Your company’s digital artwork assets are a crucial part of your business. Each one costs time and money to produce and is a hard-working part of your brand identity. And digital artwork assets can have a long lifespan. They can be used and reused any number of times on packages, labels, advertising, point of purchase, free standing inserts, digital marketing, on customer’s websites – you name it. The problem is, they tend to accumulate quickly, and when they’re not cataloged, they frequently get misplaced or lost over the course of time.
Would you like an example?
Let’s suppose your brand creates a logo lockup for a special breakfast cereal promotion. Your design agency creates the lockup, the lockup is placed on the box, and the promotion is a resounding success. Congratulations are extended and everyone moves on to other things.
Fast-forward several months and your brand wants to use the lockup asset again for a different campaign. All you have to do is track it down. Easy, right?
Maybe not.
Let’s say you’ve changed agencies since the first campaign, and the project manager who worked on the packaging change was a contractor. She’s moved on to another company, and her laptop has been replaced. Or maybe the lockup is on a company server, but it takes days to locate it. In either case, you’ve incurred needless expenses:
- Time spent searching for the lockup asset; and
- Money spent recreating the lockup from scratch, in addition to approval time.
Does this sound familiar?
For companies that aren’t working with a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) provider, this is the norm.
The solution to these headaches is a DAM that offers a centralized database that can catalog digital artwork assets worldwide. Instead of a mad scramble for a digital artwork asset that’s AWOL, you can conduct a simple search that will yield immediate results. You can search via any number of parameters: file name, file type, body copy terms, package ingredient, company branch, project team member, etc.
A centralized database also supports brand consistency. Constantly recreating missing digital artwork assets results in minor changes over time, and even minor changes over time can produce significant deviations from your brand standards. To enable brand consistency, you must have version control, which allows you to know which digital artwork assets are the most current. When you decide to update an asset, a DAM system can automatically record every version you create in case you want to go back and release an older one, and a good DAM system can highlight the differences between the versions.
Finally, a DAM delivers efficiency. If you want to locate an asset, it can be done with a simple search by file name, file type (.pdf, .jpg, UPC code, GTIN), photographer, talent, brand, etc. You won’t need to set time and money aside to recreate missing files because you know exactly where they are. This also makes it easier to re-use approved assets, thereby eliminating a lengthy secondary approval process and getting your products to market faster.
BLUE Software’s leading enterprise label and artwork management applications enable its marketing, retail, CPG, and life sciences clients to satisfy the rigorous demands of creative, brand and regulatory compliance. By leveraging SaaS based collaboration and workflow tools, BLUE dramatically improves efficiency KPIs around label development and deployment for more than 100,000 users, 12,000 brands and 5,000 companies worldwide.
