AI and Retail Marketing: Using data and AI to grow business exponentially
AI and Retail Marketing: Using data and AI to grow business exponentially
Without a doubt, Artificial Intelligence is the number one story of 2023, with breaking news and hyperbolic predictions popping up daily. Retailers and their partners are justifiably concerned. Retail marketing and advertising directors are asking what AI will mean for their current operations and the future of retail marketing in general.
The first thing to remember is that AI and its related technologies – machine learning (ML) and “big data” – are nothing new. The idea of using large training data sets to automate routine activities or predict future outcomes, often called “narrow AI,” has been around for decades. But with all the advances in cloud computing and the November release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the floods of new information (and misinformation) have created more than their fair share of anxiety for some retail professionals. However, the secret to overcoming these fears is the same as it has been for any new technology – understanding its abilities and limitations.
Basic concepts
AI can be applied to almost any digital data, including structured data (usually alphanumeric fields with logical labels and relationships) and unstructured data. Think of structured data like a spreadsheet with clearly labeled rows (records) and columns (fields). Unstructured data does not have such neat labels and includes digital images and unclassified text, such as that found in social media posts. But even if a data set doesn’t have logical, structured labels (or metadata), it can still have meaning.
AI is designed to detect patterns in large volumes of unstructured data. Those patterns, often confirmed with human assistance, are used in ML algorithms to train a system to recognize similar patterns – in images or text – and make predictive decisions automatically. An AI does not understand the meaning of those patterns as a human can, but it can simulate a human’s meaning-aware response far faster than human decision-makers.
Let’s consider the difference between human understanding and how AI can simulate it. A retail marketing manager, for example, may understand the meaning of certain facts about a product:
- It has sold well at certain times of the year.
- It has a reasonably high-profit margin and a reliable supply chain.
- The manufacturer has supplied most of the product’s relevant information.
- It has had many favorable reviews on social media and elsewhere.
- It has been favorably described in various blogs and articles.
- There are publicly available images and videos of people using it.
Items 1–3 represent structured data, typically found in sales history, inventory, or product information management (PIM) databases. Items 4–6 are unstructured, for the most part. But from those data points, a human might reasonably conclude that a sales campaign for that product is a good idea. But because there are so many different products and product variables, it would be impossible for one human being – or even an entire marketing department – to make those decisions on a massive scale. On the other hand, an AI-based system can detect meaningful patterns (as confirmed by humans) from all kinds of available data and automatically prioritize the most likely candidates for a marketing campaign.
Doing this at scale would accomplish several things. If the AI’s pattern recognition is accurate – an easily testable hypothesis – then the effectiveness of retail marketing campaigns would be greatly increased. It would also lessen the cost and drudgery of combing through data to find meaningful, actionable insights. Finally, if marketing and advertising directors were freed from these burdens, then they could focus more on things that artificial intelligence will likely never do, namely consider the aesthetic and psychological preferences and biases of their audience. Creative and insightful humans will always have the edge regardless of how well or quickly AI can mimic human behavior.
The retailer’s advantage
In this area, large retailers already have a big advantage over other companies, namely their ready access to massive amounts of mostly structured, product-related data. This is only natural since they must handle thousands (or millions) of individual products from multiple manufacturers. Every product SKU must have an array of feature and component data, usually stored in a PIM system. At the same time, it must maintain all the images and descriptions of each product, typically stored in a digital asset management (DAM) system. Add an array of other data sources for sales, inventory, pricing, and other essentials. Many companies now also include e-commerce sales histories and customer reviews.
That ocean of data has to be well managed, of course, which can be challenging. Fortunately, Comosoft’s data integration teams have helped many retailers unify their PIM, DAM, and other structured data sources, using the LAGO system for meaningful, collaborative planning and efficient, InDesign-based workflow optimisation for multi-version print and digital campaigns.
Of course, the difference is that the typical PIM, DAM, and other data sources are highly structured – as they should be. We are only in the early stages of adding structure to new varieties of data, such as customer reviews and customer-supplied images and videos. But those new data types offer incredible potential value to the retail marketer. And AI will only accelerate that value.
Focus on data-readiness
Before anyone can realistically tackle AI and masses of unstructured data, they must first master their structured data – turning it into marketing gold, as it were. Comosoft LAGO is a proven tool for doing just that.
Once a large retailer has found a way to be “data ready” with what they already have, the next step into artificial intelligence will be a logical, powerful next step. With this readiness level, AI can only launch the retailer into new levels of efficiency and growth.
Find out more about Comosoft’s custom systems integration and data strategy service and book a demo to see for yourself how LAGO can streamline your data workflow.
The Planning Paradox
The Planning Paradox*: How to Effectively Plan Multichannel Marketing Campaigns
*The uncertainty of early-stage decision-making characterises the paradox of project planning. To plan appropriately, stakeholders must make early decisions to keep things moving but might not initially have the knowledge (or data). More information (or data) might be available later in the production process, but the decisions made in these later stages might be less important for its success or would be too late. That concept is the paradox.
Large, national retailers – and even smaller, regional ones – often must cope with several logistical and market challenges. One of these is the rapid proliferation of media channels. In each one, they must establish a good relationship with current and potential customers, preserving the retailer’s brand without sacrificing accuracy or time-to-market with each campaign.
Before digital, planning and executing an ad campaign or catalog took hard work and creativity. Now, the work is exponentially more complex, thanks to the demands of digital, mobile, and especially social media platforms. A single, well-planned, branded campaign must now feed multiple outputs – each with its own peculiar attributes and requirements. Each campaign also must be strategic, featuring products with ample profit margins, dependable sales histories, high brand recognition, and adequate inventory in the region(s) where they are promoted.
All of these particulars are represented as distinct pieces of data. Some are contained in massive Product Information Management (PIM) systems. Others, like product images and descriptions, are housed in Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems. Still, others are found in separate, often proprietary databases or systems for pricing, inventory management, sales history, social media management, and content marketing. Sometimes, these databases can be more or less related or combined. But all too often, they are separate “silos” of information – rich in potential but difficult to handle efficiently and still leave room for creativity.
Putting Marketing Managers in charge
Marketing managers and directors have enormous responsibilities for creating profitable campaigns. To do so requires more than good instincts. They must also have a solid grasp of the data and how it relates to the campaign. For example, when planning a multi-region campaign, it’s vital to know which products have the greatest sales and profit potential in each region and their stock availability in those regions. With little time to spare for research, the best alternative is to let the data tell you which products are best. In the marketing ballgame, instinct counts, but data makes the rules.
The problem is that most data is often not easily accessible – or easy to visualize. What is needed most is a comprehensive integration of all that product data, plus the ability to transmit a marketing manager’s decision directly to those designing the print or digital campaign output.
In previous columns, we’ve discussed how Comosoft LAGO provides such an integrated marketing workflow. However, for those responsible for creating campaigns out of all that data, we must take a closer look at LAGO’s approach to planning.
Nearly every modern business plan begins with a brainstorming or concept overview process. The universal metaphor for this is the ordinary whiteboard. In this century, physical whiteboards have been supplanted by digital ones, allowing multiple parties to collaborate on visual representations of an idea. LAGO provides such a tool for marketing managers but with a crucial difference. In addition to freeform notetaking and review visualization, the LAGO whiteboard is truly connected to the retailer’s integrated data.
During the planning phase of a campaign, the manager or director can easily find the products best suited to the retailer’s bottom line. Once selected and placed on the whiteboard layout, the planner’s decision includes the product’s related PIM, DAM, and pricing information. This decision also sets a reliable reporting framework in motion, allowing the marketing manager to track a product’s success in a specific campaign and learn how to improve that performance over time. LAGO’s visual interface gives the planner the best of both worlds – conceptual awareness of a product’s appearance and attributes PLUS a frictionless connection to reliable product data.
Making the handoff easy
Once a campaign is mapped out with the LAGO whiteboard, an Adobe InDesign template is generated automatically, giving the production design department a head start in creating the output. The template includes each page’s product placement decisions, complete with links to the related PIM, DAM, and other data sources. Each designer is freed from the burden of tracking down all that data or, worse, replicating all the marketing manager’s choices. They are free to do what they do best – design.
The connection between layout and data is preserved using a LAGO plugin for InDesign. If something changes in the data, such as an updated image or product specifications, the layout is updated automatically. The data flow is also bi-directional. When a designer makes a substantial change – via a documented approval process – the marketing manager is aware of it.
One of the bigger challenges for larger retailers is making custom or regional versions of each catalog or other campaign output. LAGO makes this process simple, using the original layout (as conceived by the marketing manager) as a “master” version. Unlimited versions may then be created, preserving the piece’s universal elements (and the brand identity) while allowing the substitution of regionally relevant products or offers. Each version remains relevant to the overall campaign while also allowing each location to have the ability to optimize for their market.
In addition, LAGO also gives marketing campaigns an effective way to replicate a campaign across multiple channels. The data, images, and presentation created by the original designer can be transmitted automatically to the retailer’s web, mobile app, or social media groups – allowing them to populate all marketing channels rapidly with the latest campaign data.
Plans in motion
Collaboration is always the key to a successful multichannel campaign. But the effort is broader than savvy marketing, creative, and production teams. Their tools must be smart as well. With Comosoft LAGO as the expert tool set, such a collaborative workflow is genuinely possible.
Retailers are automating their weekly circular production
How retailers are automating their weekly circular production and do more with less
The weekly circular has long been a staple marketing and advertising tool for grocery chains and other large retailers. To cope with the disruptions of digital media, retailers have experimented with various ways to cut costs, sometimes discontinuing the printed versions of circulars (especially as newspaper inserts) only to bring them back in other ways. Recently, a national grocery retailer paused the printed versions of their weekly ads but then brought them back as regular mailers, with targeted promotions and QR codes to take customers to sale items on the website.
There are good reasons why the weekly circular – in print or digital formats – is an enduring tool for marketing and advertising directors. As Motley Fool writer Maurie Backman noted in her May 2023 column, using the circular as a five-minute research guide for shopping lists can save consumers significant amounts of money – a worthwhile pursuit during high inflation. And, if the circular is well-designed (and accurate), it also serves as a familiar, brand-reinforcing weekly reminder to consumers.
A complex process
Weekly circular ads and flyers (printed and digital) are the lifeblood of a retailer’s marketing program. The larger the retailer and its inventory of products, the more challenging it is to produce compelling and accurate flyers using SKU data that promote high-margin products. Creating multiple versions of that same flyer that support various regions and markets is even more challenging.
As creative services and production managers know, creating an effective weekly circular is complex and difficult. It was always challenging, but with the growth of digital, retailers are under enormous pressure to deliver more content across an increasing number of platforms. By using the weekly circular as a starting point, they can begin to fill that need – but only if they have the right processes and workflows to handle the flood of activity it requires. And they must do so, very often, using overstretched human resources.
The circular involves multiple departments and individuals, each racing against a weekly deadline and coping with product management details, rapid and time-sensitive changes in the information, design localization and versioning, and conversion to digital and social media channels. This process is complicated even further by the fact that product statement from multiple manufacturers is stored in several different databases, starting with their product information management (or PIM system), digital asset management (or DAM system), and other data sources.
If any of these processes must be done manually, then retailers cannot reasonably expect to keep up. They will risk enormous gaps in their marketing content mandate – not to mention the risk of costly errors in the material produced. Automation is the secret to “doing more with less”, but that is hard to do haphazardly or piecemeal. Facing the continuous onslaught of activity that weekly circulars represent, retailers need a global solution.
An elegant solution
Comosoft’s LAGO represents the ideal solution to this perplexing problem for large retailers, including major grocery chains. By taking a holistic approach to data management, campaign planning, and media production, LAGO gives retailers the luxury of automation while giving marketing managers and production designers the freedom to innovate.
The LAGO process begins with a plan. Retail product line and marketing managers create a campaign strategy based on an integrated approach to product information (PIM), product images, logos, descriptions (DAM), and other connected data sources – all coordinated with a digital whiteboard interface. Products with higher margins or known popularity can be featured, along with a mix of the retailer’s other offerings. Sale pricing is based on real-world business goals and solid data.
After the campaign is planned, it gets transmitted to the design team through InDesign templates automatically. These have the campaign’s featured products in place and real-time connections to all their related PIM and DAM information. Designers are freed from the need to track down all that data and can focus on designing the finished product. When multiple regional versions are required, the design team can create these easily, using the base circular as the “master version” and creating regional variants according to that region or branch manager’s priorities.
Other time-consuming manual tasks are highly automated as well. LAGO provides an efficient, collaborative approach to proofing and approvals, sending digital proofs automatically to the right decision makers and returning their feedback to the design and production teams, who can send the finished, multi-version result to the proper print service providers anywhere in the country.
The automation does not stop at print, however. Data used to create a circular in LAGO can be automatically sent to the retailer’s website or mobile app, even on a regional level, satisfying today’s shopper’s growing need for up-to-date information on multiple media channels.
As LAGO users have discovered, there are ways to reimagine the printed circular. QR Codes, which have seen a resurgence since the pandemic, can easily be integrated into the LAGO workflow, typically as part of the retailer’s existing DAM system. Just as a marketing manager and design team can easily specify a product photo, they can also include a QR code for that product. When the printed circular comes in the mail, users can quickly go to that product’s sale landing page, genuinely integrating the print and online experience.
“Doing more with less” is much more than a catchphrase. With advanced workflows from LAGO, retailers can make it a profitable reality.
How LAGO PIM and DAM help you create a seamless customer experience
How LAGO PIM and DAM help you create a seamless customer experience
In information technology, the idea of a “single source of truth,” or SSOT, is a well-established practice. Simply put, in the context of databases, SSOT means that each piece of information is edited only in its leading system. It’s logical in theory but often difficult in practice.
Retailers, for example, must store different types of information about a single product they sell in separate databases, each designed to optimise a different part of their operations. A product information management or PIM system contains different types of information than a digital asset management or DAM system. Each system serves a specific, vital purpose. To duplicate the data everywhere would be pointless and time-wasting – the very thing SSOT exists to prevent. The real trick is getting all those special-purpose databases to work together.
Various databases
A retailer may have immaculate records on every product they offer, but they will only stay in business if they can effectively advertise and promote those products. Therefore, today’s retailers must have immediate, efficient access to every data source available to market effectively. As every creative services manager, production manager, and director of marketing knows, it’s all about the data and learning how to use it.
That’s where SSOT comes in. It’s OK for different types of data to exist in their appropriate and unique locations – so long as marketing can harness all of it in a well-planned campaign or, more likely, in hundreds of simultaneous campaigns across multiple channels and regional variations. With proper integration and workflow, multiple databases can become a single source of truth.
For instance, the degree of difficulty for marketing managers is very high. A system with an integrated PIM, DAM, and other databases can help organize, categorize, validate, and distribute product information and digital assets. More importantly, it can do so transparently, allowing designers to create content for multiple channels efficiently without having to master each database. Such a system, Comosoft LAGO, exists today.
As retailers move increasingly into e-commerce, such a system becomes even more important, allowing them to create marketing content for existing channels while simultaneously doing so for online and mobile channels, creating a seamless brand experience for their prospective customers.
The customer experience
Making one’s message welcoming, engaging, and relevant requires creativity and communication skills unencumbered by complex data technology. Retail consumers have never been exposed to this much media clamoring for their limited attention. Wise marketers are acutely aware of this and thus must continually find ways to make their messaging welcome, engaging, and relevant. This combination requires creativity and communication skills, unencumbered by complex data technology. Doing this well requires the work of many hands.
One advantage of an integrated approach is that all the data – usually supplied by various manufacturers and vendors – is genuinely and securely centralized. LAGO accomplishes this not only for internal production use but also for external users such as agencies and sales reps. While the data still reside in separate, secure systems, they are also part of a trusted, single source of truth.
Another thing LAGO accomplishes for the marketing or advertising designer is to provide transparent access to accurate, up-to-date, and rich information for each product. So, for example, when a marketing or product line manager identifies the product most likely to appeal to a target audience (by using LAGO at the start of a campaign), all the relevant information is instantly made available to those creating the campaign.
With so many “touch points” available to the average consumer, from print to digital and beyond, marketing and production managers are too often at a loss how to keep all those channels full – without flooding the customer with mere noise. LAGO offers creatives the ability to do this and more. Facilitating complex information exchange across many channels simultaneously multiplies the creativity of good marketing and advertising designers. As a result, even the need for multiple regional versions of a single campaign can be accomplished with relative ease. By doing this, retailers can sustain the best possible customer experience, using only the current, trusted product information in the customer’s chosen medium.
Finally, using a well-integrated PIM and DAM approach accelerates a retailer’s go-to-market strategy for marketing campaigns. Critical workflows, including print versioning and mobile app updates, can be automated with LAGO, allowing designers to explore new strategic opportunities. LAGO can also be integrated with enterprise and cloud-based enterprise resource planning or ERP systems, further optimising and automating large retailers’ national or international operations. Also, since most databases are already highly customized and burdened with legacy code, the LAGO API gives a retailer’s IT department a decided edge in creating a robust, enterprise-wide, single source of truth.
Ultimately, the proof of any retail marketing campaign is how well it resonates with the individual consumer. In the age of big data, there is no shortage of available information – about the customer, their preferences, and the products themselves. Amid that immense sea of data, only a trusted, single source like LAGO can help the retailer create that optimum customer experience.
LAGO Product Information Management
Learn more about our LAGO PIM and how we can help you organise your product information efficiently.
Why Digital Asset Management matters
Why Digital Asset Management matters
Does everyone on your team have the same access to all the assets they need to do their job? What about your third-party collaborators or your remote team members?
Here’s a fact:
In one study examining how digital assets are managed, 54 percent of survey respondents reported using Google Image Search to locate their own company logo.
Managing assets like photos, PDFs, and videos isn’t as easy as it sounds when your organization requires multiple teams to collaborate on content creation and publishing. At its best, this collaboration needs to be optimized with software to ensure that their sales team, for example, always finds the latest version of a file, like a logo, at the right size and resolution.
This is where Digital Asset Management comes in. So, what does this kind of tool do—and why does it matter? Here’s a look at what Digital Asset Management can do for you and your team.
What can you and your organization do with a DAM solution?
- Share files via a cloud-based platform at any time and from any place
- Organize all of your digital assets in a centralized location
- Collaborate, share, and create content from a single set of shared updated assets
- Empower your team and your third-party partners to locate assets quickly and easily
- Manage rich media like audio files, videos, and high-quality images
- Keep everyone on the same page regarding branding and current versioning
- Streamline digital publishing and distribution
- Track which assets are being used and when, assign metadata to each asset, and understand how your content is being used
With a Digital Asset Management solution, everyone is on the same page within your internal teams and when working with outside vendors and other partners. For example, your creative team and marketing, sales, packaging, technology, and legal teams have access to the same assets. Moreover, sharing these assets with external users like agencies, distributors, and other collaborators is easier and more secure.
Why it matters: The benefits of utilizing a DAM solution
The demands of today’s digital landscape are constantly increasing. As brands look for ways to make the most of their content and the lifecycle of their digital assets, Digital Asset Management offers myriad benefits shaping how these assets are used.
- Rich in Metadata: Metadata is the perfect opportunity to bring order to chaos. A system of assigning keywords and other metadata makes it easier to find assets later. It tracks important information embedded alongside each asset, including copyright and licensure dates, technical specifications, origin, keywords, and more. At a glance, you (and your team) can manage your asset metadata and know if the asset you are viewing is up-to-date and usable, which campaigns it’s been used for already, how it’s been used, and who created it.
- Advanced Search Capabilities: An effective Digital Asset Management solution means your entire organization can explore your digital assets in new ways via advanced search capabilities. Using a traditional file storage system, you might only be able to search for files based on their file name or date—but a DAM gives you the power to use filters, categories, subcategories, keywords, collections, and more to find what you need.
- Control Who Has Access: One of the essential features of a DAM system associated with asset governance is that the platform makes it simple to manage who has access to your assets. Administrators have control to establish how different users from different groups interact with your company’s assets and even track who uses or makes changes to assets—and when. A DAM solution allows you to set separate access rights for creators, sales and marketing teams, and even third-party collaborators. Hence, everyone has access to what they need, and you can limit access to all your other assets to keep them secure, protected, and used only for the proper use cases.
- Manage Security: Outdated file-sharing methods don’t give you the same level of security over our assets the same way Digital Asset Management does, and more labor-intensive file-sharing wastes valuable time. DAM systems boost your cybersecurity strategies, storing everything securely to protect your assets and ensure your entire organization is adhering to the regulations or guidelines you must follow for digital rights management. You also save time because your teams don’t have to waste time establishing access permissions—because it’s already done for you. In addition, DAM simplifies secure sharing without the time and hassle of encryption or file transfer protocols (FTP).
- Uphold Your Brand Reputation: Thanks to a single, centralized repository for all your assets, you can rest easy knowing that everyone on your team will use the most updated version of all your assets. You don’t run the same risk as someone using a low-quality or low-resolution asset or an outdated asset that no longer fits with your current branding. Everyone is working from the same page. The result is consistent output and strong branding from everyone on your team to present a professional, consistent image.
- Save Time and Money: Employing a Digital Asset Management solution saves you valuable time and resources. How? As you create and use new assets, you risk misplacing files. Then time is spent searching for—and sometimes even recreating—these assets simply because they aren’t easily accessible. But this doesn’t happen when assets are stored in a DAM solution. Instead, you create an asset once, which can be published anywhere. As a result, a DAM platform streamlines your processes, quickens your time to market, and simplifies collaboration.
- Take Advantage of Analytics: How are your assets performing? How often are they getting used? With an intuitive DAM solution, you can access all kinds of analytics about where your assets are going, who is using them, and which assets are used the most. It shows you what kinds of assets are most useful to your brand—and paints a picture of the most beneficial assets to create moving forward.
- Work From Anywhere: Because DAM software is accessible from any web browser, your team can utilize your brand’s assets from wherever they are. There’s no waiting to access files from an office computer or for someone to set up a secure FTP; everything is securely stored in the cloud to keep your work in motion.
The importance of governance in Digital Asset Management
When managing your assets, governance is one of the most significant benefits of using a Digital Asset Management tool. Governance is an essential strategy to keep track of your ever-growing library. Asset governance is about establishing and evolving standards, policies, and best practices for how you plan to manage it all as an organization. This not only includes the assets themselves but also everything surrounding these assets, including:
- The people who use them
- The processes of how different assets are used
- The technologies your organization uses
Establishing a well-defined governance plan gives you a clear path to move forward in managing your assets and sets you up for success with implementing a DAM platform. It sets the information, guidelines, and policies to keep your DAM running smoothly.
Why does this matter?
On the one hand, a clear definition of policies will help you use a DAM system optimally and securely. In addition, these guidelines can be a helpful guide for adjusting your operations in general, since a critical part of DAM management involves optimizing a continuous and collaborative workflow with your entire team.
Governance can be an oft-overlooked part of setting up or maintaining a DAM system. After all, in establishing your organization’s DAM platform, you’re already thinking about systems configurations, user permissions and access, taxonomy, metadata, and legal compliance – not to mention training everyone who will use the DAM solution.
But DAM governance is just as important as the nuts and bolts of it all. Think of it like the rulebook for your favorite board game. While you might have all the right playing pieces, the dice, and the cards to get started, the rules – in this case, your governance structure – help you keep things moving.
Your organization’s governance structure may include considerations like:
- What kinds of assets belong in the DAM
- Who has access, what they have access to, and what they can do with it
- What naming conventions will you use organization-wide
- What metadata standards and requirements do you have
- How to handle versioning
- What licensing and compliance requirements do you need to consider
- How to communicate changes and updates with users
- How to handle expired assets and how to archive out-of-date assets
Making things pretty DAM simple
Comosoft’s LAGO DAM solution is the ultimate in Digital Asset Management: It’s powerful, easy to use, and a media-neutral repository to keep your brand’s most valuable digital files, images, and videos secure and usable.
Thanks to an expansive, standards-compliant approach to metadata, LAGO by Comosoft takes the burden of asset management off your team so they can focus on more important tasks. Together, you can import and maintain assets in one secure, central location, manage access, stay compliant with brand guidelines, and help everyone be more collaborative and productive.
Plus, LAGO eliminates time-consuming requests and asset silos through collaborative workflow tools that enable you to create, edit, revise, and approve print and digital marketing communications all from the same place with the most updated assets. In fact, LAGO automatically updates active media campaigns whenever assets are updated or replaced to make your work more efficient than ever. Are you ready to see LAGO in action? Book a demo today!
PIM | DAM impact on retail business
How PIM and automated data management are changing the way manufacturers and retailers do business
These days, you cannot turn on the news or read a publication without seeing something scary and fascinating about Artificial Intelligence or AI. Nearly as often, you see ads by Amazon or IBM promoting cloud computing and “big data.” What you see or read far less often is a down-to-earth explanation of ordinary business data and how that data can make marketing a truly efficient process.
For retailers and their marketing and advertising directors, the most abundant collection of valuable data is the vast ocean of information about the products they sell. Every item has its own, unique collection of images, general descriptions, and product details, all stored in either a Digital Asset Management (DAM) or a Product Information Management (PIM) system. Often, there are also separate data sources for product pricing, inventory, sales history (for physical stores and e-commerce), customer reviews, and other feedback.
The problem, of course, is how to combine all that data and utilize all those data sources automatically in multichannel marketing campaigns. Eventually, AI will be able to use large data sets more effectively, but first, we need to manage the product data we already have. As more and more data moves from local servers to the cloud, the first step is optimizing our PIM and DAM systems.
Retailers and manufacturers must always start with accurate, trusted data if they are to effectively reach customers across all print and digital channels. A cloud-based PIM system then serves as a reliable, central product data depository. When its data are consistent and connected with DAM and other data sources – and ultimately to print and digital production systems – the use of manual processes is minimized. In other words, the flow of data between systems is streamlined and automated, allowing campaign projects with multiple versions and channels to reach their audience faster and at a reduced production cost.
Over the past ten years, PIM systems have migrated from limited, locally-hosted entities to cloud-based ones. This transition has made it easier in theory for retailers to accept and use manufacturers’ PIM data and connect PIM, DAM, and other systems into a more unified, flexible infrastructure. In practice, this has often been challenging, especially when it comes to integrating with print and online production systems like Adobe InDesign.* One of the only systems to effectively manage and automate this “last mile” between cloud-based PIMs and actual design and production is Comosoft’s LAGO.
Data accuracy is essential, whether the final output is for print, digital e-commerce, or (as is usually the case) both at once. So, one of the first things Comosoft does when implementing LAGO is to ensure that the PIM data from manufacturers and the retailer are aligned by SKU number. This alignment is critical, whether the systems remain local or are in the cloud, because LAGO has all available data for each product in the campaign. In addition, retailers often rely on LAGO’s own cloud-based PIM system, although LAGO can also work with existing PIM and DAM systems.
The LAGO PIM system allows for the vast complexity facing marketing and retail advertising directors, namely the need for product data variants. For example, a single product may have different regional names or be expressed in more than one language. It can even be defined by customer-specific content. With so many possible variations and regional marketing needs, the PIM must have unprecedented flexibility to produce multi-versioned campaigns quickly and efficiently.
Perhaps the greatest need in a PIM-to-production marketing workflow is for the data to flow wherever it needs to go without undue manual intervention. LAGO accomplishes this by making PIM data bi-directional. Production designers can pull all the elements for a single product (from the PIM, DAM, and other systems) with a single action – or in a template created by the campaign planners. The process is automatic, freeing the designer to do what they’re best at – design. But if they have to change something, such as a regional override or correcting an error, that data change is communicated back to the cloud-based PIM. An authorized marketing manager can then approve the change globally or allow it as a regional or situational exception.
Data interconnectivity does not stop there. Besides coordinating the data flow between PIM, DAM, and other data sources, LAGO also conveys relevant campaign data automatically to other systems, including sales and inventory management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing campaign planning, and other complex systems – often also in the cloud. It also conveys the campaign design data, usually expressed as regional variants, from one medium (print) to its many online counterparts, such as mobile e-commerce. By supporting a wide, multi-faceted, and largely automatic data flow, LAGO has changed PIM from an isolated data “island” to an integrated part of an efficient marketing workflow.
With or without advances in real-world AI, cloud computing and massive data sets are now an everyday reality for retailers’ marketing and advertising departments.
* Adobe’s suite of graphic design products is known as “Creative Cloud.” However, apart from license verification, the software itself still consists of local desktop applications.
LAGO Product Information Management
Learn more about our LAGO PIM and how we can help you organise your product information efficiently.
How secure is your Digital Asset Management solution?
How secure is your Digital Asset Management solution?
Working with a cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) solution means your entire team can connect and share the same assets from anywhere. It makes fast, efficient collaboration more straightforward and more accessible than ever and can help you do things like:
- Tracking and managing assets
- Assigning and utilizing metadata
- Formatting and customizing assets
- Searching and locating assets in moments
- Automating workflows
- Updating assets across the entire enterprise
- Integrating with other solutions
But how secure is your DAM solution? Cybersecurity has never been more critical than it is now. So many organizations use cloud-based tools to do everything, from multichannel marketing to eCommerce platforms to resource planning, customer management, user experience, and more.
And cybercriminals are paying attention. So when evaluating solutions and choosing the right cloud-based DAM platform for your company, include cybersecurity in the conversation. Instead, discover what you need to know about protecting your assets from the rising threat of attack.
Protect your assets: Why DAM security matters
Your brand’s digital assets possess inherent value – after all, you use them to promote and share your message as a company. Unfortunately, cybercriminals and other bad actors find this kind of data extremely appealing because they know how valuable it can be. That’s why you have to make an intentional effort to protect your assets and choose robust cybersecurity tools to defend against the actions of hackers and other criminals.
What are some of the risks associated with your digital assets? They include things like:
- Phishing attacks that include attempts to download malware or make their way into your DAM.
- Ransomware that holds your data and assets hostage until you pay a costly fee to access them.
- Data breaches to view, share, transmit, or sell your digital assets and other sensitive data.
It’s estimated that by the end of 2023, more than 33 billion records will be illegally obtained by malicious actors, a dramatic increase of 175 percent from the number of records stolen in 2018. And it’s not just the large companies that are at risk. Of course, large multinational corporations constantly face threats from cybercriminals. But small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are also under attack.
In fact, the Internet Crime Complaint Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) reported an astonishing 847,376 complaints in 2021, totaling almost $7 billion in financial losses. Their findings? Most of these complaints and attacks targeted SMBs. That’s why choosing a secure DAM solution is mission-critical to your long-term success, regardless of your company’s size.
The other issue? Working with a digital asset management solution is – by nature – deeply collaborative. That means assets are shared, edited, and used by a whole host of users within and outside your organization. So, security is even more critical for digital asset management because you must have a strategy to protect your assets even when sharing amongst many people.
Choosing a Secure DAM Solution: Factors to Consider
Your DAM platform holds a lot of responsibility. It’s where collaboration happens – and with good reason. After all, once a digital asset leaves your DAM solution, you lose control over that asset. That means:
- Vendors, partners, and team members may wind up using an outdated asset or an asset that doesn’t fit your current brand standards.
- Marketing materials may include photos with expired digital rights, and you could have no idea and no control over this happening.
- You don’t gain access to asset metadata, which can help you track usage patterns to better understand what assets serve you the best.
A cloud-based DAM solution helps you retain control of your valuable digital assets while fostering partnerships, workflows, and collaboration from anywhere. But what about security? How well does it keep you protected? Here are factors to consider when looking for a secure cloud DAM platform.
Share files securely with internal teams and outside partners
Anytime you share assets with anyone, including your team, agencies, and retail and distribution partners, it is a calculated risk, especially if you’re about to launch a new campaign, service, or product. You’re juggling many things simultaneously, including embargo dates, product testing, final edits, publishing deadlines, and more.
Your DAM solution can help you track and safeguard assets with external vendors, third-party partners, and your team whenever you need to share assets without compromising your security.
Track the usage of your assets
Your marketing teams need a way to analyze which assets are getting used and why. This gives you unprecedented data about which visuals offer the highest performance and how to attune your marketing strategies. In addition, your DAM system must track your digital assets once they are distributed.
Especially when dealing with things like embargo dates and related protected images, you can manage the reach of your assets, detect unauthorized usage (and potential activity from cybercriminals), and protect your brand’s intellectual property.
Monitor & audit user access
What happens if assets are compromised by user access or a data breach? First, you need to know the source of the leak right away to mitigate further damage. Leak detection and complete records of user access to assets are essential when content is leaked or misused.
When you choose a DAM solution that monitors and manages all access, you’ll better understand where your assets are going and who is seeing them.
Other security measures to consider
Security isn’t just something you paste on top of your DAM tool—or any software solution, for that matter. Other security features to look for include:
- Strong passwords to prevent brute force attacks
- Two-factor or multi-factor authentication to keep bad actors out
- Secure application programming interfaces (APIs) connecting your DAM to your enterprise
- Encryption of data, including your digital assets
How LAGO Keeps You Secure
LAGO by Comosoft was developed with your security in mind; the whole idea behind a digital access management and product information management (PIM) platform is to enable secure sharing of your assets. As such, there are several security measures put in place to keep your data – and your entire brand – protected.
Security features include:
- Requiring secure passwords from all users
- Allowing for two-factor authentication (2FA) methods, including text, email verification, and authenticator applications
- Sending alerts to managers following any failed access attempts and suspicious activity
- Accessing and integrating LAGO with your existing platforms via a secure API
LAGO: Ensuring Asset Security At Every Turn
With LAGO by Comosoft, we’ve successfully completed both on-site and cloud installations of our DAM-PIM solution. Based on how most brands are working now, most of our customers are opting for a cloud-based installation to enable collaboration from anywhere.
LAGO has specific security protocols built-in to keep your assets protected. These include features like:
- Centralized and encrypted file storage
- Physical separation of database and file storage
- Distributed file storage with master and slave logic for external locations
Secure Sharing
LAGO DAM enables users to define access, visibility, and usability to restrict access to their most protected assets. So, when you share access to assets with internal users and outside vendors, you don’t have to grant them access to your entire digital asset library.
LAGO allows secure sharing by offering a wide range of restricted access to assets, which is helpful for those assets that have not yet been approved, are no longer valid, or have been limited to specific departments. Factors like validity dates can restrict the usage of a particular asset, and the visibility and editability can all be adjusted by assigning single users or user groups to an asset.
Easy, cloud-based access for external users
Some cloud file-sharing services like Google can share files via a link using different permissions, but they only include some of the metadata and other features that come with using a DAM solution.
Having all your assets stored within LAGO DAM enables external users not part of your LAGO-hosted production process to request imagery. For example, a web-based application allows users externally request access to the LAGO DAM search engine to find assets. Once a user has found assets needed for external purposes, the assets can be placed into a shopping cart for download. Users may download an original file or only a preview depending on user rights.
5 Digital Asset Management Best Practices
5 Digital Asset Management Best Practices
Currently, around 70 percent of organizations already have a digital transformation strategy or are in the process of creating one. Digital transformation is growing at unprecedented levels. Just how fast? In 2021, organizations spent $1.5 trillion on digital transformation globally. By the end of 2023, that figure is expected to climb to $6.8 trillion.
With all this focus on digital transformation, more and more digital assets are created every day, and organizations are relying more on these assets than ever before – which means brands need a platform to manage it all.
That’s where digital asset management (DAM) comes into play. A DAM platform stores and organizes all of this information, empowering workflows and making it easy for users to find and share content quickly.
What should users know about employing a DAM solution? Here are the five best practices for digital asset management.
1. Discover what you already have
Your visual and creative assets are powerful tools you can use to connect with your audience. In fact, over 60 percent of digital marketers share that visual assets are essential to effective marketing strategies – and there’s plenty of proof to back this up. For example, when people hear or read a message, they can recall and relay about 10 percent of this information three days later. However, when that same message is paired with some visual graphic, people can remember 65 percent of the information after the same amount of time.
But here’s the kicker: You can only use the assets that you know you have. So, there could be plenty of unused assets, or worse – your organization could wind up spending time and resources to recreate assets you already had but didn’t know were there.
One of the most important things you can do when moving to a DAM solution is to conduct an audit of your existing assets, looking for things like:
- What assets do you have?
- What kinds of assets will you need to manage?
- What are your assets used for?
This audit can help you not only make better use of your existing assets but also get a better idea of your digital asset management goals and find a DAM solution that fits your specific needs. For example? A DAM solution designed to manage videos and images over multiple channels and outlets might mean that you should choose a DAM with an integrated workflow tool that fosters faster approval, collaboration, and distribution.
When moving to a cloud-based DAM platform like LAGO, an audit will help you compile all your assets across your entire organization and bring them together in one place. Conducting such a thorough audit means everyone will have access to the same resources no matter where they are.
2. Build your workflows around your DAM solution
It’s been reported that 70 percent of companies fail at their attempts at digital transformation. Why is this? Often, they don’t bring their team on board or make their new technology solutions integral to their operations. So, over time, these underutilized tools fade into the background, and any efforts to improve their processes don’t succeed.
One of the most important things you can do is build your workflow around your DAM platform. Learn what your team members need from one work silo to the next, listen carefully to their concerns and what might help them do their job better, and choose – and use – your DAM’s workflow functionalities and automation tools to foster collaboration and communication in real-time throughout your processes, from creation to editing to approval to publishing. Well-utilized cloud-based workflows empower your team and all your partners to move through projects faster and more unified.
When you lean into the features that your DAM platform offers, like workflows and production automation, you benefit from well-designed workflow technology and ensure successful adoption across your entire organization.
3. Set access control and roles & permissions
DAM solutions are used to unify the work of multiple departments and many team members whom all play different roles within the same organization. Establishing things like roles and permissions not only makes it easier for everyone to use the same platform, but this process also gives all your assets an extra layer of security.
When you set roles and permissions, you can limit access to certain assets to specific campaigns or even a single team or department. This layer of permissions means unauthorized users can’t gain access to assets they don’t need, those still in development, and those awaiting approval. As a result, your assets stay secure, and everyone uses the most current version of every asset in your toolbox. Especially with cloud-based DAM platforms like LAGO, where cybersecurity is crucial, your team and third-party partners can securely access the assets they need from anywhere.
Similarly, it’s a good idea to set up access control functionalities. Often, organizations are handling photos that are copyrighted or have been created with one use in mind. When you establish access controls and restrict access to these assets, you limit the chance that an asset winds up in an unapproved use case that could exceed the bounds of copyright agreements.
BONUS: Speaking of copyright, you should use your DAM platform to set alerts on copyrighted assets to stay in the loop regarding upcoming expiration dates so you can renew licenses when necessary.
4. Unify your naming conventions
Creating – and sticking with – naming conventions is an indispensable way to organize everything in your digital asset management system. It makes it simpler to locate the needed content and avoids issues with duplicating existing content simply because it couldn’t be found due to the name structure.
Work with each department and team to standardize your naming conventions to ensure that all your assets are uploaded and stored with a shared naming structure. This exercise is also an excellent opportunity to establish a protocol for categorizing your digital assets and what metadata is included to simplify the search process. When everyone works together to make your assets easy to organize and find, everything becomes more accessible, and your processes become that much more efficient.
Some ideas for naming conventions:
- Including a date in the file name for each photo means it’s faster to find all the pictures taken on the same day.
- Insert metadata like the name of a campaign to identify all the assets used for that particular campaign quickly.
- Create keywords and tags for each campaign or use case to build a searchable, organized database of all your assets.
5. Make the most of your assets with analytics tools
A robust, cloud-based DAM platform doesn’t just store your assets and all the accompanying metadata. It helps you optimize this data as well. A critical best practice for digital asset management is to utilize analytical data to your advantage. After all, a DAM not only helps you organize and locate digital assets, but it also provides information like:
- When an asset was used.
- Who used it.
- What was it used for.
Your entire team can use these features to unlock all insights about team engagement with your assets. Your DAM analytics tools can give you information about what assets are used most and discover which content gaps need to be filled, what’s working, and what needs improvement.
One example would be to discover which assets are used more or less frequently than others so you can modify underutilized and underperforming assets, so they serve your team—and your goals—better.
Elevate your DAM potential
LAGO by Comosoft was created to help brands collaborate better. As a cloud-based, combined DAM, PIM, and marketing production solution, LAGO helps with everything from workflows to access control, versioning optimization, proofing, organization, and more.
Why waste time looking for the right solution or waiting for one team to sign off on something? LAGO provides automated task management and keeps everyone working from the same data set. In addition, it has best practices like access controls built in to empower the work that marketing and production professionals do every day.
Streamline and automate marketing production workflows. Take multichannel marketing to the next level. Keep your assets organized and protected, and make them work for you.
4 Tools to keep collaboration on point
4 Tools to keep collaboration on point
Fit Small Business recently reported that in most companies, collaboration accounts for 85 percent of work time, and 9 in 10 workers believe that digital tools that foster collaboration processes are becoming increasingly important.
Eighty-five percent of the work week is a lot of time spent finding processes to work on projects with your own team members or other teams in an equitable and reliable manner. Team collaboration is more important than ever, and digital tools enable companies to collaborate remotely.
The support of collaboration tools is essential in the world of marketing production, as they form the framework of the marketing value chain. Only when participating teams can collaborate on marketing materials without friction can the value chain be successfully streamlined. This is the only way to make marketing production efficient. Below are some important tools to consider for smooth collaboration.
1. Clear communication channels
According to McKinsey, using social technology tools to strengthen workplace communication and collaboration has the power to increase productivity by as much as 20 to 25 percent. In addition, these tools can clarity for workflows and ensure everyone is working from the same page in the same book.
Here are a few tools you can implement to nurture strong communication channels and encourage collaboration:
- LAGO Whiteboard: This module is perfect for marketing managers, product managers, and agencies to plan printed advertisements efficiently, no matter a person’s experience level with layouts. Collectively, your team can assign products with all the relevant SKU data and images to specific pages via a web-based whiteboarding environment. Once your team is ready to go, the pre-layout results automatically populate InDesign templates for the creative team. Whiteboard bridges the gap between category management and marketing production, integrating the two departments to work together.
- LAGO Workflow: LAGO Workflow goes beyond print and digital production to help you control your entire production and create, schedule, and manage projects from beginning to end. These tools give your organization better, clearer control of every project step, from multichannel campaigns to merchandising, promotional planning, whiteboarding, and more. LAGO’s workflow modules help reduce the cost of creating and managing these multichannel campaigns by opening the lines of communication, allowing information to be changed and conveyed to designers, and limiting the possibility of errors, data entry mistakes, or other miscommunication issues. This also helps your team assign pages, monitor status, track results, and more in a web-based environment.
- LAGO Proof: LAGO Proof is a web-based system to bring your team together to ensure that your final product is ready for publication either online or in print. It provides a smooth, efficient, timely approval process even when numerous decision-makers have to sign off on each element. This includes automatic delivery of files for approval (and corresponding email notifications), assignment and tracking of mark-ups, and more. In addition, every user’s corrections are visible, even as the proof is passed from person to person or department to department. Those corrections are seamlessly integrated within the original document, eliminating breakdowns in communication and keeping everyone in contact effortlessly.
2. Efficient task management platforms
There are all kinds of proven benefits to implementing task management tools. For starters, bigger tasks can be handled better when we break them down into smaller, bite-sized portions. But additionally, task management platforms offer a host of other benefits, including:
- Improved personal productivity and better focus
- A deeper understanding of the broader needs of the entire organization
- Stronger communication between employees and departments
- Greater visibility of an entire project and an improved ability to meet deadlines as a team
Staying on task and communicating can be hard when there are multiple projects to juggle or lots of people working together on the same tasks. Task management platforms help foster collaboration, stick to demanding deadlines, and tighten workflows.
LAGO Workflow is entirely customizable and can be tailored to suit your organization’s specific needs for multichannel marketing production. Use LAGO to assign particular tasks defined by each person’s role, including the time allotted for each part of the workflow, to automatically calculate due dates, reduce delays, limit errors, and remove friction from the overall workflow.
3. Reliable asset management support
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is an intelligent solution to manage all your company’s assets, including photos, documents, videos, music, presentations, brandings, and other media needed for marketing and promotional use.
Digital asset management is about keeping your workflow moving and preserving your production plan. It helps you catalog, share, and store all of your digital assets in one place – and opens the lines of communication about where all of these assets are being used.
A DAM system can help you build a more efficient and collaborative workflow for designers, photographers, videographers, and art directors. Additionally, there is more time to focus effort on what they do best, like creating compelling content rather than searching for images or sending or requesting certain assets.
For marketing professionals, a DAM system frees you from countless hours searching through images or creating new ideas for print and digital campaigns. Using a single, central repository, you can quickly locate the content you need without sending requests to the creative team and waiting for a response.
Because most DAMs are cloud-based, they make collaboration simple. You can share files from anywhere, at any time, and find what you need quickly. In addition, all of your company content comes from the same place, empowering brand consistency among all collaborators.
Digital asset management helps you share assets with your team and outside collaborators, retailers, and agencies. As a result, you can ensure your brand’s materials are distributed appropriately, that you are using the most updated images and assets, and that you are representing your brand the way you need to. It’s the ultimate collaboration tool.
- Consolidate your asset management in a single repository
- Share assets with team members via a central platform
- Automate the process of cataloging assets to increase collaboration efficiency
- Save critical information from loss or isolation on a particular employee’s device
4. A smart data management solution
Do you have a way to manage and track all of your data? A Product Information Management (PIM) system provides a single solution to manage your product data, including SKUs, product identifiers, titles, descriptions, images, pricing, quantities, and more. The overall goal is to provide organizations with a central media-neutral storage tool to manage and distribute product information, even when you’re overseeing a variety of output channels.
Here’s why this matters: A reliable PIM system like Comosoft’s LAGO PIM solution can help you avoid mislabeling products and shorten your time to market. It can also automate the collaboration between sales and advertising teams and foster improved collaboration through a seamless workflow.
What are some benefits of managing data with a PIM system?
- You can improve the employee and customer experience by pulling all information from a “single source of truth,” which means your sales agents, designers, and marketing team can access the most up-to-date information. Collaboration is simple because no one has to hunt for the latest data. Sales teams can quickly send product recommendations and details to customers. Designers can access the latest data. Everyone can do what they do best, only more efficiently.
- You can limit human error throughout the product lifecycle and even integrate with warehouse management systems to share the exact product specifications and inventory data across your entire operation via a shared data repository. You can also automate data entry to limit the risk of error.
- You can better classify and categorize your product offerings, which helps your team identify chances to upsell or offer additional products.
Comosoft: Your partner in collaboration
LAGO was designed with collaboration in mind. It’s at the core of what we do. LAGO is a PIM, DAM, and marketing production solution that fosters a collaborative, checkpoint-based workflow, complete with versioning optimization and proofing. It keeps your marketing production process flowing so that work is efficient and cooperative, even when juggling large data sets.
With automated task management and configurable user rights, your whole team will work from the same unified data set. Everyone knows what their responsibilities are. Work happens faster. Approvals are more straightforward, and collaboration is simple.
We’ve seen the power of Comosoft LAGO firsthand. Over 4,000 marketing and production professionals have discovered how easy it is to simplify marketing production workflows, optimize multichannel marketing activities, and cut production time and costs through LAGO’s collaboration toolkit. Now it’s time to see it for yourself.
5 things to know about DAM in retail
5 things every retailer should know about Digital Asset Management
In any case, one advantage of digitization is that processes have become leaner and more accessible thanks to new tools and innovations. Of course, this does not only apply to marketing processes in the company, but here the apparently small processes among many, already generated a large amount of work. These processes include the management of assets needed in the creation of printed or digital marketing materials. In modern marketing, the time-consuming manual work has been reduced to a minimum, but at the same time the number of digital assets that had to be available for an entire branding grew disproportionately.
Ever since, marketing and advertising departments have struggled to keep track of all those assets, giving birth to a new software genre, Digital Asset Management or DAM. With over multiple enterprise DAM systems to choose from, plus many other customised versions available, it’s time to list the five most important things a retail marketing and advertising professional needs to know about DAM.
1.It’s all about the metadata
Assets in a DAM system are not limited to photographic images and illustrations. There are also text descriptions and customer reviews for each product, not to mention videos, audio, and other media used in a campaign. With all that data, the problem is finding the right asset or the version you need in time to create a deadline-critical ad or promotion. Studies have found that searching for the right image can consume 20 to 30 percent of a worker’s time!
The way to recoup that lost time is to use a DAM with a consistent and easy-to-use metadata framework and a robust search engine to help users find what they need. Every object must have consistent identifiers, keywords, version numbers, and other easily accessible information to speed up the design and production process and avoid costly errors.
The metadata used by a DAM also must be consistent with that of other data sources. Retailers must have ways to deal with product-related assets from manufacturers and outside agencies so that the identifiers and keywords are all in the places designers need to find them.
2. No DAM is an island
Over the past decade, DAM systems and other aspects of enterprise computing have moved out of local data networks and into the cloud. This trend has highlighted the importance of connectivity between multiple data sources. For retailers data from a DAM must be connected practically to a Product Information Management or PIM system, as well as other, sometimes proprietary, pricing, inventory, and logistics databases. Without that connection, creating a promotional piece about a single product will take far too long – much less a catalog or mobile app promotion for multiple products.
The first step in connecting all these data sources is a consistent metadata strategy, as noted above. But the connected DAM, PIM, and other databases must also have a meaningful, efficient workflow for using those assets and data in a promotional campaign. Whether the result is a printed catalog, a website, or populating a mobile app, the data must be used effectively by marketing and advertising planners, designers, and producers.
One such framework for wrangling all these data sources is Comosoft’s LAGO system. By making all the product data available, at any stage of the advertising planning and production process – no matter where the data reside – LAGO can streamline the entire multichannel marketing process. This has been demonstrated at Lowe’s and many other large retail operations.
3. Leveraging DAM workflow
In large retail organizations, there are many levels of authority to create, find, update, and replace assets in a DAM system. Think of each asset as having a true lifecycle, from its creation through multiple revisions and eventually obsolescence. At any point, marketing and advertising professionals may need to find a particular asset and any of its related data points to promote one product, suggest related products, and deepen the retailer’s connection with individual shopping behavior.
To do this effectively requires a comprehensive and effective approach to users and permissions. Anyone may identify an error in the data, but correcting it requires approval and accountability. A good DAM system must make it easy for the right people to act and do so without undue delay or complications. When the data changes, such as introducing a new product photo, the DAM system must also have the means to update all the related media without incurring extra review and approval cycles.
Again, Comosoft’s LAGO is especially powerful when it comes to keeping DAM and related workflows moving smoothly. Permissions for users and groups are managed uniformly across all data and workflow processes. In addition, when something in the DAM system is updated or modified, it is automatically updated in the InDesign production file thanks to LAGO’s two-way workflow. For example, suppose a designer finds an erroneous data element. In that case, they can easily communicate that to someone with the authority to correct the issue globally – or allow a local override.
4. Maintaining brand identity
One of the strengths of DAM is its ability to enforce brand consistency. Brand-critical elements such as logos can be “locked” in their most current, approved form. Retailers must not only use their own brand elements consistently and make sure to correctly use manufacturers’ logos and product images in every campaign and channel. A well-organized DAM system will always provide the most current version of such assets and restrict access to older versions.
LAGO takes that further, by maintaining InDesign templates with all the approved brand elements (images, illustrations, and text) in their originally designed configuration. As a result, designers are free to do their thing elsewhere on the page, creating compelling displays of the retailer’s featured products, but they cannot override the well-planned brand aspects of the piece. Such centralized control is critical for retailers with multiple locations, and creative channels spanning both internal and external teams.
5. Automation that works
With the explosion of digital assets and the channels they use, every retailer must find ways to automat design and production wherever possible while leaving designers free to create fresh and compelling work. An integrated DAM-PIM-production workflow offers many such opportunities, such as assigning assets to other objects based on rules or an asset’s data attributes. By automating such steps in a production process, advertising and marketing departments can save on manual labor and free up valuable time for more creative work.
Again, LAGO has made great strides in this area. For example, once a campaign has been devised using a data-connected whiteboard process, the selected product’s data are automatically placed in an InDesign template, giving the designer more time to finesse and improve the piece. Multiple regional versions of a single piece are also easy to create, automatically re-using the base elements and letting the designer focus on customisation.
Giving DAM its due
Digital Asset Management systems are far more than just advanced cloud storage drives. DAM and its allied data sources can connect multiple departments to help retail marketing production become faster, more accurate, and far more efficient. In this age of multichannel-everything, no competitive retailer can afford to be without this advantage. All it takes is a workflow that truly understands the power of integrated data.