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Digital Asset Management (DAM): Trends and Best Practices

What are some trends and best practices surrounding Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

By Josch Chodakowsky, Joanna Fragopoulos    July 23, 2026    

Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are tools all modern marketers should leverage as part of their marketing technology (martech) stack to better serve branding needs. DAM platforms can help oversee campaign materials, create consistency across a brand's identity and assets, and serve as an enterprise-wide organizer. Doing so is especially useful with artificial intelligence (AI) transforming processes.

In an interview with ANA, David Lipsey, co-founder of and strategist/managing partner at FCx3, discussed AI's effect on DAM systems, stating, "AI is certainly impacting DAM, in a myriad of ways. We have opportunities and as is common with AI initiatives, a lot of yellow caution flags on the DAM track. For example, AI can help to round up and broadly categorize branded product images on a wide global search. For a project like this on the 'caution' side, if counterfeit and other false positives or archaic and deprecated images are found (or videos, etc.), these must be closely examined without automated ingest into DAM. It's quite common for these still-early uses of AI and DAM to invoke this pattern of 'useful with guardrails.'"

By centralizing assets, DAMs are able to become the glue that binds various departments together, fostering cohesion across the brand's strategy, marketing, data, and finance — laddering up to the brand's vision and mission.

According to MediaValet's "2026 DAM Trends Report," 77 percent of the study's survey respondents reported "improved brand consistency since adopting DAM." The report also stated that "when DAM is at the core of the brand ecosystem, in place with the right features and integrated technologies, like a templating solution and a brand hub, brand consistency" increased 11 percent, from 77 percent to 88 percent.

Time-savings were a key finding as well. The report noted, "AI-powered DAM alone saves a whopping 11 hours a week on branding initiatives. Integrate it with the right brand ecosystem tools like a templating solution, and increase that to as much as 18 hours a week—or half a working week."

Below are best practices, trends, and examples on how to successfully harness DAMs.

Best Practices and Trends

Below are the latest resources on trends and best practices for leveraging DAMs.

2026 DAM Trends Report (MediaValet, 2026). Media Valet's annual report is "based on survey responses from a diverse group of organizations actively using Digital Asset Management systems to power their brand, content, and creative operations. Respondents represent a wide range of industries; industries where large content volumes, distributed teams, and brand governance needs are most pronounced. Most organizations surveyed operate at scale: nearly 60% have over 1,000 employees, and many manage global or multi-regional operations. Respondents also span multiple functional disciplines, highlighting DAM's cross-organizational impact from strategic brand direction to day-to-day content execution."

The report also found that across all segments, DAM is "critical infrastructure for content orchestration. It is a central platform enabling brand consistency, operational efficiency, and scalable collaboration in environments where content complexity continues to grow. The 2026 DAM Trends Report showcases how teams are using digital asset management software today, and the emerging capabilities they expect to rely on next."

How AI is Transforming Digital Asset Management: Emerging Tech and Tools (Intelligence Bank, February 2026). Intelligence Bank wrote that "AI is transforming Digital Asset Management (DAM) by automating the most tedious parts of content marketing operations. With AI-powered tagging, search, focal-point cropping, captioning, approvals, and governance, teams can find, control, and publish assets faster. Campaigns move from brief to 'in market' with way fewer handoffs, less rework, and tighter brand control. Modern DAMs attach accurate metadata on upload, generate channel-ready variants, and carry rights and expiry information with each file."

The piece goes on to state that "the outcome is speed (less time hunting), consistency (one approved master with governed variants), and compliance (usage rights and approvals recorded with the asset). If your content volumes are climbing and your brand needs to land perfectly across channels, AI digital asset management becomes the multiplier. AI provides your team with cleaner libraries, faster search, reliable delivery, and measurable productivity gains."

Leveraging DAM for Marketing Asset Management (Media Valet, November 2025). Media Valet noted that "organizations are facing the daunting challenge of efficiently managing a vast array of marketing assets across multiple digital channels. But maintaining brand consistency and authority is not just a marketing team responsibility: it lies with the entire organization. It's imperative that organizations enable and foster collaboration across various departments, and marketing asset management software (MAM) is the foundation of this."

Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems: Basics and Benefits (Adobe, October 2025). As per Adobe, "Digital assets organization is essential for modern enterprises managing large volumes of media content across teams. Digital asset management systems offer a range of benefits that help teams organize their digital resources more efficiently." This article explores the "importance of digital asset management, what these systems do, and the different types of asset management systems available."

Digital Asset Management: Complete Guide to DAM Strategy (Intelligence Bank, September 2025). As per Intelligence Bank, "Digital asset management is the practice of organizing, storing, and distributing an organization's creative files in a central hub. This includes all marketing content, everything from a tiny icon and thousands of product images to campaign videos and brand guidelines."

Why I'm Falling in Love with Digital Asset Management Again (CMS Wire, July 2025). The author writes, "As generative AI and agentic systems take center stage, DAM is poised for its next act. Here's why I'm all-in on DAM's future and why DAM managers and practitioners are about to become the unsung heroes of the AI-powered web." For instance, the article notes that "AI transforms DAM. Artificial intelligence is reshaping digital asset management. It automates tasks like tagging, metadata and content generation. Content quality matters. High-quality, well-governed assets are essential for effective AI outputs. Garbage in, garbage out still applies. DAM roles evolve. DAM managers are becoming essential stewards of brand governance, customer experience and AI-driven content strategies."

Digital Asset Management (DAM) — Trends, Innovations, and the Impact of AI (ANA, April 2024). This presentation (plus a very detailed slide deck) discusses DAM capability models and how to use them as an ongoing assessment tool for DAM systems. It includes a list of 11 action steps that you can use as you work to launch a DAM. The speaker also emphasizes that as organizations establish DAM leadership, it's important to remember that DAM's role in the organization can (and likely will) change. Staying on top of needs and change and maturity and sustainability is an ongoing process, worthy of regular attention and focus. See also: Digital Asset Management: Q&A with David Lipsey of FCx3.

DAM 101: How to Evaluate, Implement, and Optimize a Digital Asset Management System (Content Management Institute/Canto, February 2025). In this 38-minute webinar (site registration is required), Ariana Keil at DAM vendor Canto shares how to "determine whether your organization is ready for DAM; common barriers to platform adoption and how to overcome them; best practices for a smooth and successful implementation; and real-world insights from marketing teams that have realized vast improvements in their creative workflows."

Examples

Below are examples of marketers successfully leveraging DAMs.

Vitalant: Lessons in Digital Asset Management (ANA, November 2024). This session describes how Vitalant transitioned to a new DAM system, how the new DAM system is used, the impact it has had on Vitalant's overall creative process, and more.

How Brands Can Drive Global Content and Personalization at Scale (ANA, May 2024). Shelley Schippert from Brown-Forman discussed how to automate and streamline the complexities of the content supply chain process, the role of a modern DAM platform, and the KPIs to report to your executive teams.

How Chevron Launched a Digital Asset Management Tool (ANA, November 2019). In this older resource, Chevron offered an in-depth look at its robust digital asset management tool and the team that runs it.