Infographic: The most popular asset formats you can find within a DAM

When it comes to digital assets, there are a number of resources available for use. As a marketing expert, you need to be able to identify the most popular formats and be up to date with the best practices for using these different file types in order to build efficient brand and marketing campaigns. You also need to be familiar with all the functionalities of a DAM and its ability to help you manage this huge variety of assets. Discover our infographic on some of the most popular asset formats Wedia supports with its Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution.

From images, videos and 3D files that promote your products to logos that help customers recognize your brand, digital assets have become indispensable in creative marketing campaigns that highlight your company and connect with your audiences. However, the number of digital assets available is constantly increasing and diversifying.

Implementing aDigital Asset Management (DAM) solutionhas become essential for companies because it creates a Single Source Of Truth for all your valuable marketing and brands assets, making them available to internal and external users of your DAM solution.

DAM platforms make all your available digital assets more easily discoverable, but a preliminary indexing work is necessary in order to organize the content according to your metadata and chosen criteria. A DAM thus platform brings all your media in one place, where creative and marketing teams can easily and efficiently collect validated resources in order to create tailored marketing campaigns adapted to their needs.

So what are these different media file types found in a DAM and what are their main characteristics?

Audio: MP3 & AAC

The MP3 format is the most common type of audio file, often used to accompany and develop the history and environment of your business. Its use remains varied from making interviews to podcasts, and takes advantage of its high engagement power to reach your target audiences. By using a DAM solution, you can reuse your video assets by keeping only the speech portion to for example create an audio asset highlighting your product or produce a guide for new employees.

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is designed to be the successor of theMP3format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 at the samebit rate.

Video: MP4 & Mov & AVI & 3GP & MPEGAM

The popularization of telephones and other digital tools has made video easily accessible and has led to its rise. This format has become a must-have for companies in any industry. Highly promoted on social networks and a very engaging medium, video allows you to create interactive and captivating content. Its uses are multiple and its virality potential is not to be overlooked.

Image: JPEG & PNG & WebP & GIF

JPEG is the most popular format for using photos online. It has a wide color range and is functional in most softwares and tools. This format is perfect when you want to keep your files to a minimum size and can accept some loss in quality to do so. Using JPEG images makes it easier to download them, especially on websites.

PNGs are images that support millions of colors and transparency, so they are very useful for logos, computer graphics and other graphic images. This format is preferred over JPEG when file size is not an issue and you want to keep the best image quality.

WebPis an image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Webmasters and web developers can thus create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. WebP lossless images are up to 30% smallerin size compared to PNGs and they support transparency.

360°: Photos and Video

360-degree photos and videos are very innovative and immersive formats that have become increasingly popular on social networks like Facebook and Instagram. They allow users to be in the center of the shot and change their perspective, creating a greater interactivity with the product. Using this type of format gives customers a virtual visit to your company's products, events or locations, and can also help you to appeal to a new, younger and tech-savvy audience.

Document: PDF & PPT & DOC

PDFs are files that capture all the elements of a printed document in a digital image. This document can then be used to view and print the image. The PDF format is very popular because it allows you to turn heavy documents like brochures or manuals into an image when you are done editing them.

Presentations that can be found in different formats are also considered as digital assets.. These formats are very popular for professional meetings and allow you to present information in a concise and professional way.

Files with .doc extensions represent documents generated by Microsoft Word. It can contain several different types of data such as images, formatted as well as plain text, graphs, charts, embedded objects, links, pages, page formatting, print settings and a lot others.

Archive: ZIP

ZIP is a widely used archive file format that's used to compress one or more files together into a single location, reducing the overall size, and making it easier to transport the files. Zip files are ideal to be shared with collaborators in order to reduce the amount of data used.

3D: OBJ & CAD

Technological and technical advances have allowed the rise of3D imagesin recent years, allowing companies to present high quality content. This kind of format is very engaging for the consumer who can appreciate the product in a more credible way. 3D images therefore help retailers in particular support the buying journey along the path to purchase.

Immage Pro: PSD, AI, InDD

PSD files are used for editing because they support multiple layers and many image formats. They are popular with creative teams who use them for their productions on softwares like Photoshop. These images allow for high quality resources.

InDD and Ai are both formats created by Adobe and designed to work with their softwares. The AI file is the most common type of vector image. It's a proprietaryAdobe Illustratorformat, so it can be tricky to open AI files if you don't have Illustrator. The INDD file is a file type for the software Adobe InDesign. The most common uses for INDD files are publishing flyers, newspapers and other business materials.

Identifying your needs in terms of digital assets is a real challenge, but the reward is high. Understanding the different media types and asset formats as well as when to use them will help you drive engagement and better conversions. But you need a solution to help you manage, organize and repurpose this huge volume of diverse assets.

Implementing a DAM solution in your company will help save valuable time for your teams by making all your media available and easily accessible in one central hub: you can filter by the type of media (image vs video vs text), the orientation of the asset (landscape vs portrait vs square), the colorspace, the document type (jpeg vs png) and so much more.

An efficient DAM must of course manage the formats natively, but also be able to adapt quickly and support the formats of tomorrow such as more immersive & futuristics formats: augmented reality content,virtual reality content, interactive video content, social media-specific content (vertical video for instagram, or 'stories' and reels) etc…

With a DAM platform, you never have to worry about misplacing, recreating, or reusing an old asset, no matter its format or the volume and diversity of your media files. Of course, that's just one of many benefits of digital asset management. Download our latest eBook to discover 7 reasons why your company should be investing in an enterprise DAM solution.

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Wedia, a SaaS software company, offers leading international brands aDigital Asset Management(DAM) solution, a marketing software that meets the needs of a content-centric marketing strategy.