Canto’s digital asset management (DAM) platform has helped leading agencies like David&Goliath, GS&F, Helm, and bviral find better ways of working and overcoming inefficiencies. Let’s explore three simple ways to work smarter without upsetting the creative spirit.

Hone your billable hours 

Priority number one should be squashing your non-billable tasks. Agencies spend a lot of time searching, filing, tagging, and organising their digital assets. Years ago, that was the only way, but now (welcome to 2024), many solutions exist that do it for you.

For example, Canto’s DAM solution includes a Smart Tags feature, which automatically and accurately detects objects, people, and colours in your images and videos using AI and adds the right metatags for you. Then, Smart Albums automatically categorise and organise your content, meaning no more clunky content hierarchies, no more junior execs spending hours editing file names and folder structures, and no more messages between team members searching for assets.

So, a DAM platform isn’t just a better way to store, organise and distribute your digital assets—these recent AI-powered innovations make it an effective way to increase utilisation and claw back profits. 

Amplify your content ROI

Cutting out these non-billable chores allows your team to scale up content production and keep up with client demand. This is vital if your agency is looking to scale and grow quickly.

Imagine you’re a creative director who landed with a new campaign brief from a client. Previously, you might have tasked your team to start concepting from scratch, to repurpose previously unused assets, or to bite the bullet and buy stock imagery. Instead, you can optimise this workflow with the right DAM solution. With Canto’s AI Visual Search, your team can find previous client artwork simply by searching with natural language. And facial recognition technology means finding specific people—like models, influencers, celebrities and company execs—is only one search away. More on this can be found in Canto’s guide to Digital Asset Management for Agencies.

Generating new client concepts can be less expensive and time-consuming with a DAM platform in place. And once again, this accelerated workflow and improved content ROI, can banish inefficiency and increase profit.

Collaborate better

Finally, don’t underestimate the complex world in which your agency operates. The nature of this type of business means constant collaboration—with clients, partners, suppliers, publishers, new business leads, media outlets, and so on. How those other organisations operate is out of your control, but it’s still possible to collaborate better.

As you might expect of a DAM solution, these platforms enable you to share customisable links to your digital assets. You might not expect the ability to create branded Portals with precise access controls, meaning you can share professional-looking suites of assets with partners, journalists, franchisees, or prospective clients, giving them everything they need (and nothing they don’t). And because Canto’s Portals are self-service, clients can instantly access, review, and approve files.

There are obvious benefits here regarding brand management and version control, but real economies of scale can be realised through this more streamlined end-to-end process. With a DAM platform, you and your collaborators are all working from “a single source of truth”, according to Callan Miranda, Digital Asset Specialist at the marketing firm Simantel. “Sharing assets for clients to review has been simplified with Canto. No more hard drives or long upload and download times to file-sharing platforms,” Callan adds.

So, is inefficiency holding your agency back?

There’s no shame in answering yes. Most agencies can do more to tighten productivity, increase billable hours, and improve profits. And now you know all these are achievable for your agency through a DAM platform—cutting out chaos and boosting creativity.