Overhauling Your Creative Pipeline: The Most Common Challenges of Implementing Creative Asset Management (CAM) Tools
Creative assets, such as graphics, images and videos, are crucial for digital marketing and internal communications alike. They come in handy for attracting customers, nurturing leads and training and motivating employees. Whether you’re running a marketing agency, media house or tech startup, your company likely uses a variety of creative assets.
Developing these assets requires a creative pipeline, which, in turn, involves several stakeholders, including writers, graphic designers, editors, marketers and producers. This multilayered pipeline underscores the need to use appropriate tools to organize and manage creative assets to make them accessible to different team members.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at a few key challenges you’ll face when implementing a pipeline for creative asset managment (CAM) — and discuss how the right tool can help you overcome those challenges.
The importance of creative asset management
If you’re dealing with a handful of assets, standalone tools, such as Google Drive and Dropbox, might be enough. But when you have hundreds or thousands of assets, you need specialized creative asset management tools.
The right CAM platform is more than just a centralized repository to import and store creative assets. It can facilitate seamless collaboration and eliminate approval bottlenecks from your creative pipeline. Having all your assets in one place also makes it easier to repurpose existing content, thus improving return on investment (ROI).
A CAM platform also lets you integrate automated workflows into your pipeline to maximize efficiency. This gives your team members more time to brainstorm, innovate and develop new content ideas.
But if you want to reap the benefits of a CAM platform, you must ensure proper implementation.
Key implementation challenges for effective CAM
Proper CAM implementation faces several challenges, each of which illustrates the need for a tool that can help you streamline the process.
Archiving and versioning issues
In the absence of CAM tools, most organizations lack proper governance and standards for creative asset management. That means files are distributed across different computers, hard drives and cloud storage solutions. This results in asset duplication, making it difficult to identify the latest versions and keep track of changes.
Let’s say you have animators and sound designers working on a product demo video. They could be working on the same asset but on different systems. This could result in two different versions of the video, causing confusion and even leading team members to override each other’s work unknowingly.
So, when you implement a CAM solution, it’s important to ensure that it helps you mark the latest version of an asset while retaining records of previous iterations.
globaledit, for instance, lets you mark the most recent version of an asset and retain a record of previous iterations under a single thumbnail. That makes it easier to track changes in real time, compare different versions and locate the correct one.
Lack of unified metadata management
Metadata plays a crucial role in making your assets searchable. It includes a wide array of information about an asset, including its title, geolocation, creation date, size and author. You can add various other tags to assets to group them into specific collections or categories.
While creative teams use metadata, it may not be very effective if you don’t have standardized policies for metadata management. For instance, you might use different naming conventions or date formats, making your files difficult to locate. Also, data vocabulary and taxonomy variations across departments could result in inconsistencies.
It’s essential to sort this out when you implement a CAM tool. With a centralized CAM platform like globaledit, you can implement a unified metadata management strategy. It’s designed to deal with minor variations in CSV/XMP files, which ensures searchability on other applications in your creative stack. Plus, the availability of expandable search terms and asset recommendations makes it even easier to find the right assets.
An incompatible creative stack
A CAM platform is an integral part of the creative pipeline. However, most creative teams use a broad spectrum of tools, from content management systems (CMS) and project management tools to image and video editing software. In fact, 83% of creatives use about three to 10 tools daily.
To build an efficient workflow, you must ensure the seamless sharing of assets between the CAM platform and other tools. Unfortunately, different software packages have varied permission settings, and each platform might have unique specifications for file formats and resolutions.
This can complicate the process of accessing and sharing assets, thus adding friction to the workflow. It becomes difficult to deliver the right assets to the right endpoints, which can directly affect efficiency and scalability.
Therefore, finding a CAM solution that seamlessly integrates with other tools in your creative stack is crucial. For instance, globaledit supports integration with Dropbox, Airtable, Mailchimp, Photoshop and other tools to streamline your workflow.
Lack of secure sharing options
The ability to share assets between tools in your creative stack isn’t enough. You should also be able to distribute assets to internal and external stakeholders without compromising security.
In the absence of CAM tools, creative teams usually rely on solutions like Dropbox or WeTransfer to share assets. With these tools, you need to locate and upload relevant files before they can be shared. You also have little to no control over how the recipient distributes your content.
If the CAM solution you choose doesn’t offer secure sharing features, you’ll still likely end up in the same situation.
A robust solution like globaledit eliminates the hassle of using third-party file transfer tools. Instead, you can directly share links (“Public Links”) to specific assets without leaving globaledit. You can even set passwords and expiration dates for each asset to prevent unauthorized access to your content and minimize the risk of copyright infringement.
Overcome CAM implementation challenges with globaledit
The use of creative asset management tools isn’t restricted to marketing agencies or content publishers. Any organization that uses different content formats for internal and external communication will benefit from a cloud-based CAM solution.
However, implementing CAM tools comes with several challenges, including archiving, versioning and metadata management issues. Moreover, incompatible permission settings can make it difficult to share files within your creative stack and with end users.
The good news is that you can overcome these challenges with a modern, feature-packed solution like globaledit. Our platform was designed with the needs of creative teams in mind. Request a demo of globaledit today to understand how our features can help streamline your creative pipeline.