In recent years, the landscape of Digital Asset Management (DAM) has witnessed a significant evolution. The latest Forrester Wave™ report for DAM systems shone a light on the key trends behind today’s most successful solutions, including:

• The ability to seamlessly integrate DAM within wider digital and marketing ecosystems to enhance overall operational efficiency
• The need for DAM platforms to scale and grow alongside the expanding needs of businesses
• The application of artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline collaboration, enhance content discoverability, and enable personalised content

As one of just 13 global DAM vendors listed in this year’s Forrester Wave™ report, Papirfly is keeping pace with these growing trends to deliver not only the most powerful DAM to our customers, but an all-encompassing brand management solution.

Below, we analyse these key trends identified in Forrester’s report, discuss how Papirfly aligns with these developments, and where we are seeking to improve in future.

Making DAM integration seamless to enable scalability

For DAMs to support modern marketers, the ability to seamlessly expand and connect with different platforms is crucial. Nobody uses one platform for everything – from BI tools to CMS and PIM systems, marketers rely on an assortment of digital tools to create, store, measure and more.

Today’s DAMs must become a one-stop shop for users. To enable people to work more efficiently and dynamically. To allow them to bring everything into one interconnected ecosystem and create one source of truth in a fragmented landscape.

By extension, this enables greater scalability. As businesses expand, having one platform that everyone can work from, while still being able to seamlessly incorporate new tools and technologies, is vital for sustained growth. 

This is where Papirfly is making strides to deliver robust integration and route to growth.

How does Papirfly make digital asset integration and scalability seamless?

The Papirfly platform integrates with a huge array of CMSes, PIM systems, creative toolkits and much more. This lets you bring any tool or platform you use into one centralised ecosystem, and not have to change anything about the way you work or operate.

For large, spread-out digital teams, this approach removes barriers, helps teams work together better and makes workflows simpler. In turn, this helps brands maintain a consistent, coherent identity across all touchpoints, no matter the complexity of their operations.

For example, while we have a dedicated DAM, we can also connect to your third-party DAMs so you can instantly bring your digital and media files into our platform, without needing to categorise and tag everything all over again. This allows you to hit the ground running much faster.

This is where our focus on integration reaps its rewards. We ask how can we work with what you have today, rather than asking you to start afresh. And that’s where the scalability question comes in – what can we do to scale alongside your organisation?

By looking at technology as an ecosystem, rather than a single point of integration, our platform is always prepared for growth, whether that happens two months from now or two years. We are at the forefront of this, delivering capabilities to our platform before our customers even need it. 

As digital worlds get more complex and people expect more, having digital asset management software that fits perfectly with your existing systems and grows with your brand is key. We continue to push hard to make sure that we deliver this. To be more than a tool, but a strategic partner in our customers’ brand journey.

Unlocking the power of AI to locate, create and personalise branded content

AI is on the growth. Organisations such as OpenAI have demonstrated AI’s role in unlocking efficiency, creativity and convenience that wasn’t feasible just years ago. And DAM solutions are another example of where this technology is making a massive difference.

When it comes to DAM, one might immediately think that AI can be used to generate assets for this repository. But that’s only scratching the surface. Today, DAM is harnessing AI to more effectively find relevant assets for any campaign through “contextual search”.

Say you want to create a video promoting your brand’s latest product. Using AI-driven contextual search, you can locate down to the pixel-level images and videos that are relevant to this requirement. Rather than spend precious time scanning through folders of assets, this enables users to find the right digital content in one search.

AI also empowers you to maintain assets more consistently with better metadata and tagging. Previously, tagging assets manually was open to a) interpretation and b) human error. When a trained AI model replaces these, it can accurately tag assets based on the learnings you provide. This ensures relevant assets are never lost in the background. 

Venturing further, AI also unlocks the possibilities of machine learning. By analysing data on asset usage and performance, AI can provide insights into optimal asset utilisation and application based on how and where assets are used. This empowers you to better determine what assets should be used for any campaign or application.

How does Papirfly’s DAM software harness AI to make life easier for users?

Within Papirfly’s AI Lab, we are continuously testing and improving how we apply this technology. Currently, you can generate relevant assets based on your brand colours, stylings and more. You simply provide a prompt and definition, and our platform generates assets within the constraints of your brand profile.

This is where we are now, but the possibilities are endless. We want to use AI to help you design and create content. Short-form videos are a good example of that – our AI in the future will allow you to insert prompts and generate the relevant content and structure of videos in a brand-consistent way. 

We also intend to employ AI to allow you to adapt assets for specific needs. With GenAI capabilities, we will enable you to immediately tweak assets based on different seasons, locations, languages, etc. – all without using a designer or a long approval process.

Right now, Papirfly is simply scratching the surface of what’s achievable with AI. But we are investing heavily in this technology to make it infinitely easier for our users to find the content they need, and create new, brand-consistent assets without barriers or red tape.

Continuously improving to meet market needs

AI is just one example of where Papirfly is growing alongside the market trends illustrated in the latest Forrester Wave™, and where we are driving a future beyond DAM. Two other prominent areas we are focusing on are 3D asset support and advanced content generation.

Starting with 3D assets, this is a huge trend in fashion, homeware, the automotive industry and beyond. It enables people to see, experience and “feel” products before purchasing.

While this is not possible in the current iteration of our platform, it’s something that we’re investing a lot of time and effort towards. Thanks to players like Meta and Apple who have introduced stronger routes to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), we are exploring ways our platform can manage and deliver 3D assets on our platform so they can be showcased in the form that suits our users.

Advanced content creation is another gap that we are working to address. Through the greater use of AI and prompt engineering, we aim to enable our platform’s users to generate on-brand, high-quality content without requiring the knowledge or skillsets of a designer.

These evolutions are steered by our Product Roadmap and pivoted around current technology. AI has been a powerful opener for us, and we’ve already spent many hours understanding what AI can offer and proving the concept works for us. This is allowing us, and by extension our users, to harness greater levels of automation.

We are also looking at ways in which we can better supply data and insights from our platform to help users make informed actions and decisions around their brand. Through our ability to interconnect and integrate with other apps, we are on the path to giving our customers enhanced insight that no one is offering today.

With every evolution of our platform, we are enhancing usability and automation to make every aspect of brand management faster, easier and more comprehensive for our users.

In today’s digital ecosystem, the fusion of design and strategic creativity is not simply an advantage – it’s a necessity for brands aiming to stand out. 

In the latest Forrester Wave™ report for Digital Asset Management (DAM), these platforms are increasingly expected to support design in brand management, and foster a collaborative environment that breaks down silos and encourages holistic storytelling.

At Papirfly, we embody this ethos. Our platform acts as a powerful conduit for marketing and creative leaders to unlock intelligent creativity in the way they work.

Here we’ll explore the growing importance of DAM in the creative process, and how our solution is enabling our users to generate on-brand assets and personalise content however they see fit.

Empowering creativity, breaking barriers

Traditionally, DAM is just a repository that controls your digital assets. Today, it is now expected to play an active role in the development of branded assets. It’s not just accessing a piece of data anymore – it’s about providing one holistic platform where creativity flows from one end to the other.

That’s why Papirfly’s platform is built for all users. The creative studios, the designers, the marketers – everyone involved in the creative process. In large, global brands, creative artists often work in silos, confined to their departments in a very rigid format.

Rather than a conventional DAM where assets are simply stored for marketing teams to access, today’s DAM systems must be so much more. What we do at Papirfly is bring everything under one roof. Our tools and workflows are aligned to allow for seamless ideation, execution and management of brand assets without conventional barriers.

So how does this work? In our platform, any user can access assets in the DAM, and then make changes where necessary in the same space. From here, you can then set workflows for approving content before it’s published, and plan the timeline for your campaign – still in the same all-encompassing platform.

You go from where you Place assets in your DAM, to where you Produce new assets, to where you Plan your campaigns and Prove their performance through data and analytics. Everything is available in one platform, accessible to everyone, with no silos, barriers or red tape.

Papirfly is creating an ecosystem where everyone comes together to produce what is needed with minimal resistance, and with complete control over brand consistency. This does not only ensure every asset is always on-brand, but is also strategically conceived to engage audiences and drive results.

Through this central, brand management hub, our platform enables design and creativity in a way far beyond traditional digital asset management tools. We provide a space where users have the freedom to create what’s needed and get innovative, while always delivering absolute consistency.

Getting personal with content creation

The Forrester Wave™ report on DAM also noted how DAMs are playing a vital role in the personalisation and customisation of content. This is somewhere that Papirfly excels.

For global organisations, it is essential to customise content for different geographic locations, demographics, seasons, etc. Without these alterations, you greatly limit the performance of an asset for your audiences, and fail to get the optimal value out of your campaigns.

So, within modern DAMs, it is crucial marketers easily adapt assets to ensure the right content reaches the right audience at the right time. At Papirfly, our platform is designed to go beyond managing digital assets; it gives you the power to transform assets for maximum engagement.

Let’s say you want to customise a particular set of assets for a specific audience, like graduates. In our platform, you can create a series of different templates and structures for this and any other unique audience. These are still bounded by your brand guidelines, but give you the flexibility to adapt content in a highly streamlined, efficient way.

Our platform also enables you to set controls and workflows for certain regions to make sure they only receive content that’s right for them. Take a brand like Mercedes for example – some of their car models are only available in particular locations.

With our advanced metadata and tagging systems, you can lock down what assets individual franchises can access. This ensures that campaigns only contain relevant products, colours and imagery that suits this audience.

This is just one control mechanism our platform provides to help you send the right content to the right audience. You can also set assets to be accessible at precise times of year – such as how Coca-Cola have unique designs on their cans during Christmas.

By enabling the rapid customisation of assets through intelligent templates, and giving you control over what assets are available for a given region, demographic or time of year, our platform is making it faster and simpler to deliver custom content that connects with your varied audiences.

A more dynamic future for content creation and customisation

With DAMs expected to play a key role in content creation and strategy, Papirfly’s platform is steering the future of digital asset management. From unlocking silos that stifle the creative process, to integrating effortlessly with marketing technology stacks, we enable brands to create cohesive, customised customer journeys at all touchpoints.

Through our comprehensive brand management solution, you gain the ability to streamline creative operations, swiftly respond to ever-changing market dynamics, and deliver personalised, engaging content at an unmatched scale.

For the first time in Papirfly’s history, we have been named in the Forrester Wave™ report for DAM systems, cementing our status as one of the 13 leading providers worldwide.

Below, we provide a top-line breakdown of the report, and explain what this achievement means for the present and future of Papirfly.

Breaking down the DAM report

Papirfly was listed as a “Contender” in the DAM landscape, a testament to the hard work our team has dedicated to the evolution of our platform over the years.

We performed particularly well for the strategy at the core of our platform and company as a whole, achieving good scores from Forrester for our vision, innovation, roadmap and community.

In Forrester’s overall analysis of the Papirfly platform, they noted the following:

Norway-based Papirfly focuses on being the first and last destination for its customers’ users every day: where every brand asset lives, where campaigns come to life, and how everyone stays on brand. Taking a conservative approach to AI integration into its platform, Papirfly continues to innovate across several DAM categories and invests over 25% of revenue into R&D. 

Although its service partnerships are currently limited, Papirfly is investing in strategic partnerships to expand its market and product offerings and grow its roster of clients, which includes IBM, Novo Nordisk, BMW, Unilever, and Vodafone.

Papirfly shines in brand and campaign portals with the ability to manage sub-brand assets at a high level of complexity. Reference customers shared that Papirfly is “easy to use with simple, seamless integration of template editing, and excellent support.” 

Papirfly is a good fit for brand leaders in North America and the EU that are looking for an easy-to-use DAM to centralize brand assets to enable marketers.

A huge step forward

“Being named a contender in the DAM space by the Forrester Wave™ is a huge achievement for Papirfly. It puts us on the map and means we’ve earned the right to play in this highly competitive landscape,” says Stefan Ropers, CEO at Papirfly.

“It’s not only big for our team, but also for our customers, because they can now more closely inspect and understand what Papirfly is doing.”

However, this inclusion does more than demonstrate that Papirfly is an emerging name in DAM globally. It also underscores the work we are doing to redefine DAM, and acknowledges the strides we are taking to transform this into a complete brand management solution.

“There is so much functionality in our platform that is not even part of Forrester’s current DAM analysis. We are looking to solve brand management from left to right – to think bigger than the constraints of DAM and solve even greater, pressing challenges for our customers,” explains Ropers.

“Our vision for the last couple of years has been to offer a broader approach to brand management. While this is built on a strong DAM at the foundation, as testified in Forrester’s report, we are taking it way beyond for our customers, giving them the tools to manage and execute their brand more efficiently and successfully than ever before.”

You can discover why Papirfly’s platform is the beating heart of brand management for over 600 growing and global organisations in our new, in-depth articles:

• Digital asset management built for today and tomorrow
• Driving design and strategic creativity through DAM
• A future beyond DAM
• Papirfly: An investment in end-to-end brand management

If you’d like to read The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management report in its entirety and see how Papirfly stacks up against other DAM vendors, you can download it below.

In an increasingly global, complex landscape, it’s only getting harder for marketing teams to manage every facet of their brand and maintain consistency at every touchpoint.

DAM partially relieves this problem, providing a central hub of on-brand assets for teams worldwide. But, as the latest Forrester Wave™ report on DAM systems attests, there is a growing need to evolve beyond DAM and enter the realm of brand management.

At Papirfly, this is our core. We look beyond the need to administer assets, and empower brands with the tools to create, distribute, and optimise content that’s always on brand. Simply put, a holistic, end-to-end approach to your brand management strategy.

Here, we explore the incredible importance of brand consistency, and why an investment in Papirfly is an investment in your brand’s true potential.

A core of brand consistency; a bridge to brand equity

The importance of brand consistency cannot be overstated. In a sea of constant change for consumers, it provides an anchor of familiarity and clarity, which over time encourages engagement, develops emotional connections and fosters loyalty. 

It’s no longer just the concern of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) – building brand recognition is a strategic imperative in a world of globalisation and increasing fragmentation.

Fundamentally, to grow brand value, you have to drive consistency. That’s been the core of Papirfly for the past 20 years. Our platform provides controls and mechanisms that prevent users from steering off-brand with their design and strategic creativity, ensuring that everything created or stored in your DAM is in lockstep with your brand guidelines.

With this level of control, you can safely create whatever you need to, whenever you need to, without any concerns over consistency. You don’t have to be a brand police anymore – you can produce branded content reliably and effortlessly, at a greater scale than ever before.

Maintaining brand consistency extends into brand equity – something that directly impacts a company’s balance sheet. The more brand equity an organisation has, the more power it holds over its market, but it only grows if a brand’s identity, message and mission stays consistent at all touchpoints. Consistency breeds trust, trust builds equity.

At Papirfly we think about brand equity a lot. By providing our customers with a complete brand management solution, we enable marketers to bridge the gap between corporate-level consistency and local marketing execution, so that these always remain in sync.

A smart commercial investment for forward-thinking marketers and brand managers

Many marketing leaders today tend to purchase a DAM as a box-checking exercise, with the idea of ensuring consistency across their assets. But we need to think broader than this.

Consumer expectations are changing. Competition for their attention is relentless. You must engage thousands of customers and hundreds of target audiences with content that is in-line with your brand, but personalised to individual customer experiences.

Even the best “DAM” is not capable of achieving this enhanced level of marketing outreach alone. So what’s the solution? Do you invest in multiple disparate systems to make up for where a DAM falls, adding more layers of confusion for your marketing teams worldwide?

Or, do you purchase a solution that manages everything from the creation of brand guidelines, to campaign execution and the measurement of outcomes, in one place? That’s the commercial advantage of choosing Papirfly.

We provide digital asset management paired with brand management technology. This reduces the number of interfaces that your teams must engage with to control your brand – resulting in heightened efficiency and strong returns on investment.

Moreover, Papirfly enables you to rapidly create content around local market trends, even if you don’t have a background in design. Through intelligent templates and mechanisms, our platform empowers you to produce whatever assets you need for any platform and audience – all while staying completely on brand and never compromising on quality.

In these challenging economic times, this means organisations can achieve more with fewer resources and internal bottlenecks. Rather than waste time and talent on operational complexities, we give teams the capacity to focus on the strategic growth of their brand.

Leading the evolution of DAM into brand management

Papirfly is an innovator. For a long time, we have recognised that DAM at its core is insufficient for modern marketing challenges. That’s why we’re pushing ahead with what we believe to be the future of DAM solutions: universal brand management technology.

In a landscape that is constantly evolving, driven by new technologies and changing consumer behaviours, we continuously innovate to deliver a complete brand management ecosystem. A platform that not only meets the demands of today, but anticipates the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

We look beyond DAM into how we integrate third-party tools to manage brands better, and into how we grow brand value through consistency. We think about how we ensure brands deliver the same message, the same tone, and the same signals in one solution.

From the very beginning of the creative cycle and brand guidelines, to delivery, execution and measurement. Papirfly is a holistic platform supporting over 600 growing and global brands, inspiring teams worldwide to achieve more and waste less.

By focusing on usability and productivity, pioneering new features, and building smart strategic partnerships, we’re becoming the indispensable partner for both growing and global brands that want to lock down consistency, reach audiences effectively and fulfil their marketing objectives.

This is more than DAM – it’s brand management made easier, smarter and more successful.

One of the biggest takeaways from the Forrester Wave™ report on DAM systems is that the modern DAM needs to be more than a DAM. 

It’s no longer sufficient to manage assets and files – they have to be at the foundation for more comprehensive brand management. At Papirfly, we have always envisioned DAM as a much broader, more powerful solution – one that changes the way we see these systems altogether.

Below, we explain further why DAM needs to grow and evolve beyond its conventional role, and why platforms like Papirfly represent the future of DAM.

Does DAM need to stretch its boundaries?

The traditional DAM is limited to a repository; a place where a brand holds its images, videos and wider assets. At one point in time, that was sufficient, but those days are very much over.

DAM is growing, extending beyond expectations because customer needs today are so much wider and more complex. It’s not just about the storage of assets – it’s how assets are being used, where they’re being used, and how consistently they are used. It is about the role DAM plays in delivering personalised, on-brand experiences.

For Papirfly, evolving DAM to include more strategic brand management capabilities is not just an option; we view it as a necessity.

DAM may be the foundation for creating digital experiences. But we must go beyond that. As we dynamically manage audiences, campaigns must be coherent and consistent with a brand’s identity. That’s where the challenge lies, and that’s where Papirfly is aiming to go.

Changing the definition of DAM

The value that Papirfly brings to our users goes beyond core DAM functionalities. While we are incredibly proud to be among the few global DAM vendors recognised by Forrester Wave™, we think bigger – we want to be the pioneering force in brand management technology.

We know how challenging campaign execution is, especially for worldwide brands with hundreds of target audiences. Every asset must be tailored to individual customer preferences and varied marketing channels, but also consistent with the overarching brand identity. Achieving this is a tall order, and demands the right technology.

We treat our platform as a suite of products that are all integral to the brand management journey. DAM is part of this, but just one part. Rather than treat these in isolation, we have sought to bring them together into one powerful, all-encompassing platform. A platform built for saving time and making life easier through advanced automation and workflows.

What Papirfly offers is a core ecosystem that manages every aspect of the brand lifecycle. A single location where you:

• Hold all of the guidelines and parameters at the core of your brand identity (Point)
• Maintain, store and control all digital assets for your campaigns (Place)
• Create and alter assets fast and consistently, with efficient approval workflows in place (Produce)
• Oversee the progress of a campaign across departments and teams (Plan)
• Measure the performance, metrics and ROI of your brand management operations (Prove)

This is no longer DAM as a sole solution; it’s DAM as part of your overall brand journey. Through technology that is only improving with artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, we are creating a one-stop package for delivering brand success, unlocking new standards of design and strategic creativity and maintaining absolute brand consistency.

Brand management is the future of DAM

The future of DAM is a future beyond DAM. A single solution for storing and sharing assets is no longer sufficient for the demands of modern marketing. Now, the focus is on managing a brand across its entire lifecycle – creation to execution, and potentially through to retirement.

DAM can’t achieve this in its current definition. The DAM of today and tomorrow must extend to deliver the level of brand consistency and engagement that companies want and that consumers expect. That is what Papirfly is all about.

Working closely with chief marketing officers and global brands to understand what they truly need in today’s complex digital landscape, we are becoming the thought leader for DAM’s evolution into true brand management.

We are driving a future where a DAM becomes almost invisible to our users, who simply carry out its actions within a universal brand ecosystem. A space where you can create, maintain, monitor and manage assets across their lifetime, all the way to campaign delivery.

The Forrester Wave™ has recognised it’s time to look past DAM as a simple shared drive, but part of a broader solution that minimises the effort of managing a brand and maximises the efficiency of marketing. That’s the future of DAM, and that’s the heart of our platform.

It’s time to break beyond the framework of “DAM” and unlock something much more powerful: a future of end-to-end brand management.