David Diamond News & Articles

Digital Asset Management software has been around for more than two decades. In fact, Photoshop 1.0 was released only a few years before the first commercial DAM software became available. Since those days, Photoshop has become so popular that the product name is now used as a verb by people who have never even used the program. By contrast, DAM remains something we must explain over and over.

The Little Britain skit in which the computer so hilariously says “no” to situations that couldn’t possibly be real is a hoot to watch. But it’s not so different from something you might experience every day on Google and not even know it.

I recently sat on a DAM discussion panel during which I repeatedly mouthed off about the way DAM ought to be if, you know, it were entirely up to me.

You might not know it, but you’re killing one of the best things to ever happen to you as a consumer. And you’re doing it for all the right reasons.

I’ve worked in Digital Asset Management software marketing for more than 14 years. In that time, while I’ve been doing everything I can to shine a light on the benefits of DAM, I’ve heard DAM naysayers make convincing arguments to the contrary. Below are the five best arguments against DAM that I’ve ever heard.

Digital asset management, according to David Diamond’s DAM Survival Guide, is “like dental floss.” If you use it every day, the “long-term benefits are significant,” even though both are inconvenient, tedious and do not display their benefits immediately. 

One needn’t go far to find a juicy argument that pits Cloud-based (SaaS) digital asset management against on-site (on-premises) or installed solutions. The debate is everywhere, and it seems the primary arguments are always the same.

Classifying metadata values along a “content lifecycle” timeline is an interesting exercise that can make your DAM easier to use and maintain. Applying the categories Historical, Current and Future, you’ll find that each metadata value describes something related to the content’s origin or history, its current state or its future use.

When you think about how highly we value things like enterprise content sharing and digital asset management, it’s really a wonder our parents were ever able to function in business at all. No ECM, no DAM, no ERM, no CMS -- succeeding in the acronym-starved Dark Ages of Business must have been tough. 

Ever had one of those discussions in which neither you nor the person with whom you were speaking seemed to understand one another? No matter how many different ways you restate your points, it’s clear that meaningful communication is not what’s taking place. What goes on between a DAM and a DAM user often feels much like this.

This week in DAM, we learn how much your digital assets are worth, how to survive DAM and how one company aims to innovate DAM solutions.