ASSETS, ASSETS EVERYWHERE

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Businesses act centrally and do not plan content with the intent of re-purposing or creating new adaptations, so it ends up not being fit for local market needs.

​Whilst marketeers sometimes consider it too time consuming or just too complicated to create new content by selecting assets that already exist on their DAM.

This leaves local markets having to create even more new assets, which in turn populates the DAM with more content and images.

​With this over population DAM’s can become full of irrelevant or not fit for purpose assets. This causes frustration for companies and marketing teams who start to lose control of their brand guardianship and incur additional costs for the creation of new short-term assets.

There can be confusion between reusing and repurposing, and the new kid on the block - asset adaptation.

Reusing generally means using an asset in the same format many times. This could be a company logo for example, where it is important for brand guardianship that it stays the same, so the user isn’t allowed to amend or adapt.

​However, the logo can still be used many times in the same format although the file type (j-peg, png etc.) may vary.

​Whereas repurposing is more fluid - it is using an existing asset or range of assets in a different media or channel without the need to recreate from scratch. This method obviously saves time and money which in turn creates more value in each asset.

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“In marketing, we are creating more of our own content in house while making existing assets go further”
  Unilever Annual Report

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Asset adaptation, a relatively new term, gives the user the ability to download an asset from a DAM and then have the functionality to manipulate the asset or image. For example, changing a product image from a ‘straight on’ view to a ‘hero shot’ view (by changing the camera angle). Or it could simply be changing the product label for the local markets, or introducing another product into a group shot. This new functionality has become possible with the introduction of new software packages which work in tandem with new 3D/CGI technology, allowing the user to work with existing assets and create new versions of them for all media types.

When you consider that as of February 2018 Amazon had 562 million products on its site, the importance of being able to adapt your assets to allow products ‘stand out’ in the marketplace only looks set to increase for the foreseeable future.

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GET ME PRE-MEDIA FIT

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This was brought to you by the team at Komposer. The views expressed reflect our personal views about the world of assets and the current state of play.