MarTech Interview with Skye Chalmers, CEO at Image Relay

You founded Image Relay 20 years ago and have led the company since. How did Image Relay get started, and what problem was the company originally built to solve?

I spent the first part of my career as an action sports photographer, selling photos to publications like ski and snowboarding magazines. By 2002, I was taking and editing thousands of images, but getting these large-file images to clients through CDs and hard drives was increasingly inefficient and frustrating. I began thinking, “If there was a faster and easier way to share my work online, my business could move faster, and I could spend more time shooting, and less time dealing with the headache of relaying my work.”

I founded Image Relay that year as a way to quickly and easily catalog, manage, and share my work online: when photography is accessible it is more valuable. The solution caught on, and as globally-recognized brands like Ben & Jerry’s began using Image Relay, I realized we had a viable and scalable business that addressed a common pain point. We’ve evolved considerably in 21 years, of course, but the core tenets have remained the same: offer a simple-to-use solution that gives our customers a clear edge over the status quo.

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How has Image Relay evolved in those two decades, in terms of what it delivers to brands and their marketing teams?

Evolving to meet the digital asset and product information management needs of our (broad and cross-industry) customer base led to building and releasing our cloud-based Marketing Delivery platform. Marketing Delivery offers unique advantages to marketing (and other) teams by combining digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) capabilities. Bringing the two under one roof, so to speak, provides brands with a single source of truth that unifies all their digital assets and product information. Marketing Delivery is a key ingredient to achieving—and continuing to ensure—an omnichannel presence.

Within today’s fast-growth organizations, it’s common for digital assets to end up spread across cloud storage accounts, and shared and local drives. Product information similarly becomes scattered and lost among different silos and different departments’ management tools. Our platform tames that chaos for brands and their marketing teams, eliminating delays and frustration by enabling quick, easy, and accurate access and distribution of digital assets and product information.

Digging in a little more, why is it advantageous for brands to combine Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Product Information Management (PIM) capabilities?

Separately, DAM and PIM are incomplete solutions to the challenge of providing an organization’s marketers, sales teams, and business partners with instant and reliable access to the assets and information they need. Disparate solutions naturally leave a gap where miscommunication, errors, and costly remediations flourish. That’s especially the case at scale. For example, sending out inaccurate or outdated product information or digital assets can be a time-consuming nightmare to resolve, and result in lost revenue and reputational damage. It’s been the status quo for too long, which is why we developed Marketing Delivery.

By combining DAM and PIM to provide a centralized and continually-updated single source of truth, brands can be fully confident that the correct product information, assets, and data are directly available to internal and external teams, whenever they need them.

With our Marketing Delivery platform, teams can automatically create and deliver reports containing data precisely customized to the needs of each brand partner and product channel. Teams and partners can similarly leverage self-service access. The result is streamlined workflows, error-free operations, and far greater efficiency.

What does Image Relay’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) look like?

We see buyers come to Image Relay from several roles. Marketing leaders are definitely a big business driver for us. They tend to really understand the need for DAM and PIM modernization and proactively seeking martech solutions that can give their teams more efficiency and, frankly, a better employee experience when it comes to managing digital assets. So, we’ll see customers come to us via the brand’s CMO, head of marketing, product marketing lead, etc. Depending on the customer industry, we’ll also see inquiries from those overseeing the development and placement of the brand’s creative elements. Other customer types of note are e-commerce and merchandising leaders, and sales executives and directors. CTOs tend to also be an influencer in the decision-making process for us. As they increasingly prioritize customizable solutions that can integrate smoothly with existing systems and processes—and handle large volumes of data without compromising performance or security—Marketing Delivery helps further those goals.

Over the past three years, how has your business strategy changed to keep it future-ready against both competition and economic uncertainty?

I think we’ve been ahead in recognizing the ever-changing requirements and challenges marketers face navigating the complexities of selling products across multiple retail channels and geographic markets. It was becoming increasingly clear that traditional PIM and DAM solutions were falling short in addressing these needs, and we were beginning to see substantial gaps in the market between what brands wanted and what was available. Our customers helped validate our conviction that a new solution like Marketing Delivery would be valuable, and that helped shape our most competitor-differentiated product to date.

In the era of AI and machine learning, how does a platform like Image Relay’s Marketing Delivery fit into a CMO’s modern martech stack?

Marketing Delivery fits into CMOs’ broader AI/ML initiatives in several ways, but here are a couple of specifics examples:

1. Data prep:

Because Marketing Delivery provides a centralized repository for organizing and storing key data (product info, images, videos, other digital assets), the single-source-of-truth solution helps brands more easily and quickly prep their data for use in AI applications. AI applications are only as good as the input data, and Marketing Delivery ensures accurate, complete, and consistent data.

2. Image recognition:

AI can be used to automatically recognize and tag images based on their content, and Image Relay’s digital asset management library gives marketers a large dataset of already-tagged images, making it much easier for businesses to train their AI algorithms to recognize specific objects or attributes in visual content.

Brands are under more pressure than ever to build a consistent and personalized brand image. How does DAM fit into that strategy, and is there a case study at Image Relay that you could highlight for our martech readers?

Combining DAM and PIM to ensure that the right digital assets are associated with the right products and information offers an essential advantage in helping marketers tell brand stories.

As a case study example, Kinder’s specializes in premium seasoning blends, sauces, and marinades—all delicious, by the way. The brand has thousands of customer-facing marketing assets, from product data to images. Keeping that information accurate and available on a daily basis is crucial to success and growth. To meet its goals, Kinder’s relies on our Marketing Delivery platform to bring a consistent brand story to its customers. With Marketing Delivery, Kinder’s internal teams are able to eliminate inefficient and duplicate work, and its business partners instantly receive all materials they require. With the brand’s digital assets and product information fully organized and optimized, Kinder’s is now more confident in telling its story and focusing on high-value growth initiatives.

Outside of how Image Relay fits into brands’ martech ecosystems, what trends or technologies in the industry are you particularly excited about right now?

Beyond the efficiency that comes with combining DAM and PIM, I’m excited about other process automation strategies that transformatively impact and improve marketers’ day-to-day activities and experiences. Many marketing team workloads include tedious tasks and bottlenecks that put the brakes on productivity, which is why I think the citizen development (or no-code) trend will be important. It’s still early days, but I expect no-code deployments (particularly combined with AI advances) will have a major impact on how employees without technical backgrounds can build and iterate applications that help them do their jobs. In my view, brands shouldn’t hesitate to put existing workflows to the test now, and start introducing automation and streamlined experiences wherever they find an opportunity.

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What do you see as the biggest challenges CMOs and marketing leaders face?

I think a huge challenge right now is navigating an oversaturation of brand messaging and ensuring a consistent narrative. Audiences are bombarded with an increasingly-incessant stream of ads, emails, social media posts, and other content. Cutting through this noise and capturing the attention of target audiences has become increasingly difficult. CMOs must constantly be developing messaging strategies that are unique enough, relevant enough, and resonant enough to stand out. It’s not easy.

The other big messaging challenge for CMOs right now is making it all cohesive. Your audience is spread across so many channels and touchpoints, but the narrative must be coherent and aligned. CMOs must ensure that their brand’s values, voice, and key messages are consistent across platforms and across marketing campaigns—it’s all but required to build trust and recognition while enabling customers to clearly understand what a brand offers and what its purpose is. Having marketing assets tied to a single-source-of-truth certainly helps achieve that goal.

Any podcasts or books that you’d recommend to young marketers and/or sales professionals?

I would recommend Storynomics, a book by Robert McKee. Storynomics delves into the origins and power of Story—how to craft it, how to leverage it, and to use it to differentiate in marketing and business. It’s an important read; after all, our entire society is shaped and moved by stories.