Let's review some Digital Asset Management (DAM) technology market trends that RSG is tracking as we debrief enterprise customers.  If there's a single overall theme I see here, it's omni-channel.

Trend #1: Omni-channel Aspirations Exposing Divide in the DAM Marketplace

The resurgence of interest in providing marketers tools to provide a true omni-channel experience is placing pressure on the DAM marketplace to provide broader content infrastructure to support complex relationships and asset types.

This is exacerbating an ever-increasing divide in the DAM marketplace.

Trend #2: Personalization Requires a More Sophisticated DAM

In addition to enabling consistency across channels, marketing and engagement professionals increasingly want to personalize customer experiences. To facilitate true personalization, simple asset libraries may no longer suffice.  Enterprises want to manage more compound assets, with increasingly sophisticated relationships between assets and metadata.  Not all DAM systems can deliver on this requirement.

Trend #3: Tracking Rights More Critical Than Ever

Delivering more assets to more channels makes managing usage rights more complicated — yet more critical. Regulated assets and expired assets need to be managed with certainty. The business case for knowing where assets are being used and who's using them is growing, but again, not all DAM systems excel at this.

Trend #4: Measurement Required at Campaign and Asset Level

Most enterprises are measuring marketing effectiveness at the campaign level, but we seem more RSG subscribers trying to measure effectiveness at a more granular asset level. Assets are the building blocks of your campaigns and it’s a powerful insight to be able to understand which assets "work" better than others.

Trend #5: Buyers Are Considering Content Platforms

There is a trend among enterprises to separate digital assets and core content from systems of engagement that are focused on a single channel. Ideally you could deploy a single platform to manage and distribute both assets and narrative content to systems of engagement like Web CMS, Marketing Automation tools, and social publishing platforms.

Trend #6: DAM Market Bubble Emerging?

There is no shortage of vendors that keep entering the DAM marketplace. We’ve seen some consolidation but we’re still seeing more vendor entrants. We've noticed some vendors are creating redundant platforms and functionality — perhaps a sign that something’s going to give?

Trend #7: Vendors Forced to Specialize to Survive

In the past we’ve seen vendors specialize vertically, for example In healthcare, legal or retail. In some cases, those specialties didn't get reflected into the technology itself, but was really more of a sales and marketing emphasis. Instead of looking for an industry-specific solution, ask yourself "Which scenarios are you trying to accomplish?" and then "Which vendors are fundamentally built to solve those scenarios?"

RSG uses a list of canonical DAM business scenarios that you should be cognizant of when you're putting together the right DAM shortlist.

As usual, we only work for you, the actual buyers of technology. We write our research solely on your behalf.