Avoid These 8 Common Mistakes with Digital Rights Management

As digital marketing channels have expanded, the digital content being generated to feed them has grown exponentially. With libraries of hundreds, thousands—and even hundreds of thousands—of digital assets, brands are investing in sophisticated platforms to manage them. In fact, the DAM market is projected to more than triple over the next eight years. But with the growing content volumes, complexity, formats, and channels, there is a critical piece that is often missing from a complete DAM strategy: digital rights management (DRM). 

In this article, we cover eight common digital rights management challenges and offer recommendations on how to overcome them. But first, let’s define what DRM is.

Digital assets are any form of digital content that is stored, shared, and even created in a digital environment. For our purposes, we are referring to digital media assets, including photos, illustrations, graphics, videos, and music, as well as compound assets that include various media types. The intellectual property rights or copyrights are typically owned and retained by the creator(s), while specific usage rights might be licensed to others. If these assets are used outside those terms, it is copyright infringement. 

Digital rights management involves ensuring that a brand’s use of licensed digital assets in its marketing and promotional efforts is compliant with the usage terms of the copyright holders.

1. Recording Rights Upfront

A common pitfall is the failure to catalog your rights for an asset at acquisition. This leaves teams with insufficient data to properly approve assets for distribution, and attempting to gather rights data after the fact can be time consuming and error prone. 

Additionally, when working with agencies, you may receive only the final creative content without the individual asset elements and associated agreements. This limited visibility into usage rights increases risk for the brand when publishing the content and hinders the ability to reuse it confidently.

Establishing a standardized process to capture the content provider’s asset rights at ingestion will save time and headaches. Furthermore, assigning a responsible party will increase the likelihood that standardized processes are followed and ensure all rights are recorded.

2. Creating a Structured Taxonomy

Licensed assets are typically bound by exclusions and usage restrictions, which may include:

• Expiration dates
• Channel restrictions
• Format limitations
• Regional boundaries
• Talent agreement constraints

Without a well-structured rights taxonomy, determining whether usage is compliant with various terms can be difficult. Furthermore, many assets are not just singular items but “compound IP,” comprised of multiple items forming one new asset. In these cases, multiples of these usage terms may apply, making compliance even more complex.

Establishing a flexible and extensible model which allows you to keep track of a host of usage terms for different types of digital files is important for scalability.

3. Mending Siloed Processes

Often, assets are used by different departments, divisions, or subsidiaries, both inside and outside the organization. Unfortunately, they may have different processes for storing and clearing assets along with different rights taxonomies. They may even be using different systems. This leads to inefficiencies and exposes brands to a greater risk of misuse.

Developing a governance strategy to manage content globally and increase rights visibility across the ecosystem will eliminate duplicate costs and efforts, improve overall efficiency, and protect your brand.

4. Where to Store Rights

As the volume and complexity of digital assets continues to increase, organizations are faced with the challenge of where to store them. Historically, many companies have used their DAM metadata fields to store rights but are finding that this approach just isn’t scalable. DAM metadata was simply not built to handle complex rights or contract data. Multiple attributes, restrictions, and multipart IP compositions are beyond the constraints of a DAM’s search and filter capabilities.

Investing in a system built to store dynamic, granular, and hierarchical rights data will boost both efficiency and compliance.

5. Centralized Storage and Access

Marketing departments frequently struggle with organizing, centralizing, and sharing their digital assets efficiently – particularly across brands, agencies, divisions, or geographies. Without a unified system, teams often rely on multiple storage locations or individual devices, which leads to duplicated efforts, inconsistent branding, and difficulty tracking asset usage rights. This fragmentation not only slows down workflows but also creates barriers to collaboration, as team members lack easy access to the latest, approved versions of creative materials. As a result, marketing teams miss opportunities to streamline content creation, ensure brand consistency, and maximize the value of their digital assets across campaigns and channels.

Leveraging a single, centralized cloud platform to standardize asset and rights data and provide a single point of access for users to find and clear assets will increase brand nimbleness.

6. Enabling Asset Rights Check

Making sure you have a green light to use digital assets before rolling out a campaign will save time and money on rework as well as protect your brand from penalties of misuse should the campaign make it to production. A few questions to ask yourself: Are your creative and marketing teams able to access the full range of usage terms in one centralized location? What about external agencies? Do they have access to that information? 

Look at your current process for leveraging licensed content and ensure that rights checking is part of the workflow. Adding in a rights verification step empowers users to create with confidence and improves efficiency by avoiding content rework.

7. Integrating Rights Management with Ancillary Systems

Implementing rights management processes and tools that seamlessly integrate with existing systems across your marketing and sales workflow, including your DAM, creative tools, and PIM, is key. Additionally, automating the flow of rights data across systems to maintain data integrity and avoid duplication, errors, and manual input will lead to more seamless and efficient processes.

As you build your strategy to protect your digital content, make sure the tools you choose are open and extensible.

8. Planning for the Future

When technology investments are being planned or budgets allocated, DRM is often deferred in favor of more immediate creative or marketing goals. However, making DRM a priority from the start can deliver substantial long-term benefits, saving millions in potential licensing fees and legal costs and increasing production efficiency by over 50%. As digital assets grow in both volume and complexity, managing usage rights retroactively becomes a challenging and risky endeavor. When DRM is an afterthought, companies may inadvertently overlook compliance requirements, leading to costly licensing violations, legal challenges, and reputational damage.

Proactively implementing DRM enables companies to track and enforce usage rights consistently, ensuring assets are always used in compliance with licenses and contracts. Furthermore, a well-planned DRM strategy facilitates smoother asset reuse, allowing marketing and creative teams to confidently repurpose content without infringing on rights. By planning for DRM from the outset, organizations not only protect their assets and mitigate risks but also enhance operational efficiency, ultimately setting the stage for sustainable growth and compliance.

FADEL takes an integrative approach to digital rights management with products that are designed to seamlessly connect and communicate with leading DAMs, creative tools, and PIMs. Our cloud-based digital rights management solutions streamline workflows across marketing teams, content creators, rights managers, content consumers, and compliance managers with tools that support the unique responsibilities of each role.

Ensuring rights are properly stored and cleared is a key component of digital asset management. FADEL Brand Vision incorporates the best of both worlds – a centralized asset repository with native digital rights management functionality, providing an organized, accessible platform to truly manage assets from end to end. 

For those who already have an established DAM, FADEL’s Rights Cloud Connectors integrate with leading DAMs, including Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Bynder, and Acquia. Users can clear asset rights directly from their DAM, saving time and eliminating the learning curve of another system.

FADEL Brand Vision – Rights Cloud helps companies prevent unauthorized use of assets with built-in digital rights management capabilities. Unified views show talent profiles, contractual terms, asset availability, and omnichannel usage for better decision making. With Rights Cloud, brands:

• Speed content production and increase efficiencies with dashboard views of available assets
• Save unnecessary costs by maximizing content reuse with visibility into which assets in your library match the usage parameters of your campaign
• Prevent unauthorized use of assets, protecting your brand from lawsuits, penalties, rework, and negative press

In addition to seamless integration with DAMs, Rights Cloud connects to a host of creative tools, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Figma. 

FADEL’s digital rights management solutions also support workflow and business process automation across the content lifecycle. By empowering collaboration between team members from pre-production through distribution, innovative campaigns can be brought to market faster. Content approval and distribution proceed seamlessly and there is no need to contact various departments to chase down rights information.

In addition to the ever-increasing size of brand asset libraries, mergers and acquisitions can increase a company’s asset volume exponentially. FADEL’s cloud-based architecture ensures that solutions scale with business growth, however steady or abrupt that may be. Expand market reach and launch new campaigns with the assurance that your platform is up to the task.

Rights Cloud supports data-driven decision making to optimize brand strategy. Along with visibility into upcoming expirations and violations, Rights Cloud users can track key trends with insights into when and where assets are being used. These can be cross-referenced with campaign performance to determine which assets are proving to be most effective in achieving KPIs and inform strategies around which content to reuse or extend, optimizing costs.

Ultimately, an end-to-end process that provides rights visibility, automation, and management throughout the entire asset lifecycle, from acquisition to distribution, is the target to aim for. FADEL’s products even extend rights management post distribution with our content tracking capabilities. 

Contact FADEL’s experts today to find out how you can build rights management into your current systems and processes.