{"id":2102,"date":"2026-05-29T02:18:48","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T23:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/?p=2102"},"modified":"2026-08-08T09:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T06:00:08","slug":"why-dam-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/picajet.com\/articles\/why-dam-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"The $10 Billion Question: Why 70% of DAM Projects Fail\u2014And Why Asking “Why?” Reveals a Messier Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ask people in the digital asset management industry why DAM projects fail, and most will hand you the same number: 70%. Follow that number back to where it actually comes from, and it turns out nobody has ever measured DAM failure at all. The 70% is borrowed \u2014 from general digital-transformation research whose own footing is shakier than the people repeating it seem to know.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Where the 70% Number Actually Comes From<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The figure traces to Boston Consulting Group’s 2020 report on digital transformation, which found that 70% of digital transformations fall short of their stated objectives. That much is real. What gets dropped when people quote it is BCG’s own breakdown of that 70%: roughly 30% of transformations fully succeeded, another 44% created some value despite missing their targets, and 26% delivered minimal value. Most projects in BCG’s sample produced something<\/em>. “Fell short of objectives” is doing a lot of work in that headline number, and it isn’t the same claim as “failed.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McKinsey gets credited with the 70% figure almost as often as BCG, but McKinsey’s own 2018 global survey on digital transformations reported something starker: only 16% of respondents said their transformation had successfully improved performance and<\/em> equipped the organization to sustain that improvement long-term. That’s a grimmer number than 70%, and it’s specific to digital initiatives \u2014 yet it’s cited far less, probably because “70%” had already become the standard line by the time that survey came out. The vaguer, more widely repeated “70% of change fails” claim actually predates the digital-transformation conversation: it traces to a 2015 McKinsey article on change management with no cited study behind it, describing organizational change programs broadly, not digital projects specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is a DAM-specific study. Nobody has run a rigorous, methodologically transparent survey asking “how many DAM implementations meet their stated goals, and by what definition of goal.” The 70% gets pasted onto DAM because DAM sits inside the broader category of enterprise software rollouts, and it sounds authoritative. It isn’t wrong to say DAM projects struggle \u2014 there’s plenty of evidence for that, covered below. It’s wrong to cite a specific, unattributed percentage as if someone counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What the Market Data Actually Shows<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If failure rates are murky, spend patterns aren’t. Mordor Intelligence puts the DAM market at roughly $7.5 billion in 2026, growing toward $14.4 billion by 2031 at a 13.94% compound annual rate<\/a>. Buried in that same report is a more telling detail: the services segment \u2014 implementation, migration, training, ongoing governance consulting \u2014 is growing at 14.33% a year, faster than the market overall, while software licensing (still the majority of spend at roughly two-thirds of the market) grows more slowly. People are paying more, proportionally, to get DAM working than to buy it in the first place. That’s indirect but concrete evidence that “buy the software” is not where the real work happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MediaValet’s 2026 DAM Trends Report<\/a> backs this up from the usage side. Adoption, not feature depth, is what the report calls the strongest predictor of DAM ROI \u2014 and adoption tracks closely with how much friction the system removes from someone’s actual workday. The report found 43% of organizations saw adoption increase specifically after adding mobile access<\/strong>. Not after a training push. Not after a new UI. After people could reach the DAM from a phone during a shoot or a meeting instead of waiting for a desktop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Three Places DAM Adoption Actually Breaks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Search that doesn’t search<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This complaint is old and it hasn’t gone away. In a long-running discussion thread on DAM News<\/a>, a DAM practitioner named Spencer Harris described exactly the pattern that still shows up in vendor pitch decks a decade later: “I have watched our users type in a partial file name or project name to search for what they are looking for, knowing ahead of time there is less than 20 options out there, but yet the search results are in the thousands and in some cases tens of thousands.” The underlying cause is almost always the same \u2014 DAM search tools are built to cast a wide net across every metadata field, which is exactly wrong when the user already knows roughly what they want and just needs it fast. If grabbing an asset takes longer through the DAM than through a Slack DM or a shared folder, people will use the DM, every time, regardless of how good the system is on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The integration gap<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

ImageKit’s research found that 100% of surveyed enterprise-scale teams (400+ employees) expected either native integrations with their core tools or a flexible, headless API<\/a> \u2014 no exceptions. When that expectation goes unmet, teams don’t stop using their other systems; they build a workaround and the workaround becomes the real process. MediaValet<\/a>‘s report quantifies the gap on one common pairing: 84% of DAM users also rely on project management tools, but only 21% report those two systems as fully integrated.<\/strong> Where integration does happen, the report ties it to a 70% jump in cross-functional collaboration and cites improved asset accessibility as the single biggest reported benefit, at 76%. The 63-point gap between “we use both tools” and “the tools actually talk to each other” is where two parallel systems of record quietly form \u2014 one in the DAM, one in whatever spreadsheet or drive people used before it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Governance nobody owns<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is distinct from low usage. A DAM can have decent login numbers and still be quietly decaying \u2014 tags applied inconsistently, duplicate uploads never merged, access permissions nobody’s reviewed since launch. The market data above is circumstantial evidence for how common this is: if governance and cleanup were a one-time setup cost, services revenue wouldn’t keep outpacing software revenue years into a deployment. Someone has to own metadata standards, enforce naming conventions, and periodically go back through the library \u2014 and in most organizations, that job either doesn’t exist or gets assigned as a fifth of someone’s already-full role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What Successful Deployments Actually Look Like<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Vendor case studies are self-selected \u2014 companies that had a bad time rarely end up on a customer page \u2014 so treat the following as evidence of what’s achievable under good conditions, not a typical outcome. With that caveat:<\/p>\n\n\n\n