What are Adobe Experience Manager Assets and How to Use Them?

The word “asset” is intrinsically jammed with positive connotations: the owner of a lot of assets; a strong asset to the team, her humor is her best asset.

Yet like seemingly every quality that is endlessly multiplied, quantity can become a real issue. (Yes you can have too much of a good thing; yes eating 10,000,000 bananas is going to leave you radiating – in the wrong way.)

And a ton of assets is no different. 

No, they won’t expose you to dangerous levels of radiation – unless your assets are in chemical storage. Yet they do overwhelm those that use them in their daily work if there is not a strong structure in place to sort them, nor smooth facilities to make organizing and using them easier and faster.

Those poor fellas who Manage Assets Digitally often get MAD; and those working in Digital Asset Management are frequently DAMned.

It’s for these reasons that Adobe Experience Manager – much like the knight in shining armor – comes to the rescue of these stranded marketers with its Assets feature.

AEM Assets is a solution provider for teams that work and manage overflowing stacks of assets like images and videos – enough to engulf the entire team from head to toe if each asset were a piece of paper.

That’s because Assets works to streamline workflows across the entire landscape of each asset, from its beautiful creation, through to management, onwards to delivery, and heightened to optimization.

Let’s take a very common example, one that occurs millions of times each and every working day. Within a business, Team Creative is working in Adobe Creative Cloud, crafting idyllic imaging and captivating video. Team Marketing is working in Adobe Experience Cloud, building great structures to funnel the assets, enabling them to reach the right people.

AEM Assets connects these teams, allowing them to narrow down the potentially thousands of images and videos from one set – let’s say you’re a fashion company and are selecting from your winter collection media – and provide approval to the dozens, if not hundreds, of workers that are part of the project. If you’re given approval to manage an asset, AEM notifies them so that they can get to work ASAP – or whenever they’re required to put in their shift.

One team can add comments from their toolkit while another team makes edits, helping to automate the flow of assets and streamlining workflow.

If you think about it, assets are essentially the building blocks of a business, helping to communicate yourself to your customers and the wider consumer community. Images and video are used directly to sell products and experiences, and they’re also used indirectly by third-party stores that sell your goods and services.

So you’d really want a system where all relevant teams are able to search, check, and download approved assets, including any third-party partners, while at the same time protecting certain assets from these partners via robust content governance and systems of providing permissions.

Assets also strengthens the personalization powers of Adobe Experience Manager. “How?” you may inquire. “I’m glad you asked”, I would reply. Each product contains certain assets. And if you sell thousands of products, adding metadata manually would be a hair-pulling expedition with no end date in sight. AEM Assets automagically smart tags your products. And can even be trained to recognize highly-specific tags. For example, imagine again being a fashion brand and you’re working on your winter collection. You can make tags for your winter color block, so when you search for these products, there they all are.

And finally, AEM Assets is designed for now. With customers engaging with brands across multiple platforms, assets ought to be specific for each and every device. Assets ensures that you no longer have to crop images and videos for each and every screen size; Assets has smart crop and smart imaging, meaning that they autotrack the focal point to crop the asset, as well as detect the bandwidth available, ensuring nice and smooth content that is displayed automatically on each and every sized screen.

So for those who do digital asset management, they no longer need to be damned.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading AEM tech teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.