Today, everyone is a content producer. At Forrester, we’ve seen many companies do this- whether it’s Virgin America’s Hollywood-produced in-flight videos, Kohler’s partnership with parent bloggers to create YouTube content, or Lego’s webisodes available on their website.  Customers' interactions with your firm rely on the content you produce at every interaction point. 

Rich media content adds the soul to these experiences. While text and copy are still prevalent and important, rich media like videos and images are unparalleled in their ability to drive customer attention and create emotional connections. Specifically, rich media helps drive more interactive marketing campaigns, enrich the brand experience, and support customer experiences driven by sales, product, commerce, and lines-of-business groups (not just marketing!).

DAM will be a critical technology to help enable the creation, management, usage, and retention of these rich media assets. Our latest evaluation in the DAM space found that many vendors are attempting to serve these needs, but few lead. The major differentiators we found are around:

  • Cloud and agility. Today, enterprise customers are embracing, and demanding, DAM solutions managed in the cloud. They demand cloud-first DAM solutions so that they can rapidly deploy solutions, always run on the latest code (no more painful upgrades!), leave operations to someone else, support scalability, and replace capital expenditures with monthly operating expenses. But too many DAM vendors are behind.
  • Adjacent marketing capabilities. Some software, like content marketing platforms and marketing resource management, has blurred with DAM so much that many solutions now offer light-weight capabilities in both of these areas. But many vendors are stuck in the old-school DAM mentality, where DAM is a static, archaic back-end repository, and will be left behind as newer entrants look to innovate and integrate into adjacent spaces.  
  • Analytics. As DAM moves beyond being a static repository just for parking assets, business users want greater insight into how to better reuse assets. But very few vendors showed us capabilities or vision in this area.

There are many other areas in which we saw major differentiation, like creative workflows, content localization, and video management. To see how the 12 most important vendors in the space stacked up—ADAM Software, Adobe, Bynder, Canto, celum, Cognizant, MediaBeacon, North Plains, OpenText Media Manager, OpenText MediaBin, WebDAM, and Widen—check out our latest Wave report. And remember that the research report is just scratching the surface of the months-long research we conducted. We encourage clients to review the detailed product evaluations and adapt the criteria weightings to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave’s Excel-based vendor comparison tool.  I also encourage clients to leverage their Inquiry access to speak with me to learn more about these vendors and which vendors are potentially a best-fit for your specific scenario.