Digital asset management (DAM) is a self-serve content repository. It facilitates the management, ingestion, storage, organization and distribution of all types of content an organization uses. The content includes any digital asset, such as text, graphics, images, videos, audio, design files and product information used by an organization to communicate with internal and external audiences. DAM platforms not only support marketing but can also serve internal and external parts of the organization including sales, HR, legal, finance, call and service centers, third-party suppliers, agencies, and distributors. The primary purpose of a DAM is to manage governance of digital assets and make them available and useful, enabling brand consistency across the organization. Beyond its role as a self-service solution, DAM products are part of a content operations ecosystem, which includes capabilities that overlap across technologies such as content marketing platforms (CMP), marketing work management (MWM) and product information management (PIM). Individually, technologies support different variations of content taxonomy, content editing, management of and content access controls to third parties (e.g., agencies). Their goals are to drive efficiency, transparency and scale of content deliverables across the organization. The primary purpose of a DAM is to manage governance of digital assets and make them available and useful, enabling brand consistency across the organization. DAM platforms serve as a repository for all digital content assets. Organizations that have a large number of digital assets use a DAM solution to manage, catalog and transfer files, and to store digital assets. The solution allows organizations to share and edit digital assets across multiple platforms and channels. DAM platforms can support external partners with portals to access an organization’s assets. Overall, it is a self-service content repository and can facilitate collaboration.
Gartner defines the product information management (PIM) market as the packaged solutions that enable product, commerce and marketing teams to create and maintain an approved shareable version of rich product content. PIM makes a single, trusted source of product information available for multichannel commerce and data exchange. PIM solutions now support complex use cases, including product data syndication (PDS), product experience management (PXM), product information effectiveness analytics, digital shelf analytics and product data contextualization. They lay the foundation for delivering personalization, product discovery and digital experience platforms (DXPs). PIM is available as hosted cloud-native, SaaS, private cloud and on-premises solutions.