1. Media libraries are overflowing and ever-expanding

Demand for content is ever-increasing, as is the multi-channel way businesses must market themselves. But the methods by which many organisations manage their digital assets haven't kept pace. Let’s put it this way: have you ever seen a media library which is getting smaller and more organised over time? In fact, most businesses have media on various cloud storage platforms, none of which offer easily navigable folder structures or an intuitive interface.

This isn’t just dysfunctional, it’s a real barrier to meeting your marketing goals and scaling your content operations. So, a DAM solution is exactly what it says—one single solution to the challenge of managing your digital assets at scale. Taking a centralised approach means your team can be more organised, find and distribute content easily, and boost your ROI and productivity.

2. It’s impossible to find the right content

The day-to-day reality for most creatives and marketers in media and entertainment is that they spend vast amounts of time wading through massive amounts of digital assets. Sometimes marketing campaigns end up not using the best videos and images, just the best you can find at that moment. 

AI-powered DAM platforms like Canto have the answer. Visual search tools empower you to find media within your library using natural language. Just briefly describe the content you’re looking for and the most relevant results appear, even in the absence of metadata. Also, facial recognition technology can detect faces in images and videos, enabling you to identify influencers, actors, world leaders, and anyone else important to your content creation. As one senior producer at US-based Atmosphere TV puts it: “We have had great success finding new content we didn’t even know we had in our Canto library.”

3. Manually organising and tagging files takes ages

One of the reasons media and entertainment companies end up in content chaos is the huge human effort it takes to just organise the stuff. Sorting folders, tagging files, and adding metadata — they’re monotonous tasks which happen to be the key to workplace productivity.

The fact that a DAM platform does all this for you is a total game-changer. Powered by AI, the platform creates smart albums, conducts auto-tagging, and even trawls media metadata to make all your files instantly searchable. 

4. Global teams are stuck playing time-zone tennis

Media and entertainment is a truly global industry, but when multiple time zones come into play productivity can stall. Dispersed teams are often stuck having one conversation prolonged over several hours or days, but it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Rather than only being a storage solution for final and approved content, DAM software includes workspaces and annotation features meaning dispersed and cross-functional teams can collaborate easily during production. For multi-language organisations, the DAM platform’s UI can even be localised to display in the native language, speeding up approvals further.

5. There’s a constant fear of copyright and licensing compliance

Media and entertainment professionals often deal with vast amounts of content from partners and contributors. It’s no exaggeration to say there is constant fear of falling foul of licensing and copyright compliance, as well as ensuring brand management and consistency.

Yet again DAM platforms have an in-built answer, with intuitive brand management and digital rights management (DRM) controls, the latter of which syncs your copyright and licensing data with your media. The software also enables automatic embargos with predetermined release and expiry dates, as well as watermarks and download presets, meaning your team can rest assured that your brand’s assets are in safe hands.

So, the media and entertainment industry faces particular headaches when it comes to managing content—and there’s a lot of revenue and reputation at stake. But with a DAM platform in place, you could find those operational pains are quickly cured.