One of the most challenging aspects of marketing and business development in the AEC industry is the organization, management, and accessibility of digital assets, including project photographs, headshots, renderings, and other imagery. Increasingly, AEC firms are turning to technology to solve this challenge. In this edition of The Friedman File, we explore how digital asset management (DAM) technology can increase efficiency, enhance proposal preparation, and reduce frustration for your marketing and business development team.
What is DAM, and Why Don’t More Firms Use It?
For architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms, efficiently organizing and retrieving digital assets is essential to successful marketing and business development. Yet many firms still rely on outdated systems or manually curated folders that limit productivity, create redundancy, and strain resources during high-stakes proposal preparation.
Digital asset management (DAM) systems streamline this process by providing a centralized, searchable platform that accelerates workflows, enhances cross-team collaboration, and optimizes asset use. OpenAsset, a company founded 22 years ago with headquarters in London and New York, is one of the only DAM providers specifically focused on the AEC industry.
Jason Janicki, CEO of OpenAsset, explains that DAM is particularly valuable to AEC firms because it integrates with core AEC tools, including customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like Unanet and Deltek.
“We built OpenAsset specifically with AEC in mind,” Janicki notes. “Our goal is to support firms in winning new business by centralizing their marketing assets and making it easy for them to find, use, and repurpose these assets – ultimately helping them save time to focus on strategic initiatives such as prepositioning and capture planning.”
The Power of Tagging for Efficient Asset Management
One of OpenAsset’s most impactful features is its tagging functionality, allowing AEC firms to organize assets without duplicating files or sifting through endless folders. Doug Larence, Chief Marketing Officer of multidiscipline design firm Sasaki, shares that tagging has simplified his firm’s ability to categorize and retrieve specific assets—whether it’s aerial photography, higher education projects, or laboratory designs—within a single, unified database. Rather than relying on multiple folders for various categories, cross-tagging allows all relevant information to be linked to a single image or file, streamlining organization and speeding up retrieval.
Laura Matter, who has been with SmithGroup for 20 years, notes that as the design firm’s workforce has more than doubled during her tenure, the volume of its digital assets has increased exponentially. After initially using an in-house tool, they began exploring DAM technology as asset volume outpaced internal capabilities. SmithGroup ultimately chose OpenAsset in 2017 for its scalability and CRM integration.
Matter, the firm’s Marketing Director, notes that while OpenAsset offers extensive flexibility for creating bespoke metadata taxonomies, her team opted to use a hybrid approach to reduce the amount of manual tagging required. They developed a streamlined tagging system focused on efficiency and consistency, allowing the most relevant tags to support marketing and BD efforts without overwhelming staff.
“We decided on a streamlined tagging system tailored to our needs,” says Matter. “Having CRM integration means our project information is automatically tagged, so we don’t need an extensive manual tagging process.”
With several years of DAM use under its belt, Matter says that the firm is considering expanding its tagging options, though nowhere near the amount that some firms use.
Additionally, integrated CRM data allows project descriptions and staff bios to automatically link to images, making them easily searchable by project type, employee role, or other criteria. This tagging functionality not only improves internal organization but also enhances proposal preparation by offering quick access to the exact images and project information teams need.
Larence cautions that the key to efficiently launching DAM is developing a sensible and highly consistent taxonomy that everyone from project personnel to marketing coordinators can understand and apply to images.
“Before implementing the system, it’s critical to take the time to establish a clear and consistent taxonomy for organizing and tagging images,” he says. “Once you’ve established that, you need to be really rigorous about training users who upload images to ensure consistency across the board.”
Matter says, “The ability to create albums has also been good for us. It’s a way to aggregate similar content. For example, we have albums for laboratories within our Science and Technology market, and our marketing lead for Science and Technology can aggregate and tag the best lab images for presentations and proposals. Our Workplace Marketing Lead has created albums of amenity spaces, conference spaces, and so on.”
Transforming Proposal Preparation with Centralized Assets
The benefits of DAM are particularly notable in proposal preparation. Too often, proposal teams waste valuable hours locating visuals, managing version control, and collaborating across departments. This reliance on manual processes frequently results in broken links, time-consuming asset searches, and other issues that can compromise proposal quality and brand consistency.
With the effective use of DAM, marketing teams can devise a set of parameters describing their needs, then reach into “the cloud” and collect relevant images, descriptions, and bios with just a few clicks, dramatically reducing proposal preparation time. According to metrics from OpenAsset, firms using their platform report up to a 30% reduction in proposal preparation time, a 22% increase in proposal output, and a 22% improvement in proposal success rates.
These time savings allow marketing and business development teams to spend more time with proactive campaigns and outreach – which also benefit from the simplicity and efficiency of DAM. “Using OpenAsset to streamline repetitive tasks allows marketing teams to focus on more strategic initiatives,” Janicki explains. “As these tools evolve, firms can expect even more functionality that supports proposal quality and team efficiency.”
Matter says that DAM systems like OpenAsset also play a significant role in maintaining brand consistency across all client-facing materials. By centralizing assets and automatically updating versions, marketing teams have access to only the most current, on-brand visuals and templates.
“DAM helps us ensure that our brand identity is consistent, whether it’s a single image or an entire presentation,” says Matter. “It saves time and makes our proposals, presentations and marketing collateral look more polished and aligned.”
This control also improves the visual appeal of proposals and supports a cohesive, professional image.
AI Integration and the Future of DAM in AEC
To further enhance usability, OpenAsset incorporates AI-powered features that support content automation and tagging. By recognizing specific project types or identifying team members’ faces, OpenAsset’s AI features make tagging assets faster and more accurate, helping firms meet deadlines more effectively and enhancing proposal quality.
According to Janicki, OpenAsset’s AI capabilities extend to generating content based on the firm’s data, such as creating descriptive project text and employee bios, or recommending visually similar assets based on prior usage. This AI-driven approach is particularly valuable in deadline-driven environments, where time savings and efficiency are critical.
In this and other ways, DAM systems support staffing functions and help firms track employee skills, project experience, and roles for efficient resource allocation. OpenAsset, for instance, enables firms to align staff information directly with project assets, making it easier to assign teams for proposals based on expertise and experience. The system’s AI-powered facial recognition capabilities can also help manage staff headshots, ensuring accuracy and reducing time spent on profile maintenance.
Moving Forward: DAM as a Strategic Investment
For mid-sized and large AEC firms, the question around DAM has shifted from “Do we need it?” to “Which solution best aligns with our needs?” With robust tools like OpenAsset that centralize resources, streamline proposal preparation, and integrate with essential systems, DAM is proving to be an essential component of an effective business development strategy.
Another consideration is that DAM, like many technology products, offers a wide range of features that firms often don’t need or want. SmithGroup’s Matter says that while the platform offers capabilities to create entire proposals and resumes, SmithGroup leverages only a subset of OpenAsset’s offerings, focusing on asset storage and retrieval to meet their particular needs. Smaller firms, too, may find that the range of features available is more than they require.
Janicki says that OpenAsset’s capabilities can be customized, allowing each firm to align usage with its unique workflows and needs. For some firms, fully embracing DAM’s extensive features may be the right choice, while others may prefer to scale back, using it primarily as a robust asset repository that strengthens marketing and business development efforts.
What is your firm doing with digital asset management? If you’re not using it, should you be? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Write to me at rich@friedmanpartners.com or call 508-397-9213. Thank you for reading The Friedman File.
