What is Adobe Experience Manager Assets (DAM)?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets is a customizable digital asset management (DAM) system for finding, governing, and activating digital assets.

According to CMI, 34% of enterprise content marketers struggle with creating enough content. A key reason is the lack of access to the right content assets to create personalized experiences. A robust digital asset management solution, such as AEM Assets, can help these enterprises deliver personalized and scalable digital experiences across multiple channels.

This post will examine AEM Assets and why enterprises should consider it for their next DAM solution.

AEM Assets in the Adobe Ecosystem

AEM Assets is the DAM component of the AEM digital experience platform. It is fully integrated into AEM Sites, combining asset and content management. However, it can also be used as a stand-alone DAM.

Experience Manager Assets is a central hub and single source of truth for approved digital assets. It stores digital assets, including images, videos, audio files, and other media files and documents and their metadata, allowing marketing teams to deliver them where their customers are.

It also offers a user-friendly and collaborative environment for digital marketing teams and asset distributors while enforcing any compliance and regulatory requirements regarding using licensed assets.

AEM Assets Benefits and Capabilities

Experience Manager Assets offers several capabilities that support marketing and asset distribution initiatives.

• Discovery: AEM Assets ingests, organizes, and classifies millions of assets, including 3D and other rich media. Instead of using manual organization processes, it automatically groups and classifies assets and their metadata so they’re easy to find. Advanced search and filtering capabilities also simplify asset discovery.

• Governance: AEM Assets offers advanced governance, permissions, and compliance. With digital rights management features, teams can ensure legal and brand compliance. It’s also easy to remove access to outdated assets to protect brand integrity and eliminate clutter with versioning and duplication detection tools.

• Activation: Teams can access, transform, deliver, and optimize millions of assets to give customers the best experience on any channel. This includes delivering brand-approved assets across channels and optimizing or resizing image and video content to meet downstream or viewer bandwidth requirements.

• Insights: With Experience Manager Assets, teams can analyze and gather insights from digital asset usage. This includes data such as top downloads to determine which assets are being activated, where they could be reused, and asset performance across channels.

Key Features Offered by Experience Manager Assets

Aside from AEM Assets’ foundational capabilities, there are also a number of key features you would expect from an enterprise digital asset management solution.

Metadata Management: Digital assets are organized so marketers can add, edit, and search through structured information, ensuring assets are easily discoverable and have the right context.

Auto-tagging: With the help of AI powered by Adobe Sensei, AEM Assets automatically assigns descriptive metadata tags to assets, reducing manual effort and improving search accuracy.

Responsive Imaging: AEM Assets dynamically delivers the appropriate image sizes and resolutions across various devices, providing faster load times and ensuring optimal display settings.

Dynamic Media Rendering: This enables swift modifications such as cropping, resizing, or adding effects so that assets are tailored to the viewing context and optimized for the viewer’s screen size and bandwidth.

Real-time Image Optimization: AEM Assets continuously adjusts image quality and performance based on network conditions and device capabilities to improve asset delivery.

Workflow Automation: Teams can streamline asset ingestion, review, approval, and publishing, significantly reducing manual tasks using extensive workflow capabilities and built-in integrations for key tasks such as translation management solutions. Additionally, AEM Assets Content Hub adds AI capabilities to different workflow stages to accelerate time to market.

Version Control: AEM assets tracks changes and maintains historical records of asset iterations, allowing teams to revert or compare different versions for better asset management and collaboration.

Video Capabilities: AEM Assets automatically transcodes and autosizes video for various screen sizes and adaptive streaming while ensuring fast delivery times.

Why Do You Need AEM Assets?

Modern enterprises operate at a scale where content must constantly be created, updated, and distributed across multiple regions, teams, and campaigns. This is why enterprises need a DAM solution. However, there are a few reasons why AEM Assets should be the DAM of choice.

Improved Discoverability & Consistency

Enterprises manage thousands, and in many cases, millions, of digital assets, making it difficult for teams to find the right content when needed. AEM Assets’ advanced metadata management, AI-powered search, automated tagging, and other features ensure that assets are easily discoverable and content is consistent across customer touchpoints.

Support for Personalization

Modern personalization strategies require highly relevant content that adapts to different audiences, languages, and contexts. While teams can generate multiple versions of an asset for various customer segments without manually recreating content using AI, they need to be able to scale and manage these assets properly. AEM Assets, coupled with Adobe’s other personalization tools, helps to support these personalization goals.

Integration into Content Editor Workflows

Searching for, downloading, and re-uploading assets slows down content teams, leading to inefficiencies in production. AEM Assets integrates directly into content authoring environments, allowing editors to access, manage, and update assets without leaving their workflow.

The Foundation for Adobe’s AI Capabilities

AEM Assets helps maximize the use of AI in different scenarios by offering a central hub for storing, managing, and quickly accessing AI assets. Adobe Sensei and other AI tools can access assets within Experience Manager Assets to develop brand awareness and store and manage any other assets created within the system.

Tight Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud

AEM Assets is tightly integrated with other Experience Cloud products, such as AEM Sites and Journey Optimizer. Using AEM Assets as your DAM of choice helps improve workflows and collaboration throughout the digital experience journey.

Additionally, designers and content creators work best when they can access assets directly within the tools they use every day. AEM Assets is also tightly integrated with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and other Creative Cloud applications, allowing for smooth collaboration between creative and marketing teams. This enables enterprises to avoid content duplication and improve time to market.

AEM Assets Shortcomings

The on-premises version of Experience Manager Assets doesn’t include a built-in CDN. Without one, digital assets are served from a centralized server, which reduces performance, slows load times, and causes other user experience issues.

Companies may need to add an enterprise-grade CDN such as Amazon CloudFront, Cloudinary, or Fastly to ensure consistent asset delivery. Alternatively, AEM as a Cloud Service has an integrated CDN to reduce latency.

Get More Out of AEM Assets with Oshyn

AEM Assets is a user-friendly, collaborative, and intelligent DAM solution for managing digital assets. It can help drive personalization initiatives and make using AI to enhance the digital experience much more manageable. However, many enterprises still view AEM as a complex product that is difficult to work with. That’s where having the proper support comes into play.

Oshyn is a certified Adobe partner that provides a range of services from the initial design planning stages to implementation and development to ongoing maintenance and support. We can help you implement AEM Assets alongside AEM Sites or migrate from another DAM solution to Experience Manager Assets.

Read our Adobe Experience Manager Implementation Best Practices ebook to see if your current AEM implementation functions correctly.