Category: Blog
Author: Rainer M. Wilbert

The inner values of content marketing: digital asset management

I personally like to use the term DAM instead of digital asset management because it immediately conveys what it is all about: your valuable content – your digital assets. And these need to be managed securely and sensibly. With alfa Media’s Digital Asset Management, our aDAM, this is really easy.

How does it work? Through six simple principles:

  1. It is best if your content is centrally available to everyone who participates in the communication process. This means that the maintenance of all content is concentrated in exactly one place – no files on users’ desktops, no sending data around for comparison or updates. This affects everyone equally.
  2. When I talk about “all” data, I mean exactly that: there is no file that cannot be stored there. For the vast majority of content, even with preview and analysis of the data type. If this is not possible, the file is saved and indexed in any case – automatically!
  3. This leads me to the platform: All data is stored in the cloud. All systems are containerised, use cost-efficient enterprise database systems and high-end assisting systems. This means running the system on Amazon (AWS) or Microsoft very close to a central data account. We use one of the fastest data nodes in the world, located in Frankfurt.
  4. Everything is containerised, for minimal installation and maintenance effort. The platform also includes the use of PostgreSQL as a database in conjunction with Elasticsearch and its RESTful API. With the assistance systems from hyScore, UpScore, remove.bg and Vision AI (Google), I always manage to incorporate the latest developments and their features and revise my assets with the most professional tools. Always at the forefront and only use what really helps.
  5. For example, assistance systems in the background manage to extract texts from videos and audios and make these multimedia objects searchable. Image processing can be automated or, with remove.bg, offer simple mechanisms for complex processing steps. The results of publication analyses, for example with UpScore, are directly usable and useful in the tools of the users!
  6. Buying your own hardware is therefore obsolete. A scalable database is essential for a flexible, growing DAM. I can start with two workstations and expand to several hundred or thousand.

The alfa DAM offers the possibility to map and support your workflows. The upstream systems deliver the data, the DAM ensures a secure and high-quality publication with rule-based processes – no matter for which platform. The DAM is the basis of the entire data pool and essential for good content marketing.