Are your brand files scattered on network drives and FTP servers?

Last week I read a report from Aberdeen Group; The Marketers Guide to Justifying Investments in Digital Asset Management by Ian Michiels. How’s that for a snappy title. I have read my fair share of vendor sponsored reports and digest each one with a pinch of salt. This report however contains some very interesting statistics that chime with our business plan and support our outlook on the state of play regarding the management of brand assets within companies.

Aberdeen surveyed over 130 executives last April and May, mainly marketing people.

Storage solutions for Digital Assets

When asked about storage of marketing content, 72% of companies have some kind of a DAM solution. But still 55% use a shared network drive, 38% store files on individual hard drives and 38% use FTP servers.

This is the issue we’re tackling with Brand Capital. Our aim is to eliminate the use of those black hole mediums where digital assets go to die. The information not captured in the numbers are the Email folders and CD’s crisscrossing the planet with associated work and cost overhead.

One of the things I feel is missing from the report is identifying the type of DAM system in use. Is it an internal company solution behind the firewall or a web based solution?

My theory is that less than half of the DAM enabled companies have a true central repository where employees in offices around the world as well as 3rd party agencies and marketing people can access the digital assets. This again would explain the FTP servers. I might drop Ian a line and ask him to confirm this.

This quote from Kathy King, Digital Asset Manager at Staples Promotion is my favorite bit in the whole report:

[...]Today, the company has been using the solution for five years, “in the past, significant staff time was consumed with finding and disseminating assets, via email or FTP, as a result of customer, supplier or sales associate requests. We had one client for whom we were making 60 to 70 CDs per catalog release. Now it’s a simple matter of a ten-minute task”[...]

This is what we want to do for people like Kathy.
The vision driving us at Transmit is that we can actually do the world some good by freeing the marketing collateral from the shared network drives. We want them placed in a true central repository, easily accessible by all parties that have anything to do with brand implementation.

Tell us your story. How do you manage your files?