Choosing the right DAM is a brand operations decision, not just a technological one. It affects how your teams create content, enforce brand standards, and collaborate across regions and functions.
A digital asset management RFP (request for proposal) is a formal document organizations use to request information from vendors when comparing DAM platforms. It gives vendors the context they need to propose a relevant solution and gives your team a consistent framework for comparing responses side by side. This guide explains what to include in a DAM RFP and how to use it to run a rigorous vendor evaluation.
When organizations should create a DAM RFP
An RFP is most valuable when the decision is complex enough to warrant structured evaluation — which is almost always the case with enterprise DAM. A few situations where an RFP is particularly useful include:
You're replacing a legacy system. When you're migrating away from an existing platform, an RFP forces you to document what wasn't working — whether that's poor search functionality, limited permissions, or no integration with your creative tools — and evaluate vendors against those specific gaps.
You're scaling brand operations across regions. Multi-region rollouts introduce complex requirements: market-specific usage rights, language variants, region-specific approval workflows. A global consumer brand expanding into five new markets, for example, needs to know upfront whether a platform can handle regional asset libraries and localized permissions.
You're centralizing assets across multiple brands or business units. An RFP gives you a structured way to ask vendors exactly how they handle multi-brand environments. A company managing four distinct brands, each with its own guidelines and creative teams, needs clear separation of assets and workflows within a single system, not a workaround.
Multiple stakeholders need to align on the decision. An RFP gives marketing, IT, and procurement a shared structure for evaluating DAM tools that keeps the process objective. Without it, decisions tend to stall on competing priorities — IT wants security certifications, marketing wants the platform with the best UX, and procurement wants the lowest price — with no structure for weighing those factors against each other.
Sections every DAM RFP should include
Company background and project goals
This section provides the background information and context for everything that follows. Vendors need to understand who you are before they can propose a solution that fits. For example, a 200-person single-brand company and a 1,000-person multi-brand enterprise operating across six regions have fundamentally different DAM needs.
Cover the basics about your organization: company size, industry, number of brands, and geographic footprint. Then get specific about your asset environment — roughly how many assets you manage, what types (images, video, documents, templates), and how many people need access, including external partners and agencies.
Finally, articulate the business problem you're trying to solve. What's broken or insufficient about your current setup? What does success look like 12 months after implementation?
Functional requirements
Functional requirements cover the core capabilities your DAM needs to have. Frame these requirements in terms of what your organization needs to accomplish, rather than an exhaustive feature checklist.
Some key areas to cover include:
Asset storage and organization. Don't ask whether the platform supports folders and collections — that's table stakes. Instead, assess whether the DAM's organization model can reflect how your teams actually think about assets. If your marketing team organizes work by campaign, your regional teams by market, and your brand team by asset type, your RFP should ask vendors to explain how their organizational model would map to that specific structure, not just describe it in the abstract.
Metadata and taxonomy. Ask vendors to describe how their platform supports custom metadata schemas, and whether fields can be made mandatory at upload. If your library is large or growing fast, also ask whether AI-assisted tagging is available to reduce the manual burden of keeping metadata accurate at scale.
Search and discoverability. Assess how easy it is for users to find files within the DAM. Think about what happens when a regional marketing manager needs a product image approved for their market, or a designer needs the latest version of a campaign visual with specific dimensions. Can they find it in your DAM in under a minute, without asking anyone? Look beyond basic keyword search to understand whether the platform supports filtering by custom fields, natural language queries, and visual search.
Version control. For teams collaborating across multiple rounds of revisions, clear version history prevents the wrong asset from making it into a campaign, a pitch, or a product launch. Ask vendors if users can see a side-by-side comparison of asset versions, and what happens to assets currently in active use when a new version is uploaded.
Permissions and governance. Access controls should reflect the way your organization operates — who needs to see what, and under what conditions. A global brand team may need full access to all assets, while regional teams should only see content approved for their market, and external agencies may need time-limited access to a specific campaign library. Ask vendors how granular their permissions model is, and whether it can easily accommodate role-based, geographic, and time-limited access.
Brand management capabilities
Organizations that treat brand management as an afterthought in their RFP often discover post-purchase that their platform can't support governance at scale — by which point switching costs are significant. Avoid that mistake by giving brand management its own dedicated section in your RFP, covering:
Brand guidelines. Ask vendors whether brand guidelines live directly within the platform. When guidelines live alongside assets, embedded on template pages, or surfaced at the point of use, team members see them as part of their normal workflow. But if guidelines exist as a separate PDF that users have to actively seek out, most won't bother, resulting in off-brand work because the right information wasn't there at the right time.
Brand portals. For organizations with distributed teams or external partners, brand portals provide a controlled environment where stakeholders can access the assets and guidance they need. Ask vendors how portals are structured, how access is managed, and how easy it is to maintain them as your brand evolves. A global company onboarding a new agency in a new market shouldn't require weeks of administrative work to give them access to the right materials.
Template management. When regional marketers, sales teams, and HR can independently create on-brand materials without involving a designer, your brand team spends less time on reactive production and more time on strategic work. Ask vendors how templates are created, what elements can be locked versus customized, and how templates connect to your approved asset library.
Rights management and compliance
If your organization works with licensed imagery, model releases, sponsored content, or assets created by external contributors, rights management isn't optional — it's a legal and financial risk you need the DAM to actively manage. This is one of the areas where DAM platforms vary most, and the gaps tend to surface only after you've migrated. It's worth scrutinizing upfront.
Rights metadata. Ask vendors how rights information is captured against assets — license type, usage restrictions, geographic scope, expiry dates, attribution requirements, model and property releases. Can these fields be made mandatory at upload, and can they trigger automated actions when conditions are met?
Expiry and takedown automation. For organizations using stock imagery, sponsored content, or talent with licensing windows, expiry management is critical. Ask vendors what happens when an asset's rights expire — is the asset hidden, archived, or flagged? Are users notified before expiry? Can the platform prevent expired assets from being downloaded or shared?
Compliance for regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, and pharma teams often need additional audit capabilities — full activity logs, retention policies, watermarking, and proof of approval for compliance review. Ask vendors how the platform supports your specific regulatory environment, and whether they can provide audit trails on demand.
Brand consistency monitoring. As AI-generated content and external creators put more brand assets into the world, some platforms now offer monitoring capabilities to spot off-brand or unauthorized usage. If this is a growing concern for your organization, ask vendors what tools they provide for monitoring brand usage in the wild.
Collaboration and workflow management
A DAM that creates friction in the review and approval process will slow your team down rather than enable them to collaborate more effectively. This section of your RFP should evaluate how well a platform supports the way creative work moves through your organization:
Approval workflows. Ask vendors how approval processes are structured. Can workflows be customized to reflect your governance model, such as routing assets to a global brand owner before regional sign-off, or requiring legal review for certain asset types? Rigid, one-size-fits-all workflows are a common source of frustration, so it's worth testing this before you commit to a platform.
Asset review and feedback. How do stakeholders provide feedback on assets within the platform? Look for features like in-context commenting and annotation, which keep feedback tied to specific assets and eliminate the back-and-forth of emails and chat threads. Ask vendors how feedback is tracked, resolved, and archived.
External collaboration. Most creative workflows involve people outside your organization — agencies, freelancers, regional partners. Ask vendors how external collaborators are onboarded, what level of access they can be granted, and how that access is managed and revoked.
Integrations and technical requirements
A DAM needs to fit into the broader technology ecosystem your teams already rely on. The core question this section should answer is whether the platform will integrate into how your organization works, or if you'll have to rebuild workflows around it.
Here are some specific requirements to cover in your RFP:
Creative tool integrations. Ask vendors about integrations with the creative tools your teams use, like Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Canva. Look specifically for native integrations which bring full DAM functionality directly into the creative tool, rather than plugin-based integrations which typically offer limited functionality and require ongoing maintenance to keep working.
CMS and marketing tool integrations. Ask vendors how their platform connects with your content management system, marketing automation tools, and any other platforms your marketing team uses to publish and distribute content. During a demo, get them to show a live workflow from asset approval in the DAM through to publication in the CMS. The goal is to understand whether approved assets can flow directly into your publishing workflow, or whether teams will always need to download and re-upload files.
API capabilities. For organizations with more complex technical requirements or bespoke integrations, ask vendors about the depth and flexibility of their API. A well-documented, open API matters most for large enterprises that need the DAM to connect with custom-built systems or data pipelines that aren't covered by off-the-shelf integrations.
Single sign-on (SSO). Ask vendors which identity providers they support and how SSO is implemented, particularly if your organization uses different identity management systems across regions.
AI and automation
The DAM market is changing fast, and AI is now a core part of how leading platforms deliver value — not a bolt-on feature. The right questions in this section will help you separate vendors with a coherent AI strategy from those layering basic auto-tagging on top of an aging platform.
AI-assisted metadata and tagging. Ask vendors how AI is used to enrich assets at upload — auto-tagging, image recognition, transcript generation for video, smart cropping for renditions. The larger your library grows, the more these capabilities determine whether assets stay findable.
Search and discovery powered by AI. Beyond keyword search, ask vendors whether their platform supports semantic search, visual search, or natural language queries ("show me all Q3 product shots taken outdoors"). For large or visually rich libraries, this often becomes the primary way users find what they need.
Generative AI workflows. Ask vendors how their platform supports generative AI use cases — whether that's creating asset variations, generating localized content, or producing on-brand creative at scale. Crucially, ask how brand guidelines are enforced when assets feed into AI tools, so AI-generated work stays consistent with your brand standards.
AI agent and MCP support. The next wave of AI tooling involves agents that can read and act on brand data directly — through protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol). Ask vendors whether their platform exposes assets, guidelines, and templates to AI agents in a structured way, and what their roadmap looks like for AI-native integrations. This is where modern brand operations are heading: AI tools that pull directly from a single source of brand truth, rather than working from outdated copies scattered across teams.
Vendor AI roadmap. Most DAM vendors are scrambling to add AI features. Ask each one to articulate their AI strategy clearly — what's live, what's coming in the next 12 months, and what's principle-led versus reactive. Vendors who can answer this confidently typically have a more durable approach than those bolting features on under competitive pressure.
Analytics and reporting
A DAM holds an enormous amount of data about how your content gets used, but only some platforms surface it in a way that's actually useful. Without good analytics, you can't justify the investment to leadership, identify which assets are driving results, or spot the gaps where teams are creating duplicate work.
Asset usage analytics. Ask vendors what data is captured on asset usage — downloads, shares, embeds, views — and how it's aggregated by asset, campaign, region, or user. The goal is to be able to answer questions like "which assets did our APAC team use last quarter?" or "which campaign visuals are performing in market?" without exporting data into a separate tool.
User and adoption metrics. As a DAM administrator, you need visibility into how the platform is actually being used: who's logging in, who's contributing assets, where adoption has stalled. Ask vendors how user activity is reported and whether you can see adoption broken down by team, region, or external partner.
Content performance reporting. For organizations that want to connect DAM data to broader marketing performance, ask whether the platform supports integrations with analytics tools or marketing platforms. Can usage data flow into your BI stack? Can the DAM correlate asset usage with campaign performance metrics from other systems?
Custom and exec-level reporting. Brand and marketing leaders often need executive-ready reports — quarterly content output, brand compliance metrics, ROI of the DAM investment. Ask vendors what reporting templates exist out of the box, how reports can be customized, and whether scheduled reports can be sent automatically to stakeholders.
Scalability and security
A DAM platform needs to work for your organization not just today, but as you expand into new markets, add brands, or onboard more teams. So your RFP should help you understand whether the platform will scale with you, and how it protects your data.
Assess how platforms perform as libraries grow into the hundreds of thousands of files and user bases expand across regions, and get a reference customer at a similar scale to your organization. Ask that customer two or three specific questions directly — such as how search performance has held up as their library grew, or how they handled adding new regional teams to the permissions model.
On security and compliance, cover encryption standards for data in transit and at rest, two-factor authentication, and security certifications — SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are the benchmarks to look for. If your organization operates in regulated industries or across multiple jurisdictions, ask vendors about your specific compliance requirements: how does the platform support data residency requirements or any industry-specific regulations relevant to your business?
Migration and data import
A DAM migration is often the longest, most resource-intensive part of the rollout. Underestimating it leads to slipped timelines, lost metadata, and resistance from teams who can't find assets they used to know exactly where to find. Use this section of the RFP to surface the realities of migration before you commit.
Asset migration. Ask vendors how assets are migrated from your existing system, what file integrity checks are performed, and what gets preserved versus rebuilt. Folder structures, version histories, custom metadata schemas, asset relationships, and approval status often need to come across — not just the files themselves.
Metadata mapping. Your current taxonomy was probably built up over years and doesn't always map cleanly to a new system's data model. Ask vendors how they handle metadata mapping, whether they offer tools or services to clean up taxonomy during migration, and how custom fields are recreated.
Permissions and access. If your current platform has hundreds of permission groups or complex rights structures, those don't always transfer cleanly. Ask vendors how user roles, group memberships, and asset-level permissions are migrated, and what manual reconfiguration to expect.
Migration support. Ask whether migration is included in the implementation package or priced separately. Get specifics on the level of hands-on support — whether you're working with a dedicated migration specialist, doing self-serve with documentation, or somewhere in between. For large libraries (100K+ assets), find out how the vendor phases the migration to avoid overwhelming your teams or leaving them without access during cutover.
Pricing and implementation
Your RFP should help you understand how much the DAM platform will cost, and what the implementation process involves.
Ask vendors to provide a clear breakdown of their pricing model — whether that's based on number of users, storage volume, or a combination — along with what's included at each tier and what carries an additional cost. For example, templates, additional asset libraries, advanced analytics, and premium support are features that sometimes cost extra.
Beyond pricing, ask for a realistic onboarding timeline based on your organization's size and complexity. Get vendors to specify what implementation support is included, and how much internal resource you should expect to commit during the setup phase.
Finally, ask about the post-implementation support model — whether customer success is included or an add-on, and how business-critical issues are handled.
Vendor stability and roadmap
A DAM is a multi-year commitment, often involving deep integrations and significant change management. Choosing a vendor who'll be acquired, sunsetted, or stuck on an aging platform creates real risk. Use this section of the RFP to evaluate the company behind the product, not just the product itself.
Company background. Ask vendors about their company size, ownership structure, financial health, and customer base. Understanding whether you're working with a venture-backed startup, an established public company, or a private equity-owned platform helps you set the right expectations around stability, pricing changes, and product investment.
Customer references and analyst recognition. Ask for reference customers at a similar scale and industry to your organization, and request that you can speak with them directly. Look for analyst recognition from Forrester, Gartner, or G2 — not because rankings are decisive, but because they're a useful signal of market standing and customer satisfaction at scale.
Product roadmap. Ask vendors to walk you through their public roadmap and how customer input shapes priorities. Vague roadmaps or vendors unwilling to share specifics are a red flag. You're investing in where the platform is going, not just where it is today.
Release cadence and platform investment. How often does the vendor ship new features? How is the platform architected to keep up with shifts in the broader content and AI landscape? A vendor whose last major architectural update was years ago is likely to fall further behind as buyer expectations evolve.
How to evaluate DAM vendors using an RFP
Once vendor responses come in, you need a structured way to evaluate them. Otherwise the process defaults to gut feeling, internal politics, or whichever vendor gave the most compelling demo. This section will help you develop a practical evaluation framework you can apply as responses arrive.
Define evaluation criteria early
Evaluation criteria should be agreed upon by your cross-functional team before the RFP goes out. If you wait until after, you risk unconsciously weighting criteria in favor of whichever vendor impressed you most, which defeats the purpose of a structured process.
The most effective way to define criteria is to start with the pain points that triggered the DAM evaluation in the first place. Map those directly to your must-have requirements. For example, if your organization initiated this process because brand inconsistency across regions was creating compliance risk, then brand governance capabilities are a must-have. If the primary driver was that creative teams were spending too much time hunting for assets, then search functionality and metadata quality belong at the top of your scoring framework.
Once must-haves are established, work through the remaining requirements and assign them to a second tier — important but not deal-breaking. This two-tier structure gives you a clear basis for eliminating vendors who can't meet your core requirements early.
Involve cross-functional stakeholders
DAM selection decisions that are driven by a single team tend to optimize for that team's priorities at the expense of everyone else's. Get the right people involved early to prevent this.
Different stakeholders each have a unique perspective they bring to the evaluation process. Marketing and brand teams are best placed to assess whether the platform supports brand governance, creative workflows, and asset organization at the scale your organization requires. IT and security teams should evaluate technical architecture, integration depth, SSO compatibility, and the vendor's security certifications and compliance posture. Procurement brings a different lens again — scrutinizing pricing models, contract terms, and the total cost of ownership.
Creative teams are often overlooked in enterprise procurement, but as the heaviest day-to-day users of a DAM, their input is essential to achieving the adoption levels that justify the investment.
Compare vendors using a scoring framework
A scoring framework helps multiple stakeholders evaluate different aspects of vendor responses. Without one, the final decision often comes down to whoever argues most persuasively in the room rather than which platform is genuinely the best fit.
To create a framework, take the evaluation criteria you defined before issuing the RFP, assign a weight to each based on its importance to your organization, and score each vendor against those criteria once responses come in. A simple example might look like this:
The weighted scores give you a structured basis for comparison that reflects your organization's actual priorities. They also make it easier to have productive conversations when stakeholders disagree — the discussion shifts from "I preferred vendor B" to "vendor B scored highest on integration depth, which we weighted at 20%, but fell short on brand governance, which we weighted at 25%."
When using your scoring framework, keep separate scores for each stage of the buying process. Score vendor responses before you see demos, and score demos before you enter commercial negotiations.
Modern DAM platforms support brand operations
Global teams, distributed agency networks, and an ever-expanding range of channels and formats mean that modern DAM platforms support the entire ecosystem of people, processes, and content that keeps a brand operating consistently at scale.
The DAMs best suited to modern brand operations are the ones that connect asset management to the broader brand workflow — housing brand guidelines alongside assets, enabling scalable content creation through templates, supporting cross-functional collaboration, and giving distributed teams governed access to everything they need through brand portals.
Frontify is built around this approach. Rather than treating DAM as a standalone repository, Frontify unifies digital asset management, brand guidelines, templates, and collaborative workflows into a single platform — giving brand and marketing teams the infrastructure to manage brand operations at scale.
