Constellation ShortList™ Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Digital Experiences
Executive Summary
Digital asset management (DAM) enables organizations to manage, catalog, deliver, analyze, orchestrate, and renew all forms of digital content across an ever-expanding array of channels. In the new age of digital-first experience, DAM must extend beyond traditional marketing and creative walls to serve the entirety of customer experience’s front lines—delivering assets to sales and customer service engagement and automation solutions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the greatest driver of innovation and evolution in DAM as Generative AI models have brought new capabilities in search, iteration and localization, further opening opportunities for users outside of traditional marketing functions to leverage DAM in their workflows. Where the DAM sits will often define where and how AI has most impacted creation, curation, and overarching collection of assets. DAMs selected for marketing-intensive work often demand more intensive creative capabilities and integrations to marketing automation, advertising, and campaign-focused use. Users will seek out marketing-specific automated workflows and the capacity to manage data beyond simple analytics. Since many marketing technologies are built on the power of image or video creation, it is not always a requirement of the marketing-driven DAM. This nuance drives the flexibility now seen in DAM offerings.
Buyers looking for a marketing-exclusive use case continue to come from traditional marketing circles: the leaders of Brand, Marketing Operations or Digital Experience. However, a new buying center, namely the CIO, coupled with the CMO, is actively seeking DAM solutions capable of connecting the entire enterprise and external business ecosystems such as agencies, channel partners, resellers, and suppliers. The CIO, in particular, expects a DAM to include security and governance controls for assets, data, and AI. Both CIOs and CMOs agree that security and governance controls are a must in the face of rapidly shifting regulatory demands that increasingly push brands to correctly source, store, label, and represent content, including where and how it was created, edited, or modified with AI.
The modern DAM platform is a dynamic experience asset hub rather than a static library. These asset hubs must also allow non-creative, non-marketing users to personalize assets to meet the needs of specific audiences, segments, and individual customers. Asset analytics that measure utilization, impact, and value of assets being utilized across all business users and experiences are also included in these robust platforms.
Some content management and digital experience vendors have begun to include DAM capabilities in their solution set. These larger platform capabilities were not included in this DAM for DX review.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:
- Asset aggregation, storage, and management for files including images, video, documents and emerging formats including 3D
- Simple, easy to access and control asset editing and personalization
- Workflows, cross team collaboration and approval capabilities
- Metadata management powered by smart tools and AI for automated metadata tagging and recommendations
- Taxonomy and automated ontologies
- AI/ML powered automated cropping, image manipulation and content awareness
- AI tools to optimize search and access to natural language prompts to empower creators to simply ask for files or for creative iterations
- Option to utilize GenAI models focused on content iteration, localization and personalization of brand approved assets
- Rights management tools, including automated alerts and workflows
- Secure controlled access with rule- or role-based controls
- Compliance controls and documentation
- Rendition management
- Search, including voice, visual, metadata filters, full-text, color, location, multilingual and multifaceted search
- Brand portals or asset microsites to enable secure third party access
- Globalization and localization capabilities with multinational support
- Access to generativeAI capabilities including LLM tools for language support, translation and globalization efforts
- Analytics and reporting, including asset impact analytics
- Out-of-the-box integrations and API connectors (including to service and sales engagement delivery tools)
- Content delivery network (CDN) access or native integration
- Application of ML or AI techniques to boost search, asset recognition, categorization, tagging and application
- Integration to tools well outside traditional marketing technologies including ERP, PIM, Pricing, Product and Commerce solutions
The Constellation ShortList
Constellation evaluates more than 40 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects market share and internal research.
- Adobe Experience Manager Assets
- Aprimo Digital Asset Management
- Brandfolder by Smartsheet
- Bynder
- Canto
- Cloudinary
- Hyland Nuxeo
- MediaValet
- OrangeLogic
- OpenText DAM
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this Constellation ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.