MerlinOne, the leading DAM platform for sophisticated marketers, has been recognized as a representative vendor in Forrester’s “DAM Vendor Landscape” report. Forrester identifiedMerlinOne as a representative vendor in their category of DAM vendors that best fit the most common use cases, details the market dynamics that application development and delivery (AD&D) pros should be aware of, and provides recommendations on how to strategize around DAM purchases.
Written by Nick Barber, Anjali Yakkundi with Stephen Powers, Jaclyn Galan, Peter Harrison, the Forrester team surveyed more than 27 vendors for this report and categorized them based on best-fit use case.
Key Takeaways From The Report
DAM Wants To Be The Center Of Your Content Universe
Forrester says “a wide variety of organizations express interest in DAM because firms across verticals focus on creating engaging, interactive content to appeal to increasingly distracted customers. To support this, DAM must integrate into broader digital experience technology investments”.
Five Factors Will Disrupt The DAM Market
According to the Forrester team, as firms evaluate DAM investments in 2017, they should note “five factors that will disrupt the market: 1) cloud deployments; 2) convergence with other digital experience solutions; 3) analytics capabilities to measure content performance; 4) integration to support flexibility; and 5) machine learning to support metadata”.
Digital Asset Management Supports Three Scenarios
In evaluating the best-fit vendors, AD&D pros and their business counterparts will find that vendors tend to support one or more of the following three use cases:
- enterprise wide
- marketing
- media and production
MerlinOne Review
Forrester lists MerlinOne’s top verticals as Universities, nonprofit, media, publishing, technology, manufacturing, healthcare. In the use cases Venn diagram Merlin is placed as best fitting the marketing use case but is also on the verges of both media and production and enterprise wide segments – making it a good all round DAM.
Deployment options listed are SaaS and on-premises. MerlinOne also supports Cloud deployment and all deployments can be HIPAA compliant when a customer so wishes.
DAM’s Real Impact
Cost Savings, Reduced Time-To-Market, And Brand Elevation are key benefits from a DAM. Forrester says when organizations use DAM solutions to support their broader digital experience agendas, benefits can include:
- Reduced content re-creation costs. Organizations that centralize assets ensure that business users aren’t wasting valuable time searching for assets and spending needless resources on re-creating content. For example, a global manufacturer and retailer we spoke with spent extra resources to shoot product shots differently in each region. It now shoots once, centralizes the global asset in DAM, and localizes it, if needed.
- Increased operational efficiency. DAM offers productivity gains just by centralizing assets; content gets to the website faster, and marketers waste less time trying to find the right asset. They help firms decrease time from ideation to actual execution of experiences.
- Improved brand consistency. With groups like customer service, commerce, and sales all involved in customer experience, DAM solutions help ensure that all customer-facing interactive content meets standard brand guidelines.
- Improved rights management and compliance. DAM solutions offer legal benefits that can help organizations avoid costly mistakes like using content with expired rights or content for which they only have rights for a specific channel or region.