How AI Is Reshaping Marketing Assets and Why Readiness Matters Now

Steve Bevilacqua 

Primary Consultant, Cella by Randstad | Martech and AI Execution Strategist |

Are Your Marketing Assets Ready for the AI Revolution?

Looking for DAM conference tips to maximize your Henry Stewart DAM New York experience?

The artificial Intelligence revolution is upon us, and it has become clear in order to stay competitive you need an AI strategy. Specifically, when it comes to marketing content, I want to discuss one specific thing you can do today, right now, to get ready for incorporating AI into your marketing technology stack.

Now before I can get to specifics, you will need to do a quick and honest check of your digital maturity.

1.      Do you have a central repository for your creative and marketing assets- typical a DAM (Digital Asset Management application)?

2.      Do you have a solid, global, metadata taxonomy in place?

3. Do you have established and followed operational workflows, quality control and governance?

4.      Do you have good change management practices: communications, user management, on-boarding, adoption, training?

If you answered “no” or “sort of”, that’s ok– shore these areas up first. Don’t try to jump ahead, it’s like putting expensive tires on a car with a bad engine.

Now if you have the foundations in place, you are probably asking, “What does any of this have to do with Artificial Intelligence?”

One only needs to look at some of the recent headlines and lawsuits to see a significant problem with Generative AI when it comes to rights management. The AI must train itself with input. The problem is that sometimes it leans more heavily on a certain piece of source material resulting in an image or output that the original creator recognizes. Bring on the lawsuits!

So, is that the end of AI? No, not at all.

This is almost certainly only temporary and will become less of an issue in the future, as AI becomes even more sophisticated. But I feel that you will always be better off with your own proprietary content even if it is just enhancing a much larger public dataset.

For now, companies can avoid this issue by training the AI with their own proprietary IP and owned media. This makes sense not only from the lens of rights management, but more generally making sure the AI stays within brand guidelines and has only the most recent materials needed for your next campaign. The AI will not know that a product’s packaging has been updated, or it’s using an old logo before your company rebranded — unless you train it.

If you have a central marketing repository, most likely in a Digital Asset Management system, you’re already poised for success.

So, what needs to be done from there:

1.      A strategy on creating new assets while curating existing assets to make them usable for the AI

2.      A review and update of your metadata schema to work with your AI engine to achieve the results you are looking for.

3.      A method and technology to evaluate the AI’s performance (analytics)

Depending on your current situation thesefew seemingly small steps can be a significant lift.

AI has garnered a lot of attention recently but is not new. I worked with Adobe on what would become Sensei way back in 2017. AI has been a part of auto tagging in DAM systems for some time. What has changed is how quickly it went from something we laughed at for its silly and frequent mistakes to being indistinguishable, and at times better and faster, than its human partners.

Following these steps will put you in a competitive position to be ready to adopt and integrate AI into your current content marketing architecture. Good luck and let me know how it’s going!

#artificialintelligence hashtag#martech hashtag#generativeai hashtag#dam hashtag#digitalmarketing

I like this part a lot Steve “I’m always a little trepidatious when everyone is talking about something […] I don’t, and never felt, that way about AI.” I also see this often in conferences, some big brand did something great (or stupid), or some government came up with a new rule, etc.

I do believe the media attention AI has today will go down, not because it’s going away, but because people will start seeing it more and more, and it will become ‘normal’.

Alex Monich VP of Technology Commercialization