Scale, personalization and collaboration requirements driving demand for composable, flexible tech stacks

Cloudinary’s first global digital asset management (DAM) survey uncovers significant challenges brands face in scaling, personalizing, and collaborating effectively across teams. Despite acknowledging the importance of images and videos for building online trust and credibility, many brands are hindered by integration, workflow, collaboration, and post-production issues. The independent survey reveals that 57% of brands utilize 2-3 DAM solutions and highlights the pressing need for automation and generative AI to address these challenges.

The Importance of Visual Content

In today’s visual economy, brands increasingly rely on images and video for various reasons:

• Build Brand Trust: 64%
• Improve Product Credibility: 62%
• Enhance Market Awareness/SEO: 59%
• Drive Product Purchases: 52%
• Reduce Product Returns: 31%

The surge in the number of digital assets is evident, with 25% of surveyed brands storing 50,000 digital assets or more. Although text assets remain the most common (85%), visual content is rapidly catching up, with images (79%) and videos (66%) close behind. Brands anticipate further growth in visual assets, including:

• Images: 65%
• Short-Form Video: 64%
• 3D Assets: 41%
• Live-Streaming Video: 34%
• Long-Form Video: 34%

Bottlenecks in Workflow and Post-Production

As the diversity and volume of digital assets increase, brands face mounting challenges in delivering visual experiences at scale. The survey highlights key bottlenecks:

• Management Resource Availability: 51%
• Time and Effort for Asset Variations: 48%

Other challenges include:

• Managing Requests and Feedback: 44%
• Getting Assets Live in a Timely Manner: 39%
• Delayed Feedback on Assets: 39%
• Asset Quality Issues: 50%
• Support for Multiple Formats: 50%
• Late Delivery of Assets: 50%

Consequently, nearly 29% of respondents report that it takes days to get approved assets live on websites or applications, leading to potential revenue loss. As a result, workflow and collaboration (59%) and asset optimization are considered the most critical capabilities for a DAM today.

Outlook: The Role of Automation and Generative AI

Looking ahead, respondents believe automation and generative AI will play a vital role in addressing repetitive tasks within DAM:

• Personalized Asset Composition: 53%
• Asset Variations for Channels and Devices: 49%
• Brand Guideline Moderation: 43%
• User-Generated Content (UGC) Moderation: 32%
• UGC Normalization: 25%

Further, the top five tools where generative AI could enhance capabilities include:

• Asset Editing: 54%
• Text Creation: 53%
• Automated Image and Video Management: 52%
• Automatic Content Modification/Personalization: 47%
• Asset Insights and Recommendations: 42%

Wanda Cadigan, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Cloudinary, stated, “The findings of our DAM research lay bare the reality we’re seeing every day. Customers continue to rely on us to manage and automate the visual content lifecycle on an epic scale. Legacy DAMs were simply not built with today’s visual-first experiences in mind.”