You’ve all seen them. The slick, beautiful DAM demos that show you everything you want to see:
Yes, you can upload assets! Wow!
Yes, you can enter metadata! Holy cow!
Yes, you can do keyword searches! Stop the presses!
Maybe you can even assign a task to someone! Let me get out my checkbook!
This is all great, but it’s not enough except for the smallest of creative departments.
Vendor salespeople can always take you through the happy path. But is that path still happy when you are producing hundreds of assets a week? Or thousands?
What does that “task inbox” look like when you have 180 items in your queue? When you have 25 active projects in various states of completion?
Is it usable? Is it fast? Is the vendor’s notion of a “Project” the same as yours? Can your real-life workflows be configured?
Is that magical AI auto-tagging giving you results that your teams a would find useful in real life? (Who in your marketing department is going to search for “happy woman with dog” for today’s targeted emails? Nobody. They’re going to search for “fall 2019 easy chairs brown” or SKU “6112315” and filter by asset type “lifestyle”)
If you’ve ever tried to use a general-purpose project management tool like Basecamp or JIRA to manage your department, you know the kinds of issues that arise. But when you see a product that’s got a slick UI and claims to be “built for creatives”, all those hard-earned lessons go out the window.
Instead, show the vendor your current projects excel sheet. Show them your shared drive. Ask them how they’d configure your real workflows. Even better, have them load all your work-in-progress assets into a test system and let you play with it. Think about all the funny exceptions in your workflow. What happens when an exec calls and says something needs to be done tomorrow? What happens when your marketing department has to fulfill a real asset request? When a creative director has to review and approve a week’s worth of marketing materials across channels?
When you are confident that you won’t need to hire an assistant production manager just to click all the workflow buttons for you, or you won’t just fall back to using email and google docs, THEN you can think about getting out that checkbook.
FinalSelect is built to handle your complex photography and post-production workflows, at massive scale. To find out more, please contact us to schedule a demo.