Get branding tips and expert advice delivered straight to your inbox.
Organizations generate a lot of assets that all need to be sorted and stored somewhere. In organizations without any asset management, that can often spread across local hard drives, email attachments, local network drives and plenty more.
This lack of a cohesive structure for asset management can lead to lost files and too much time spent searching for existing files at the expense of productive work. Who wants to deal with that? Read on to learn why software such as creative asset management in Brandfolder can help your organization stay on top of its creative and digital assets.
What Is Creative Asset Management?
Creative asset management, a division of creative operations, is also sometimes called digital asset management, but what is digital asset management (DAM)? CAM/DAM is a platform used for digital asset storage.
The definition of a digital asset is extensive and can cover most types of files an organization may generate. As an example, this could include all types of files, such as artwork, media files, videos, audio clips and more, in addition to the more typical spreadsheets, documents and slideshow presentations.
Many existing cloud storage services are available if you just want a centralized location to save your organization’s files, but CAM goes further than simple asset storage. CAM allows you to organize, manage, distribute and analyze all your assets in one location. Sounds like a lifesaver, right?
Read on to find out how this approach to asset management can better your organization’s workflow and improve productivity.
How Can CAM Help Businesses?
Businesses generate many digital assets as part of their workflow, but many get lost or forgotten over time (yikes!). This results in time wasted either trying to find the missing files or recreating them. Organizations will often require collaboration on assets, so if more than one person needs to work on one, how does that get shared?
Relying on attaching files to emails can make it difficult to keep up with what version of an asset you’re all meant to be working from, and it’s virtually impossible to properly restrict access to only the necessary parties if it’s a secret or sensitive file. CAM can help fix all of these issues and then some!
The Value of Creative Asset Management
Have you ever Googled questions like “What’s the best software for video asset management?” or “What's the best file storage for business?” Fragmenting your digital storage solutions can lead to similar issues with storing, locating and sharing assets as simply using emails and local storage solutions.
An all-in-one CAM provides a single source of truth for your organization’s assets, regardless of file format or size. Workers can log in to the CAM and then assign themselves to teams. Permissions can be tweaked for teams and individuals to finely control access and sharing rights on a per-file basis.
CAM Can Maximize the Value of Your Creative Assets
Assigning file permissions on a per-file, per-client or per-project basis makes sorting and storing them much easier. These files can also be shared externally so that clients can be kept in the loop on the status of a project and can preview the work while still maintaining strict access control.
CAMs such as Brandfolder use AI and machine learning technologies that can automatically sort and store these files. It can even categorize them based on an asset's content, meaning storing files can be as simple as dragging and dropping a folder to upload. This drastically cuts down on the time required to sort, label and store your assets manually (your employees will thank you).
Tips for Using Creative Asset Management Software
Since your CAM will be your organization’s central source of truth for your creative assets, you should pick a CAM that fits your business needs. Read our article, “How to Find the Best Digital Asset Management Tool for Your Team,” for tips on selecting the best CAM, and read below for information on making the most out of yours.
1. Make Use of Templates
Brandfolder supports asset templates, which can provide both consistency and a quickstart launchpad for new assets.
Adding a new employee and need to get their email signature set up? Just create a copy of an email signature HTML asset, customize it and you’re good to go.
Need an extra media banner for your latest campaign? Get started with the template file to get all the correct dimensions, format, color space and everything else automatically.
2. Use Smart Rules
Brandfolder utilizes AI to automatically handle assets according to a set of rules that the user can define, known as smart rules. It doesn’t take very long to define some smart rules, but once you do, the platform will automatically apply them to new assets you create or upload. These rules can help define how to treat, categorize and store different types of assets.
3. Make Use of Suggestions
Brandfolder can automatically suggest similar assets to the file you are currently browsing based on properties such as text, file structure or visual similarities. If you’re running a summer campaign, you can quickly and easily identify all the assets you have showing photographs of people on beaches, for example.
You can then see what worked well before and pick some that are visually similar, which would be tough to do without the power of a CAM. This is especially helpful when managing social media assets, which may include different versions of similar assets fine-tuned for each social media platform. CAM/DAM for social media asset management improves the organization, searchability and accessibility of your assets, and can even convert assets to the appropriate file size and type based on which platform you’re publishing to.
4. Use Labels, Tags and Pins to Get Uber Organized
A CAM supports not only storage for assets but also metadata storage for those assets. Metadata can include information about the file, such as format, size and dimensions, but may also include additional data. Apply labels and tags to help provide fine-grained control over assets and make it easier to search and locate at a glance.
Pins can also support additional extraneous information, such as finding all files made within the last 24 hours or all assets published on the web. These tools create richer data streams and help establish connections between assets, making it clearer to team members when files are related and finding them easier.
5. Enable Guest Upload
Working on global campaigns may involve using assets provided by external stakeholders. Traditionally, handling these types of files can be a pain. Who are you sending files to, and how are they disseminated to the team? What happens if you want to tweak an asset you previously sent that your team is already using?
With the guest upload feature, you can send and receive a private, secure link to upload assets directly to the CAM. When you or your external team members make changes to assets, team members don’t need to be manually informed. These changes will automatically update the next time they access the file, making collaboration and version control much easier to manage, resulting in happy teams.
6. Take Advantage of Smart CDN
Smart CDN allows you to embed files directly from Brandfolder into your website. Since the assets are still stored and managed within Brandfolder, any changes to a file are pulled through instantly on the web and even email.
This makes version control and updating assets super simple – now you only have to change an asset from within your CAM to see that change reflected on the web. No more changing an asset only to forget to upload it to production!
CDN stands for content delivery network and refers to where the servers that contain your assets reside. The closer a user is to the physical location of the server serving your assets, the faster it will load for the user. For optimal performance, Brandfolder uses cloud-based servers around the globe so that your content is always served from the server with the closest physical location to the user, resulting in the fastest loading times and the most optimal user experience.
Get Started With Creative Asset Management
If you're looking for ways to get more out of your creative and digital assets, Brandfolder is the solution. Our friendly and knowledgeable team can show you how a smart CAM system can help make asset management easier than ever!
See step-by-step how a CAM solution can integrate into your existing creative workflow to keep everything neatly organized and maximize efficiency. That means no more lost files! Contact us today to schedule a demo.