In the sports industry, modern fans are demanding real-time, engaging content more than ever before. To keep up, sports organizations must be able to easily create different types of content at speed and scale and effectively use their vast content libraries to tell the right story to the right fans at the right time.
Enter digital asset management (DAM), a software solution that organizes, stores, and assists in distributing digital assets—like images, videos, documents, and audio files—to help businesses streamline workflows and maximize value from their content. DAM solutions provide a centralized platform to manage these assets throughout their lifecycle, from creation to distribution and archiving. But when it comes to sports content, the true value of DAM is its ability to facilitate content creation proactively and deliver it to a targeted audience.
To capture the attention of fans, organizations need to showcase every storyline around the main event and deliver content in the right formats at the right time. This goes beyond traditional game and event broadcasts, to deliver content to any device. To access, distribute, and repurpose content efficiently, organizations need a DAM solution to effectively build-out a content library filled with videos, images, and other media.
In this article, we examine how sports organizations can use DAM solutions to improve their core workflows and elevate their content strategies. We’ll examine key features, benefits, and challenges that often arise during the evaluation process; and best practices for implementing a solution that can maximize fan engagement.
Tackling the Challenge of Managing and Delivering Content
Every match, training session, and roar from the crowd is an opportunity to tell a story. Without a solution to locate, tag, index, and distribute the content, it can be a struggle for organizations to get their content out fast enough.
Leagues, clubs, and broadcasters are constantly accumulating footage from multiple sources, including live game streams, behind-the-scenes interviews, high-res images, training camp content, fan-created content, and more. The disparity creates more than a few challenges when it comes to sharing content, including:
- Content Organization: Locating, tagging, and indexing assets becomes a daunting task when scattered across different storage systems and shared to multiple platforms
- Accessibility: Making content readily available for current marketing efforts and potential future ones can be difficult without a centralized hub and archive
- Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent experience and voice across all touchpoints becomes impossible when teams struggle to find and repurpose the right content for various platforms
- Collaboration: Siloed content makes it hard for different departments and external partners to collaborate effectively on content creation and distribution
- Leveraging Archives: Valuable historical content often goes to waste due to inadequate cataloging and metadata tagging
The ability to organize and catalog assets based on metadata like dates, event names, locations, venues, teams, players, and type of plays, empowers multiple stakeholders to find the content they’re looking for. Coupled with search and filtering capabilities and potentially a tiered access system, teams can quickly find and repurpose content for various platforms, like social media pages, official websites, and also make content available to 3rd party publishers and partners with a login and password.
DAM systems also break down silos and foster collaboration by providing a single source of truth for all content. With everyone working from the same centralized platform it’s easier for different departments and external partners to seamlessly work together. Furthermore, DAMs can help teams breathe new life into archived content by making historical assets more discoverable, so that no valuable content goes to waste.
How to Select the DAM Solution That’s Best for You
While it’s essential to have a solution, finding the right one that aligns with your organization’s unique needs, preferences, and goals can be complex.
Some of the challenges include navigating the variety of options, ensuring scalability for future growth, encouraging users to adopt the platform, and balancing cost considerations with long-term stability.
To find the best fit for your team, start by assessing your organization’s specific requirements and pain points. Ask yourself:
- What are the key areas that need improvement?
- Who’s going to use the system, and what challenges do they have?
- What are the goals or KPIs we want to achieve?
Look for features and functionality that align with your needs. Important features to consider are things like automations, security, scalability, a good user experience, integrations, archive capabilities, and the level of support and training provided by the vendor.
First-hand experience is invaluable throughout this process. Request demos from a shortlist of options and when possible, push for a pilot to test for potential issues and determine whether the solution truly fits your workflow.
By proactively addressing these challenges sports organizations can identify a DAM solution that maximizes the value of their digital assets and scales with their organization as their content strategy evolves.
In part two of this article, we will explore the unique challenges of DAM in sports and how WSC Sports has developed a new offering called Around the Game that addresses these directly, as well as its many other game-changing features. Stay tuned for more.
If you simply can’t wait then check out this press release that provides initial information about Around the Game as well as two other exciting new solutions from WSC Sports.