Are you tired of paying extremely high invoices or increasing yearly support fees for media asset management (MAM) solutions that are meant to make your life easier, but just end up coming up short and eating up your budget? You're not alone. Sadly, it's not an uncommon story to hear about media management solutions promising the world for a customer's large upfront investment and commitment, then struggling to deliver.

In this blog, we'll explore five reasons why other MAMs and digital asset management (DAM) solutions are failing to deliver the best value during an economic time when businesses need it most.

Reason #1: Limited Storage Options At a Premium Cost

One of the biggest complaints about MAM/DAM solutions is the cost of storage. Many solutions require you to purchase their own storage, which can add up quickly, especially for organizations that are heavily invested in video assets. The truth is that selling storage is a core part of the business model of most media management solutions. The end result is that the customer doesn't have much choice when it comes to paying high costs or enduring the drudgery of moving their organized archives away from their existing storage.

With iconik, you can leverage the storage you've already invested in, eliminating the need for additional costs and disruption. By simply connecting your existing cloud storage or on-prem storage (via the iconik Storage Gateway), iconik will index everything and only upload smaller proxy files for you to browse and preview anytime. The whole process happens in the background and any existing folder structures and metadata will be preserved.

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Reason #2: Limited Workflows Mean Extra Costs for More Solutions

Your media most likely isn't static, remaining in one location for a single process or workflow—it's dynamic. The creative process and production flow push your assets through many workflows that many media management solutions don't support.

A MAM/DAM often sits outside the context of everything else. Media is taken out to be used and then placed back when finished. During that time away, the media has gone through workflows for:

1. Quality control and review and approval
2. Video collaboration with comments and drawings
3. Revisions with many versions
4. Post production processes
5. Transcoding assets into new formats
6. File transfer and delivery
7. File sharing with external stakeholders

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As this happens, there is a ton of data created around each asset. Since many media management solutions don't offer workflows for these, it's the customer who has to buy more solutions and figure out a way to get as many solutions to integrate as possible. This adds up quickly and creates confusion and inefficiencies in your workflows.

To be truthful, none of those listed workflows have been seen as essential for media asset management, but all one has to do is step back to see the wider picture of how we use media today. Today's media professionals need ALL of those solutions. That's why iconik has included them all in a single media management and collaboration hub—it just makes sense to us.

Iconik offers built-in workflows and features that can effectively replace your existing video collaboration and review solutions, as well as file sharing, transfer services, and even more. With iconik, you'll be able to optimize your work and save time and money in the process.

Reason #3: Up Front Costs Increase Risk of Wasted Resources

Many MAMs have CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) pricing, with upfront costs for setup, deployment, and licensing. This can be a huge burden for small and medium-sized businesses looking to implement a MAM system. It can be difficult to accurately forecast and budget for the resources you need when starting out.

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As an alternative, iconik offers a solution with its usage-based pricing model. Instead of paying for resources you haven't fully utilized, iconik's pricing model is designed to correspond with the actual usage of the service. This means that inactive users aren't billed and resources are not wasted, making it a more cost-effective solution.

This flexible and adaptable approach allows you to adjust your usage over time, especially in an unstable economy. With Iconik's pricing model, you can be sure that you're paying for what you need when you need it. And during busy times when your team needs more support, you can easily scale up your usage without being stuck with paying for additional seats or licenses that you only use once a year. This makes iconik a game-changer for MAM and a more sustainable option for businesses of all sizes.

The Bottom Line

If economics and digital transformation are driving your business decisions, iconik has a unique offer to explore. Besides the fact that the setup costs of other asset managers can potentially pay for a year of iconik, you also would have flexible storage options, built-in collaboration and review tools, usage-based pricing, and the ability to unify your production processes. Based on that, iconik is a smart choice for anyone looking to save money while putting a media asset management solution in place that is scalable and futureproof.