If digital transformation is at the heart of discussions in most companies, it is also a central challenge for so-called “traditional” agencies—those that aren’t “pure players,” where technology isn’t at the heart of their activities. They now realize that digital occupies a central place in their needs and in those of their clients. Managing to change and adapt in order to face this digital revolution is a big challenge for them.
Adobe works directly with many agencies that are already heavy users of our creative solutions, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, or our digital marketing solutions. These agencies, however, are realizing more and more that these solutions can also be useful for their own internal purposes, not only to their clients.
One particular tool is at the heart of these challenges: digital asset management. DAM allows organizations to centrally manage media content, facilitate internal and external collaboration around such content, and automate many tasks (automatic renditions, for instance, which is the automated generation of all versions of a master image). I have already written an article about it.
So far, agencies have mostly focused on the creation part, but the impact of digital on their customers has led to two new issues:
- The drive to expand their footprint, and also manage the marketing aspect
- The desire to improve collaboration and work internally to optimize exchanges and processes
The impact of DAM on productivity and satisfaction
Very often, DAM is at the heart of these issues because it has a major impact on these two challenges. Let’s look at a European advertising agency I work for, which now faces two major challenges:
- Improve team satisfaction, ensuring that people spend less time on unnecessary tasks
- Use this freed-up time to work on its positioning and thus be better equipped to face the digital transformation
After conducting a thorough review of the agency’s situation, we found that 28 percent of its work time was spent on tasks related to functions within the scope of DAM, which is the equivalent of 3,560 days of work per year across the whole office! By setting up a DAM solution, it could recover an average of 2,000 days per year. Pretty impressive, I think.
This work time could be used to make richer creations, but also to invest in transforming the teams’ occupations, going toward a broader approach, a more complete marketing support for clients. Thus, a DAM solution may prove to be the starting point for a much broader internal transformation, and may have an extremely strong impact on productivity.
And I speak about productivity deliberately: the use of DAM is usually approached from an ROI point of view. However, it is essential to keep in mind that it also allows for a dramatic improvement in productivity and efficiency, thus boosting satisfaction at work. By using DAM to automate the non-intellectually rewarding tasks, employees can focus on other, more fulfilling aspects of their work.
What about you, what do you think about the role of DAM in the digital transformation of agencies? Feel free to give your opinion in the comments!
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