Start to finish: Digital Asset Management for in-house agencies

As a visionary in-house agency team leader, your mission is to achieve excellence in creative services. However, you often find yourself juggling competing challenges.  

The list is long and includes maintaining client relationships, building a solid reputation, managing a talented team, demand planning with freelancer requirements, ensuring brief quality, and overseeing the entire end-to-end process.  

No surprise, then, that the role of Digital Asset Management (DAM) may not always be top of mind for non-technical leaders!  

From my extensive experience working as an in-house agency leader, ranging from large complex agencies to setting up smaller creative production teams, I believe that we need to shift our perspective.  

Far too often, DAM is viewed as the end rather than the beginning - the place where published assets go to rest after navigating a bumpy journey through work management and approvals platforms.

Insights from the IHALC survey

According to the recently published In-House Agency Leaders Club Benchmarking Survey, 77% of in-house agencies have a DAM in place. However, there’s a significant lack of integration between DAM systems and other internal platforms, with only 25% achieving such integration. This disconnect prevents the DAM from becoming what it absolutely needs to be - the central source of truth within the organisation.

Challenges faced by in-house teams

A recent conversation with a production team, who worked from shared artwork files as an overflow for a client's in-house team, unearthed that their DAM was neither fully up-to-date nor correctly meta-tagged. This revelation underscores the need for managing metadata in Digital Asset Management, a topic that will be explored at DAM Europe 2023.

Moreover, some interfaces of DAM systems are not user-friendly, leading busy teams to claim that it takes too much time and effort to find the assets they need. As a result, teams resort to saving assets locally or using inefficient methods like email, which takes us further away from the central vision.

The evolving role of in-house teams

The remit of in-house teams continues to evolve, with aspirations for almost half of them (47%) to grow into Lead Agency status. However, many teams currently lack the capabilities and processes required for tier-one brand work. It’s interesting why these teams are aiming to reach higher up the marketing funnel instead of focusing on becoming experts in their current domain. This was a surprising insight from the IHALC Survey.

Addressing the challenges with DAM

Given the explosion of always-on content, there’s an increasing need for expertise in creating high-volume, multi-format digital assets. DAM Europe will shed light on the latest trends and best practices for managing Digital Assets at scale.

To achieve more with less, in-house leaders must align their people, processes, and technology. By integrating production thinking into the start of the creative process, brief reception can be improved, leveraging existing assets for reference and optimisation. AI and Machine Learning in DAM continue to play a pivotal role.

Innovation and future trends

In-house teams must strive to integrate their processes as their remit expands and their output becomes more sophisticated. The ability to create modular content and embrace automation necessitates support from DAM systems. Global collaboration and localisation strategies will also be crucial for teams operating in a global landscape.

Conclusion

By prioritising DAM integration and streamlining creative services, in-house agencies can elevate their efficiency, enhance collaboration, and unlock their full potential in the ever-evolving creative landscape.

I’m looking forward to attending DAM Europe 2023, the highly anticipated conference in London on 28-29 June, where industry leaders and experts will come together to explore the transformative power of Digital Asset Management.