Credits: Published by our strategic partner Tenovos.

We live in a data-driven age, where information is the key to unlocking value.

To make decisions with data, we depend upon metrics. But metrics can be a double-edged sword: choose them wisely, and you can zoom in on growth-accelerating insights. All too often, though, we choose our metrics based on what we usually measure or can measure with our existing tools — not what we should be measuring, or would choose to measure in an ideal world.

One of the biggest offenders in the Digital Asset Management (DAM) universe? Return on Investment, or ROI.

How ROI Gets It Wrong

The theory goes like this: implementing a new DAM system costs time and money. Since your company is in the business of making more than it spends, it’s important to make projections of how much your DAM will save and how much additional revenue it can generate. So you make some educated guesses to sell stakeholders on a DAM project, and try to piece together what the DAM helped with later on.

It’s that last piece that often fails to hit the mark. While it’s easy to know what was spent on a DAM project, it’s a lot harder to find where and how it made a difference. Moreover, the ROI calculation can only prove one thing: whether the DAM project saved money or not. That’s a good start, but … what’s the real purpose of a DAM?

Return On Asset (ROA): A Smarter Metric for a Smarter Era

With Sify DAM platform, we’ve got an answer that goes beyond ROI, to give you more in-depth answers that help you determine strategies and understand your customers, all while illuminating the true value of our platform.

It’s called ROA: Return on Asset.

When you use the Tenovos platform to find the connective tissue that turns your assets into stories, each of those assets can be seen in a new, value-driven light. When you maximize the return on your assets, you maximize your return on investment, too — now with additional insights that enable your growth goals.

With Sify DAM, you can find underperforming and overperforming assets when they’re still in active use to tell stories better and achieve a higher ROA. Dig through the buried treasure of campaigns past with AI-augmented DAM to find what stories resonated with your buyer and how to make lightning strike twice.

Improve ROA for Storytelling Success

The story of digital assets in the 21st century has been one of meteoric growth. More assets are being produced than ever before, with ever-expanding file sizes and project costs. Video strategy is now mission-critical to digital marketing, but producing videos can cost far more per asset than photography or written work.

As budgets tighten and the world braces for more uncertainty, one thing is for sure: the era of throwing assets at the wall and seeing what sticks is over. It’s time to get smart. Enterprises need to know what’s likely to work (and what isn’t) before the project budget is spent and the campaign gets a postmortem.

As your teams all over the world create assets for their individual campaigns, the Tenovos platform illuminates what’s working, including suggestions that connect and unify your story across business units and geographies.

These kinds of connections — created using the same types of technology that power AI recommendation tools from heavy hitters like YouTube and Netflix — are the DAM and the missing link between your current asset management tactics and a unified storytelling strategy.

The Bottom Line: Getting the Return that Matters

The real mark of a good metric is that improving it has a “rising tide” effect: as it rises, it lifts up other metrics that are also good signifiers that your business is doing well.

When it comes to DAM implementations, ROI just isn’t enough. You can raise ROI on a DAM project by decreasing headcount, or by reusing assets, but those cost savings don’t necessarily translate into continued growth.

It’s a metric that is limited in value to ensure that you didn’t lose money — which is why, at the end of the day, most ROI is really all about CYA.

ROA goes further, without losing anything: you can still calculate the value of your DAM implementation, now with a granularity that allows you to iterate and improve on every aspect of your storytelling operation.