You probably already know why you should implement AEM Assets. We are now in the midst of the holiday shopping season. Prospects are visiting your website, viewing your social media, and reading your emails. They want to see up-to-date information on all your channels. AEM Assets ensures that your prospects don’t encounter incorrect information.

Ensure Your Prospects Receive the Right Messaging at the Right Time

Prospects need the right information regardless of how they are interacting with your business. It doesn’t matter whether via your website, your social media, or your email. As an omnichannel marketer, you would be horrified if customers see one product picture on one page and a completely different picture on your Instagram account.

At the same time, you must update information as circumstances change during periods of heavy business. You must make changes to all of the affected assets.

If you present the wrong message at the wrong time, you can lose customers—and your business can lose revenue.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets addresses these challenges. It ensures that your prospects see the right message at the right time. But AEM Assets is not easy to implement, introducing challenges of its own.

Confront AEM Assets Challenges

What is AEM Assets? It is an intelligent Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that automates many asset management tasks.

Automation of asset management is necessary today. As noted in a previous article, a single company may have millions of pieces of content for all of their products and each product’s assets, markets, and audiences and personas. If you assembled an army of people to manage these assets manually, it would take a long time to update assets, and results may be inconsistent. AEM Assets allows intelligent, automated management of your assets to facilitate accurate and rapid updates.

However, it takes a lot of effort to implement AEM Assets, due to three main reasons:

  • The complexity of the AEM Assets solution makes it daunting for untrained technologists to install and implement it. An implementation that lacks a well-defined process and technical and business expertise may encounter significant delays, or may never result in a finished solution
  • The need to integrate AEM Assets with other solutions, both from Adobe and from third parties, also increases the complexity. Again, a poor implementation may delay or torpedo the end solution.
  • Finally, security is a critical concern. Your system must manage and protect private customer data. A single security misstep may risk your customers’ data. This can bring your company embarrassment and a consequential loss of revenue.

The remainder of the article addresses the problems that AEM Assets solves, and how you can implement AEM Assets to solve these problems.

  • The first part of this article describes how AEM Assets solves your need to get the right message to your prospects at the right time.
  • In the second part of this article, I will address how to implement AEM Assets so that you can enjoy this functionality without creating a nightmare for yourself by trying to implement it on your own.

Overcome Problems in Tracking Assets and Asset Use

AEM Assets is a digital asset management (DAM) system. DAM systems are designed to organize, store, and retrieve many types of digital assets, including:

  • Images — JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, RAW, etc.
  • Videos — MP4, AVI, MOV, WMV, etc.
  • Audio — MP3, WAV, AIFF, etc.
  • Documents — PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
  • 3D models and animations — STL, OBJ, FBX, etc.
  • Web pages and code — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
  • Specialized content — CAD drawings, scientific data, etc.

Your company may use these assets in a variety of channels, including your website, social media, emails, printed documents, and others.

A superior DAM allows you to not only organize, store, and retrieve all of these types of assets, but also to:

  • enforce company-wide consistency in the use of digital assets;
  • enable all authorized persons in the company to access the assets; and
  • report on how assets are used across the company.

But if your DAM contains millions of digital assets,

  • How can you retrieve the one asset that you need?
  • How can you enforce consistency?
  • And how do you manage the “metadata” associated with the assets?

Retrieve assets

AEM Assets offers a number of ways to retrieve the one asset that you need. In most cases, AEM Assets supports this by letting your retrieve assets based on the “metadata” associated with each asset. While I will not discuss how you manage the asset metadata until later, I will provide examples of the ways in which your employees can retrieve your assets using this metadata.

Asset search results. From Adobe Experience League.

Depending upon your AEM Assets configuration, you may be able to use the following characteristics to search for and retrieve assets:

  • The title of the asset.
  • The date that the asset was created.
  • The date that the asset expires and is no longer available for use.
  • The tool used to create the asset, such as Adobe Photoshop.
  • Whether or not the asset is approved for use.
  • The copyright owner of the asset.
  • The person or entity who contributed the asset.
  • The file type of the asset (PNG, PDF, etc.).
  • Other asset types (Adobe Stock images, Dynamic Media, etc.).
  • Information about the asset, such as the width and height of an image.
  • Words within the description of the asset.
  • Visually similar images, using AEM Assets’ advanced “Find similar” feature.

Again depending upon your configuration, you can restrict your search to a particular portion of your DAM, such as an individual folder.

In addition to the standard search interface, you can also use Asset selector (formerly known as Asset picker) to construct commands to search your assets.

Example of Asset selector use, from Adobe Experience League.

You do not need to be within AEM Assets to search the assets. Creatives who use Adobe Asset Link within their Adobe Creative Cloud apps can search your DAM without leaving their creative applications, and without needing to learn the AEM Assets application.

Enforce asset consistency

The ability to retrieve the right asset is only part of the challenge. How will you react if one of your products changes color, requiring you to modify EVERY asset associated with the particular product?

Naturally, the metadata helps here. If every asset for this particular product has the same value in one of the metadata fields, then you can retrieve and modify all of the affected assets.

But what if there were a way to only modify ONE asset (instead of many) and have the change ripple through ALL of the other affected assets? For example, let’s say that the same product is pictured on a Facebook ad image, an Instagram post image, an Instagram story image, a LinkedIn banner image, and a myriad of other social media file sizes. Can you modify all dimensional images at once?

Using Dynamic Media. From Adobe Experience League.

You CAN do this if you base everything on a single asset and use AEM Dynamic Media, coupled with experience fragments, to automatically resize an asset for each individual channel. This substantially decreases your workload and lets you convey changes to your customers more quickly.

Manage asset metadata

We’ve referred to “metadata” several times. In its simplest form, metadata is “data about data.” The purpose of metadata is to describe the data with which you have associated it. In the world of assets, metadata provides additional descriptie information about the asset.

While every organization has its own way to define, organize, and implement its metadata, AEM has a standard way to define the metadata schemas that your organization needs.

Would you like to see a detailed example of how you can define the metadata schemas that you need? Earlier this year, David Nestor explained how to implement a use case in which marketers needed to know restrictions on asset use, as well as the need to display proper image credits. Nestor demonstrated in detail how to accomplish this by creating a new set of tags, modifying the metadata schema, and handling the logic by creating the necessary client libraries, overlays, and servlets.

Other examples of metadata management (specific to digital rights management) include:

  • the ability to set asset expiration dates that ensure that outdated content never makes it into a prospect’s hands;
  • the ability to embed license management details to ensure that licensed materials are used properly; and
  • the ability to relate derived assets with their origins.

As you define your own schemas, you control how your users can search for the assets they need. For example, if your schema includes license management details, then your users can search for assets with the proper license management terms.

As you can see, AEM Assets provides an intelligent way to rapidly retrieve and manage assets. But how can you install and implement AEM Assets so your company can realize its benefits?

Implement AEM Assets with the Help of KBWEB Consult

AEM Assets is a powerful tool, but is tricky to implement. A successful AEM Assets implementation requires careful planning, with representation from all key stakeholders, to ensure that the final implementation addresses all of the organization’s critical needs. Failure to properly plan and implement the project endangers the entire process. Conversely, a properly planned and executed project increases your company’s future revenue and guarantees a rapid return on investment.

But it all comes down to the planning. Examples of questions to be answered during an AEM Assets planning stage include:

  • Who will need to access, create, modify, and manage our assets?
  • What tools will our creative people use? How will they integrate with AEM Assets?
  • What other tools does our company use for website hosting, email distribution, purchasing, and other needs? How will they integrate with AEM Assets?
  • Which channels will our organization use to distribute content? What are the technical and business requirements of each channel?
  • Who owns the assets? Who owns the brand guidelines?

When your organization decides to implement AEM Assets, you need a guide who can address both the technical requirements of your Adobe products, and the business requirements that you will face. To ensure a superior implementation, you need to work with an Adobe Certified Partner such as KBWEB Consult. You can learn more about me and about KBWEB Consult on our About Us page.

And no, you CAN’T implement AEM Assets and have it up and running before the end of 2023. But now is the time to start planning for 2024 or 2025.

If you would like to learn how KBWEB Consult can accelerate your web page authoring, schedule a free, confidential 30-minute consultation. You can book a meeting on our Let’s Talk page.