How To Contain Your Marketing Assets Costs

Seth Earley President & CEO Earley & Associates

Marketers need to organize, manage, and repurpose marketing assets in order to control costs, maximize brand impact, and minimize cycle times. With multiple channels requiring consistent messaging across various devices, all with different resolutions and formats, managing digital assets has become more complex and costly. This article discusses how to control those costs using technologies that enable reuse and make it possible to bring expensive agency functions in-house.

Digital Assets And Applications
Though everything online is technically “digital,” “digital assets” typically refer to non-text assets. Digital assets can be divided between assets that are sold to the consumer and those that are used to sell other items to the consumer (not the asset itself). Examples of the former include music from iTunes, TV shows and movies from Netflix, and games sold for various mobile devices. Examples of the latter are photographs of shoes or patio furniture in an e-commerce catalog, advertising illustrations for production in a magazine, and video instructions for assembling a bicycle.

Asset-management applications come in multiple flavors. Frequently, digital assets are managed as part of another process–for example, fulfillment tracking or e-commerce. There are purpose-built applications that have very focused functionality–for example, systems created to handle file transfers and basic workflow between a creative agency and a customer. Most e-commerce systems handle a range of media types. Digital-asset management and marketing-resource management systems provide additional functionality that can help lower costs.

>> Digital-asset management (DAM): In applications that handle text documents, assets contain information that a search system can parse and index. For instance, product descriptions and articles are mostly text. A search engine can usually find text information with a few keywords. We’re not so lucky with rich-media assets. Photos and illustrations do not contain text, and image-recognition systems are not advanced enough to handle keyword descriptors. We’re left with the need to tag the image with terms (as metadata) that the system can then use to retrieve the asset. DAM systems provide the necessary tagging and workflow-management capabilities. They also handle video files that are very large and can “transcode” these files into various formats. A Web site could be optimized for one resolution and file size, whereas a mobile device could require another. Photos also can be managed at various resolutions–for example, thumbnails for quick retrieval and higher resolution images for production.

>> Market-resource management (MRM): MRM applications also provide for digital-asset management. One of the biggest costs to marketing organizations beyond the cost of media placement is the cost of the media itself. In many cases, organizations lack a simple way to catalog, manage, and retrieve the photos and images they commission. Instead, production managers will use the standard asset-management system that everyone has–the telephone. They’ll call the creative agency to get a copy of the asset at a different resolution or for a different purpose (or, in many cases, the same resolution for the same purpose because they cannot locate the in-house copy). The agency is happy to oblige–for a fee. These fees for asset management and retrieval or, worse, fees for re-creation of assets can add up to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. MRM systems also handle more complex workflows and even campaign tracking and management. MRM allows for the storage, management, and retrieval of component and composite assets.

Next Page: 12 questions to address to get started with DAM and MRM.