Last week I wrote about Open Text's acquisition of eMotion, and may have added to the confusion over the alphabet soup of DAM, MAM, and MOM. Allow me to clarify how we use the acronyms, and then how they may be used differently by others.

1. DAM = Digital Asset Management
2. MAM = Media Asset Management
3. MOM = Marketing Operations Management

First, as with ECM, we must make the distinction between disciplines and technologies/tools. As my colleague Alan often points out, ECM is really a strategy or an approach that requires many different technologies coming together. I'd argue the same for Marketing Asset Management (sometimes also shortened to MAM) and MOM. Marketing Asset or Operations Management isn't a technology, it's a strategy, set of workflows, and often a suite of tools working together to achieve marketing goals. That might include a DAM system, a web analytics tool, and even a WCM system or a portal capable of personalization. All those technologies might manage marketing assets: brand materials, customer information, or the messages you want to target.

Now, we'll insist that tools alone don't make for a true ECM or Marketing Asset Management solution any more than a set of hammers, wood, and nails makes a house, so we're more specific about the MAM acronym and use it to describe technologies that specialize in certain scenarios. In our parlance, and in the lingo of many of the companies themselves occupied with the management of time-based assets, such as video and audio, MAM specifically describes the management of audio and video assets.

Corbis' (now Open Text's) eMotion is a hosted platform for general Digital Asset Management, largely used by marketers (and thus is called a MAM system in the Marketing Asset Management sense, as Open Text is pitching it). Open Text's other DAM platform, Artesia, offers both traditional DAM (management of digital photos and other marketing materials), as well as MAM (Media Asset Management) for time-based assets, one of the few vendors in our report that does both. In our universal DAM and MAM scenarios, we group ones related to marketing collateral and print production into one group, and the ones for video and audio production into a completely different group, given how vastly different the vendors are in their capabilities. Open Text's new combination of eMotion and Artesia means they're covering more of the whole range, in both hosted and licensed offerings.