Digital Asset Management for InDesign Users

As a designer or layout artist, you’ve seen—and likely created—digital media of all kinds, taking part in an evolution whereby digital media has become an increasingly significant part of our everyday lives. Every day, we consume and interact with photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, interactive ads, streaming movies, and even experiential marketing, which has gained increasing prominence with the rise of VR and AR.

This digital media boom is driven by a combination of trends and innovations: inexpensive, highly functional digital still and video cameras (by themselves or as part of mobile devices); increased network bandwidth; decreased storage costs; low-cost, high-performance processors; high-capacity, solid-state memory; affordable cloud services; and the requisite digital media infrastructure.

Yet, navigating all this digital media creates challenges for consumers and enterprises alike. From your standpoint as a designer, finding and navigating through all the elements to create increasingly complex digital media experiences can be a source of daily job frustration.

Designers need to organize the use and experience of digital media files. You want to be able to find them, categorize them, and use them when and where you want. You want to be able to create digital media products to reach prospective customers. You may want to use digital assets as part of a marketing campaign to reach a specific audience in a specific form, such as a digital or printed brochure, an email promotion, a movie trailer, or a website landing page. The digital media you’re creating could also be the product itself: an electronic magazine, ebook, or catalog—distributed in a variety of formats or forms.

Though I’m not a designer myself, I work with designers and other creatives day in and day out. After several years working in print publishing during the

days of Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress, I evolved into a technologist who tries to make the creative process more efficient. But more importantly, I try to apply technologies in ways that make the creative process more collaborative and fruitful. That’s how I came to work in DAM (digital asset management). It’s a horrible acronym (try going through your career being referred to as “the DAM consultant” or “the DAM analyst”). The joke gets old very quickly. What was a niche when I originally began working in it has increasingly become a core technology in the modern creative landscape.

What is a Digital Asset?

People often ask, “What are digital assets? And how do we identify ours?” Consider an asset conceptually rather than as a physical thing; this may help you understand DAM and its potential usefulness. As a starting point, consider the general notion or concept of an asset: something that has intrinsic or acquired value. Your house, a building, a coin, a postage stamp, a recording, a book, and your skills or abilities are all assets.

For example, a movie, television show, magazine, or book has an implicit intrinsic value that today is increasingly produced digitally. These types of assets tend to be easier to understand, since they are both digital assets and the “products” being manufactured for sale. They have (in a manner of speaking) “shareholder” value.

By contrast, for marketers, a brochure, white paper, or banner advertisement may also have brand equity and marketing value, but no value as a direct income-generating asset. An asset’s value may fluctuate over time. The key factors for digital asset management (DAM) are that the asset has some value throughout its lifetime and that someone wants to use or reuse the asset.

But that’s not all. This definition also allows for physical objects such as DVDs, old videotapes, film reels, product samples, film costumes, and even museum items to be included as “assets.” While this may appear a stretch, consider enterprises that need to catalog physical items and provide a digital form or proxy to represent them, such as a museum cataloging its collection of Renaissance paintings. Now you have a digital image or icon representing the physical thing. Therefore, the definition of a digital asset actually includes both digital and physical things.

As a designer, you need to create, organize, find, and use pieces of digital media: not only the individual images, graphics, photos, video segments, and audio files that form the elements of your creation; but also the layout, editing, and design files that provide the structure. In most cases, you need to add textual information such as copy, descriptions, and maybe product data as well. Finally, you have to assemble everything together in the right format within the specific production process or workflow.

Upon completion, you’ll want to distribute and track all the components, as well as any changes or versions over time. Additionally (if all that weren’t enough), many digital files have usage restrictions and rights that must be monitored and respected.

This management of digital media throughout its lifetime is the general domain of digital asset management. As a discipline and a technology, DAM is all about the control, flexibility, portability, access, and reporting of digital assets (images, video, audio, and documents) among organizations, customers, partners, and suppliers. DAM is concerned with delivering the right content to the right people, on all devices, mostly in real time, with the ability to track and measure digital asset engagement across an enterprise and its potential global reach.

The Importance of Metadata

Technically speaking, a digital asset is more than just the media file. To realize the value of a file (or collection of files), you need to have additional information about that asset. In short, you need metadata (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A file becomes an asset when it has metadata associated with it. Metadata enables findability, process automation, and targeted distribution of assets. Image source: Real Story Group.

For most DAM purposes, we define an asset as the media content plus its metadata. This metadata can be as simple as the name, author, or creation date of the file, or as complex as the rights and fees around use of an image or the extracted speech converted to text from a video. Content becomes a usable asset only when metadata is associated with it.

Metadata is essential to managing these assets, providing useful information about the content, such as: “Older woman holding a baby,” photo, taken by Phil Smith, on January 5, 2008. This information makes content accessible and searchable, provides context, defines usage rights, shows an asset’s history of use, and, over time, can be used to determine an asset’s value. Metadata can, in a sense, become an asset itself. It is invaluable, and you will need to manage it as well.

What Do DAM Systems Do?

Though DAM is first a discipline, it’s also a technology. In its simplest form, a digital asset management system provides a secure repository that facilitates the creation, management, organization, production, distribution, and, potentially, monetization of media files identified as digital assets (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A typical DAM system landing page interface. Images are showcased by default based on a user profile, and then searches can be carried out and refined. Image source: Fotoware.

In the context of InDesign and other Adobe tools, some would say, or perhaps perceive on first impression, that a DAM system is a souped-up version of Adobe Bridge. But a DAM system does a lot more than Bridge, which is simply focused on locating, organizing, previewing, and batch processing files in Adobe Creative Suite/Cloud-specific ways. DAM systems have extensive functionality beyond what Bridge can do, in particular when it comes to distribution of assets to downstream technologies such as digital marketing and web publishing tools.

Like Bridge and other content management technologies, a DAM system provides basic library services: a common (typically centralized) and secure place to store, organize, and retrieve files. However, it also provides core process services, including specific facilities for the management, manipulation, transformation, security, movement, and processing of rich media files and their metadata. Most DAM systems can now integrate with other tools and systems, which, for a designer or marketer, can be particularly useful.

Compound File Handling

What’s probably most interesting for designers is how DAM systems handle what’s called a “compound asset” in the DAM world—any layered file, or a file that contains multiple assets, while at the same time being a whole asset in and of itself. Compound files contain, embed, or reference other assets. While the most obvious examples can include InDesign or Illustrator files, other formats of documents, books, catalogs, brochures, ZIP archives, PowerPoint presentations, or DVDs are also considered compound assets. An additional nuance is that while compound assets are master container files that embed or reference other files, those referenced files may or may not also be compound.

Uploading compound assets introduces challenges for a DAM system; how they’re handled varies from product to product. The first challenge is how the system marshals the externally referenced and internally embedded files. Quark and Adobe documents commonly reference files that live elsewhere on the file system. You may be required to gather all of these files into a location and upload them as a batch, but in the best cases, you can simply drag a compound file onto your desktop and it will parse the file into a myriad of “child” assets, all referencing the “parent” compound asset. In other cases, you may need to create a special ZIP file that contains the full compound file, so that the system has and can reference all the linked files. As I mentioned earlier, the best systems provide mechanisms or tools to perform this process for you.

PowerPoint files are another common example of this challenge. A slide deck may reference images and files that live elsewhere. They aren’t assets (yet), but they need to be included in the upload. If the system doesn’t handle this process properly, when you try to download the file from the system, it will have unresolved links to files and may corrupt your presentation. But done right (that is to say, in a DAM and uploaded as a compound asset), individual slides and assets on those slides are stored as parent and child assets, easily found and re-used by others throughout your organization.

Metadata Extraction

Ingestion includes processing the incoming file. Typically, it includes extracting or pulling out the embedded information or data that becomes metadata in the DAM system, which includes the implicit metadata created while you’re working on an InDesign file, for example. The information could be embedded in the file as file attributes in various standard formats, including IPTC, EXIF, and XMP; as Microsoft Office file implicit metadata, such as author, date, and modified by; or (in the case of video) as scene changes, keyframes, time codes, closed-caption text, or possibly through speech-to-text conversion that indexes text back to the video.

Systems vary widely in the kinds of file attribute and metadata extraction services they provide. You need to be sure that if your workflows or metadata include information stored in standard formats, you can extract and store (or map and store) in the system. More generally, you need to understand which information the file system can extract for a given file type and which it cannot.

Additionally, metadata can live in an external system—or even a spreadsheet—and be pulled in and associated to an asset by the system at ingestion. It can assist many workflows where the information already exists in other systems, and simply needs to be aggregated in one place, providing increased value and searchability to both the file and to the asset.

Origins of DAM and Connections to Creative Applications

The origins of digital asset management technology date back to the early 1990s. Early DAM vendors attempted to provide a common repository in which to store digital media files. Most vendors started by developing desktop applications, providing a simple database or archive for cataloging and indexing digital images. In many cases, they were cataloging licensed or stock photographs used in brochures or other publications. This is why early DAMs integrated directly with technologies like Quark XPress and Aldus PageMaker—and why today they are focused on direct connections to Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

The “direct connection” in this case means a plug-in that you as a designer can download to your desktop and that adds enhanced functions to InDesign. For example, you can directly access the latest version of what’s in the DAM system directly from your Creative Suite/Cloud application (see Figure 3) without having to log into the DAM system separately.

Figure 3. In this example, note the additional Mediabank menu at the top of the InDesign application frame. This allows direct access to the assets in the central DAM repository, so you can be sure you’re accessing the “single source of truth” and the latest version of what you may be putting in the catalog. Image source: WAVE Corp.

On the flip side, DAM systems allow users without InDesign to edit a layered file within the browser, as illustrated in Figure 4. Text in InDesign becomes editable fields in the browser, so people who aren’t on the creative team can make modifications within the restrictions of a template that you’ve designed.

Figure 4. Most DAM systems can take an InDesign file and make it moderately editable in the browser environment. Here, we see a tourism ad for the province of Alberta, Canada, in which an authorized user can update the text or associated images if desired, without needing to use InDesign. Image source: Brandworkz.

As a third example, DAM systems allow for photo cropping and format conversion in the browser (Figure 5). As a designer, these tedious conversion tasks are no fun for you. A quick crop or conversion from TIFF to JPEG can be taken care of by whomever wants to use the image, because the master high-resolution file would be the one stored in the DAM system.

Figure 5. Quick crop and convert in the DAM system. Image source: Brandworkz.

The DAM Market Today

I often say that I follow DAM vendors in the way the British press follows the royal family, that is to say, obsessively and constantly. Much of what I do is advise organizations on which system may be the best fit for their requirements. When a DAM system purchase is driven by designers and creatives in the organization, the systems that tend to be the best fit are very different from ones where high levels of enterprise data integration are required.

The DAM market is really a spectrum of simple to sophisticated products. In Figure 6, the products on the left are more out of the box, easier to configure and maintain, mostly software-as-a-service, so you don’t have to worry about maintaining hardware, either.

Figure 6. DAM options: A spectrum from simple to sophisticated

I see these systems most frequently chosen by design teams and marketers who are perhaps not wanting or willing to involve IT in their process. That said, the simpler products also have less sophisticated APIs, and thus aren’t as enterprise-ready when it comes to integration.

The products on the right in Figure 6, meanwhile, are the ones that tend to get purchased by large Fortune 500 organizations, who have vast multi-channel marketing requirements and high levels of integration requirements with systems such as PIM (Product Information Management), MA (Marketing Automation), or e-commerce.

DAMs that focus more on the creative process and integrating with InDesign include:

• Canto: One of the longest-running DAM vendors, jointly based in Berlin and San Francisco.
• Brandworkz: A British vendor focused on brand management.
• Extensis: Another longstanding DAM vendor with a long history of integration with Adobe products.
• Bynder: Modern Dutch vendor with a growing presence in the USA.
• Censhare: Publishing-oriented vendor based in Munich.
• Fotoware: Norwegian vendor focused on image management.
• MerlinOne: Boston-based vendor with a long history in newspaper publishing.
• WAVE: Florida-based vendor with a broad web and print publishing suite.
• Widen: Highly service-oriented vendor with a 60+ year history in print.

Ironically, Adobe’s own DAM, which came to the market quite late vs. the ones in this list, doesn’t offer as wide a breadth of functionality when it comes to direct integration with InDesign and other parts of the Creative Cloud.

When Might I Not Need a DAM?

About a quarter of the time I work with an organization on a strategic review, I end up telling them they don’t need a DAM. Sometimes, Adobe Bridge or similar tools are enough, because you don’t necessarily need to do high-volume distribution of assets or automate connections of assets to other systems. Since I don’t sell any system or represent any DAM product, I can be brutally honest and oftentimes make them face the fact that a particular DAM system may not be what they think it is, or that technology won’t solve their process challenges. Some organizations just don’t have a strong enough business case, or the scale, to justify spending the money on a DAM system.

The least expensive DAMs run about $12,000 per year once you account for the implementation and support costs, but those are just a step up from your shared drive.

If you’re a small design shop, Bridge may be good enough for your needs. If you’re doing web publishing only, your WCM (Web Content Management System) may be all you need to manage your images, because you’re not doing anything multi-channel. If you’re an agency doing only social media campaigns, you can probably just use Percolate or a similar social media management tool to store your images, as well.

Enhancing Creativity and Productivity

At its core, the value of DAM is that if you’re doing it right, your assets are easily findable, shareable, and target-ready from a marketing standpoint. DAM systems help automate menial tasks and make more of what you produce accessible to the rest of your organization, freeing up your time to do what you’re best at: being creative.