Why we don't need digital asset management to run our marketing operations. by DAM News Staff

I work in a small marketing team of about five. We have a designer, a product manager, a brand manager, a marketing assistant and an online marketer. We work closely with the sales and customer success management teams. We often collaborate with the account executives and project services teams on projects. Basically, anyone with a customer-facing role depends on Marketing and Marketing depends on them.

Like many organizations, our marketing communications programs include online marketing, public relations, brand management, event marketing, etc. We produce a number of digital assets that are put to use promote our brand, sell products and services and assist with customer relationship management objectives. These digital assets are owned and created by a number of different people across multiple departments inside the organization and externally. Each department has their own shared folder on the network and many employees also have their own folder as well. It’s easier for each department to work separately and for each employee to keep their work on their desktop. When we have a new project, we just start fresh in creating new materials. It’s just easier to re-create something than go digging through some archive somewhere or turn to someone else.

If for some reason, someone needs something that someone else has worked on, we’ll just email it or post it to the FTP. Sometimes, the materials get too large for email so we’ll just use web-based delivery programs like YouSendIt or something like that. There are all sorts of tools or methods we can turn to… no need to settle on one. If someone needs a logo or letterhead, they can always email our designer and she can stop what she’s working on and send them whatever it is they need. Sometimes it might take a few emails to get it right, but that’s ok she’s paid by the hour.

It’s common for teams to email a project file back and forth a dozen times and still see mistakes in the end. “She said this” and “he said that” and the project file morphs into something totally different than expectations called for. They should have given better directions and should have done a better job keeping track of changes. Version 1… version 2… version 7… Who cares what was done to which version and where they’re at? That’s just part of internal communication breakdowns that all businesses have. Why should Marketing care?