Investing in quality assets and creative asset management for your company is an essential part of executing your marketing plan.
What is a Creative Asset?
A creative asset is a file such as an image, audio, copy documents and other digital media that is used for communications for your company. Companies often start with logo development, designing a visual depiction of your business’ name. The file often requires several iterations and file types to use in various media outlets. For example, a full color logo, white, black, and other alternate versions. Each version during logo development will require different digital formats such as JPEGS, PDFS, PNGs, or Tiff files. These variations can add up to dozens of digital files – and that’s just a logo.
Photography assets that reflect your product or service can be made up of hundreds of thousands of digital files. It starts with the click of a photographer’s camera, often thousands of digital files are produced in just one photo session. Then those photos are sorted, refined, and retouched, creating even more digital assets. The hardware requirements to maintain these digital files can be expensive. Introduce video into your creative asset arsenal, and the hardware space required to function becomes astronomical.
Creative Asset Management
Managing these files takes time and dedication. Many of the files will never be seen by the public. A well curated creative asset library ensures that the public or consumer is only served the highest quality representation of your product or service. The capture and creation of these files play an important role in creating the final output you produce for your marketing materials. Creative teams working in a professional digital marketing agency spend countless hours experimenting, reviewing, and testing ideas and executions in an effort to make design worthy of sharing with the world. Once logo development has been finalized, or the photo of your newest product has been retouched, then those digital assets must be distributed or made available for public consumption, and the rest of the files organized and tucked away for the next creative challenge or deleted to conserve hard drive space.
Benefits of Quality Creative Asset Management
When your creative assets are managed by a creative team in a professional digital marketing agency, the benefits begin to reveal themselves tenfold. Familiarity with a company’s assets spark ideas. Once a strategic marketing plan has been created and the creative challenges arrive, the creative team with familiarity of the available assets a company has makes for easier problem solving and incredible efficiency. Efficiency means cost savings, but most importantly translates to less searching through digital assets and more focus on solving creative challenges. With proper creative asset management, each project is no longer a blank slate, the team is armed with creative assets like paint for a canvas. A creative asset library puts the right files at the designers’ fingertips.
This makes for a creative team that can produce effectively, and their familiarity helps identify what a company lacks for creative assets. Knowing what assets are lacking help make your future investments in asset acquisition more efficient. That means not paying for photo/video shoots for redundant materials and focusing your investment on acquiring the creative assets your library needs.
The benefits of a creative team acquiring and managing the creative assets under one roof are numerous, but it’s not only the creative team that benefits from this organization. All members of your company are often called upon to provide creative assets to partners, vendors, sponsorships etc… With your creative assets well managed, requesting files or having a digital asset portal means your companies brand elements can deployed with ease. Ensuring your brand is always represented in the best possible light, with the best digital representation. That will improve your company’s bottom line, improve brand awareness and increase profits. As a Creative Director I get excited just thinking about the possibilities. A digital marketing agency, with multiple departments and team members, visually speaking with one voice.
To recap, the benefits of having a well-managed creative asset library are:
At Mascola Group, we manage creative asset libraries for all our clients, it is a foundation for all creative output at this digital marketing agency. Contact us to learn how we can benefit your company with our proven creative asset management and creative processes.