The cost of not implementing a DAM platform

Early in my career, I worked for a national building magazine. As a niche publication, the team that put together each month’s edition was small and constantly changing. To make matters worse, the publication originally started out as a monthly newsletter, then a regional publication, before finally upgrading to a nationally published magazine. While the name never changed, the publication had three different logos from its various stages and had gone through multiple font and color changes. On a monthly basis, it was not uncommon to see several different versions of the logo in a single issue as designers struggled to find the correct logo while trying to meet a deadline. 

This is a far too common scenario for many brands. If people can’t find what they’re looking for, they will simply use what they find, even if it has a detrimental effect on their brand. Using outdated logos or images that your brand no longer has rights to is potentially extremely damaging to your organization, not to mention the incredible time loss and costs associated with many people throughout your organization spending a great deal of time simply searching for the correct asset.  

The publication I worked for tried to create a folder structure on a shared server, but with rules and permissions around who could make changes, we ended up with countless folders named variations of “Final logos and font” or “REALLY FINAL LOGOS” or “USE THESE!” A DAM platform can help with these problems on many fronts. 

Permissions

By utilizing user roles and permissions in a DAM platform, your team can lock down who has the ability to create new folder structures or rename and or tag assets with searchable terms. 

Version Control

By implementing version control, older logos or assets can be versioned. This allows users to continually search or browse the way they always do, and get the correct asset, even if the brand’s fonts or colors have changed. 

Brand Guidelines

Many NetX customers use our Micro CMS pages within NetX Portals to create Brand Guideline pages. This allows users to quickly review the Brand Guidelines to make sure they’re using the correct colors, fonts and abiding by any other rules your brand enforces around using its logo. 

Archiving

In some cases, brands know their assets have a lifecycle and they want to make sure those assets are removed from their collection when the assets are no longer valid. Sometimes this may mean the brand only has the rights to use images for a certain length of time, or can only use the images or assets in so many publications. In these cases, administrators of the NetX DAM platform can set up simple archive functionality to remove expired assets from the searchable content. Archived images can easily be moved to a folder which only admins have access to, moved to a cheaper off-line store, or watermarked to show the image still belongs to the collection, but it is in fact expired because the brand no longer has the rights to publish it. 

If your organization is struggling with version control or findability, schedule a call with our team so we can walk you through exactly how we can help!