[Music] [Ben Chan] Hi, everyone. My name is Ben Chan. I'm from the Global Product Marketing team of Adobe's Experience Manager Assets. Adobe's cloud-native digital asset management solution built for today's and tomorrow's content needs, and helps organizations drive personalized customer experiences at scale.

In this session, I would like to share our vision of what the future of digital asset management or DAM, we usually call it, is going to be. What are the trends and paradigm shifts we observe in the market? How the DAM shall transform to solve organizational content challenges? And how Adobe Experience Manager Assets is evolving to help democratize content creation and consumption, empower everyone within the organization to be part of the content production engine, accelerate content personalization, and enhance content delivery across channels? First of all, let's talk about the changes of content demand nowadays. Why is it important? And how is it related to DAM? You may be thinking about, "Isn't DAM just library or centralized repository to store-approved assets?" I wouldn't say it is wrong, but let's step back a bit to look at this challenge of content demand.

Every organization these days are fighting for customers' mindshare. And to achieve that, no one will disagree to provide a more personalized experience to every customer can be the key of winning.

But this also means that every organization needs to create a lot more content to achieve personalization. While most are already under the pressure of doing more with less resources and budget.

In this real example of an Adobe manufacturing customer with a catalog of 1,000 products, you can see how the calculation plays out.

With a modest 25 assets per product and 15 regions to support, this customer is having to plan, create, manage, share, activate, install a whopping 375,000 of assets.

And once you begin adjusting your assets for granular customer segments and contacts within the journeys, this number can easily go up to millions.

And this is when most marketing departments and teams struggle to keep up with the pace of growing content demand.

Again, here, some data from our own research, speaking to our customers. We have heard them wasting huge amounts of time on manual design tasks, which lots of those are relatively simple tasks like creating a specific content variation that could have been solved with automation.

And then we have heard from multiple customers that they have, in average, a quarter of content wasted because there is no efficient way to search and access the content. Maybe they are stored in siloed and redundant repositories owned by separate teams. So very few of them could actually meet the demand for marketing content successfully while the demand just keeps getting bigger.

Earlier, I referred DAM as a library or centralized repository for assets, which is probably what most organizations looked to achieve when they decided to invest in the DAM.

And in many cases, this was a decision driven or highly influenced by the IT.

While the DAM has become a library with great governance and control of assets in place, in some cases, also few adoptions within the organization. So all these assets got stored in the DAM, live in the DAM, and died in the DAM.

But recently, we see that more C-Suites recognize the critically important role of the DAM as the primary touchpoint of content across an organization's end-to-end content supply chain.

There is a shift from a CIO-centric asset management solution to more a CMO-focused content or experience enablement platform.

So the evolution of DAM transcends its librarian-controlled repository state, embracing a model that provides access for all, functioning as a consumption hub, connecting all applications with governance at the edge. This transformation empowers non-creatives to remix existing assets to create new content variations within brand guard rails, supported by composable Digital Rights Management for compliance and asset authenticity.

This approach replaces restrictive librarian-controlled repositories, ensuring seamless connectivity, brand consistency, and governance at the point of use, allowing the CMO to prioritize efficient content generation for impactful marketing experiences.

And then we have the talk of the town. GenAI in place to help with content creation, or is it really helping? When it comes to GenAI, with great power comes great responsibility.

What do I mean by that? When you have something as powerful as GenAI, how can you manage the governance of its use? How can you find a specific asset from millions of asset variations that GenAI help to create? And how can this asset be effectively distributed across the organization and also to downstream activation channels? So here comes our vision of how DAM shall become composable and what those Composable Services shall be available to make up a future-proof DAM.

Fine. Where you can find content? In an intuitive portal or even in the applications that you are familiar with.

Remix. After finding that content, populating it into variations, minimizing reliance on agencies and creative teams, when a simple ad is to get things out of the door.

Governance. Managing the content with the proper controls and permissions through a campaign workflow.

And Activate, which is super important. To get those variations deliver to multiple channels with velocity.

And underneath it all, the insights that are provided from each service to feed that data back and improve personalization in the campaigns even more the next time.

Having a composable DAM that addresses to multiple content challenges organizations may face is important.

But what is equally important is that the DAM itself needs to be scalable to support the expansion of volumes of content created, incremental number of users that need access to the DAM, multiply the number of regions, applications, channels, and even external parties that the DAM need to deliver and publish content too.

So the scalability is not only infrastructural but also functional. How the DAM is capable to solve multiple use cases like compliance requirements, democratizing content consumption and reuse within the DAM, connecting the DAM to a wider Martech stack within the organization, and in many enterprises owning and managing multiple brands. They will need customizable distribution capabilities and also expensive permissions, governance, workflow, and security layers that are configurable for each sub-brand within the enterprise.

With all this in mind, Adobe has been relentlessly driving innovations to make Experience Manager Assets a future-proof DAM.

It is a central hub that harmonizes the tech stack for personalized customer experiences. It is the centerpiece of the content lifecycle of an organization. Reaching the upstream content creation workflow and production, and the downstream sharing, distribution and delivery of assets. And also, measure and provide insights on asset performance and ROI to inform and evolve the content strategy.

So let's dive a bit into the area of creating content variations at speed and scale.

Again, I want to give some examples here.

A customer of us, which is a renowned beauty group, they needed to roll out a campaign, and they had to create 50,000 content variations for all downstream channels. And these variations are created from 50 hero images.

It took them 200 people, including agency workers and in-house marketing and creative teams, and four weeks to do that.

And then imagine, they are a group of 23 brands, and each brand, on average, are rolling out 12 campaigns per month.

And then the campaign needs to be localized per region.

When they need to go faster with more volume, it is becoming super expensive to scale.

Now imagine that time and cost cutting in half, and there are two components that can help you democratize asset of content to a broader group within the organizations to create. So now this is not just relying on creatives and agencies to create content. You are offering tools to allow non-creatives to be creative in which they were not able to do so before, and to provide GenAI that produce commercially safe and on-brand content.

So by bringing our very own Adobe Express, the easy-to-use all-in-one content creation app that helps drive content velocity while staying on-brand. And Adobe Firefly, Adobe's GenAI powerhouse, which features Text to Image, Generative Fill, and Text Effects, into Experience Manager Assets. We can make every marketing team more agile by empowering DAM to easily create new brand-compliant content, quickly edit existing brand assets, and generate size and language variations of approved assets.

Now let's take a closer look at how your marketing teams can achieve these outcomes.

As creative teams, adjust priorities to meet shifting demands. It is important to empower your marketing teams to create and publish content that could be simple edits, minimizing the reliance of creatives and agencies.

Providing your marketing teams with the tools to build customer experiences can increase your speed to market, result in proper utilization of resources, and generate brand-compliant content across teams.

Here's a look at how your marketing teams can create consistent branded content quickly and easily. Creative teams can set up a brand-compliant template using your company's fonts, colors, and logos.

Marketers can then select and populate templates. Generative AI models allow them to generate high-quality, ready-to-share custom images and text effects.

Your marketing teams can also directly access the assets stored in the DAM, which is Adobe Experience Manager Assets, from within their preferred user interface to save edited content back to the DAM.

And the time-consuming process of creating derivative assets, coupled with variations in size and language, drains your marketing team's efficiency and responsiveness.

Streamlining this menu process can reduce agency's support and fees, improve your content's relevance and usefulness, increase speed to market.

So here's a closer look at how your marketing teams can effortlessly generate a variety of asset versions in different sizes and languages, relieving the workload on creative teams.

Existing brand-approved assets are stored in the DAM and can be accessed from within the marketer's existing user interface. In this example, Adobe Express.

Marketers can auto-size assets for social media channels or choose the custom option to set dimensions.

Marketers do not need to work on manual language translations using external translation tools. Instead, they can efficiently translate text into any language within the existing tool.

So now, your marketing team is very happy because they can create thousands of asset variations within the DAM.

But what's next? Remember what I showed? The more people and more content generated, especially with GenAI, the other steps need to happen include approvals, controls, governance, and delivery.

While the content creation speeds up with more people creating content, approvals, controls, and the rest slows down and then it gets harder to hit their performance stage.

Sure, you can solve that one problem of creating content, but what about the rest? This is where DAM is pivotal.

With the robust and extensive governance and rights management features in Experience Manager Assets, including workflows, access, permissions, and controls, together with the support of bulk asset ingestion, advanced metadata management, and auto-tagging of an asset upload. Organizations can be rest assured that assets stored in the DAM can be identified and discovered easily, while permissions and access control can still be granular and specific.

And then the next is to get these approved assets to the downstream.

And with recent innovations in Experience Manager Assets, organizations can now integrate DAM easily, not only with Adobe applications, but also other third-party applications.

But there is also something more than just integrating and selecting assets into DAM from a specific application. You have this content produced and they need to get out to these various different channels, devices, and screen sizes.

And the customer journey needs to be seamless across all of the devices.

So what does that mean? More assets, more variations, and various types of images, videos, and even 3D assets. At times, we have seen as many as 140 plus possible asset iterations for any given product.

How to make sure assets can be transformed and optimized for performance? And best customer experience is also super important.

This is where dynamic delivery comes in to accelerate the delivery of immersive content to every channel and insights along the journey.

Not only do you deliver assets, but using modern web formats to reduce file size and enhance the delivery performance, you can also achieve where one file can generate unlimited published versions, and then leveraging all of the different transformations at the edge, this interactive and emerging media to increase customer engagement and higher conversion. So the assets are now everywhere.

The next big challenge is to understand how they are performing.

We have seen lots of organizations saying one of the main problems they want to solve is how can they effectively save marketing dollars? Without data, how can you measure against KPIs, know what assets are being used so you can reuse, and understand how assets are performing and where they are delivered to.

With all that, Experience Manager Assets as a DAM provides campaign insights on what are the searches that drive better find, or what variations is generating engagement, and where that content is being delivered to.

The data and statistics are being visualized and made available in the DAM for all users to easily consume, and also to generate reports and tailor them as needed.

The performance data are available at an asset-specific level. So either marketers, librarians, or content managers can feed those insights back in order to adjust the content to be more personalized and targeted the next time.

There is also an upcoming innovation which is super exciting.

With this innovation, we can provide marketing and content teams with even more granular content insights at the level of experience, characteristics, elements, and attributes of content in order to inform content strategy and improve the effectiveness of personalization across audiences and so the ROI of experiences.

These insights, with the help of GenAI, will also be fed back into the generation process of content variations from optimization. So in short, what we envision to be the future of DAM and how it needs to evolve is with composable surfaces to handle the volume, speed, and scale.

You can choose how to expand and be more targeted with control.

A DAM that does not only allow you to manage the workflow of assets coming in, but also allow you to create content that is controlled.

So a DAM is not just a simple storage or a dumping ground.

It actually allows non-creative to be creative, expanding more users, like channel marketers, regional marketers, social marketers, and partners to create content who was not able to do that before, and pair that off with the proper controls and governance of that content throughout the life cycle to be able to perform.

So this is almost my final slide, which shows an ideal creative journey from discovery and search of assets in the DAM or distribution portal.

We use and remix approved assets to create new content variations, reaching millions of variations for personalized customer journeys. And then, when expanded DAM capabilities, like dynamic delivery, and asset insights, and performance measurement come into play.

This is not necessarily a linear journey, but just an example.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets has been a recognized leader in the digital asset management space for years, and we have been helping lots of world's biggest brands and organizations across all industries to achieve significant business values.

With our relentless innovations and bringing the best of breed Adobe Technologies and GenAI capabilities into the product.

What I have been talking, today, about the future of DAM, the future is actually already there. Experience Manager Assets is your future-proof digital asset management solution.

And with that, thank you so much for watching.

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