Digital asset management (DAM) software stores, organizes, and distributes rich media files in a central location. Rich media files can include photos, creative files, video, audio, presentations, documents, and more. Businesses large and small invest in DAM software for various purposes, often to manage marketing content. DAM software helps businesses get more value from their digital assets by storing them in a centralized digital library, providing employees, clients, contractors, and other key stakeholders controlled access to digital assets.

DAM systems are often implemented by marketing and operations teams across various industries for help in defining and managing their online brands. They can also be used by product teams who require up-to-date assets when building products or by sales teams who need to leverage brand assets when creating presentations. Externally, DAM systems provide PR firms, partners, distributors, retailers, franchisees, or agencies with controlled access to digital assets for on-brand content creation.

These products can also be used to reduce the duplication of an organization’s assets, maintain up-to-date collections, and control security of assets with role-based permissions. Some businesses assign specific individuals as DAM administrators or “librarians" to oversee these assets, build and enforce the taxonomy, tags, and metadata used to organize them, and ensure they follow established brand-specific guidelines. Many modern DAMs include rules-based automation and machine learning to ease administrative overhead.

The value of a DAM system is amplified when it is integrated with other tools in the business. DAM systems are often at the core of creative processes. They connect creative, collaboration, and project management tools to streamline the creation process. They can also connect web content management software, enterprise content management (ECM) software, and marketing automation software to streamline the customer experience process.

While the foundational DAM functionality revolves around storing, organizing, and distributing a company’s digital assets, some products provide advanced organization and search capabilities. Select products utilize AI to autotag assets, provide suggested tags, and automatically organize assets that are uploaded to the DAM based on how similar assets are already organized or based on metadata.

To qualify for inclusion in the Digital Asset Management category, a product must:

• Provide storage for company-wide rich media files, such as photos, sound files, videos, presentations, and graphics, in a centralized library
• Allow users to efficiently organize and search assets through the use of media tags or other advanced search capabilities
• Offer tools for managing rights and permissions of media content for external use and embedding on internal or external websites
• Save and track the history of previous versions of digital assets and ensure the most updated versions are available to use and distribute