As organizations grow, so does the complexity of managing digital assets. Large enterprises often rely on digital asset management (DAM) or cloud storage systems that have been in place for years—systems owned by IT or managed globally by central teams. However, evolving needs often require collaboration across different systems.
We’ll explore why you need a brand portal alongside your DAM and outline the benefits and scenarios where integrating a brand portal (such as Frontify) with your existing DAM systems makes sense, ensuring smooth workflows, enhanced collaboration, and consistent brand representation.
What is a brand portal?
A brand portal is a centralized platform designed to manage, share, and communicate all aspects of a brand, including visual identity, campaign toolkits, digital design systems, and other guidelines. It also provides advanced user management capabilities, enabling different levels of access for marketing teams, designers, and other stakeholders. This ensures the right people can contribute to and utilize brand materials effectively.
A brand portal provides easy access to essential tools for brand building, delivering the context needed to autonomously design and implement marketing campaigns and content that align with the brand’s identity. It could also offer enterprise-level templating capabilities for regions and markets to localize marketing collateral, empowering teams to create visuals quickly and efficiently and to customize them in a guided, context-specific manner.
Organizations often build brand portals on top of DAM systems, incorporating brand guidelines as static PDFs or hardcoded elements that are hard to maintain and scale.
Without a built-for-purpose brand portal that supports the corporate brand team and provides dedicated spaces for different departments to ensure visibility and governance, organizations risk brand inconsistency, such as the use of off-brand or unlicensed images.
This is especially important for organizations with multiple teams working across different channels and regions, where maintaining brand consistency is crucial.
While a DAM efficiently stores and organizes digital assets, it lacks the context, collaboration features, and consistency controls that a brand portal offers to ensure cohesive brand representation. DAM systems, designed for deep integration across the organization, often overlook casual users who simply need approved assets. Integrating your DAM with a brand portal lets you flow a subset of relevant assets into a more accessible space, even for the most tech-novice users.
Why do I need a brand portal when I already have a DAM?
Traditional DAM systems excel at managing asset workflows that support complex business processes. However, they often fall short in delivering a brand-focused experience, particularly around easy-to-consume brand components, supporting marketing teams in brand development, digitizing brand guidelines, and bridging the brand literacy gap between brand guardians and the wider organization:
- Centralization and digitization of guidelines: A brand portal creates a single, dynamic source for various guidelines—from visual identity to campaign toolkits and employer branding. This simplifies access and boosts consistency, something traditional DAM systems struggle to achieve.
- Improved context for asset discovery: Brand portals help users find and apply the right assets by providing context that DAM systems often lack, improving adoption and usability.
- Enterprise templating solution: A brand portal offers advanced templating for localization and personalization, helping teams produce brand-aligned content efficiently without costly integrations.
How do these two systems work better together?
There are specific situations where it makes sense to maintain both a legacy DAM and a brand portal:
- Legacy DAM integrated with downstream systems: The DAM is deeply embedded within a broader technology ecosystem that includes CMS, PIM, DXPs, and custom solutions. This level of integration makes immediate replacement difficult and helps maintain continuity across existing workflows, CDN links, and connected systems.
- Different ownership and budget constraints: The legacy DAM might be owned by another department, and replacing it would be challenging. Integrating a brand portal enables improved governance and user experience without disruption.
- Distributed asset management needs: Large organizations often need both centralized asset governance and localized brand activation. A legacy DAM can serve as a centralized repository, while a brand portal allows regional teams to adapt and personalize content within set guidelines, ensuring both consistency and flexibility.
Setting up a DAM ecosystem
A flexible, collaborative approach to asset management is key for modern organizations. When considering DAM integration, organizations that typically benefit include:
- Companies with established DAM systems (e.g., AEM, Sitecore, OpenText, or Aprimo) looking to improve usability and asset distribution.
- IT departments that need to maintain strict governance over asset storage while granting local teams autonomy in managing creative assets.
- Organizations aiming to enhance user adoption by improving asset visibility and searchability—without requiring a complete DAM system overhaul.
When is DAM integration the right choice?
Determining whether to integrate or replace a DAM starts with assessing how embedded it is within the organization’s digital experience landscape. If the DAM is tightly integrated into downstream systems such as CMS platforms, DXPs, or broader IT initiatives like content supply chains, then integration is typically the most practical and least disruptive path.
Equally important is team ownership. If the same team owns both the DAM and the brand portal and they are aligned on brand and content strategy, a replacement often makes sense, especially if the existing DAM no longer meets usability or scalability needs. In cases where the DAM is owned by a separate team, the decision hinges on satisfaction with the system and openness to consolidation. If the system is working well and is deeply integrated, integration is preferred. However, if the team is seeking simplification or improved performance, replacement remains a viable option.
A brand portal can integrate with existing DAMs in multiple ways to address diverse business needs:
- Sync selected assets from the Enterprise DAM to the brand portal: Automatically push assets from your Enterprise DAM to the brand portal. This allows the DAM to continue to be the source of truth for your assets while brand assets are made available in the portal for use in guidelines, templates, or download through the portal’s UI. Traditional DAM systems are typically not user-friendly for casual end users, and increased asset consumption is often seen when integrating with a brand portal.
- Sync selected assets from the brand portal to the Enterprise DAM: Automatically push assets from the brand portal to your Enterprise DAM. This is ideal when the brand portal is used for asset creation or curation, and the final versions need to be stored centrally.
- Bi-directional sync: Automatically sync metadata from your Enterprise DAM to the brand portal, while assets flow from the brand portal back to the Enterprise DAM. This is ideal when your DAM holds the global metadata structure, but asset creation happens in the brand portal. You can also sync source assets from the DAM to the portal for use in templates, with output files synced back to the DAM. To avoid infinite sync loops, ensure a clear information architecture.
Key considerations before integrating
When considering integration, it’s important to address a few key questions:
- What’s the purpose of each system?
- Which system is the source of truth?
- Is bi-directional sync required?
- Who manages the assets and metadata?
- What’s the metadata strategy?
- What data is needed in the secondary system?
Integration alternatives: Replacing your current DAM
For organizations looking to replace their DAM, many brand portals offer migration services—whether from systems like Bynder, Google Drive, or Dropbox. Providers can support manual migration or work with you to automate the process, ensuring that all assets and metadata are transferred.
A brand portal solution, such as Frontify, can integrate with your existing DAM system when needed. This ensures IT requirements are met while empowering marketing teams to manage and use brand assets effectively. Whether your goal is to enhance usability, manage metadata centrally, or provide localized asset access, integrating a brand portal with your DAM offers a flexible, efficient solution.
