How Cloud-native DAM Optimizes Customer Experiences

Written By the Cloudinary Team May-06-2019 4 Min Read

In today’s digital age, brands rely heavily on rich media to tell stories, foster engagement, and make emotional connections that drive results. Marketers use videos and images, tuned to customers’ interests, to create dynamic visual experiences. Digital campaigns about trips to Florida, for instance, have separate plot lines, depending on audiences’ passions for golf, deep sea fishing, or kid-friendly versus romantic getaways. Marketers expect to detect preferences, produce personalized experiences highlighting different desires, and turn digital prospects into vacationing customers. The ultimate success of a marketing campaign relies on the consistent delivery of these customer experiences, at scale.

However, personalizing dynamic visual experiences takes time, effort, and a variety of digital assets. Certainly, teamwork across engineering, marketing, and creative teams is an important part of the equation. Photographers, videographers, photo editors, and video producers all have important roles to play, visualizing emotional connections with rich media. Web developers and marketers alike then have the digital assets in hand to deliver optimized online experiences create campaigns and tell engaging stories.

Streamlining Creative Activities and Marketing Operations

But time-to-market and costs are important considerations. Tried and true manual operations cannot keep up with the variety of customer experiences, the velocity of business activities, and the volume of digital assets required. Suppose stories about trips to Florida also include romantic golfing vacations for couples on weekend escapes, particularly those who have left their children with grandparents. Better to develop this and other plot lines automatically, from assets and scripts already vetted for wide-scale use.

New situations require new experiences and emotional messaging, rendered in full fidelity across multiple devices and display environments. Needed is a content infrastructure based on a single source of truth – a shared repository for managing digital assets – together with the embedded services for streamlining creative activities and marketing operations. With these services in place, campaign directors can rapidly identify the most popular visual themes, and use these insights to script new stories.

Next-gen DAM and Better Digital Campaigns

There are two parts to producing better digital campaigns – developing the plot lines and ensuring the right digital assets are readily at hand. Creative and marketing teams must collaborate efficiently. They are going to rely on a digital asset management (DAM) platform to deliver these dynamic visual experiences, accessing the multiple rich media variants to produce personalized plot lines. Moreover, a cloud-native DAM, like Cloudinary, makes it easy to manage assets while scripting stories and creating campaigns.

Here’s the situation. First, creative professionals continue to produce photos and videos. Some photo shoots may begin as specific assignments where the results are then stored for later reuse. Other shoots may be creative activities on their own. What is important are the rich media lifecycles, beginning with creation and capture events, then upload and manipulation tasks, and finally distribution and delivery processes. There are multiple editorial and production workflows between external branding agencies and in-house producers, depending on the organizational culture and business relationships. A cloud-native DAM provides the single source of truth across all of the steps of this rich media lifecycle.

Then, when scripting the personalized plot lines, marketers easily access and select from extensive collections of photos and videos, vetted and approved for distribution. They can focus on the messages behind the campaigns and access the digital assets that best visualize the experiences. They can easily browse through very large rich media collections, automatically tagged by multiple categories, often categorized by emotional moments.

This shared repository supports digital campaigning at scale. In addition to familiar capabilities for storing, securing, tagging, and accessing assets, the cloud-native DAM platform includes AI and machine learning capabilities to provide auto-tagging as well as on-the-fly object recognition. A smart repository minimizes the need for manual processes. Marketers can rapidly produce multiple personalized plot lines at lower costs and with fast time-to-market.

Cloud-native DAM

Finally, it is important to consider the underlying deployment environment. When it comes to omni-channel content delivery, a cloud-native DAM platform makes a difference. Traditionally, there are multiple points in a creative workflow where assets are downloaded from a DAM, shared with a different team, transformed, and then uploaded as other versions. Instead, a cloud-native DAM platform provides an on-the-fly URL that can be used at every stage of plot line development – the original, every transformed version, and wherever customers expect to view it on web sites, mobile apps, and even high-resolution kiosks.

In short, a cloud-native DAM platform such as Cloudinary optimizes customer experiences for digital campaigning. A cloud-native DAM delivers digital assets dynamically to any channel, any device, anywhere, with the perfect quality and performance, ensuring the full fidelity of the customer experience being rendered exactly as designed. Assets are managed within the shared repository, enabling marketers to spend their time and effort doing what they do best – personalizing plot lines.