You should only invest in equipment, software, or services if you realize a positive return on investment (ROI). This applies to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets and the software licenses and services (including implementation services) that you purchase. For many customers, AEM provides positive ROI.

AEM Assets business value

But let us look at the numbers. In July 2024, IDC examined the business value of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets. Based on interviews with AEM Assets customers, IDC concluded that the interviewed customers could realize an average annual cost saving of $9.04 million per organization. These cost savings came from multiple sources:

  • Reduced risk of using out-of-date/unapproved assets (52%)
  • Reduced risk of accidental disclosure of assets (27%)
  • Reduced spending of duplicative (62%) or unused (40%) assets
  • Reduced agency spending by completing work in-house (24%)
  • Reduced go-to-market time (55%)
  • Reduced time for content to go from creation to production (47%)
  • Reduced time for content in a new form factor (39%)
  • Reduced time to create a new digital asset (66%)
  • Reduced time to repurpose an existing digital asset (73%)
  • Reduced time to create a rendition of an asset (60%)

But let’s extend beyond the companies in the IDC survey and look at three high-level financial benefits for your organization.

Why AEM provides positive ROI

To simplify things, we will group these cost reductions into three categories to see why AEM provides positive ROI.

Faster creation of new assets

I’ve already discussed several ways in which AEM Assets lets creatives and marketers create new assets more quickly.

Finding assets can be challenging.
  • Smart Tag. AEM Assets Smart Tag makes your marketing work easier. When you have millions of assets, finding a particular asset can be equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack. But manual tagging can take too long and can be inconsistent if multiple people are tagging. But if you create an intelligently organized tag taxonomy, AEM Assets Smart Tagging can automatically and consistently tag your assets based upon their characteristics.
  • Smart Crop. AEM Assets Smart Crop automatically detects the focal points in your images and crops them to feature the most relevant portions.

These and other AI-powered features in AEM Assets let you realize faster content creation times comparable to the ones in the IDC study (66% reduced time to create a new digital asset). By using these features, AEM provides positive ROI.

Faster rendering of existing assets

What if you need to vary existing content to address audiences by country or by industry? AEM Assets supports features to assist you.

  • Content variations. AEM Assets Content Variations let creatives and marketers iterate existing content, compare different iterations, and select the most effective variation.
  • AEM Dynamic Media and experience fragments. These features support omnichannel marketing by allowing a single asset (stored in an experience fragment) to display in unlimited renditions, changing size, format, resolution, weight, color, crop, and effects such as a zoom view.

Again, the use of AEM Assets to repurpose existing content provides positive ROI comparable to those IDC found (73% reduced time to repurpose an existing digital asset).

Faster content delivery

Smart tag, smart crop, content variations, AEM Dynamic Media, and experience fragments all contribute to faster end-to-end content delivery. You can use these to quickly locate assets and create content for your website, your emails, your videos, and all your other marketing channels. And you do not need to perform extensive manual effort to create your omnichannel content.

But another Adobe tool, Edge Delivery Services, provides two speed benefits.

  • Rapid document authoring. Creatives and marketers can create web pages in tools they already know, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. They don’t have to learn an Adobe product that they may not know.
  • Rapid web page presentation. Web pages created with Edge Delivery Services provide near perfect Google Lighthouse scores in the 99-100 range.

All these features combine to deliver content to your prospects and customers now, so they can buy now.

But let us look at an example.

ASICS benefits from Dynamic Media and AEM Assets, providing positive ROI

ASICS is a Japanese sports company with global operations. As this case study notes, previously these operations were siloed, resulting in duplicate efforts and brand inconsistencies. Sometimes images were stored on an individual’s computer rather than a centralized system, making intelligent asset management next to impossible.

ASICS implemented both organizational and technological changes to improve its product marketing.

  • Organizationally, ASICS centralized both content production and content management/governance to ensure consistency in assets and reduction of duplicate efforts among the regions.
  • Technologically, ASICs expanded its Adobe footprint. It was already using Dynamic Media for content delivery and added AEM Assets to its tech stack. ASICS spent four years migrating its operations to the new tools, taking care not to disrupt existing operations.

The result? ASICS now intelligently manages 700,000 digital assets worldwide, adding 40,000 new assets in a single year. All teams throughout the world now use up-to-date images, minimizing the risk of sharing outdated information with prospects and customers. Most importantly, ASICS has seen a 20% to 30% reduction in waste.

What ROI benefits will your firm realize?

But you don’t care about how AEM provides positive ROI for ASICS, the firms surveyed by IDC, or other firms. You care about the benefits for your own firm.

Will your firm realize positive ROI by implementing AEM, or by refreshing your existing AEM implementation with KBWEB Consult’s AEM Resurgence offering? If so, how can you quantify those positive ROI benefits?

AEM Resurgence is a five-phase process:

  • Phase 1: Diagnose Project Status or Stalemate
  • Phase 2: Define Completion Roadmap
  • Phase 3: Execute and Optimize Implementation
  • Phase 4: Validate and Launch
  • Phase 5: Provide Dedicated Outsourced Support

To find out the qualitative and quantitative benefits of KBWEB Consult’s implementation processes, why not schedule a free consultation with me? You can do so at https://calendly.com/krassimir-boyanov/30min.