TL;DR
Most teams already have a DAM, but they still struggle with five persistent issues:
- Search that doesn’t work
- Fragmented systems
- Video bottlenecks
- Rising rights needs
- Integrations that break as they scale
These patterns point to a larger shift: organizations need content orchestration, not just storage.
Every sales call tells a story. When you listen across a full year of discovery calls, those stories start to line up. Patterns emerge. Pain points repeat across industries and team structures. After hundreds of conversations, the themes become impossible to ignore.
We reviewed a full year of notes from discussions with marketing leaders, creative operations teams, IT directors, archivists, product owners, communications departments, and members of the C-suite. More than 90 percent of these teams already had a DAM, and many were managing more than one.
We quickly learned, most organizations are not shopping for their first DAM. They are trying to replace the one they bought.
Across all of these calls, five challenges surfaced again and again. These issues aren’t new, yet they persist even in organizations that already invested in DAM. In many cases the root cause is because the system was chosen quickly to solve the problems for one team, not taking into account how the tool could be leveraged for other teams.
Below is a closer look at the issues teams face today, the root causes behind them, and what these patterns tell us about the state of modern content operations.
The list is ordered by how often these issues came up on calls.
We also built a short DAM health assessment based on these patterns. It gives you a quick read on where your system stands today and offers next steps and resources to help you strengthen the areas that matter most. Take the quiz.
1. Search is broken for most teams
What we heard
Search came up in almost every conversation. Teams told us they cannot find assets across buckets, cloud storage, or legacy systems. Video is especially hard to find because tagging rarely captures what happens at the frame or scene level, leaving critical visual detail unsearchable. Tagging models never scaled. Some teams already use AI tagging, but it stops at generic labels and misses any specificity around their brand, products, and campaigns.
Impact on the organization
- Teams waste hours searching for content
- Campaigns slow down
- Legal reviews take longer
- Editors re-create footage they already have
- Creative teams repurchase stock content
- No shared view of what exists or where it lives
Why this is happening
Search has changed. Modern teams need:
- Global search in different languages
- Natural language or conversational search
- Scene, speech, and concept search for video
- Brand-specific and product-aware metadata
- AI that enriches metadata, not replaces governance
Many DAMs were never designed for global, AI-powered discovery. Even those with “AI tagging” often apply stock-photo-style labels, not enterprise metadata or product context.
The result is simple. Even organizations that bought a DAM to fix search are still struggling with search.
Is your team struggling to find what it needs? Learn more about how AI can help your teams find what they’re looking for.
2. Fragmented systems are slowing everything down
What we heard
Teams said they are juggling legacy servers, SharePoint folders, cloud buckets, department-owned DAMs, bespoke MAMs, and “temporary” storage that turned permanent. Content lives everywhere. Systems do not talk to each other. Every team has its own way of working.
Impact on the organization
- Work slows at every stage
- Creative teams recreate assets that already exist
- Marketing spends hours each week searching across systems
- IT spends time maintaining brittle infrastructure
- No one trusts what is current, approved, or final
Why this is happening
Most organizations did not start with an enterprise content strategy. They solved local problems fast. One team needed storage for photos, so they bought a lightweight DAM. Another needed video, so they implemented a MAM. Another built campaign folders in SharePoint.
These choices brought quick wins, not long-term alignment. Now the cracks are showing.
Most organizations already have a DAM, often several, but none were chosen to support the full content lifecycle at scale.
If your DAM was built from quick fixes, read our guide on how to rebuild the right way. Download our guide.
3. Video has become the new pain point
What we heard
Video is now central to marketing, brand, and content operations. Most DAMs still treat it as a file type, not a workflow. Teams told us they have no proxies, manage footage outside the DAM, and rely on MAMs that still do not support useful search. They cannot transcode, annotate, or review in one place. Editors spend time switching across tools.
Impact on the organization
- Editors work inefficiently
- Footage gets lost or underused
- Review cycles slow down
- Teams rely on drives or network folders
- Production and marketing stay disconnected
Why this is happening
DAMs were created for images. MAMs were built for broadcast. Neither was designed for the hybrid world teams now live in.
Teams do not just want to store video. They want to:
- View it
- Comment on it
- Clip and edit
- Review it
- Mark moments
- Search within it
- Approve it
- Distribute it
The rise of video has exposed how unprepared most DAM and MAM vendors are for the modern content lifecycle. They focus on transcoding and delivery, not on managing the real-world storage demands of growing libraries. Without smart storage tiers, teams end up treating every file the same, no matter its usage, value, or rights. Costs go up. Access gets harder. And the system that’s supposed to help ends up in the way.
If video is slowing your team down, read our guide: How to Eliminate Silos and Streamline Video Workflows, which shows how to bring review, search, and collaboration into one system, so every team can move faster.
4. Rights management and compliance are becoming urgent
What we heard
Rights came up constantly, and not only from legal teams. Organizations told us:
- “We do not know what is approved or for what channels.”
- “We can’t track talent and model rights.”
- “We cannot track expirations.”
- “We rely on email for UGC permissions.”
- “We need HIPAA or GDPR controls.”
- “We worry about rights around AI and asset variations.”
Impact on the organization
- Legal and regulatory risk
- Brand risk
- Slow campaign approvals
- Uncertainty across teams
- No reliable audit history
Why this is happening
Rights are getting more complex:
- Multi-region distribution
- UGC licensing
- Model and location releases
- AI content rights and restrictions
- Data privacy and compliance frameworks
Most DAMs treat rights as metadata, something you store, not something the system enforces. That’s why so many teams end up buying separate rights management tools and spending time (and budget) on custom integrations.
But rights should be built in. A modern DAM enforces usage, licensing, and approvals at every step, so teams don’t have to chase them down later.
If rights and approvals feel messy, this guide shows how to fix them. Read How to Implement DRM in Your DAM.
5. Integrations are no longer optional
What we heard
Teams want their DAM to power the rest of the content stack:
- CMS publishing
- Editing and production tools
- Creative environments
- Collaboration systems
- Marketing platforms
- Studio systems
- Analytics and reporting
Many DAMs were not built as integration platforms. They rely on brittle scripts, limited connectors, or one-off custom projects.
Impact on the organization
- Manual work multiplies
- Workflows break
- Assets live outside the DAM
- IT becomes a bottleneck
- Campaigns slow down
Why this is happening
The content stack is evolving fast. Teams want orchestration, automation, and connected workflows. They do not want another repository. They want a system that sits at the center of their content ecosystem.
If your DAM struggles to power the rest of your stack, this guide shows how to fix it. Download How to Implement a DAM That Powers Your Tech Stack.
The bigger picture: why these pain points are happening now
Across industries, several forces are converging:
- Content volume is exploding
- Video is becoming central
- Rights and compliance are more complex
- File formats are multiplying
- Teams are distributed across regions and business units
- Integrations are essential to how work gets done
- Organizations expect tools to adapt quickly
Legacy DAMs were not built for this reality. Departmental tools were not designed to scale. Quick wins from early DAM purchases have turned into long-term obstacles. When a DAM cannot support these needs, teams work around it. They move assets to drives and desktops. They recreate work. They adopt new tools to fill gaps the DAM cannot cover. The system becomes something people avoid rather than rely on.
Organizations are no longer looking for a place to store assets. They are looking for a content orchestration platform.
Why our customers told us they chose Orange Logic
We didn’t just analyze pain points from discovery calls. We also reviewed every reason we heard for why organizations picked Orange Logic as their DAM solution in 2025. The themes were almost a mirror image of what teams told us in their challenges.
Here are the reasons they gave:
- They struggled with fragmented systems → Teams told us Orange Logic finally consolidated their tools into one platform.
- They could not find assets → Search accuracy improved immediately, giving users faster, more reliable results.
- Their DAM could not scale → Customers saw a platform that could grow with their teams, brands, and regions.
- Their teams needed real video support → Video review, search, and collaboration became part of their everyday workflows, not a separate process.
- They faced rights and compliance pressures → Governance became clearer and easier to manage across teams and markets.
- Their tech stack was disconnected → Integrations worked the way they expected, helping the DAM sit at the center of their content ecosystem.
Teams do not choose Orange Logic because we check DAM boxes. They choose us because we solve the issues that slow real work down.
We help organizations:
- Replace patchwork systems
- Unify workflows
- Provide enterprise-grade governance
- Support the full content lifecycle
- Plan for long-term scalability
- Elevate video from a file type to a workflow
- Deliver search that actually works
- Connect the entire content stack
The way teams use content is changing fast. It’s not just about storing assets anymore, it’s about orchestrating how they’re used, reused, approved, and delivered across channels.
We built the platform for teams who are ready for that shift. One that adapts as your business evolves, with built-in tools that grow with you, not workarounds you’ll outgrow.
Our pace of innovation compounds your advantage. Continuous enhancements build on each other, so the longer you use the platform, the more it does for you. That’s how you know you’re not just buying a tool. You’re choosing a partner you won’t need to replace.
Ready to make the shift? Let’s talk.
Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by budgetbuddy.
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