• by David MacLaren , September 15, 2011

The digital age is rapidly transforming marketers' day-to-day working lives as an avalanche of media assets overtakes them. Under pressure to constantly deliver fresh, timely and audience-specific content to print, online and mobile channels, marketers need tools to help them access, manipulate and deliver their content.

The marketing departments of brand companies and advertising agencies are increasingly seeing the value in systems that help them centralize, index and archive their digital assets, while also enabling all necessary parties to easily access their assets and preventing them from being lost or misplaced.

Digital asset management systems can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of creative teams, saving companies and agencies time, money and frustration.

There is another side to this coin: the delivery mechanism. This is where digital asset management systems have traditionally fallen short. Theses systems are not entirely efficient unless all internal and external teams involved in the production and delivery process have direct access to the necessary digital assets.

Recognizing that the delivery of digital assets should be part of the core asset management solution is one thing, ensuring that external vendors, such as printers, have access to the final digital files through the same system as those that created and approved the files, is another.

With digital file sizes ballooning and the complexity of the marketing and advertising worlds exploding, simple FTP services no longer suffice.

Luckily, by combining the advantages of the cloud with those of traditional digital asset management systems, marketing and advertising teams spread across various offices, departments and vendors can access, share and collaborate on the necessary files.

The benefits of cloud-based digital asset management systems doesn't stop here -- although having access to those assets from anywhere, through any browser, is enough to make most marketing and advertising executives take note.

Cloud-based digital asset management systems are not limited by traditional IT infrastructures. These systems are massively scalable and infinitely flexible -- conforming to the needs of any size company or agency, no matter the industry, the number of users, amount of content or location.

Primarily delivered under a SaaS model, cloud-based systems don't require heavy upfront investments and tend to be quite cost effective. Due to the low cost of cloud-based systems, companies and agencies can provide access to large numbers of users and allow them to upload and download files as needed - without worrying about their budgets.

Rest assured that the cloud-platforms that these cloud-based digital asset management systems are built on, those by Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are managed and maintained by the industry's leading IT experts, ensuring that those who use the systems require little to no technical expertise.

Thanks to the cloud, it's suddenly become effortless to aggregate, organize, repurpose and share our mountains of digital assets.