What Qualifies As Media Asset Management: Video, Audio, Photography?
Creative workflows need to be optimized and streamlined for them to be an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘liability’ to your creative professionals.
As a creative agency or media house, you always find yourself grappling with how to manage your creative assets better. Your ever-growing asset libraries make it a mandate to use a robust digital asset management (DAM) solution.
But the industry standards and consumer demand for increasingly immersive audio-visual content have now created the need for a specialized Media Asset Management (MAM) solution.
But what exactly constitutes ‘media assets’—video, audio, photos, or all of them?
Media Asset Management: The Age of Specialization
MAM is a niche subset of DAM, highly focused on the unique features needed for managing audio-visual assets like videos, audio, and images. MAM does for media assets what DAM does for general digital assets including documents and sales collaterals.
Video content has long been the dominant format, dictating not only marketing and business strategies but also internal communication and training programs in virtually all production companies.
But even then, the importance of images and audio has not been reduced. The success of your creative outputs hinges on video, image, and audio equally.
A photoshoot or video shoot goes through multiple stages—production, storage, transcoding, adding metadata, editing & collaboration, and delivery or broadcasting. These increasingly complex steps require your asset management solution to be advanced enough to handle both the technical and visual aspects of the entire creative process.
As a result, a successful MAM solution needs:
- Seamless ingestion and storage of your media assets
- Quick and easy search with analytics-powered metadata
- Granular access & security controls
- Streamlined collaboration tools and Versioning control
- Integration with your organization’s existing tools and technologies
Your team might already be using a DAM or even a MAM solution for creative workflow management, but is it really the right one for you?
Is it helping you find your media assets when and where you need them, enabling granular collaboration, and integrating the system with your existing software environment?
What Qualifies as Media Asset Management?
Media asset management helps you manage rich multimedia files including video, audio, and photos. It’s designed to handle high volumes of rich media and create a seamless workflow for your organization. MAM largely deals with the following media files:
- Photos represent the visual identity of your brand and hence, play a key role in communicating your unique brand voice.
- Audio plays its part as well, as countless brands have shown with their iconic, timeless themes and motifs.
- Video offers your customers a highly immersive medium to connect with your brand.
The right MAM solution for your team needs to take a holistic view of your entire media asset library and enable you to tell an engaging and complete brand story.
It needs to extract actionable insights from the tons of data your production generates. And it should be able to do the heavy lifting of intelligently keeping your videos, images, and audio at your fingertips and managing multiple approvals.
As we discussed earlier, you need to ensure that whatever MAM solution you’re choosing, it should be able to handle the requirements of your organization and should scale with your growth. Owing to the increased complexity of managing rich media assets as compared to documents, your chosen system should also be built around audio-visual assets from the ground up.
With a comprehensive MAM solution, your media assets are automatically ingested and made cloud-ready to be shared with curated stakeholders. Automatic metadata generation and analytics-powered search save you hours of hunting for existing content.
Moreover, collaborating on videos and images is easier than ever with comment layers and asset ratings. Once your creatives have leveraged assets from all your favorite pre and post-production tools, approvals are a breeze with side-by-side comparisons between asset versions.
Managing media assets, especially rich video files, is not simple but with globaledit’s video management solutions, you can be rest assured that you’re part of the future and primed for growth and scalability.
Talk to us so we can partner with you on your quest to master MAM.