experience and Improved Buyer Engagement as the next priorities. This reflects the strategic value of the DAM system within the new digital marketing standards expected in most companies.
Customers no longer need DAM, they crave for great DAM!
This is quite different from the same survey 3 years ago. Now, three times as many respondents see DAM in the wider context of “the entire buyer journey” (website, marketing content, sales content, etc.).
Also, 74% of the respondents confirmed that they want to consolidate their DAM systems. The top two reasons being “We need a single-source-of-truth” and “Achieving cost reduction”. But these priorities vary greatly by region – the Single Source reason is rated highest in North America (62%) while Cost Reduction is Europe’s top reason (61%).
DAM is a busy market, with many local project-based providers offering their experience as a software product. Indeed, the Capterra website lists 479 DAM vendors in its directory. We have found a vendor landscape of the Top 15 vendors and/or brands as selected by 1,500 business decision-makers, based upon their experience, or perception, of product, company and service quality.
These are the Market Leaders within the Top 15 (having both a Strategy and an Execution score of over 4 out of 5) as scored by the survey and myself (listed alphabetically): ACQUIA (WIDEN), ADOBE, APRIMO, BRANDMAKER, BYNDER, CANTO, CELUM, CENSHARE, CLOUDINARY, and OPENTEXT.
Watch out for the report in a few weeks’ time.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
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Can’t Digitally Market without Great Digital Asset Management
I am working on an update to our Vendor Selection Matrixtm on Digital Asset Management (DAM) – the survey results are in and I’m now talking to the vendors named and scored in the survey over the next weeks before completing the report. The link above shows the 2021 report, and the list of vendors is quite consistent, just three out and three new ones in.
DAM is a backroom process that most marketers do not concern themselves with. Cynics used to say, “A DAM is where our creative assets are sent to die”. That is because, historically, it was a repository for photographs and other static images. And the people managing this process were the ultimate geeks. I well remember getting a client inquiry two weeks after I had made a speech at a Content Management Summit in Cleveland about getting more creative about tagging content assets with informative units like sales phase, customer pain point and other stuff. The client said that what I was proposing was impossible, he had tried and “my DAM coordinator told me “No way”, he uses the date and time stamp and that is all”.
But things have changed. Now modern DAM administrators know they are no longer just storing assets, they are supporting the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey. DAM systems are being used to store and manage rich media assets like video, even virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) images, as well as text and documents. DAM is a cornerstone of digital marketing, just like Digital Experience Management (my next report project, survey is in the field).
Which means that the DAM process is now a high priority for the whole marketing organization. This was confirmed in our survey of 1500 business professionals familiar with their DAM projects where 55% confirmed “We are now very focused on optimizing the customer experience and this requires change in the DAM process” as Very True.
The survey scored these three objectives as their top benefits desired from their DAM system:
- Better system performance and responsiveness
- Brand management capabilities
- Delivering an elegant and intuitive customer experience.
Nearly three quarters of the companies confirmed they were planning to consolidate their DAM, PIM, and other content management systems (up from 51% in 2021). So, this is an exciting (or precarious?) time for the DAM vendors, an interesting mix of marketing suite and point solution vendors.
Watch out for the report in a few weeks’ time.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
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Marketers Need to Manage All Their Resources
You may have noticed: when I do market research on software vendors and products, I always approach my topics from the business point of view – not a technology category/label only familiar to product managers in software companies, or analysts at Gartner or Forrester. I name a business process (or family of processes) that I know marketers are thinking about. After all, marketing executives don’t buy software because they are collectors, they want to make their processes more efficient and expect an automation project will help.
Over the years, their list of processes to be automated has become longer but also more business centric. Way back when, marketing was only about sales support, lead generation and literature. Now, thankfully, modern CMOs or Marketing Directors are now responsible for a more extensive operation, some of them even measured on revenue contribution. And so, as with any business executive, they have full responsibility for the planning and effectiveness of all their business resources.
For a marketing executive, those resources fall into these categories: money, people, content assets and brand. And the process to manage these resources is therefore being called “Marketing Resource Management” (MRM).
I would propose that now the time has come for many more CMOs and Marketing Directors to acquire their own “ERP system” and implement a serious MRM project, taking full control over what can make a marketing organization successful – especially the financials.
Content and brand resources are already marketing-specific and many CMS and Brand Content Management systems include resource management for those resource types. Digital assets are managed in DAM and PIM systems. But using the corporate ERP software to manage people resources is not good enough as a typical CMO-led organization increasingly includes external contributors (agencies, freelancers, analysts), all to be accounted for as an ongoing marketing-people resource. Lastly, the spending of marketing budgets is now so dynamic and digital that executives can no longer rely on monthly or quarterly batched financial reports with historical data – if anything, they need a dashboard that forecasts, predicts and recommends.
By definition, the MRM system should be marketing-centric – one that has the right language or terminology, reporting structure and cadence. Marketers think in terms of campaigns, not financial quarters, and they need a planning calendar. It should provide marketing professionals at all levels in the hierarchy with an ideal experience and support decisions about marketing investments. For that reason, the ideal solution would often be one that is grown out of an existing management system used within marketing.
But a relevant MRM must be more than just a planning/budgeting system: database plus reporting. It needs to able to be state of the art in that it can:
- Take inputs from all players in the marketing ecosystem – for many companies this can include geographic entities or subsidiaries and even business partners
- Collect live data in real-time to support decision-making
- Provide recommendations and insights based on AI.
MRM is still in its adoption infancy. Capterra has some 50 MRM Software offerings in its directory. And my esteemed ex-colleagues at Forrester produced a NowTech report on MRM in Q1 this year that focused on the needs of enterprise B2C organizations above $1 billion in revenue and identified 28 vendors.
But what is the market saying?
Well, I have now fielded my 2022 global survey of marketers’ experience with MRM solutions and am talking to the vendors to complete my research. This is the list of the Top 15 vendors from the survey (in alphabetical order).
ALLOCADIA, APRIMO, BRANDMAKER, BRANDMASTER, BRANDSYSTEMS, CONTENTSERV, ELATERAL, INFOR, LYTHO, MARMIND, PERCOLATE, SITECORE, WEDIA, WELCOME, WORKFRONT
Curiously, a significant number of vendors who marketers cite as their MRM solution are telling me that they do not want to “position the offering as MRM”. Who says that the customer is always right?
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill