[Music] [Ben Chan] Hi, everyone. My name is Ben Chan. I am a Product Marketer for Adobe Experience Manager Assets, our industry-leading, innovative, AI-infused digital asset management solution that enables organizations to meet the growing content demand and drive business outcomes with high-quality content and personalized customer experiences.
Those who attended my Summit session last year may remember that I have presented the same topic about the future of DAM, but as you may know, the landscape of content management and DAM have been evolving at an unprecedented pace, fueled by the rapid development of GenAI and change of customer expectations.
What you'll be hearing from me is an evolution of our vision of DAM, and hopefully you will leave the session feeling inspired, and you should start re-imagining what does a future-ready DAM look like for you and your organization. Realigning your content and DAM strategy, and evaluating whether your tech stack currently in place can cope with all the content challenges and get you to the desired outcomes.
So first of all, I would like to speak to some trends that we have observed in the industry and from the conversations we had with many of our customers, especially their marketing and creative teams and departments about content management.
It may sound cliché, but the market is really changing so quickly. The complexity of content challenges is stacking up, and the pressure is mounting on all the marketing and creative teams of every organization as they grow.
Organizations need to reduce their time to market, meaning that they need to accelerate the content journey to get those content into channels real fast. To achieve this, you need a platform that democratizes content accessibility for everyone in the organization so that anyone can discover and reuse content timely to create winning experiences for the customers.
Next is GenAI. It's no longer a buzzword, but every organization is exploring or have already started investing into GenAI to help scale content productivity.
This exponential growth of spending means a lot more content is going to be created.
And the next challenge that comes will be how to maintain governance, how to make sure content is created and used it responsibly and aligned with brand guidelines. Organization will need a trusted content lake that can intelligently help users to adapt content with brand guardrails and to maintain compliance.
The next trend is hyper personalization. Again, not a buzzword. This is a key differentiator for organizations to really drive winning customer experiences, purchase intent and conversion. But as marketing campaigns scale and spend across so many different channels and touch points these days, it is really difficult for marketers to keep up with the pace to scale and achieve sustainable results. So there is a need for a single point to optimize, activate and automatically scale the content delivery to downstream channels.
And with all of this in mind, you will now be looking at a double digit number of growth of content to be created while it is not uncommon that most organizations' marketing and content creation budget are staying flat, if not reduced. So you will need to unlock more value from existing tools and tech stacks, including a DAM, to help streamline the process and resources, and also to provide you insights like how the content is performing, so you can adjust your content strategy to get more value out of it.
And all these are exactly why we have seen an exponential growth of demand of DAM from enterprises these days. DAM are becoming so much more compelling than ever, as organizations are seeking for a silver bullet to solve the content challenges. And organizations' expectations to a DAM have also evolved now. It's no longer just a repository or library to securely store assets, but also an integral solution to support scaling of content activation, foster collaboration between stakeholders of content, turbocharge speed of content delivery, assemble fragmented content into meaningful experiences to drive customer engagement, and maintain brand compliance and governance of content at scale.
So there are a lot to ask. And what we have seen a lot in organizations are still struggling with problems of disconnected workflows, technologies, and teams that hinder the ability to effectively deliver and scale content, like what is being shown here. At Adobe, we call it the spaghetti slide, and I personally call it the nightmare of the broken content supply chain slides that illustrate the chaotic nature of how the content and asset flows within an organization.
The good news is an enterprise DAM should be able to tame the chaos and become the point of orchestration of content workflow of an organization, starting from consolidating all brand-approved assets sitting in multiple siloed repositories owned and managed by separate teams and departments into one single source of truth for effective management, then applying control and consistency to all the assets, then enriching this valuable brand-approved assets by properly applying metadata so to enhance the searchability of them, and also helping with compliance and automation workflows by connecting the DAM and the content to every single touch point internally and externally.
If you are a DAM buyer or owner or have been involved in evaluating and choosing a DAM for your organization, you must have noticed that there are so many solutions now available in the market, especially, compared to just 5 if not 10 years ago. Again, it just tells you how compelling DAM is these days. However, not all DAM solutions are created equal. There are solutions that are built for specific tasks or use cases. They may be quicker to set up and deploy, and provide simpler connectors for simple integrations, and usually look more affordable in the price tag. They may look good for a single team or departmental use case or as a starting point to getting a DAM. However, organizations may soon face blockers from growing the adoption of the platform and expanding the use cases and scale due to limitations like lacking advanced workflows, integration points, scalability, and performance to support the growth of volume of assets, and additional tools to cover other content management requirements.
So when an organization is committed to invest in a DAM, you should not be only looking at what is needed for now, but also the next 18 months, 3 years, 5 years, and beyond. There should not be a situation, although we have actually heard and seen a lot of times from our customers before, that their content demand at the end has outgrown the solution they chose in the first place. Ideally, an enterprise DAM solution should be able to offer the flexibility to start small, but also a seamless path to expand and scale the platform instead of ending up with multiple DAMs or repositories. The DAM shall be a unified platform and serves as the centerpiece of the organization's entire content supply chain. It shall be capable of supporting integrated content workflows across various platforms and channels, providing advanced and customizable metadata and search capabilities to make sure content discovery is never a problem no matter how many more users and assets are in the DAM. Robust compliance, governance, and scalability, and also tools to democratize assets to brand-approved assets to more users to foster collaborations and reuse of content in the DAM.
This may already sound a lot of what the DAM can and is supposed to do, but at Adobe, our vision for a DAM actually goes beyond to just a core DAM or the foundation of a DAM.
What we and many of our customers believe and are looking for as the most important value of a DAM is the ability to enrich the content currently living in the DAM, to transform brand-approved content into winning content, and to activate this winning content to where the users and customers are. And these activations of content will, at the end, drive tangible business outcomes like conversions for the organization.
This slide illustrates our DAM vision that I just spoke to. You have the robust core DAM sitting as the foundation, and then sitting on top are the five key ingredients that we have defined for a winning strategy to successfully activate content from the ingestions to the delivery. All this powered by intelligent AI and GenAI infused composable services in our DAM.
Now I will zoom into each of the five ingredients of content activation by talking to some of the common challenges we observed and our approach to solve those. This is not a product roadmap or top innovation sessions, so I won't go into specific product features or functionalities, but hopefully, you have attended or watched the Summit main stage session and have already seen some of our exciting key innovations coming out. I will also show you a list of other Summit sessions at the end of the presentation, and I definitely recommend you to check those out later and available.
So the first ingredient is, discover.
If you are a DAM platform owner, admin, or librarian, and at the same time you are a parent like myself, I'm sure this slide is either bringing you a laugh or a nightmare.
As how difficult it is to teach your kids to tidy up the room is to get your stakeholders to adopt and consistently use the DAM properly.
It is not uncommon to hear complaints from users about not knowing how to navigate or use the DAM, or they can't find a particular piece of asset.
And the problem gets even worse as the content grows. As more and more content is being created and stored in the DAM, managing and finding the right content becomes increasingly difficult.
And what we envision the better way of content discovery is through a single pane of glass approach. So first, imagine all content is accessible from a single interface or a unified servicing layer of all content. And when I say all content, it does not only refer to assets stored in the core DAM, but all different repositories sitting in different teams and departments across the organization.
So now users have one single go-to place to find content, but they may still be stuck with a legacy way of searching and sorting assets, usually limited to tags and keywords only. But imagine in this era of GenAI and AI, you can actually discover content with new search capabilities, like natural language search. You can type in a text prompt like you do it in a lot of GenAI tools these days, and it will analyze your prompt to find out the context and intent of your search and return with most relevant results.
This power of GenAI does not stop here. It can further optimize your search results and help identify if there are duplicated assets in the DAM or help you locate all the similar content that you can also use for your relevant campaign.
Next ingredient is, govern.
I love speaking with customers, and this slide is based on a real tragic story that I heard from a DAM librarian in a recent DAM industry event in Europe. Her company is one of the biggest aviation and travel companies in Europe, and they have deployed an enterprise DAM which has just gone live less than two years ago. Imagine a global company like hers only has one single librarian in the whole organization, and she basically needs to single-handedly support all the user requests related to metadata management and health check, tagging of assets, asset governance and authorizations, asset orders and usage right configuration, just to name a few. Unfortunately, with the macroeconomy climate and most enterprises talking about doing more with less these days, the hope to get a few extra pair of hands to help her is really, really minimal. And what's even worse, there are more organizations and users trying to create content with GenAI these days. That is creating even more pressure and risk to businesses from a compliance standpoint.
That is why your DAM should have robust trust and governance embedded in to support the organization, if not the librarian. So metadata is the key to ensure assets are discoverable, but tagging can be a very granular time and time-consuming job. AI-driven auto-tagging or sometimes it's being called smart tags, have been available as a technology for years. And with the recent development of AI and GenAI, this sort of smart tags are just becoming smarter and more accurate. And eventually, it is going to be capable to identify not only particular attributes and characteristics of an asset, but also being able to generate and apply tags that reflect meaning, usage, and audience of the assets, or even brand-aware tags, all based on trainings and content analysis also powered by AI.
The advanced metadata applied to the content does not only help with discoverability of the content, but also more granular control of assets of content. You can apply role-based accessible based on metadata attributes in addition to traditionally folder-based access control, so to ensure that particularly content is accessible strictly by authorized users.
And imagine an AI agent in the DAM can help automatically scan assets for legal compliance and brand requirements, identify whether an asset is created with a GenAI tool, and apply the label or content credentials to it. And if necessary, to enforce dynamic usage rights and restrictions based on evolving contracts and licensing.
This all help organizations scale the content, but at the same time protect brand integrity and compliance, making sure all outgoing content are coming from a trusted source.
Next is, optimize.
Optimization is key to make content effective and adaptable across multiple platforms. This slide and the numbers tell you we understand and feel the pain of our customers because this is an example of our very own Adobe Global Marketing Organization.
Our one global studio team is supporting the creation of all the campaign assets and banners for all our online social campaigns and channels, marketing events, etcetera. So we are talking about hundreds of thousands of assets that are being produced annually, and this is growing year on year. So how to make sure everyone is on the same page and collaborate on asset creation, scaled creation of content variations for specific segments, channels, locations, and down to devices, and how to repurpose brand-approved assets to maximize the reuse and utilization are all challenging tasks.
So now imagine a DAM with AI-powered tools building to support both creatives and marketers to automatically produce and recommend high-quality personalized content catered to specific audience segments and channels. It works like a content advisor or also an assembler for the team, and it does not only improve the content productivity of the organization, but also increase the content ROI and ensure brand integrity, as only the best performance content and the most brand and legally compliant assets will be chosen to repurpose and produce new content.
And content, after being assembled, shall also be optimized and adapted easily or automatically to different formats for dedicated channels like social media, emails, websites, or imagine one single template of assets stored in the DAM can automatically populate into thousands, if not millions, of personalized variations on the fly.
And the DAM shall also provide an intuitive interface, almost like a cozy meeting place for all content stakeholders, both internally, like marketing teams, and externally, like partners and agencies, to collaborate and maximize the value of each asset.
Next is, deliver.
If there is one ingredient, then I would really want to emphasize in relation to content activation, it is definitely deliver.
A modern DAM shall no longer be a graveyard or final destination for assets. When an organization is designed to invest in a tech stack like a DAM, the priority should not be how to get assets into the DAM anymore, but how to get the assets out of the DAM to the customers. Because this is what and how the assets on the platform actually bring business values to the organization. Common challenges we have seen that hinders the delivery of content from the DAM include the lack of seamless workflow and integration with channels, inability to handle huge volume of assets, and diverse type of assets like high-definition images, videos, 3D shoppable media, and definitely poor delivery performance.
So to effectively get your brand-approved assets out and start getting the value from the content. A DAM shall be able to connect to various downstream applications and deliver approved assets directly from the DAM so to ensure that assets being delivered to the customers are always up-to-date, brand-approved, and of highest quality.
And for sure, enterprises shall not compromise security for the sake of performance. So a DAM, despite being able to deliver assets to any channel, shall also provide advanced access control and secured delivery options to make sure only the right asset will be delivered to the right user or audience group at the right time and the right channel.
And delivery of high quality, which sometimes means high resolution assets, can be tricky due to constraints like bandwidth and user location. But imagine an AI-infused DAM can help automatically detect and transform assets to the optimal format and size for the dedicated channels or customer touch points. Regardless of all the variable factors, the delivery of assets is always performant to ensure the best customer engagement and conversion.
So the last piece of the five is to understand.
And in simplest speaking, it is all about data and insights. It is about understanding the content usage and performance. It is about what are the hero content and assets that is bringing money on the table. And I would say it actually sounds easier than it is because if you have missed some of the foundational pieces in the process, the capturing of data can be much more difficult than you would have imagined. For example, inconsistent or incomplete metadata may limit the visibility or accuracy of asset usage. This connected system can bring challenges to getting the signal of where and how the assets are delivered. And it may, at the end, become a time-consuming job that involves several teams just to manually grab the data.
So let's get the basics right. As mentioned earlier, metadata is the key. Having AI to help with capturing and generating granular metadata, plus a robust and customizable metadata service in the DAM, can ensure that you have all the necessary trackers or signals to ensure the accuracy of the asset usage and performance.
Also mentioned before, the importance of having the DAM connected with all the downstream channels and if possible, the entire content ecosystem in the organization.
Only if all workflows are seamlessly connected that you will be enable to capture all the performance data of every piece of asset with the most minimal effort.
And last but not least, having all the assets' insights is important, but it is not the last stop of an asset journey. An end-to-end content journey should not be linear, but recurrent.
Brand-approved assets are living assets, not dying. And by capturing all the data and convert it into insights, the DAM can again use some help of the GenAI Content Advisor to take that one step further by recommending winning content for your next campaign based on past performance of the assets. And it can help assemble these best assets into new winning content for fast activation.
So I covered a lot about a vision of the DAM and the five key ingredients of content activation.
Before I wrap up, I also want to bring up a couple of secret sauces of a future-ready DAM. So now you can tell, despite a proud marketer of the DAM, I'm also a home cook, right? So the first secret sauce is metadata.
I just cannot emphasize enough how important metadata is in ensuring a successful content strategy and performance of the assets and the DAM as the platform.
Sometimes when I spoke with some content and DAM strategists in industry events, we have jokingly said, "Metadata itself is even more important than the actual content." And in this ever-changing content landscape, especially fueled with the presence of GenAI, we shall keep reminding ourselves that metadata is not something static.
It shall not stay as what it is at the time of ingestion or when an asset is being uploaded.
Metadata is a set of living labels that can span and travel through the content lifecycle. And a future-ready DAM shall provide robust and comprehensive metadata capabilities, including but not limited to customizable metadata schema, advanced metadata management, and automation and AI-powered functionalities to help reduce, if not eliminate, many work of tagging.
The second secret sauce, actually not quite a secret, is definitely GenAI.
In here, I'm not only just referring to what people commonly think about using GenAI to create new assets like images or videos, but more about how GenAI is influencing or infused in the whole content lifecycle. GenAI can actually help maintain asset governance by identifying and ensuring brand standards, enhancing search experiences with capabilities like intellectual language search or semantic search that understand the intent of the users.
And the DAM, being the single sauce of truth of all brand-approved content, can also become the content lake for training an organization's own custom AI model about the tone and style of the brand. And the model can later be leveraged to generate consistent on-brand content and different variations at scale in the future.
And last, but definitely not least, leveraging the latest Agentic AI to be the content advisor to evaluate, recommend, and assemble content to be personalized and delivered to every single customer touchpoint.
So in short, if I have to summarize what a future-ready DAM should look like with a product lens, here is a list of core things I will look at and evaluate.
And as I said, this is not a product session, so not until now I'm finally mentioning our very own DAM, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, or AEM Assets usually being called.
Our DAM is purposely built to solve all the challenges I outlined and support this reinvented DAM vision that I have presented in this session.
Adobe Experience Manager Assets, as a cloud-native and AI-first enterprise DAM, have already been helping many of the world's biggest brands to solve the content challenges, enable their organizations' end-to-end content supply chain, and achieved tangible and significant business values and results. I'm not going through this line by line, as I'm sure you're already reading this while I'm speaking and are already amazed by the results.
If you are still intrigued by what I shared with you today and want to hear more about the solution and some other customer stories, there are some other sessions about AEM Assets at Summit this year.
If by any chance you are now in Vegas for Summit, make sure you don't miss these sessions and our AEM demo booth. And if you are sitting at home watching this now, no worries, most of the sessions will be made available on demand shortly after the event. And for sure, I'm more than happy to connect with you on LinkedIn, and we can have a chat about my always favorite topic, DAM and content supply chain.
And with that, thank you so much for watching this session. I hope to meet you in person at the next Adobe Summit or other DAM industry events very soon. Have a damn good rest of your day.
[Woman] Create the perfect experience for every customer by having all the content you need right at your fingertips with Adobe Experience Manager Assets.
Centralize, manage, optimize, and activate photos, videos, and rich media across channels to quickly meet the growing demand for great content.
AI-powered smart tagging and customizable metadata schemas automatically organize assets so you can easily find them and kick off content workflows. Governance features and digital rights management capabilities let you set expiration and permission settings.
Protect brand integrity by capturing content credentials and ensure legal compliance so the right assets are approved and ready for activation.
If you can't find the image you need, you can redesign an existing asset using Adobe's generative AI and automate thousands of branded variations.
Your team can edit assets using their favorite creative tools and send them for review and approval.
When you're ready to publish, Experience Manager Assets automatically adjusts your content to fit different screens and devices for a faster time to market and an optimized experience.
See how your assets are being used and how they're performing across digital channels to improve future experiences and continue to wow your customers with winning content.
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