Sitecore Leverages AI for Smarter Management of Images and Video, Reduces Content Creation Pressure

Company streamlines content lifecycle management, announces CHILI publisher integration and releases Javascript software development kit for third-party solutions

Sitecore, the global leader in digital experience management software, released version 3.4 of Sitecore Content Hub, offering new robust, streamlined and scalable capabilities to help brands accelerate their digital transformations.

Brands today manage thousands of digital assets to create engaging digital experiences for their customers. Leading organizations are quickly realizing the necessity of augmenting their content management with world-class digital asset management capabilities to support the current content explosion and improve their marketing efficacy and efficiency in the process. Sitecore Content Hub version 3.4 offers enhanced Digital Asset Management (DAM) capability with leading edge innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and video capabilities, in addition to improving workflows and ease of use with extended integration to third-party solutions.

A recent study by marketing advisory firm Econsultancy¹ found that 65% of marketers spend more of their time creating content than any other activity supporting digital campaigns. To offer time-savings, Sitecore Content Hub 3.4 adds Content AI to analyze image similarity so brands have instantaneous access to alternative images in the DAM, with more options made immediately available to fit their particular need. Marketers can then choose to reuse or repurpose these rather than create new ones—saving their company time and money. For example, when using a photo of a family on the beach, Content Hub will recognize the makeup of the photo and offer similar images of groups on the beach, reducing content creation timelines and expense for marketing teams.

Consumption of video content has grown and continues to grow exponentially, with 85% of U.S. internet users saying they watch online video content,² and viewers report spending 59% more time watching online videos in 2019 than they had three years before.³ To help brands manage their video content more effectively, Content Hub version 3.4 also includes the ability to automatically generate metadata as well as transcripts for video using AI analysis from Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. In addition, video management capabilities now include support for time- and range-based annotation, cropping and subtitles, giving marketers more automated capabilities to make their videos more consumable by different audiences.

“Our vision has always been to streamline work and take the tedium out of the creative process for our customers,” said Tom De Ridder, CTO, Sitecore. “With version 3.4 of Content Hub, we’ve taken several massive steps to further drive this mission with new capabilities, enhancements and integrations in a SaaS product that makes it easier for all content stakeholders in a distributed environment to work together to solve the content crisis—all in a single solution that distributes content to all channels.”

Recent research from SoDA found that 95% of marketers say producing and publishing personalized digital content more quickly is a priority and 39% say manual processes are holding them back. ⁴ Additional workflow and ease-of-use functionality new to version 3.4 helps to support these demands, including smarter navigation, mass-edit templates, and on-the-fly tagging. Now, Marketing Resource Management and Content Marketing Platform (MRM and CMP) integration empowers DAM users to manage both agile workflows of content items and timeline-based project management workflows from a single location.

Content Hub 3.4 also improves workflow and ease-of-use for DAM users who use Adobe Creative Cloud. With a DAM search panel, users can upload, check in, and check out assets from InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. They can preview work-in-progress within InDesign documents directly in the DAM without packaging, and package finished assets directly into the DAM from InDesign.

CHILI publisher integration

Producing graphics the traditional way can be fraught with challenges for today’s marketer. It takes time, requires money, and involves risk. Marketers face brand compliance and governance challenges, scale challenges, and time-to-market challenges.

With Content Hub 3.4, enhanced Web to Print capabilities with tight integration to CHILI publisher are now available to simplify and automate graphic production across digital and print publishing. This integration connects Content Hub data and assets to CHILI Smart Templates that enable preset customizable elements while embedding brand identity guidelines. Users can now self-service anywhere in the world with just a browser to deliver customized, brand-compliant, and ready-to-use printed assets at scale.

Javascript development kit

And to make it easier for assets and content to flow to and from other applications in the marketing technology stack, Sitecore has also released a Javascript SDK, making Content Hub more extensible with accelerated and minimized development and integration efforts for third-party solutions.