Digital asset management (DAM) consolidates an organization’s digital content into a single location, making it easier to access, manage, and distribute to internal teams, partners, and customers. Traditionally, DAM was considered a business-critical function for any organization that regularly produces digital content and media assets, especially as content creation has increased to meet demand.
The 2020 pandemic poured fuel on the fire in terms of content demand. In the post-pandemic world, that trend has continued, with the global digital content creation market size reaching 32.28 billion in 2024, up from 11 billion in 2019. From 2025 to 2030, it’s expected to grow at a 13.9% CAGR. Moreover, from 2015 to 2021, the amount of the world’s data stored in the cloud rose from 25% to 50% (keep that in mind as we’ll talk about the importance of this data later).
Today, most organizations use a DAM solution to centralize and store their content. But is that enough?
Based on our conversations with industry experts recently at NAB, no, it’s not. Everyone is trying to find a way to do more with their content beyond just storing it. Ultimately, they want to activate their content to drive revenue.
To do this, organizations need capabilities to monetize and distribute content effectively. While many DAM solutions claim to have an AI component, it’s hard to tell how robust these capabilities are, which is a serious problem for anyone trying to monetize.
To do this, you need AI to help you:
Search for content quickly and find it as soon as you need it
Let’s say you produced content last year that you want to reuse for an upcoming project. Finding and recovering those media assets will take months if you do not have a centralized and scalable way to tag content. Furthermore, it can become even more challenging when people leave the company and take their knowledge of where assets might be located.
Have a clear picture of what is in your archive or media library
Many organizations don’t even have a complete inventory of their content. There may be pieces of media sitting on a drive or in analog formats somewhere, lying in disuse rather than continuing to generate value. If it’s on older formats, this content might even be deteriorating and at risk of becoming too corroded to use.
For the digitized content, teams need to understand what’s contained within files without manually reviewing them. That means rich metadata that can help them further narrow the search and give them greater visibility into what they have as they search for something relevant to their current project parameters.
While many use DAM solutions to centralize their content storage, many might still be managing it in a hybrid fashion, with some in the cloud and others stored locally. DAMs can alleviate that friction to a certain extent. Still, they will fail to deliver that end-game piece of making content as searchable and distributable as possible for revenue-generating opportunities—that’s where Veritone comes in.
But before we get into that, let’s level set and clarify exactly what we mean by DAM, including associated terms, the business use cases, the benefits, and how to choose a DAM.
What do I need to know about DAM?
Digital asset management uses many terms that overlap. We want to demystify these terms so that you understand the differences and know what they mean when encountering them.
Digital Asset Management System is a broad set of software solutions that help people store, manage, and share their content. They come in various forms, from on-premise solutions to fully in the cloud, or some hybrid.
It can be confusing that any system someone uses to store their assets could be construed as their “DAM” system. So it is often used interchangeably with specific solutions positioned as DAM systems or with any collection of tools, applications, or software solutions that operate together as one digital asset management system.
There are a few other terms that we put in the same camp like this one. DAM Solution (or DAM Software) is a commonly used term that encompasses a software or application tool, or set of applications and tools, that helps organizations and individuals effectively manage their digital content.
Another is DAM Platform, a singular solution with diverse tools, features, and capabilities to streamline content production, management, and distribution. This term stands apart from the others in that it’s more about a single solution with extensive capabilities to handle all aspects of digital asset management. In contrast, the others may involve a collection of applications and tools.
Is digital asset management the same as content management?
Content Management is the process and systems used to manage various types of content created by individuals, companies, or government entities. While digital asset management involves content management, this term is often associated with content marketing.
When assessed from a marketing standpoint, content management could be placed under the wider umbrella of DAM, but it’s not exclusive. It’s more often a marketing term that involves the management of marketing content, including blogs, white papers, and other pieces of collateral.
Content management is mainly associated with DAM because they both deal with two overlapping terms: media assets and digital content.
A Media Asset is content typically in five key formats—images, audio, video, documents, or HTML. This term usually refers to the specific, individual piece of collateral created.
In contrast to Digital Content, which is a broader sweeping term for any created asset that can be consumed digitally via various platforms, including wearables, smartphones, tablets, computers, OTT, television, and video game platforms. It is any type of content that can be served digitally to consumers. These terms are used interchangeably, together, or exclusively with digital asset management.
Now that you are familiar with these terms and understand what they refer to, we can explore the use cases of DAM further to help you better understand its application in the real world.
What are the uses of DAM?
With a basic understanding of DAM and all the terms associated with the topic, we can now explore real-world use cases. Here, we will learn about the capabilities digital asset management offers companies.
DAM protects your content
Digitizing any content in analog formats and consolidating all your digital content ensures its preservation and protection. If stored in warehouses, analog media will eventually deteriorate or be damaged by fires or other natural disasters. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
Just because digital content assets are digital doesn’t mean they are completely safe. Servers can crash, hard drives can become corrupted, or a virus can force you to lose content. But moving all this media into the cloud allows you to secure it with the latest technology, have it backed up, and ensure it is not at risk of becoming lost.
DAM improves team collaboration
Due to the pandemic, many companies were forced to require their employees to work remotely, which created serious collaboration challenges. Now, many companies are still operating in a remote environment. So, how do employees access content on company servers securely? And what about global teams that aren’t located in the same time zones? How do they work together?
One of the great things about a DAM solution is that you have control over access. This means you can give authorized people within the organization access to content, which goes beyond that.
Many companies create content with partners and need a way to give those teams access. The access you need to provide typically needs to be limited to a certain set of content and not your entire archive. DAM can provide that solution so that content collaboration amongst different groups of people is smooth, no matter where people are working.
DAM accelerates distribution
One key aspect of digital asset management is the ability to integrate with other applications and tools for content distribution. Some solutions have pre-built integrations that can be leveraged out of the box to make it truly turnkey, but others may require some work to implement.
This is far easier than producing the content in one application, applying the final touches in another, uploading it to another platform, then finally pushing it out or making it available to other teams. As part of the collaboration point we discussed, distribution becomes much more streamlined with the right DAM solution.
The shortcomings of DAMs and how Vertione bridges these gaps
While DAMs get you 90% in managing your content more efficiently, they typically don’t have a scalable way to extract data from these files. That’s where AI comes into play.
With face detection, object and logo detection, transcription, and translation capabilities, AI can create metadata to represent what’s found within a file so that users do not have to sift through it to see what’s there manually. For instance, say a media company’s team needs to find where a particular brand is mentioned or appears. You can now use search to elevate that content via metadata to find those exact moments.
As mentioned before, many DAMs have some sort of AI capability. The difference is that these solutions were not built with AI in mind. AI is now an added feature, whereas all Vertione solutions were built as native AI solutions designed to maximize an organization’s data. In this case, the data is associated with content. Thankfully, index automation with artificial intelligence streamlines this process, which we will discuss later in the series.
Now that you have your content’s data under control, you can take your media and start monetizing and distributing it, which DAMs fail to do.
Creating new revenue streams
With a digitized and metatagged asset library, your organization will have a clearer view of your existing content, allowing you to see more opportunities for reviving, repackaging, and localizing what you already have or will create. Essentially, you’ll be able to get more out of your existing future content, but you’ll also set your future content up for monetization opportunities.
So, how exactly do you do this?
Veritone Digital Media Hub is an AI-powered media hub designed with a specific purpose—to make every piece of media searchable, accessible, and ready to drive revenue. With Digital Media Hub, your team can:
- Locate and activate content faster with AI-powered metadata enrichment, auto-indexing, and natural language search.
- Curate, clip, and organize media seamlessly using bulk selection, persistent filters, automated workflows, and more.
- Distribute efficiently by pushing media and metadata directly to cloud storage, social platforms, or production tools like Adobe Premiere.
- Monetize with an integrated marketplace, automated rights management, e-commerce tools, and flexible permission-based access.
DAMs can store your content, but you need to do more with it than just have it sit somewhere collecting dust. With a monetization and distribution system like Veritone Digital Media Hub, you can fully activate this valuable content to unlock new revenue streams.
How do I choose the best solution?
Consider six things when determining the best solution to take your content beyond simply storing it.
- Vendor Trust
You’ll want to gauge whether you can trust the vendor you are looking at. If they have been around for a while and are successful, you can feel more comfortable knowing they won’t suddenly go out of business. The last thing you want is to end up with an unsupported solution, forcing you to make a disruptive and costly migration to a new solution. - Capability
What capabilities and features does it come with out of the box? Do you need all those capabilities? If not, how does that affect the price? What about integrations? But most of all, what sort of AI capabilities do they actually have, and do they have a background in implementing this type of technology? These are important questions to identify any potential gaps you may require. - Accessibility
What sort of access controls does it offer? Many organizations operate with teams that aren’t colocated or have situations where they need remote access to their content. Having the flexibility of global access, no matter where your teams might be located, is necessary today. - Security
What security features come with it to guarantee that your content and its associated data are protected? This is important to defend against hackers stealing content and ensure that everything is backed up in the event of a server malfunction. - Deployment
This is tied hand-in-hand with security. How can you deploy the solution? Is it on-premise or hybrid, or can you completely deploy it in the cloud? Most solutions these days are cloud-based, but there may be a unique case where you need deployment flexibility based on other applications or tools you might be using. - Monetization
Lastly, and the most important aspect, is the kind of monetization capabilities it offers. Can the solution identify your best-performing content with the highest potential for licensing? What about demand monitoring so you can identify marketplace trends with your content? At the end of the day, your goal is to uncover new revenue opportunities in underutilized content and develop data-backed monetization strategies for greater returns on every piece of content.
Explore Other Chapters
Chapter 1: What Is Media Asset Management?
What makes it different from digital asset management?
For people new to asset management, we explore the differences between digital asset management (DAM) and media asset management (MAM).
Chapter 2: Brand Asset Management
How is it different from DAM and MAM and why is it important?
Exploring what makes brand asset management different from digital or media asset management.
Chapter 3: Video Asset Management
What it is and what it entails versus other asset management solutions and methodologies.
Diving into how video asset management is different from other content management systems and what unique features make it ideal for video media.
What it is, how it’s usually done, and best practices for doing it effectively.
For those interested in learning about metadata tagging, what it is, the different methods to carry it out, and how modern technology helps with it.
What it is and how it works.
Revealing how artificial intelligence is used to auto-tag content with rich metadata to improve asset management.
Sources:
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/digital-content-creation-market-report#:~:text=The%20global%20digital%20content%20creation,the%20demand%20for%20the%20market.
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/11/23/2131980/0/en/Digital-Content-Creation-Market-Is-Expected-To-Reach-a-Global-Size-of-US-38-2-billion-by-2030.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
