Brands are comprised of many moving parts. From the logo, fonts, colours and even language we use, to the look and feel we communicate to our customers, we are responsible for establishing systems and processes to protect these elements.
A rather significant component of any brand is imagery. The type of imagery used, the style of photography and, importantly, the different imagery that is relevant to some parts of the business and not others.
What is Digital Asset Management and whose job is it?
What used to be known as a photo gallery is now universally known as a Digital Asset Management (or DAM) system. This is primarily because the requirements around the management and distribution of imagery for organisations have become more complex and technology has grown and adapted accordingly.
The responsibility for set up, management and administration of a DAM is generally shared between an ICT team and the Brand and/or Marketing Team.
How do organisations manage imagery?
A typical scenario that we see with clients before they've employed Outfit is a 50/50 split (give or take): 50% approved imagery stored in a cloud-based, centrally managed gallery in a Google Drive or Dropbox file structure and 50% random assortment of images saved locally on a salesperson or admin representative's computer.
There are many problems with this type of setup, the primary one being that when a brand audit or refresh occurs, there is no way control and eliminate non-approved or outdated imagery.
What we'll show you next is how simply this can be managed through Outfit's in-built DAM solution.
How do we manage imagery differently through Outfit?
Firstly, we think about your filing structure and permission set before we think about your actual imagery. The other great thing about an Outfit DAM is that we think about permissions in 3 distinct ways:
- Straight up and down, honest-to-goodness accessibility
- Restriction of which users can see which specific imagery
- Can all users upload their own imagery or can they only use what's been supplied to them?
- Accessibility vs. download
- Once we've thought about which users can see which specific imagery, we need to establish whether they can download all/some/none of that imagery
- How your imagery can be used within your Outfit templates
- Once we've thought about all of the above, lets think about which images are relevant to be used in some documents and not in others
A scenario of this complex permissions structure in action might look like this:
User A is an event coordinator who needs to create a batch of event certificates for attendees and some branded social media posts to share photos of the recipients on stage at the event.
User A is part of an elite group that can access a collection of image in the Asset Library called Signatures for the bottom of certificates. They can't download these images to use out of Outfit, but in the Signatures Input within their document, they have the ability to switch only signatures from the Asset Library into the allocated signature space.
User A is also at the event taking photos live of the recipients as they receive their certificates. In the event social media template, User A can upload these photos directly into the branded social media documents.
The major benefit to this structure is that we're never thinking about your images as just images, but rather as 1 component in context to your brand as a whole.
How does the Asset Library Setup work?
Firstly we need to know how you're currently managing your assets:
From here, we'll work with you to develop a matrix of user permissions, a folder structure and help you either migrate your data from its current location or integrate your existing DAM system into Outfit to allow you to continue managing your imagery in 1 place, all while seamlessly allowing these images to plug into your templates!
