There’s no shortage of content. We’re up to our eyeballs in videos, social posts, photos, websites, AR/VR, TV, webinars, podcasts, etc. Given the superabundance of content, brands need their visual media to be engaging. To stand out. To pop.

Engaging is only half of the equation. Images and videos need to be optimized. What your content looks like matters as much as how it's delivered.

Of course, the way to accomplish being eye-catching and optimized is via a digital asset management (DAM) solution.

There are a lot of DAM solutions out there. Most offer a unified platform to manage visual assets across multiple agencies and technologies. Among the more “stodgy” DAM platforms, many require significant management and others aren’t especially good at facilitating cross-team collaboration.

While it’s been a great time to be a consumer of online content, times have grown tough for legacy players in the space. 

The digital landscape has evolved. People expect unique customer journeys, and they expect them to be delivered instantly. Additionally, the omnichannel environment has changed brand and sales strategies in novel ways by delivering personalized experiences directly, ensuring a seamless, optimal viewer journey.

The modern online marketplace has evolved in ways only the most prescient could have predicted. Adding to the already complex demands of the online experience are heavily trafficked channels like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, each with its own formatting requirements that further expose the limitations of traditional DAM systems.

Legacy DAM systems are now struggling to keep up with today's dynamic demands.

The rigidity of these solutions inhibits growth and stifles creativity, underscoring the need to transition to more agile and adaptable asset management solutions. Current shortcomings of legacy DAMs include:

• Lack of AI-powered automation. Older DAM solutions lack AI-powered automation, missing out on the opportunity to streamline workflows and optimize asset management.
• Limited scalability. Traditional DAM systems lack the capabilities necessary to handle the volume of assets and global distribution demands.
• Inflexible frameworks. Traditional DAM systems are often built on rigid frameworks, limiting their adaptability to evolve alongside business needs and technological advancements.
• Inefficient collaboration tools. Legacy DAM solutions often lack robust collaboration features, hindering real-time teamwork and productivity for geographically dispersed teams.
• Complex implementation and user adoption. Implementing and integrating traditional DAM systems can be cumbersome due to complex setup and required team training. These hurdles have led to resistance in user adoption and overall efficiency.
• Inadequate metadata management. Insufficient metadata capabilities in traditional DAMs can result in asset organization and searchability challenges.
• Limited support for dynamic content formats. Traditional DAM systems may struggle to handle dynamic content formats, blocking businesses from efficiently leveraging emerging media trends.
• Security concerns. Older DAM solutions may not have the robust security features to protect valuable media assets from modern cybersecurity threats.
• Inability to leverage user-generated content (UGC). Legacy DAMs are often incapable of utilizing and moderating UGC due to it being such a drain on resources.
• Lack of analytics and data insights. Traditional DAM systems don't offer the comprehensive analytics and data insights required to optimize asset performance.

Bottom line: Digital asset management has evolved. 

Cloudinary Assets is the intelligent DAM for marketing professionals, e-commerce, retailers, enterprises, and brands that understand the power of visual storytelling to capture attention and engage viewers. 

Today, teams are often dispersed around the country or even the world, and the projects they’re working on are often complex and sprawling. Among other issues, fragmented workflows and asset storage make it difficult for teams to access the right images. A unified DAM solution with access management and permissions can streamline asset storage and ensure a single source of truth.

Geographically dispersed teams often struggle with real-time collaboration. Leveraging DAM solutions that integrate with collaboration tools and offer features like real-time commenting can break down the barriers that bring projects to a crawl and improve teamwork.

Version control is another collaboration headache. Deliver the right asset every time by easily managing multiple versions of each asset and eliminate version confusion with easy-to-understand version controls. Don’t waste any effort reviewing the wrong asset.

Cloudinary Assets includes creative review and approval flows capabilities to improve team efficiency and gets your products to market faster by allowing creatives and marketing teams to collaborate throughout all steps of your digital asset management workflow. From uploading photos and videos, to tagging and sharing, performing sophisticated searches to find just the right assets for a particular new design or campaign, and up to the point that final assets are selected and ready to be delivered in your website or app by your developers.

Manual asset management tasks consume valuable hours and are major roadblocks to the creative marketing process. By integrating automation within a DAM system, these repetitive tasks can be eliminated. For example, assets can be automatically transformed to meet omnichannel specifications for image size, quality, orientation, and more.

Marketing campaigns are omnichannel with initiatives across social media platforms, emails, the company website, and more. These diverse campaigns are intricate. To determine asset performance, or which visuals and content resonated with the target audience, a DAM solution with advanced analytics that store and organize assets and track omnichannel performance is a must. Analyzing data on engagement, clicks, and conversions, the team can pinpoint which aspects of the marketing campaign are driving the most impact.

This data-driven approach allows marketing teams to optimize their strategy and exploit those 

assets that generate high engagement, tailor content for specific platforms, and refine their campaigns for maximum effectiveness.

To maximize the benefits of a DAM system, the solution must be embedded into the existing workflow.

Selecting a headless DAM solution that integrates existing technologies and workflows ensures an efficient integration, decreasing the time it takes for the solution to begin optimizing the content management process. As new technologies emerge, a headless DAM can integrate with new tools to future-proof your tech stack.

Creating a personalized shopping experience requires a rich variety of images, often spanning different backgrounds and scenes relevant to various regions, seasons, or specific events, like the holidays. Leveraging AI and GenAI makes the sourcing of these assets instantaneous and ensures they're optimized and, with Cloudinary AI, the entire process is fully automated. 

Applying Cloudinary AI and GenAI in post-production editing at scale, you can rapidly create variations of assets that can be published to any channel. 

Some of Cloudinary generative AI capabilities include: 

 • Generative Fill

 • Generative Object Remove

 • Generative Replace

 • 3D Spinset

 • Zoom Pan

 • Product Gallery

 • Filter and overlays

 • Upscaling

 • Video smart cropping

Cloudinary's advanced search ensures efficient content curation and distribution, catapulting personalization to new horizons. By harnessing AI, teams can deliver experiences that connect with individuals and drive sales.

Other AI-powered features enable you to streamline the management of image and video assets with AI-powered metadata creation that can be tailored to your organization, auto-tagging, and image captioning, along with asset searchability and discoverability, making any asset easily findable with AI-powered management.

Cloudinary's advanced AI-powered search features locate assets based on visual characteristics such as color, shape, or objects within the images. This level of granularity ensures that the right assets are accessible at the right time, optimizing the efficiency of content creation and distribution.

Activate content by providing internal teams and brands, agencies, partners, and others with secure access to fully branded portals. 

Portals provide seamless, secure access to curated assets ensuring teams and stakeholders spend less time searching and more time activating content. Additionally, Portals connect to other content resources (integration with BOX, Google Drive, Sharepoint, etc.) and are accessible on any device/mobile responsive.

Permissions and sharing protect and maintain brand integrity by ensuring stakeholders have access to the right assets, and only the right assets. You can manage access with requests and notifications for granting approval knowing that all your content remains secure within DAM.

Moreover, you can gather insights into content consumption and performance to continuously improve your content by tracking engagement within your portals. Rest easy by maintaining a secure audit trail and monitoring who is accessing your portals and engaging with your assets.

All Cloudinary products are API-first with granular APIs, easy-to-use UI, widgets, and robust documentation. This extends DAM across your entire tech ecosystem to increase usage, adoption, and overall ROI by getting visual assets into the hands of cross-functional teams and contributors.

Developers using Cloudinary's media management API can programmatically transform and deliver media, automatically optimized for quick and responsive delivery to your customers.

Cloudinary is MACH certified and the ideal DAM for composable architectures whether they’re full-stack best of breed or in transition.

UGC has become an essential aspect of marketing strategies. However, managing and moderating UGC can be a challenge. Cloudinary's DAM solution offers comprehensive moderation tools, ensuring brand safety and maintaining consistency while leveraging the power of UGC to engage audiences.

Cloudinary's automation capabilities reduce manual intervention, automating tasks like asset ingestion, metadata assignment, and distribution. It enables marketing and creative teams to focus on innovative content strategy and customer engagement.

Metadata is the backbone of effective asset management. Cloudinary's intelligent metadata management system allows users to add and manage metadata efficiently. This results in enhanced search productivity, making it easy for teams to find the right assets at the right time.

AI/ML automatic image tagging analyzes images and identifies objects to accurately detect and tag objects in even The most complex or crowded photos. AI assigns relevant tags and categories, making it easier to search and organize images based on specific criteria.

Automatic image tagging can significantly reduce the time and effort required while improving the organization and searchability of your digital asset library.

Cloudinary's AI-powered automation selects the best features from multiple CDNs to speed up and enhance delivery of content to end users. This ensures your images and videos are presented in the best quality and format, making websites load faster for a lag-free experience.

The challenges that content operations, marketing, and e-commerce teams face in managing digital assets can be overcome by embracing visual media automation. Cloudinary's innovative AI-powered image and video platform offers a robust solution to simplify asset management, boost search productivity, and empower content creators.

Contact Cloudinary today to reimagine your DAM strategy and prepare for a more agile and innovative future.

“The fact that we could easily drop product videos into the DAM led to an impressive 45% increase in sales of those products, because of the Cloudinary improvement to the campaign around it.”

Hannah Bennett

Head of Digital at Paul Smith

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Cloudinary is the image and video technology platform that enables the world’s most engaging brands to deliver transformative visual experiences at global scale. More than two million users and 10,000 customers, including Apartment Therapy, Bleacher Report, Etsy, Grubhub, Mattel, Mediavine, Minted, Paul Smith and Peloton, rely on Cloudinary to bring their campaigns, apps and sites to life. With the world’s most powerful image and video APIs backed by industry-leading artificial intelligence and patented technology, Cloudinary offers a single source of truth for brands to manage, transform, optimize, and deliver visual experiences at scale. As a result, the most engaging brands across all industries are seeing up to a 203% ROI using Cloudinary with benefits including faster time to market, higher user satisfaction and increased engagement and conversions. 

For more information, visit www.cloudinary.com.

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