What Forrester’s 2025 DAM Landscape means for modern brands

Forrester’s Digital Asset Management Systems Landscape, Q3 2025 has arrived. The report confirms what many enterprise marketers and brand leaders have long suspected: Digital Asset Management is no longer just about storage and governance—it’s about acceleration, personalization, and measurable impact.

In this post, we unpack the key findings from the report and how they relate to Papirfly’s roadmap, product strengths, and vision for DAM in the enterprise.

Core DAM capabilities: what is required by common use cases

Forrester splits the DAM landscape into “core” and “extended” use cases. Core capabilities are no longer differentiators—they’re expectations. Among the most critical:

• Asset rights and compliance: Papirfly ensures brand governance with granular user permissions, automated asset expiry, and GDPR-compliant consent management. Our face recognition feature for consent flagging puts us in strong alignment with where enterprise compliance is heading.
• Asset reuse at scale: Efficient reuse is more than just downloading assets. Our global brand portals, which can be tailored to specific roles and use cases, empower local markets to locate and repurpose assets quickly, maintaining consistency while significantly cutting production costs.
• Time-to-market acceleration: Templated Content Creation enables non‑designers to localize content in minutes, eliminating bottlenecks and scaling output globally.
• Centralized brand control: As a single source of truth, Papirfly’s DAM ensures consistent, secure access to approved assets across markets and teams.

While other vendors may highlight advanced AI transformations, Papirfly focuses on enabling everyday use cases with immediate ROI—like localization, governance, and speed.

Extended use cases: where DAM software must go next

Forrester’s report also highlights extended use cases that signal where DAM is evolving:

• Advanced compliance: With AI-powered facial recognition, Papirfly flags non-compliant assets and automates consent tracking—a critical feature for regulated industries and global campaigns.
• Searchability and personalization: Papirfly’s robust categorization, metadata tagging, and facial recognition support advanced search capabilities to help users find and localize content faster across regions and departments.
• AI-assisted localization: Tools like AI translation and upcoming image derivatives help enterprises adapt content for global audiences without reinventing the creative wheel.
• Content intelligence (WIP): While we currently offer analytics on asset usage within the ecosystem, full lifecycle tracking remains a future goal—a priority for roadmap development.
• 3D asset support: Despite industry hype, Forrester notes limited real-world demand. Papirfly’s position is to integrate with external tools when needed, rather than building redundant features.

How brands should evaluate DAM solutions in 2025

One of the biggest takeaways from the report is that enterprises must shift how they assess DAM solutions. It’s no longer about checking off feature lists—it’s about impact:

• Can your teams find, adapt, and publish content without delays?
• Does your DAM protect your brand while empowering every market?
• Is AI solving a real problem—or just creating new ones?

At Papirfly, we believe future-ready DAM is about user-first innovation, not feature-first marketing. This means focusing on adoption, extensibility, and automation that supports real workflows. That is why some of the world’s biggest brands are our customers, and choose us time and time again.

Choose a Digital Asset Management system that continues to evolve

Forrester’s 2025 DAM report doesn’t just outline where the category is today—it maps where it’s going. And for brand leaders, it’s a clear signal to prioritize tools that scale content creation, ensure compliance, and enable smarter operations.

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