About This ShortList

Digital asset management (DAM) enables organizations to manage, catalog, deliver, analyze, orchestrate and renew all forms of digital content across a growing landscape of channels. In the new age of digital-first experience, DAM must extend beyond traditional marketing and creative walls to serve the entirety of customer experience’s front lines—delivering assets to sales and customer service engagement and automation solutions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the greatest driver of innovation and evolution in DAM as Generative AI models stormed into broad access, impacting search across libraries, and new heights in collaboration and workflow effectiveness. AI innovation has also created two schools of DAM: the marketing- driven brand smart hub and the experience-driven enterprise asset hub. Where the DAM sits will often define where and how AI has most impacted creation, curation and overarching collection of assets. DAMs selected for marketing-intensive work often demand more intensive AI capabilities in automated workflows, data management and the capacity to manage data beyond simple analytics. Since many marketing technologies come filled with the power of image or video creation…it is not always a requirement of the marketing-driven DAM. This nuance drives the flexibility now seen in DAM offerings.

The modern DAM platform as a dynamic experience asset hub rather than a static library. These asset hubs must also allow for non-creative and non-marketing users to personalize assets to meet the needs of specific audiences, segments and individual customers. Asset analytics that measure utilization, impact and value of assets being utilized across all business users and experiences are also included in these robust platforms.

Increasingly, vendors are including robust, feature-rich DAM solutions into larger CMS or DXP suites. While many of these offerings are comparable to many stand-alone solutions, they are not included in this review.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

  • Asset aggregation, storage and management for files including images, video, documents and emerging formats including 3D 
  • Simple, easy to access and control asset editing and personalization 
  • Workflows, cross team collaboration and approval capabilities 
  • Metadata management powered by smart tools and AI for automated metadata tagging and recommendations 
  • Taxonomy and automated ontologies 
  • AI/ML powered automated cropping, image manipulation and content awareness 
  • AI tools to optimize search and access to natural language prompts to empower creators to simply ask for files or for creative iterations 
  • Option to utilize GenAI models focused on content iteration, localization and personalization of brand approved assets 
  • Rights management tools, including automated alerts and workflows 
  • Secure controlled access with rule- or role-based controls 
  • Compliance controls and documentation 
  • Rendition management 
  • Search, including voice, visual, metadata filters, full-text, color, location, multilingual and multifaceted search 
  • Brand portals or asset microsites to enable secure third party access 
  • Globalization and localization capabilities with multinational support 
  • Access to generativeAI capabilities including LLM tools for language support, translation and globalization efforts 
  • Analytics and reporting, including asset impact analytics 
  • Out-of-the-box integrations and API connectors (including to service and sales engagement delivery tools) 
  • Content delivery network (CDN) access or native integration 
  • Application of ML or AI techniques to boost search, asset recognition, categorization, tagging and application 
  • Integration to tools well outside traditional marketing technologies including

The Constellation ShortList™

Constellation evaluates more than 40 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects market share and internal research.

  • Adobe Experience Manager Assets
  • Aprimo Digital Asset Management
  • Brandfolder by Smartsheet
  • Bynder
  • Canto
  • Cloudinary
  • Hyland
  • Orangelogic
  • Wedia

Frequency of Evaluation

Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.

Evaluation Services

Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this Constellation ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.

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