Why your business needs creative asset management

Highlights

You’ll learn why CAM is essential:

• Streamlines workflows: Centralizes asset storage, simplifying access and saving time
• Improves efficiency: Automates tedious tasks, boosting productivity
• Consistent branding: Ensures all team members use up-to-date brand elements
• Cost savings: Reduces redundancy and maximizes your asset value
• Enhances collaboration: Facilitates seamless teamwork and feedback
• Makes your system scalable: Supports growing asset libraries and evolving market demands
• Adds security: Controls access and protects your intellectual property

Explore the top CAM solutions and transform your creative process today.

Your marketing, content and advertising teams are creating more content than ever. And, as content generation shows no sign of slowing down, managing these digital assets becomes a nightmare for businesses. Imagine your marketing team is running a photoshoot for an advertising campaign. At the end of the shoot, you probably have hundreds of photos or assets, but only six or seven make the cut to your website or marketing collaterals. 

The challenge? Searching through hundreds of these creative assets to find the relevant ones. 

With so many creative assets, from logos and website design to social media content, product images and ads, managing and organizing them is paramount for your digital success. 

The solution? Creative asset management (CAM). Good CAM is central to the lives of your marketers and content creators because it manages their creative assets from a single platform, optimizes resources and reduces search time. 

So, before proceeding, let’s understand creative asset management, its benefits, key features and the top CAM software to consider.

What is creative asset management?

Creative asset management (CAM) is organizing, storing and sharing digital or creative assets centrally. These creative assets include:

• Images
• Photos
• Audio
• GIFs
• Sound snippet
• Rich media
• Graphic designs
• Documents
• Digital files

These assets are required for building a successful marketing or advertising campaign. Creative asset management builds and files your creative assets in one place with specific features, like asset histories, tagging and comment sections. Rather than managing your countless files between Google Drive, emails and Dropbox, creative asset management systems store your assets safely in one place. What’s more interesting is that you can keep track of all the changes and collaborations leading to the final product.

Only 14% of marketers and creatives are happy with how they store their digital assets, a CAM is a must. A CAM helps your team members access these assets and ensures they’re used effectively across different platforms and campaigns, reducing rework. With a CAM, you can share assets with your external stakeholders, simplifying collaboration. 

CAM increases collaboration, reduces redundancy and keeps your brand message consistent. Plus, these systems often use metadata, image tagging and version control to help your team find what they need while tracking how assets are used.

Creative asset management vs digital asset management

Let’s explore how a CAM is different from digital asset management (DAM):

Benefits of creative asset management

Streamlined creative workflows

When your teams can access and use their assets, everyone works together. This saves time, reduces downtime, sparks creativity and increases productivity while ensuring all assets are available when needed. In companies that adopt CAM, ideas flow freely and projects move forward because everyone is in sync. 

Improved efficiency and productivity

As creative asset management streamlines your workflows, you free up valuable time and eliminate challenging manual adjustments. Whether it’s your logo that needs resizing or an image that you want your technical and creative teams to work on together—CAM has you covered. The benefits don’t stop here. CAM shares digital assets on various platforms, helping you reach your target audience.

Consistent branding and messaging

CAM plays an important role in maintaining your brand consistency. How? CAM allows marketers to access a centralized hub for all their digital assets. As a result, you no longer sift through hundreds of emails or browse through your Google Drive to find the latest version of your template, logo or any approved rich media. With CAM, everyone on the team accesses approved brand elements, helping you maintain consistency in your messages and marketing collaterals. 

Saves time and cost

With CAM software, the days of manually scouring folders and platforms to find one file, image or video are gone. By offering an intuitive and centralized system, CAM allows your marketers to locate digital assets, freeing up their time for other creative processes and important work. 

Creative asset management (CAM) also eliminates duplicate assets by giving you visibility into your existing digital assets. Besides saving time and effort, CAM saves money by preventing redundant digital assets and maximizing the value of your existing ones. 

Helps you scale your creative asset production

When your marketing team builds a library of digital assets and increases the number of campaigns you run, manually managing your assets is more than challenging. A well-structured CAM produces and shares assets, helping your teams adapt to market shifts and customer wants. In addition, a scalable CAM system supports current operational demands and positions you for future success.

Adds more security

When sharing digital assets in Google Drive or via email, you cannot completely control who views, downloads or reuses your branded assets. That’s why companies are switching to creative asset management systems like Contentstack. Your CAM helps you control who has access by giving different permission levels. With CAM, you can set an expiration date on access so that unauthorized personnel don’t have access to your assets.

Faster time to market

A major advantage of effective CAM is getting your products and campaigns to market faster. Launching your products quickly sets your brand apart from others. A solid CAM system makes creating, reviewing and deploying creative assets smoother, reducing delays often caused by a lack of communication or lost files. By centralizing your digital materials and setting up clear workflows, team members can collaborate and tweak designs, ensuring everyone can access the most up-to-date versions.

How has Contentstack helped Extu improve its speed to market for reseller marketing campaigns?

Extu partners with close to 4000 marketing resellers to manage digital marketing campaigns. However, their previous content management platform lacked a multilingual feature, creative assets and integration with their technology, slowing them down.

After using Contentstack for creative asset management, Extu can now handle multilingual content, streamline workflows, and connect with its technology for faster campaign launches. This change ensured a 53% faster delivery of translated content and a 21% quicker rollout of English content, making life easier for its internal teams. Contentstack gave Extu the power to grow rapidly into new markets.

After using Contentstack, Tara Yukawa, VP of Marketing Solutions at Extu, said:

“Using Contentstack has given us peace of mind, particularly with our internal users who are managing content in multiple languages that they might not speak. So, our users were able to reduce steps in their workflow by 21%.”

Read the complete case study here.

Key features of a creative asset management system

Asset storage and organization

When selecting a CAM, choose one that stores all your assets in a single location. Asset storage and organization help you find assets and make managing your files easy, saving time and effort.

Advanced search, metadata and tagging

Use smart search tools, tagging and metadata to find your assets efficiently.

Version control and tracking

When choosing a CAM, prefer a solid version control system to see how your assets have changed. With such a CAM, you always access the latest versions of your creative assets while keeping track of older ones.

Integration with creative tools

Look for creative asset management platforms that integrate with other creative software. As a result, you can work across different platforms.

Collaboration features

Add features that make it simple for your teams to work together. CAM enhances communication, allowing your team to share feedback instantly and automate tasks, increasing productivity and project management.

Top creative asset management solution

Contentstack

Contentstack is a headless CMS. Based on your requirements, you can use it as a creative asset management system. As Contentstack integrates with various creative tools, like Bynder, Brandfolder and Aprimo, you can store your media files, including images, videos and documents, in one location.

With Contentstack, you can tag assets with metadata to make it easy to search for your assets. As a result, your creative team can locate the right files. The platform offers version control, which allows you to track changes and revert to previous versions. Contentstack offers customizable workflows to fit your team's needs, ensuring your assets go through the right approval processes before anyone uses them. Contentstack’s multi-channel delivery support distributes your creative assets across various platforms, helping you maintain a consistent brand experience.

Bynder

Bynder is a creative asset management platform for storing, managing and distributing your digital assets across different platforms. The platform provides version control, collaborative features and brand compliance while managing your creative assets and files. But Contentstack outclasses Bynder in many aspects. Contentstack’s flexible and scalable headless CMS architecture allows seamless integration with various tools and platforms.

Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a CAM system. It integrates content and assets across web, mobile and social media to deliver targeted campaigns, engage your customers and improve brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Contentstack, however, offers superior functionalities. Its user-friendly interface and quicker implementation times make it easier for your teams to find the necessary digital assets.

Aprimo

Aprimo is a powerful marketing operations platform offering asset management capabilities. It can manage your content, assets and campaigns. It also helps your teams collaborate and streamline your marketing processes. The result?

• Improved efficiency
• Performance tracking 
• Better marketing outcomes,
• Increased ROI and business growth. 

Contentstack excels with its headless CMS approach and CAM, offering flexibility and the ability to deliver content and digital assets across various digital touchpoints.

FAQs

What is a creative asset management system?

A creative asset management system catalogs, collects, and organizes all your creative materials, including images, videos, audio and other relevant media files, in a centralized location. These systems optimize your processes and organizational communications and guarantee that your resources are retrievable for numerous projects.

What is an example of a creative asset?

A creative asset can be a logo used in a marketing campaign or a promotional banner created for a particular marketing campaign. It can also include stock images, videos, illustrations or animations and text content like blogs and articles across platforms.

How do you manage creative assets effectively?

To manage creative assets, establish a well-structured filing system, use metadata tagging for easy searchability and implement version control to track changes over time. Regular audits of the asset library and encouraging team collaboration can also ensure that assets remain relevant and up to date.

What defines an asset in creative asset management?

In creative asset management, an asset is any digital content that can be reused and repurposed across various projects and platforms. This includes visual and audio files and templates, branding guidelines and design elements contributing to a brand identity.

Learn more

The need for creative asset management is only increasing as we live in a highly visually engaging and dynamic digital environment. Companies are creating numerous assets to cater to the new generation of customers. Besides delivering successful marketing campaigns, a CAM plans, creates, approves, manages and distributes your assets on various platforms. 

To choose the appropriate CAM that can accelerate content creation at scale and ensure your assets don’t get lost, talk to us today.