Video transcript below:
My name is Helen Aboagye and I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Imagen.
I am responsible for the planning, development and execution of our marketing initiatives ensuring Imagen’s message gets to the people that matter, so we can meet our targeted growth objectives. Most recently, my team and I have been working on the launch of our new product called Imagen Go, which is an AI-powered platform for marketing and creative teams that helps to remove the complexity that comes with managing digital assets – something that marketing teams have to juggle on a daily basis.
What is a DAM, and what does it do?
DAM stands for Digital Asset Management. It is essentially a system that stores, shares and organises digital assets in a central location. So it really helps to amplify the benefit of creative files such as images, videos and other media, but ultimately a DAM is a company’s content sharing and storage solution.
Why is there a need for a product like Imagen Go?
Maketers are creating more digital content that they ever have before and digital admin is preventing us from making the most of the content we are spending our time and money creating. We recently did some research that found that 38% of respondents went into marketing because it enabled them to be creative, yet over a third of respondents said they just don’t have enough time to do so. Imagen Go gives you a branded project workspace where you can manage, discover, share and archive all of your digital assets. It is a place where you can securely collaborate on your content across its development lifecycle, with both internal and external stakeholders thus removing some of the common problems associated with the cost of content creation that take up so much of our time.
What does ‘digital admin’ really mean, what are the day-to-day issues that a DAM can solve?
Digital admin refers to issues like being able to find the exact file you need quickly. So rather than ploughing through endless folders on your G-Drive or Sharepoint, or scouring back through your emails, with a DAM it can find your file in seconds. Think of it as a more sophisticated Google search tool for all of your own content.
Then there are the problems of sending large files successfully – how many different solutions do you think people within your organisation use to do this? We all know the joys of sending large files via email don’t we? Or through third party websites like DropBox or WeTransfer – or even sending files via post or courier. How secure is this and how often do you have to send things multiple times, or the links expire or things just get lost? With a DAM, everything stays – and is managed – in one place.
Another common problem is version control. Protecting the integrity of your brand is a full-time job and one that is very important to most marketers. With a DAM, it is made so much easier with clear status settings for work in progress, different versions, approved and published content and so on. So the days of colleagues using the wrong logo or creatives adopting the wrong imagery for campaigns will disappear.
These are just 3 issues faced readily by anyone producing content and oftentimes marketers just live with this and accept it as the status quo. We don’t even realise that there is sometimes technology out there that can really help us work more effectively. These are problems that suck the life out of our creativity and eat up our time – time that can be used for much more important things like growing your business.
In marketing, what is the most frustrating thing when working on projects?
One of the things that frustrates me the most is being able to find what I want when I want it. This is further compounded by working remotely because I can’t just turn to my team and ask them where it might be or if someone has it or can point me in the right direction – or what a file is actually called. For searches in many applications, you need to know what the file is called in order to get anywhere close to finding it – and even then, it can probably be buried in a ridiculous hierarchy of folders somewhere. 38% of people we surveyed recently said that it takes them at least several minutes to find a digital asset every time they need one. If you just think about how many hours that adds up to over weeks, months, years, it can be enormous.
How can AI help with these frustrations?
There has been a huge growth in video marketing over the last few years and its popularity has risen across many different platforms but whilst I love the benefits of what video can bring in terms of engagement, it is also one of the hardest mediums to work with – from production through to storage with its variety of sizes and formats. Imagen takes away a lot of this complexity. Features like time-coded comments make it ridiculously easy to request changes at exactly the right point in the video. So you won’t have to watch your videos 20 times over, pausing, rewinding and going back a million times to capture the time at which you want to make a change – and then put all of that into an email. You can direct your comments to specific people and engage with those people around your comments all within the platform.
We want to bring the ease and intuitiveness of Microsoft Word and Google Docs tracking and editing to video, alongside a lot of other content formats like PDF, audio and images as well as Powerpoint and Word files.
Why is it important for marketers to invest in technology like Imagen Go?
Investing in digital tools is an investment in your team. Imagen Go gives you a virtual space to get your best work done and it helps remote teams to collaborate and work more effectively together. So rather than spending time planning and managing hierarchical folder structures or trying to be information architects or worrying about terrible legacy file names that mean you can’t find anything, you can spend more time nurturing your talent within your team and let them do the things they love. After all, no one goes into marketing to become a librarian – digital or otherwise – do they?
