Get your DAM budget: How to get your boss on board with your Digital Asset Management strategy

You, like so many other DAM managers out there, are a team of one or few. Every week you’re working hard to add more assets to your digital asset management (DAM) system, improve data quality, and help users, while also fixing another problem, onboarding new users, running another audit, or starting another project. There is also a laundry list of improvements you want to make if you can ever find the time. How can you build a digital asset management business case to support these efforts? Maybe you are looking for support with these common scenarios:

When you ask for resources to help solve the problem, it’s crickets. The budget is just not there.

You should know you’re not alone. It can be notoriously difficult for DAM managers to get the budget they’re asking for because the ROI is not always clear (or easy to calculate). 

We’re here to help. We can’t give you a magic wand to conjure up a budget that doesn’t exist. But we can certainly help you maximize your chances of getting the “yes” for that next budget pitch you’re making to your leaders.

Trust us: the right planning and execution can turn your frustration into feelings of optimism and empowerment as you convince budget-holders that DAM is worth the ongoing investment.

Here we go.

Enable Strategic Goals Through Digital Asset Management

Now that you have your top two or three strategic goals, you need to identify just how exactly the DAM is going to enable those.

It’s not always an easy 1:1 relationship when it comes to how the DAM provides value to a business. You may need to do some thinking here, but here’s an example to help you get your head around it:

Example 1

By looking at the strategic plan, you’ve identified the business is really pushing to speed up time to market for new products. You know the company is starting to use 3D models as part of the design and production of these products, but the workflows for these creative assets are less than optimal. Different teams store assets in different locations, and people spend a lot of time looking for specific assets. Then once they find them, they can’t be sure they’ve found the right version. Simply by centralizing those 3D assets in the DAM, you can immediately save time and money on those processes and help advance that push to speed time to market. 

Example 2

Another example is a company’s new data transparency strategy. The organization wants to ensure that both employees and customers understand what data they collect, store, and use. They also want to maintain a clear provenance of data collection and use. Because digital assets are part of the organization’s enterprise data set, the DAM can act as a centralized data hub and source of truth for certain classes of data.

Articulate the value of DAM by aligning with strategic goals

Neither of those examples may apply to your specific situation, but you can see how understanding the strategic goals of your organization can help you tie in DAM to those essential projects.

The key is to empathize with the problem, align your understanding of the goal, and then articulate a solution. Think about using this format to articulate your value proposition pitch:

We know that [goal] is a major priority of [org name], based on [the timely primary resources consulted]. We believe that doing [x, y, z] will help further this goal in these specific ways: [list, items, here]

Identify Digital Asset Management Cost Savings

Just because you’ve figured out how to tie DAM to strategic projects and goals doesn’t mean you’re done building your digital asset management business case!

It’s almost a guarantee that leadership will ask you how your system is saving the company time and money. This question is what trips up a lot of DAM managers—there are so many ways to answer it! Ultimately, you want to go beyond saying “DAM increases productivity” or “DAM reduces content spend.” Instead, go deeper with details on how, and try to quantify wherever possible.

Reducing content spend

Here’s an example for you. One of a creative team’s biggest expenses is the cost of licensing content from a creator or company like Getty Images. Let’s say your organization also shoots a lot of video content. Some of this was expensive-to-produce footage, shot on location in remote areas. During the editing process, we estimate that 80% of footage (b-roll and other cuts) is left unused from a given shoot. That doesn’t mean the footage is bad, it just didn’t make the cut for this video. This content is often forgotten about as the creative team moves on to new projects. It is kept – probably on a hard drive on someone’s desk, along with hundreds of others – because the team knows there is potential value there, but it just contributes to the enormous growing backlog that never seems to get tackled.

The next year, the production team is working on a new edit, and that aerial footage that ended up on the cutting room floor last year would be perfect. Unfortunately, no one remembers it, much less knows where it is. They license similar, although far more generic, footage from a stock provider instead – the same footage they licensed two years ago.

That’s a huge opportunity here for DAM. How much could the company have saved by reusing its own footage instead of re-licensing it? You can easily source that information, and just there you’ve found quantifiable cost savings for the creative team. And as a bonus, you have the opportunity to create higher-quality content that is original and on-brand.

The DAM gives you an entire library of images, b-roll footage, and more your company can use in lieu of purchasing stock footage. And these are assets that are created as part of existing projects, meaning you’re helping to not only save your company money on purchasing content, but maximizing the ROI of existing creative/content spend. These are the types of outcomes that make executives happy, and ones you can demonstrate in your digital asset management business case.

Boost efficiency and time savings

Don’t make the mistake of thinking what is obvious to you is obvious to others. In your digital asset management business case, don’t overlook how much time users save by having a centralized content repository optimized for findability.

Creative teams will tell you that any time they can’t find an asset in the DAM, one of two things happens:

Remember: make sure whatever integrations you apply are aligned with the governance standards you established earlier.

Once they find the asset they are looking for, it will often have no metadata (including critical rights information) associated. That forces them to turn to the legal team, and the wait gets even longer. 

So, it’s not an exaggeration to say the DAM can speed up content creation by a factor of weeks. It can also improve the likelihood that your users will find what they are looking for, rather than settling for something familiar and easy to use (but has been used too many times before). 

Get more precise by talking with your creative team to understand how much time they are spending (or would spend if they didn’t have a DAM) on finding assets to use. While you’re at it, find out how often they are successful in finding what they’re looking for, and how often they have to compromise by using a less compelling or overused asset or turn to stock once again.

The cost of inaction

Sometimes the best way to think about a digital asset management business case is not always identifying the benefit of DAM, but calling out the cost of inaction if DAM doesn’t get the investment it needs.

You can go from saying:

“DAM centralizes video assets to make it easier to find and reuse content.”

To something like:

“Reshooting videos next year is going to cost you $10 million, unless you have a DAM to reduce how many reshoots we need.”

Or from saying:

“DAM can help protect restricted assets.”

To something like:

“We have experienced several cases of license violations that have cost us $1 million annually the last two years, and which we are budgeting for in the future. Implementing a DAM with strong permissions and usage metadata can protect our media content and reduce our litigation budget.”

It’s a subtle but different way of thinking about the ROI the DAM provides. Sometimes when you’re dealing with budget holders, it can be easier to loosen the purse strings when they see the problem they’re solving first. Spending $200,000 per year to save millions on video reshoots sounds like a no-brainer, right?

Calculate the ROI of Your Requested DAM Investment

By now we’ve identified the strategic goals that matter to your stakeholders, budget-holders, and leaders. We’ve also decided what measures (cost savings, time savings, etc.) to use in our digital asset management business case, and started to collect some initial data. Now it’s time to gather even more quantifiable data and put it all together to measure or project the ROI of our investment in DAM.

Focus on the strategic priorities

Try to avoid the trap of measuring everything you can think of to maximize the perceived DAM ROI. Instead, stay hyper-focused on the measurements that relate to the strategic priorities you identified at the beginning of this process.

ROI is a pretty simple formula = Return or Benefit / Cost or Investment. Let’s start with the return.

Calculate the benefit

Start by measuring your baselines. What are we doing right now, and how is it performing? 

If we’re measuring cost savings, then we need to know what our costs are right now. If our measure is time savings, we need to measure how much time we’re spending on things right now. And if it’s risk mitigation (rights management), how much are we spending on content-related lawsuits today?

The takeaway here is that we can’t calculate the ROI until we understand these baselines.

Now, you may not always have the exact numbers in front of you, but it’s okay to extrapolate a little as long as the multipliers you’re using make sense. Gather as much data as you can, then do some analysis.

For example, you may be able to find out exactly how much the creative team spends on licensing content per campaign. But to find out how much time they spend looking for assets and their allowed usage, you may need to take the average time a few designers spend looking for images, multiply that by how many images are needed on average for a campaign (considering multiple distribution channels as well, so each image has multiple versions), and how many campaigns are run each year.

Now use those baselines to set thoughtful projections on how the DAM will impact them. Set and communicate the goals you have for each measurement so leaders know there is accountability on your end.

Estimate the cost

Next, you will need to have figures on the cost of the investment you want to make to round out the other side of the equation. You will need to have projected what resources you need, and what the associated costs will be. 

When you put it all together, you need to be able to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the costs.

How to Demonstrate Impact and Make the Digital Asset Management Business Case

This is a lot of data you’ve collected. Avoid overloading your audience with information that takes away from the main points you want to make in your pitch.

While each organization is different, often the strongest communication mechanism when addressing leaders and executives is to use a short, streamlined slide deck. You may or may not have the chance to present it. So make sure it can stand alone to get the key messages across at a glance. 

Your presentation should clearly describe how the DAM is going to contribute to the organization’s strategic goals. Lead with this so the impact is clear.

More tips for demonstrating impact

Next, be specific about what you’re asking for:

If you aren’t sure about these things, talk to sister organizations – companies in the same industry or of similar size. Ask these community resources what their commitments were/what they spent.

Include what success is going to look like. Answer these questions: How are you putting the new budget to use? What is it going to do for the organization? How are you measuring success? What timeline do you need to achieve those results?

The Power of Storytelling

People love stories. They’re easy to relate to and can be a compelling way to receive information.

As you’re presenting your data to the leadership team, think about how you can turn it into a story that helps you make your digital asset management business case. For example, let’s say you’re asking for additional budget to implement a new workflow module in your DAM. Maybe you showcase the lifecycle of the creative process: walk executives through each step of the process from the perspective of the user, using a specific example that resonates with them. For example, use a common scenario like, “Where can I find the most recent version of our last campaign in Mexico?”

Walk the audience through the challenges that this user faces today, then what their experience will be once it is solved – calling out your data points in compelling visuals along the way – in order to demonstrate exactly where your proposed plan will make an impact on productivity and change the story’s outcome.

You can do this on a single slide! It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just make sure you’re telling a story with your data that will help contextualize the impact of your proposed project.

Getting Budget for Your DAM

Securing a budget is not easy. But the steps outlined above are going to help you be well-prepared for the pitch. Just be sure you factor in your company’s budget cycles. You want to be prepared ahead of time so you’re ready when the time comes, rather than scrambling at the last minute to get your pitch in. 

By the time you’ve gone through this process, you should have:

For help pulling this all together, click here to download a slide deck template. It will help you document the details you’ll want to include in your pitch, calculate some of the figures that you will want to highlight, and pull together your story. This free tool was developed collaboratively by Tenovos and AVP.

With the new budget you’re going to win, you can start to deliver on the evolving requirements of the business and your stakeholders without the late nights and stress that come with being understaffed, or saddled with the wrong tool for the job. There’s hope – it just takes the right planning and execution.

This piece was written in collaboration with Tenovos. Tenovos is a data-first digital asset management platform, intuitively designed to empower brands to streamline and automate the traditional complexities of creating and publishing global content.

Related AVP guide: “DAM Operational Model“