Meaning, DAM Meaning, Statistics and ROI

By Matthew Gonnering Oct 7, 2009

In this guest article Widen Enterprises CEO, Matthew Gonnering, argues that customers have a lot to learn from (and demand of) SaaS software vendors.

SaaS providers have access to metrics that validate current Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategies in addition to identifying areas for increasing the return on the investment in the technology. If you're not getting this data or if you've not being paying attention to it, it's time to sit up in your chair.

We probably have baseball and The Sporting News to thank for the proliferation of statistics in all sports. Yet, Mark Twain once said there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Of course, he was speaking about to the persuasive power of numbers and about how people will either promote or ignore statistics based entirely on whether or not they support a position. This “truth” is the reason many baseball arguments have never been settled.

100% of Humans Love Statistics

That's probably not true, but let me tell you something. Statistics are not going away. An entire industry of sports fantasy leagues is now flourishing because somebody found a way to get people to “compete” using statistics. It seems a fondness for these numbers is human nature.

You compare your stats to everyone else’s to find out where you stand. Marketers and creative folks are no different. They want to know how they compare to others, including their use of digital asset management (DAM). We are well down the path of being able to begin providing this kind of information and have it be meaningful.

SaaS Providers Have More Stats

As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, we are in the unique position of having access to an aggregation of all of our customer’s data. We know we have more than 50,000 users from 120 different countries. We see the amount of downloads taking place for digital content. We see what content is being used and repurposed. We see how much data is being consumed.

We are literally sitting on a goldmine of data. It should be no surprise that marketing or brand managers would be interested in knowing what that data says. It behooves us to be constantly looking at it and to create ways to show our clients what they and others are doing while maintaining customer privacy within our strict security.

Stats Make DAM Sense

The majority of organizations invest in digital asset management solutions to improve interaction with their branded materials to maximize the investments made in the creation of images, videos, audio, creative files and other marketing materials.

While each customer will use DAM and judge its overall effectiveness differently, enough common threads exist which can be standardized and measured in ratios, similar to financial statements.

We picked the following four ratios that we feel are most important to digital asset management.

Digital asset activity ratio
Repurposing ratio
User activity ratio
Digital asset consumption ratio

Digital Asset Activity Ratio

A comparison between the quantity of files that have been ordered and the amount of files stored in the application. This ratio provides insight into the relationship between download activity and all the digital assets stored in the application. For example, a low number for this ratio could mean that a marketing department may need to look at assets with high activity, compared to low activity. For instance, lifestyle images may have higher activity than static product shots. If so, marketing can shift their spending on creating assets.

Repurposing Ratio

A comparison between the active digital assets and the quantity of files ordered. This provides insight into the amount of content repurposing that is taking place over a period of time. Repurposing continues to be a key component of digital asset management value.