Should you buy a DAM from your creative agency?
Over the years, I’ve worked with many RSG subscribers who were roped into using a “DAM” from their advertising or creative agency.
The story is almost always the same:
- Company hires a creative agency to conjure up an advertising or marketing campaign
- Creative agency hosts the assets they create on a cloud service, which they make available to their clients as part of the review and delivery process
- Over time, the agency adds DAM-like, lightweight services to their delivery service such as search, download, and commenting
- The agency then decides they want to go to market with a product, and in turn charges licensing fees to the customer to store assets in a multi-tenant, basic library
Invariably, companies outgrow this scenario as their requirements to apply and adapt assets become more varied, and integration becomes more important. I recently evaluated an agency DAM used by a Fortune 50 company, and the system passed only three of the ten core characteristics of a DAM.
The cautions are clear:
- “Agency-ware” is usually less than it appears. Avoid monikers. When an agency says they "have a DAM,” you may want to test if it even can do the basics.
- The business and skill set needed for developing software is dramatically different from that of a creative agency. Would you also assume a chef could raise a pig, or grow vegetables, simply because she can cook those foodstuffs well? Probably not.
- Do you want to tie your asset repository to a creative-services relationship? What happens when you want to switch agencies? I've heard many a nightmare about "trapped" assets.
- An existing relationship is never a good reason to buy a software product from any particular company — especially if you’re buying software from a company whose core competency is services.
In our DAM research, we rate not only how well 30+ software products can deliver on the basics, but also across a myriad of other technical criteria and strategic considerations. Be sure to have a look at an excerpt, or try out our selection tools.
