Most marketing organizations fall somewhere on the 4-step maturity model below. Each maturity level is addressed in sections below.

Organizations experiencing a Leverage challenge have trouble finding and reusing assets across the organization. Here are some sample Leverage issues:

• Stock images purchased by one business unit are not easily accessible by other business units.  
• European marketers require several transatlantic interactions to clarify digital rights for footage shot in the US.
• Hispanic Marketing expend considerable effort obtaining original high-resolution video without embedded English audio.

Organizations mired in Leverage challenges can often build a strongly positive business case simply by eliminating unnecessary assets recreation.  And the labor savings are usually more significant.

And while it’s hard to tie a dollar return to peace of mind, every marketer is happier spending less time on low-value grunt work and more on high-value creativity, strategy and insight.

Want to learn how DAM solves Leverage problems? Please contact us.

Companies with Collaboration problems expend unnecessary effort simply coordinating between groups:

• Sharing large files encounters obstacles with email size limits—either for official assets or one-off photos of in-store execution.
• After many approval cycles of high-resolution proofs, the team discovers that the color gradient looks terrible on the low-resolution web and mobile version.
• Even tiny change requests have to be communicated face-to-face or run the risk of misinterpretation and wasted cycles.
• Agencies use the endless meetings to justify substantial bills for very minor adjustments.

When organizations improve their Collaboration, they can substantially cut costs and improve time to market on every campaign.

Want to learn how DAM solves Collaborate problems? Please contact us.

The Operationalize maturity phase is where DAM has the potential to be truly transformative.  Creative production and omnichannel distribution often feels like a constant fire drill to organizations failing to Operationalize. 

• Marketing organizations expend significant resources on project management.

• A competitor makes an aggressive move that demands a quick responses, but complex internal processes require weeks of lead time to adjust messaging across channels. 

• Intermediate internal deadlines either require close management or timelines slip to put considerable strain on downstream team members.

• Despite consistently positive ROI, even basic personalization or A/B testing is judged too difficult to implement consistently.

• Final downstream delivery of assets to the web team, social media, printers, and media agencies is rarely automated.

Inefficient processes can exert huge drag on both the top and bottom lines for an organization. Addressing these inefficiencies holistically can be a large undertaking; however, optimizing one or two high-volume processes often demonstrates great value and builds momentum for organizational change.

Want to learn how DAM solves Operationalize problems? Please contact us.

Companies struggling to Optimize do not have robust processes throughout the marketing organization to take action on big data and analytic insights

• The television team may not be able to act on key insights from the web team's A/B tests.

• The Latin American team may be the last to launch a new product, but have no easy access reports on which tactics and assets were successful in previous geographies.

• One asset or group of assets may consistently outperform all others, but the creative team tasked with asset selection still makes choices based on personal preference.

The few, visionary marketing departments that have Optimized their DAM processes have successfully pushed insight and intelligence from the analytics teams to every level of their organization. Their competitive advantage emerges naturally from empowering employees with powerful knowledge connected to the relevant assets rather than in separate and rarely accessed reports.

Want to learn how DAM solves Optimize problems? Please contact us.