Most teams already have a DAM, but they still struggle with five persistent issues:
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 our DAM assessment.
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.
Search has changed. Modern teams need:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Rights came up constantly, and not only from legal teams. Organizations told us:
Rights are getting more complex:
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.
Teams want their DAM to power the rest of the content stack:
Many DAMs were not built as integration platforms. They rely on brittle scripts, limited connectors, or one-off custom projects.
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.
Across industries, several forces are converging:
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.
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.
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:
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.