Dropbox or DAM – which is Faster?

We’re all time-bound to some degree – especially creatives, marketers, sales professionals, leaders, and people that influence revenue. 

People count on us to deliver because we have a direct impact on our business. Cliche alert: “time is money.”

Endless requests and prolific digital files: Is efficiency possible? 

Many teams are going to remain dispersed as part of a hybrid remote working model. Combine that with the hard pivot to “digital everything” and we’re seeing a significant strain on teams and their ability to manage multiple data stores and file storage. 

Dropbox and other cloud drives are popular options for storing and sharing large amounts of files and for good reason – they are inexpensive, easy to use, and cloud-based.  

As a marketer, I’d like to share with you my experience and perspective on the speed of Dropbox versus using a Digital Asset Management solution like MarcomGather. 

Uploading into Dropbox vs MarcomGather

It’s relatively easy to grab a folder of files and upload them into Dropbox or MarcomGather. Both have drag and drop or “browse my computer” functionality and both are intuitive. 

Dropbox: When I uploaded this photo of an incredible, classic Porsche, it took a matter of seconds to log in, find the folder where I wanted to put the photo and drop it into the folder. Simple. Total time: 36 seconds

MarcomGather: In the DAM, the process is different. I dragged and dropped the file into MarcomGather just like Dropbox and then I was prompted to add some metadata and details about the file. AI-tagging did a good job of giving me baseline tag options, so I added “Porsche” and “Classic Car” – with those added, I was done. Total time: 57 seconds (roughly double)

Searching, Finding, and Downloading the Asset in Dropbox vs MarcomGather

This experiment takes some imagination since I just performed these actions and it was fresh on my mind. However, inside my personal Dropbox, I have thousands of files, photos, resources, documents, etc – very similar to every Dropbox user out there. It was not hard envisioning my future-self digging around in my Dropbox for the classic Porsche photo.

Dropbox: I opened my “Photos” folder and the scrolling window of endless options did not bode well. Organizing the list of files by date and type can be marginally helpful as well as sub-folder naming conventions. But let’s be honest, without naming the actual file something remotely useful, I’m going to be poking around in this folder for a while. Total time: >1 minute

And here’s the punchline of this article: the DAM is faster when it comes to using the solution for the reason it was built: organization and centralization that enables immediate and meaningful  search results.

MarcomGather: Remember those tags like “Porsche” and “Classic Car”? The tiny amount of intentional effort invested during the upload paid off big time with me finding the photo in MarcomGather, fast. Total time: <7 seconds (or however fast you can type)

Parting thoughts:

Dropbox and other cloud drives are excellent storage solutions for wholesale safekeeping of important documents, files, and even archived assets. They are especially great for personal archives. 

For a business, their ease of input is exactly what makes them cumbersome for end-users. Users can indiscriminately upload thousands of files and not consider what it will take to access them again in the future. 

In MarcomGather, it is possible to upload large quantities of files, tag them, and add metadata automatically using presets. The intentionality and process of adding files to the DAM enables easy access in the future, which saves teams of creatives, marketers, and sales pros hours each week – and keeps them focused on making an impact.