DAM systems are not anymore a single source of truth to organize your assets across your organisation but are providing new capabilities to manage your brand identity guidelines on board. This is a smart way to protect and ensure the brand consistency and go to market faster. Using the assets from the DAM to personalize your marketing campaign will create a true value for more customers engagement and a 360 omni channel view.
Why brands needs a new edge of personalization :
- Using DAM provides more efficiency across all the communication channels instead of local silos
- Control the assets in order to share the right content at the right time
- Digital delivery to all your applications using curated data from your DAM.
- Make it easy to create custom content for print, digital, emailing and social
- Speed up and enhance the creativty that only matters.
- Ensuring that your published assets are always up to date from the creation to syndication (CMS, e-commerce…) Who ever you are a retailer, a brand, CPG Pharma you need to distribute at scale with personalized content. The usage of a DAM enable new business opportunities working with content easier and smarter. Within the data alignement along side your workflow you can control and produce at the right time.
Of course it is also at one time to select the the right technology stack. Today we see often integration within DAM. 10 years ago I was already using a smart component with CELUM DAM based on IDML, just super easy and low cost.
Today you have 2 main technologies :
1- Indesign based
Indesign based native file powered by Indesign Server. To be honest this is the way I advise just because you can easily get your native files on your desktop without going through complex connectors. If you have to manage complex multiple pages it is fast and works. Adobe InDesign is the global standard in page layout for commercial and corporate publishing. It offers extremely powerful and sophisticated page composition, and is used by millions every day for high-quality print layout, as well as digital publishing.
Adobe InDesign Server brings the entire spectrum of InDesign layout & composition capabilities into a server context. Instead of being controlled by a traditional User Interface (UI), InDesign Server is controlled by automated processes, for example a Web Service call telling it to load a template and update text and graphics based on information from a database or web request.
One of the best company managing this technology is definitely Silicon Publishing and today at the great of Adobe Strategy. Their product Silicon Designer 4.0 offers a white label online editing experience second to none. With unparalleled customization, Designer brings standards-based modularity to another level. Merging the power of Adobe InDesign Server with HTML5, Designer delivers one of the most powerful online editing experiences available today.
- Easy template setup
- Customization of the user interface
- High quality print output that plays nicely with prepress and production workflows
- Restful web services as well as a JavaScript API enable integration with systems
2 weeks ago fresh from the Adobe Max 2019 conference Max Dunn, Jill Talvensaari and Brett Kizner made an overview of the best moments of the Max and also unveiled the state of the product Silicon Designer and Connector. Silicon Designer is integrated with Adobe AEM but also with Nuxeo one of the leader in ECM.
You can find their Keynote here.
One other very good solution is Wedia. This vendor is one of the top DAM vendor with a very nice User Experience, easy to use and maybe with one of the best ROI hosted on Microsoft Azure. They are more and more successful especially in France. I was working with as a customer 10 years ago to produce online catalogs for retailers and years ago they acquired iBrams in 2016 so now they have a very great full html5 Native Indesign editor, easy to use, very fast even with multipages and the integration with the DAM is at the core. They developed their own Adobe CC connectors with a lot of innovation thanks to AI.
Wedia’s Digital eXperience Management (DXM) module is at the crossroad of content and consumer context: it allows clients to dynamically adapt master assets from a single source of truth library, and distribute them on various distribution channels (mailing, social, CMS). During his last Product Council 2019, Wedia unveiled some great new capabilities to syndicate the content from the DAM to Print, Social and CMS.
An other leader is Bynder a agency 5 years ago and now a top DAM vendor. You can also create on-brand templates in an instant. Define elements and rules that control the way designs are edited so they can be created for different campaigns, markets, and channels.
You can create on-brand ads, banners, and social imagery for all digital channels quickly; no design skills needed.
A germany company one2edit provide also a online Indesign editor, now it is BRANDGUARDIAN.
A French company J2S is also skilled to propose Online Indesign editing capabilities with a strong background in custom development : J2S Publish-In Suite.
2- Full Web based Online Editor
On the other side you can also personalize the content without using Indesign Server. Maybe one the best one is CHILI Publish a young company 10th birthday next year !!
Their Software is dedicated for Smart Artwork and Marketing Material Creation. It allows users of any skillset to edit customizable documents in a browser, or fully automate artwork generation. CHILI publish' output files are ready to use for print and digital in virtually any application. You can also use Indesign connector to upload and manage you're templates.
During the Spicy event 2019 in Berlin (my aftermovie here)
I discovered one there nice partner Kan Design providing a nice an easy way to manage and personalize marketing content.
Now Chili Publish has more DAM integrations to empower assets and metadata.
You have also Brandmaster designed to provide an advanced and dynamic digital solution, delivering overall brand management with branding automation. See the demo :
Chili Publish has also been integrated with Stylelasb from Sitecore ( Coca Cola project)
So DAM systems are even more at the heart of the omni channel communication with online capabilities for more engagement and customer experience.
I like to share with you this article of Max Dunn, top analysis and History of Scene7 Web-to-Print.
As a reminde, do not forget to subscribe to my webinar Monday 9th December 4pm CET :
"How to select the right marketing cocktail between DAM, PIM and CMS in 2020"
