The accidental asset manager

Increasingly, marketing and brand managers are finding themselves responsible for the management, distribution and tracking of very large repositories of digital assets used to support and even enable brand management and marketing communications throughout their organisation. These files come in any number of video, audio and image formats, and must be quickly and easily accessible to be of value. Many organisations start by using various shared network drives to manage assets, but at a certain point, those solutions become unwieldy, and the activation of a true digital asset management system is imperative. But doing so comes with many organisational, technical, financial and legal challenges in addition to more complex conundrums that come with working with people. Some of the challenges to be faced include: securing support and cooperation across departments and across geographic regions; integrating a new system into legacy information technology environments; consolidating disparate asset databases (shared drives) into one centrally-accessible system; gathering and gaining agreement on technical specifications and service level agreements (SLAs) from all stakeholders; securing budget support from many departments; and ensuring that the system will protect the organisation’s intellectual property. This case study details the challenges that the author experienced with activating a digital asset management system within a global hospitality company, Marriott International.