It's been rare historically that you'll find anyone with a "C" in his or her title talking about Digital Asset Management. When I first started covering DAM in-depth about 5 years ago, most of the people who ran DAM projects or bought DAM software were marketing managers, ad agency technology managers, or perhaps a regional marketing director.

I was pleasantly surprised a couple of weeks ago that -- when meeting with a $1 billion-annual-revenue company and Real Story Group premium subscription customer to discuss their strategic approach to DAM -- not only were the CIO, CTO, and COO invited, they all showed up. And to boot, they engaged deeply in conversation about DAM for a full 90 minutes. Not just talking about managing assets, but how DAM could fundamentally improve their business agility and time-to-market, to give them competitive edge.

I was challenged, interrogated, even yelled at a bit for carving up a few sacred cows. These are the best days of my job. And really, any DAM practitioner should rejoice in hearing such a story. CTOs, COOs and CIOs getting worked up about DAM is a wonderful and beautiful portent. It's about DAM time. 

Why now, and why not before? I'll attribute much of this to the acute pains currently felt by executives regarding regional marketing asset silos, and the inability to deliver brand experiences to multiple channels from one single source. Executives are aware that it's painfully expensive to keep doing things in siloed, regional ways, and to manually create dozens of channel-specific file formats, or pay an agency thousands of dollars to manage and convert each file for the myriad of ways they might need it delivered.

Still struggling to convince your C-level boss that DAM matters? Or are you the C-level type that needs a bit of DAM 101? If so, just let us know how we can help.