Digital Asset Management software exist for a simple reason. Marketing organizations create a massive amount of content, and without a system it turns into chaos. Historically, DAMs have primarily focused on brand safety, compliance and consistency. This ensures that the wider team can find and use approved content, like the latest version of a logo or other brand elements.

Performance Marketers and Creative Strategists, however, have a very different problem. Performance teams don’t win by storing assets correctly, they win by learning faster than everyone else. That means the way you organize and search for content becomes fundamentally different from a traditional brand library.

This shows up over and over again in customer conversations. Even if the organization already has a DAM solution in place, the performance assets almost always end up in either Google Drive or Dropbox, simply because the existing solution isn't helping performance teams move faster and make better decisions.

What performance teams actually need from a DAM

What we see over and over again is that performance teams don’t have a clean library of what has been produced, the hypothesis, what has worked, what you can iterate on next, and what you should reuse. A performance DAM should help teams manage creatives across the full lifecycle:

• What’s ready to launch
• What’s being tested
• What’s working & scaling
• What should be iterated on next

It's common for performance teams to work in weekly cycles. The week by reviewing what was produced, which creative elements were tested, and which patterns show up across winners. This in turn, dictates how resources should be spent during the coming week. If your DAM doesn’t make this easier, it’s not helping the team make better decisions.

Similarly, if your team is preparing for a shopping holiday, they should be able to quickly access what was tested last year, what performed, and what should be reused or iterated on.

Your creative library should be part of performance

We're heading towards a world where more and more parts of the creative production process can be automated. Brief writing, variant creation, performance analysis are already happening with less manual work than before. As creative output becomes easier to generate, decision-making eventually becomes the bigger bottleneck.

Performance teams need a clean dataset of creative output over time, where assets are connected to the results they drove, as well as the performance-relevant elements inside it. Without a structured dataset of what worked, you'll end up using AI to create more noise.

We’re building Focal as a Performance DAM that helps teams manage creatives the way performance marketers think:

• Auto-enrichment: creatives are automatically tagged using the brand’s own performance taxonomy
• Performance linked to assets: results are tied back to each creative, so teams can build a reliable library of past tests and winners
• Flexible workflows & automations: teams can build their own processes on top, from reviews and handoffs to alerts and next-step recommendations

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