What is Video Asset Management (VAM) and why it's more important than ever

Martha Kendall is a freelance B2B SaaS writer who loves creating strategic blog posts that drive traffic and convert. When she’s not writing about marketing, you can find her petting fluffy cats and reading good books.
Martha Kendall
Video asset management can be incredibly helpful in organizing video content and project managing production efforts. Learn more here.

You pour blood sweat and tears into every part of the video production process, from nurturing the initial idea to filming and editing the final product. While this is a lot of hard work, it’s not enough to just create a good video. You have to get it in front of the right audience at the right time, and you can’t do that without proper access to your videos.

What is Video Asset Management?

Video digital asset management (VAM) is software that organizes video assets so that stakeholders can find what they need when they need it. The best video asset management system makes video assets available to anyone who needs them while also enhancing video marketing campaigns, improving the customer experience, and optimizing content production and distribution.

What defines a video asset?

The number of videos crossing the internet per second is exponential. That’s a lot of video content. Video is quickly becoming the must-have type of content as learning platforms and social media alike focus more on video. 

A video asset is video content that brings value to an organization. Video assets can come in formats like MP4, MOV, and AVI. MP4 is the most popular format when it comes to sharing videos online. MOV files are higher quality and necessary for showing on large screens. AVI files are multi-media, meaning they contain both audio and video.

Why is Digital Asset Management software like VAM important?

Because video requires high bandwidth and storage capacity, video asset management systems are a must. Digital asset management video software organizes the whole video production process, from ingestion into editing software to raw file storage and even distribution. 

VAM uses tags or metadata to name files so that you can easily access what you need whenever you need it. This makes customizing content for use across departments like marketing and sales a piece of cake. The naming conventions ensure you and your team are always using the right version of your video assets, which saves a lot of time. This is especially true for companies using VAM software that any employee can access, as team members from various departments won’t have to request files-- they can just go into the VAM software and find exactly what they need.

When creative teams aren’t weighed down by content chaos, they can let their creativity and productivity flow, creating more unique, powerful marketing campaigns that positively impact the bottom line.

Who needs Video Asset Management?

Video asset management is important for creators and marketers alike. Anyone who deals with video assets will benefit from video asset management software, as it optimizes the process of managing, locating, and distributing digital assets. 

For marketing and sales teams, VAM allows internal and external stakeholders to access video content in different formats from wherever, whenever they need it. This centralized storage of video assets can standardize a brands identity by ensuring creatives across parties are using brand-friendly content. 

Creators can use VAM to collaborate on the production process. Creators can give permissions for specific video assets to individuals working on the production team. VAM software securely stores raw, final, and even archived video assets. This high level organization can even help teams identify video content that can be repurposed for future projects. 

Executives can use VAM for video training, remote onboarding, and even to analyze the performance of video content. 

Explore Vimeo Central, your AI-powered video hub

How to choose the best VAM system for your organization

Because video files tend to lean on the larger side, the amount of storage you need will greatly impact your search for the video asset management system that best fits your organization. 

Video Asset Management systems are revolutionizing how distributed teams communicate, especially for companies like Wise, which leverages Vimeo's video library. This centralized platform allows Wise to host and organize both live and on-demand video events, ensuring seamless access for all employees. The "auto archiving" feature, with its structured folders and clear labeling, eliminates the need for employees to sift through countless recordings, making it easy to find the information they need, precisely when they need it.

Beyond internal communications, VAM provides immense value to marketing teams. By utilizing platforms like Vimeo Central, marketers can easily import video content from various sources, you may want to explore Vimeo's integrations including Zoom recordings and existing DAMs like Box and Dropbox. This streamlined process facilitates efficient editing, repurposing, and distribution of video assets across different marketing channels, maximizing the reach and impact of their content.

Furthermore, VAM offers significant benefits for large enterprises in the realm of employee training and learning & development (L&D). Enhanced discoverability features empower employees to locate specific training materials without enduring irrelevant content. Starbucks, with its vast global workforce, exemplifies this advantage by using Vimeo to deliver targeted training content to each of its hundreds of thousands of employees, ensuring efficient and effective learning experiences regardless of location.

Here are some additional features you should consider in your search for a video asset management system:

  • The ability to integrate with your existing hardware and software
  • Intelligent file organization
  • Advanced search capabilities
  • Ability change file formats
  • Cloud based digital asset management
  • Customization
  • Scalability
  • Security protocols and content encryption 

Other types of video asset management

Video Asset Management isn't the only type of asset management software that exists to help companies sort and organize their digital content. VAM can also be considered a subset of Digital Asset Management. Depending on your needs (and what types of assets you need to manage), you can choose an asset management system that works for you! Below are a few of the different types:

Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) are both used to manage digital content, but they have different purposes. DRM is used to control how users access and use digital content, while DAM is used to store and organize that digital content. For example, Vimeo OTT makes Digital Rights Management technology available to Enterprise sellers. 

Final thoughts

With VAM software, you can spend less time searching for your video clips and more time creating video masterpieces.

Get started with Vimeo today

If you want tools to help build your video library and the content coming to the Vimeo video player, you can also leverage our timeline video editor for tasks like trimming video, merging video, compressing video, cropping video, making GIFs, and more.

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