“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  visual-first experiences in mind.”

DAM usage 

In visual economy, brands rely on images and video more than ever. According to the survey, brands use visual content for five main reasons: to build brand trust (64%), to improve product credibility (62%), to improve market awareness/SEO (59%), to drive product purchases (52%), and to reduce product returns (31%). Therefore it’s little wonder the number of digital assets online is surging. Of those surveyed, 25% store 50,000 digital assets or more.

Although text assets such as documents, PDFs or presentations remain the most common type stored in DAMs (85%), images and video are close behind at 79% and 66%, respectively. Visual assets in particular are expected to grow in the near future, with brands expecting to use more images (65%), short-form video (64%), 3D (41%), live-streaming video and long-form video (both 34%).

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Major bottlenecks flagged in workflow/collaboration and post-production work

As digital assets become more diverse and prolific, delivering visual experiences end-to-end and at scale is becoming more challenging for brands. The survey identifies bottlenecks in two areas: workflow/collaboration and post-production. When deploying digital assets at scale across sites and applications, the availability of management resources were identified as the number one challenge at 51%. Post-production issues such as time and effort to create asset variations also rank high at 48%.

Similarly, when delivering assets to the development team for use on websites or apps, the top challenge is managing requests and feedback (44%), followed by getting assets live in a timely manner and delayed feedback on assets (both 39%). When receiving assets from creative partners, post-production and quality issues such as asset quality (50%), support for multiple formats (50%), and late delivery of assets rank high.

Given these challenges, it follows that nearly a third (29%) say it takes days to get approved assets live on websites or applications. In fast-paced economy, this can mean a significant loss. As a result, both workflow and collaboration along with asset optimization (59%) are ranked as the most important capabilities a DAM should provide .

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Outlook: Automation and Generative AI to the rescue

Looking further ahead, respondents believe there are several areas where automation and generative AI capabilities can have a positive impact in the near future. The top five repetitive tasks a DAM should automate are personalized asset composition (53%), asset variations for channels and devices (49%), brand guideline moderation (43%), user generated content (UGC) moderation (32%) and UGC normalization (25%).

Getting even more sophisticated, the top five tools or features where generative AI could make a difference mentioned are: asset editing (54%), text creation (53%), automated image and video management (52%), automatic content modification/personalization (47%) and assets insights and recommendations (42%).

According to Wanda Cadigan, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Cloudinary, “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 visual-first experiences in mind.”