Not too long ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was just a concept from science fiction movies. But today, AI is changing the status quo of entire industries — including marketing technology (martech). When it comes to digital asset management (DAM), image recognition software has a valuable and growing role in metadata creation by automatically tagging assets during the upload process.

Let’s take a look at how image recognition software works and the efficiencies it can bring to DAM workflows.

The use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving in the digital asset management (DAM) community, and rightfully so. AI-powered tools support metadata creation, a time-consuming process that’s often one of the biggest pain points for DAM software administrators and users.

This is why these tools are no longer merely a nice-to-have. As digital libraries expand and AI becomes more sophisticated, image recognition and auto-tagging tools have become a must-have for any enterprise DAM solution. 

The adoption of AI tools in the Widen Collective^® has kept pace with this evolution, and as with any other software developments within our platform, we’ve gathered customer feedback around the functionality to ensure the capabilities meet their needs.

The start of the pandemic in 2020 forced consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to streamline their e-commerce experiences. And unexpected changes in customer behavior brought with it expedited digital trends that are disrupting the consumer-goods industry forcing them to shift away from traditional success models. For example, online sales of food and beverages reached an all-time high of $66 billion in 2020 and according to NielsenIQ, online CPG food and beverage sales could reach as high as $109 billion in 2021. What once was a shopping trend embraced by a select few, is now a common occurrence for many households. 

However, this kind of rapid growth also brings with it some challenges. It demands that companies scale along every part of the value chain, and marketing is no exception. Widen customer HARMAN International, a global consumer electronics company, found their marketing communications tools and processes became a hindrance to delivering products to market, so they invested in a product information management (PIM) system and then a digital asset management (DAM) system. 

Let’s take a closer look at what HARMAN has achieved with their DAM and PIM investments.

Anyone who has worked in digital marketing knows that marketing and technology go hand in hand. Successful marketing strategies rely on a variety of tools to evaluate data, connect with audiences, and create engaging content. With thousands of martech tools to choose from, the key is determining the right ones for your team. 

Imagine that your marketing team has the ideal technology stack. The customer experience is seamless across every device and channel. Your analytics give you insight into every touchpoint of the customer journey. All your software is integrated, redundancies are eliminated, disconnects are connected, and bottlenecks are gone. It’s a nice dream, right?

With the right marketing technology team, you can bring a lot of that dream to life. Probably even more of it than you think. Assembling an effective group of martech heroes takes some work, but you can do it. Just like you would map out the ideal future state of your marketing technology (martech) stack, you can map out the people and team structure you need.

“Everything’s fast now and it’s totally unreasonable,” says comedian John Mulaney. “The world is run by computers. The world is run by robots. And sometimes they ask us if we’re a robot just because we’re trying to log in and look at our own stuff!”

Marketing teams face the opportunities (and temptations) of more channels, more content, and more technology. And thinking about how it all works together to deliver a consistent, effective customer experience can lead to more headaches.

If you’re feeling like your marketing technology is making you work more not less, or you’re struggling to keep up with the speed of business, it’s time to take a step back and think about what your technology is doing for you, your business, and your audiences.

Thinking about integrating Salesforce with your Widen Collective^Ⓡ digital asset management (DAM) system? There are many ways to connect these powerful tools. Let’s explore how this integration works, why it’s valuable, and relevant use cases.

As businesses look for new and effective ways to engage customers, many are exploring how to advance their content marketing strategy into brand publishing. As publishers, brands form connections through high-quality stories created by talented journalists, photographers, videographers, and illustrators. Content is continually created and shared to cultivate a stable audience and build long-term brand awareness and growth. 

One distribution format that is gaining traction among brand publishers is podcasts — not only are they relatively inexpensive to produce, but they have growing consumer interest. According to Edison Research and Triton Digital, roughly 55% of Americans (or 155 million people) have listened to a podcast — up from 23% a decade earlier. And there are now over 800,000 active podcasts with over 54 million episodes available worldwide. From news and history to true crime and culture, podcasts span every subject and interest. 

But podcast distribution entails managing feeds to a variety of networks — including iHeart, Google, Spotify, Tunein, Stitcher, iTunes, and more — which can be time-consuming. Any Widen customer can use our digital asset management (DAM) software, the Widen Collective^®, to streamline their podcast production process and publish content efficiently across various networks. To explain how, let’s look at an example from a Widen customer.

Digital rights management (DRM) is the use of technology and systems to restrict the use of copyrighted digital materials. DRM tools are designed to protect the rights of the copyright holder and prevent unauthorized modification or distribution.

Stealing or copying other people’s ideas or work is an age-old phenomenon. But modern technology has made piracy exponentially easier. With a few clicks of a mouse, many copyrighted images, videos, and audio files can be shared or downloaded from the Internet — often without proper permission. From Napster to bootlegging and “borrowing” art, this activity is widespread and costly. A recent report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that online piracy costs the US economy almost $30 billion a year. 

Best Friends Animal Society is an animal welfare organization that finds homes for rescued pets across America. They use their digital asset management (DAM) system, the Widen Collective^®, to store, organize, and distribute all of their digital assets — which includes a lot of images of ridiculously cute dogs and cats. 

Sarah Kichas is Best Friends’ Photography Manager, and DAM administration is just a small part of her job. It entails managing a constant stream of new content from a diverse group of photographers — including staff, freelancers, and volunteers — many of whom take pictures at just a single event. Giving them all access to the Collective with the appropriate login credentials, permissions, and upload instructions could be a part-time job in itself. 

At the 2019 Widen Summit, Sarah shared how they use the Widen API and Dropbox to turn this onerous upload process into a simple, streamlined workflow. “I love it,” she said, “because it saves me time and energy, and most importantly, my sanity.”