Key takeaways
- Your DAM system serves as the central hub for all digital assets—logos, marketing materials, and product images—creating a unified foundation for your brand.
- The right DAM solution transforms organizational chaos into streamlined workflows, maintaining brand consistency whether your team collaborates in-office or remotely.
- For organizations managing digital assets across multiple teams or locations, a DAM becomes essential—turning your operation from digital disarray to brand excellence.
- When selecting a DAM partner, evaluate critical factors beyond basic features: user-friendly interface, compatibility with existing systems, scalability potential, appropriate access controls, security protocols, and performance analytics capabilities.
What is digital asset management?
A digital asset is any file a company uses to represent, communicate, or enhance its brand — logos, guidelines, social media templates, photography, animations, or other collateral.
Digital asset management (DAM) is the process of storing and organizing all your brand’s digital files. Many companies use a dedicated digital asset management system to simplify these processes.
Let’s look at how such a solution provides a centralized and easy-to-access home for all your brand and campaign materials.
Understanding the benefits of using a DAM platform
Digital asset management software provides a comprehensive content management framework for accessing, organizing, and distributing your brand assets.
These assets — the images, videos, animations, or documents — are the essence of a functioning DAM. In a perfect world, the files are searchable through metadata and offer different access and user rights.
Centralized access
DAM software provides a centralized location for storing all your brand assets. When anyone in the business creates a digital file, they save it to your DAM rather than on their laptop or in their personal folders. Today, DAMs are often cloud-based. No more digging through email threads, searching across shared drives, or messaging colleagues to confirm which version is correct.
A DAM is a smarter way to organize, share, and retrieve assets. Instead of scrolling through folders or guessing filenames, users can filter assets by campaign, file type, product type, region, or any other relevant attribute.
With everything in one place and easy to find, teams can focus less on searching for files and more on creating, collaborating, and confidently launching brand campaigns.
Better organization
With a DAM, you can categorize assets into libraries to make them easy to navigate. For example, you could set up libraries for different marketing campaigns, product lines, or departments.
A well-organized DAM ensures your team can find the exact file they need exactly when they need it. When you upload an asset, you can improve searchability by adding detailed metadata and tags:
- Metadata simplifies categorizing and has a clear format, such as “date.” It helps to structure the asset library, similar to how “genre” structures your music library.
- Tags are entirely open-ended with no restrictions. If you use only tags and multiple people upload files, the tags might be inconsistent (e.g., “puppy” and “dog”), which makes finding the right asset more difficult.
Metadata and tags work best if you follow a clear structure or naming convention. Then, users can add tags to help narrow in on an asset within such a metadata category.
The ability to filter and search also helps prevent duplicates and outdated assets from cluttering your DAM, helping teams work more efficiently.
Improved distribution
DAM software gives all team members access to your brand assets to find and use the files they need. Everyone can have their own account, and you can add or remove users as necessary. This improved distribution is also practical when working with people outside your organization, such as partner agencies. Instead of downloading and re-uploading files, you can share files and campaign assets with external partners directly from the DAM by sending them a link — eliminating version control issues.
A DAM can also help you restrict access to individual files. With granular permissions, you can allow view-only access, limit downloads, or set expiration dates on assets so brand materials are used appropriately and only when needed. For example, if you have creative assets for a marketing campaign that are still being reviewed, you can hide them from the broader organization until they’re approved for publication.
Beyond access controls, a DAM also provides visibility into asset usage. Tracking features let you see who has accessed or downloaded files, giving teams better oversight and ensuring materials are distributed effectively.
Maintaining brand identity
A DAM helps protect and reinforce your brand identity by ensuring every asset follows the same visual and messaging standards, no matter where or how it’s used. Whether it’s a social media post, a presentation, or a product page, teams can confidently create content that aligns with brand guidelines.
With a DAM, you can:
- Store and manage logos, typography, and color palettes in a single hub.
- Control access to brand assets.
- Provide pre-approved templates for marketing and design teams to use.
- Prevent outdated or incorrect files from being used in campaigns.
- Keep brand guidelines and messaging readily available for employees and partners.
This level of consistency strengthens brand recognition and ensures every touchpoint reflects a unified identity.
Easier collaboration
A DAM streamlines collaboration by making it easy for teams to share, review, and approve assets — whether they’re working in the same office or remotely.
Instead of emailing large files or juggling different versions, teams can access, comment on, and update assets directly within the DAM. Built-in approval workflows keep projects moving while reducing back-and-forth.
For agencies and external partners, a DAM provides secure access to the right brand materials, eliminating confusion over which files to use. Permissions ensure teams only see what they need, reducing clutter and protecting sensitive content.
By centralizing feedback and approvals, a DAM keeps projects organized and ensures teams can work together efficiently no matter where they are.
Does your organization need a DAM platform?
When considering whether your organization could benefit from a DAM system, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your organization frequently create, use, and share a large volume of digital assets? If multiple teams and external partners need regular access to digital content and materials, a DAM centralizes and streamlines this process.
- Is your team geographically distributed, or do you have regional offices? A DAM ensures everyone can access the same assets, regardless of location.
- Do you need to track asset usage, control access, set up, and automate creative workflows and approval processes? A DAM can optimize operations and boost productivity.
- Is it important for you to deliver personalized and consistent content experience across various channels? A DAM acts as a single source of truth for your digital assets and can integrate with your everyday tool stack, such as your CMS, Contentful, AEM, and design tools (e.g., Canva, Adobe, and Figma).
If you answered “yes” to the questions above, you likely need a DAM system. Let’s explore who uses digital asset management software and what role it can play in your business.
Who benefits from digital asset management?
Most employees will access your DAM at some point, though some teams will be heavier users than others. But it’s not just your internal teams that will collaborate — external partners may also benefit from DAM software.
Creative teams
Your company’s creative teams — designers, photographers, and videographers — are likely to use your DAM most frequently. They’ll use the platform to organize and store the media assets they produce and share access with other colleagues for approvals and feedback.
Marketing department
Marketing teams also use DAM tools to create promotional materials, content, and templates.
A DAM gives them a central place to store assets and collaborate. This is especially useful if you have regional offices or a distributed team, as everyone can find the relevant files. This way, the marketing team spends less time sending documents to everyone or individually granting access to specific assets.
External partners
Any external partners you work with — such as creative agencies, freelancers, or PR companies — may need access to your DAM. This means that they can use your logo or add your mission statement anytime. Additionally, they can upload files to your DAM, which makes it easy for creative agencies to share assets with internal stakeholders for review.
Choosing the right DAM platform
There are lots of DAM tools on the market. When comparing different options, here are a few things to consider in your decision-making process.
1. Integrations
Look for a DAM platform that natively integrates with your tech stack. This is especially true for creative tools like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe — they make it easier for your creative teams to use and add files to your DAM.
It’s best to include your developers in your DAM decisions so that they can give the thumbs-up from their side. For example, allowing the software to communicate and exchange data with ease via open application programming interfaces (APIs) or web services is a must-have feature. Alternatively, you could look for solutions that offer a developer platform and SDK to let you set up your own integrations so you can customize them to fit your existing tech ecosystem.
2. Ease of use
It can be tricky to roll out a new technology and ensure that it gets adopted. When testing or attending DAM product demos, be sure to evaluate the user-friendliness of the software.
Look for a simple, intuitive interface and user experience that’s easy to set up and work with so that you won’t need any coding or a lot of training. This will lead to a high adoption rate and fast return on investment.
3. Horizontal solutions for brand consistency
Compare different options and find out if the solution is a stand-alone DAM-only product or if it’s part of a bigger platform.
Comprehensive brand-building platforms, such as Frontify, offer other functionalities — including real-time commenting and connecting with products, such as guidelines and templates. This will allow users an end-to-end experience directly within the same platform, boosting brand consistency, collaboration, and organization.
4. Asset accessibility
Your users want to collaborate anywhere and anytime by finding, downloading, and commenting on content and assets on their phones or computers.
Depending on your needs, you can choose a vendor that offers a mobile app — perfect for brand building on the go — and a desktop app that provides instant access to all your content without opening the application in the browser.
5. Scalability
The more your brand grows, the more files you’ll have — to a point where it becomes impossible to keep an overview, let alone manage anything. Ensure that you select a DAM solution that helps scale by centralizing, managing, and sharing your growing number of assets with ease.
6. Access and rights management
You’ll want lots of people using your DAM, but you don’t want everyone to have access to everything.
Find out how easy it is to set up rules about who can access what and how granular you can get when adding or restricting users. For example, can you limit access to individual files or only to whole libraries?
7. Analytics
The best DAM systems provide data that shows how your teams use the platform and specific assets. It helps you understand and track brand engagement levels within your team. Analytics is a must-have feature that helps you monitor asset usage, creating a data-driven culture for all things creative and brand-related.
Some vendors offer user-friendly analytics dashboards that help you with the following tasks:
- Evaluating budgets: Gain visibility into the brand platform’s usage and performance to prove its ROI.
- Optimizing content marketing: Identify whether the resources spent creating branded content are paying off, and get insights to guide your content strategy. Are teams using the content you create? Do specific content types or topics get used more than others?
- Streamlining software integration: Get a bird’s-eye view of your brand operations to identify the gaps in your team’s daily workflows and determine where new software integrations might improve processes.
8. Vendor support
Before choosing your DAM vendor, read peer reviews and case studies to understand if customers are happy with the vendor’s support.
Collect all the information about the onboarding and initial rollout: Find out if the vendor provides onboarding training or additional sessions when they add new features.
Learn how customers are using Frontify to streamline brand building
Uber
Uber has been using Frontify to manage its brand assets and document its guidelines since 2021.
Uber’s DAM houses thousands of brand files and materials. The global company has also created a public asset library — including logos, fonts, templates, and usage guidelines — so journalists, marketers, and other external parties can access the core materials.
"Today, more than 20,000 Uber brand builders have engaged with the platform globally — about 12% of the company creates, manages, and shares assets through a centralized hub,” - Brian Coonce, Global Creative Director at Uber."
Learn more about how Uber uses Frontify’s DAM.
Telefónica
Telefónica uses Frontify’s DAM to house over 1,200,000, such as logos, illustrations, and color palettes. The company manages 19 brands in the same central system.
“To be able to manage all brand materials and workflows at the same time in one unique space for all countries and brands is the main benefit and a milestone for Telefónica.” - Cristina Terrón Moreno at Telefonica
Learn more about how Telefónica uses Frontify’s DAM.
Spring Health
Spring Health adopted Frontify’s DAM for its flexible self-service features, so they could streamline content creation and brand management. With Frontify, Spring Health has scaled its brand operations by reducing manual processes and giving teams the freedom to manage assets on their own.
"Frontify has essentially paid for itself with the time-savings and self-service aspects." - Connie Bravo, Senior Manager of Marketing Technology and Analytics at Spring Health.
Learn more about how Spring Health uses Frontify’s DAM.
Use Frontify to simplify brand management
Managing digital assets shouldn’t slow your team down. Frontify’s DAM streamlines brand management, so the right teams can access, manage, and distribute brand assets efficiently. With automated workflows, version control, and permission-based access, teams spend less time searching for files and more time creating impactful content.
