Name: 4 Scary Manual Workflows and the DAM Automations That Fix Them
Uploaded: 2026-10-27T16:01:25.132Z
Duration: 35 min
Description: 4 Scary Manual Workflows and the DAM Automations That Fix Them

Transcript for "4 Scary Manual Workflows and the DAM Automations That Fix Them": Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining our spooky webinar today. I hope everyone's in the Halloween spirit because we are gonna be talking about some scary manual workflow that is probably haunting your marketing team today. But before we get into it, I wanted to start off by introducing myself. My name is Lynn Herman. I run global campaigns at Canto and give you a couple of housekeeping items. So today, we are using the Goldcast platform, and you'll notice that there is a chat functionality. So to make sure everyone can hear me and we're all engaged, let's... Let us know where you are joining today from. So put, your city, your town, your state, your country, wherever you're joining us from today. Next, I wanna talk about the doc section. So I have curated some content that I think you would find relevant based off today's conversation. You can find that in the doc center, so feel free to download and share those with your team. And then last but not least, we do have q and a. So we are going to be answering questions throughout the webinar. And if we have some time, we'll save some questions at the end, but feel free to put your questions in there. But, also, we want this conversation to be dynamic and engaging. So if you want something, to be seen by the whole group, feel free to throw that in the chat and engage with your fellow attendees that way. Okay. Let's get started. Our agenda today, what we're gonna do is the first half of the conversation, we're gonna be talking about those spooky manual workflows, those four that I had talked about earlier, the organizational, the recreation, the brand update, and the distribution. Don't worry. We'll dig into each one of those. Then we're gonna be talking about the fix. So what is actually going to help you get out of that haunted house and where to start if you're feeling like you just don't know which one to tackle first. Okay. So let's talk about this. What does it look like? Imagine that you just arrived at work. You sit down and you say, okay. I really need that asset from last quarter's campaign. So you start looking for it. You look in your shared drive. It's not where you thought it was. You search. Nothing comes up. So you're like, okay. I'm gonna ask a colleague. So you open up Slack or Teams, and you write a message, and they point you to a folder that you've never heard of before and you had to get permission to access. You find something that's kinda close, not exactly what you were looking for. It's an outdated version, so you ask another colleague. And an hour and a half later, you are in the same place that you started. Does this sound familiar? Drop a yes in the chat if this is something that you have lived through before. Here's the thing. That scenario, it's not your team's fault. They're trying their best to stay on top and be as organized as possible, And it's simply almost impossible to keep up with the amount of content volume that we are experiencing day to day. And the problem goes way beyond search. It's really that workflow problem because the amount of content that we're creating, we just haven't built the system to support that. So there are four specific manual workflows that I talked about a little bit in the agenda that we're gonna dig into, and it's really that house of horrors for your marketing team, and we are gonna get through them one by one. So the first one is the organization nightmare. Think about this in terms of tagging inconsistent metadata, assets that are scattered across six different places, maybe shared drives, perhaps an agency that you're working with, they use Dropbox, or even that one person's desktop who left the company several months ago. Those are real situations that happen, and the library is growing faster than anyone can organize it. I know we've talked a lot about in previous webinars and in reports, the content volume has absolutely exploded. So that is just gonna mean that your company's organizational debt is gonna compound pretty quickly. So every asset that goes in without proper metadata or any access that would make it easier for you to find is just gonna make that search 10 times harder. And because tagging is probably not something that people are gonna go back six months later and say, oh, man. I forgot to update that, asset that I uploaded. I should go do that now. That's not gonna happen. So that just happens over and over and over again when we think about the amount of assets that we upload every month or every quarter. So the library is gonna become less useful the bigger it gets. And so that's what this organizational nightmare is all about. The content exists. We know that. We built it. We used it once, but nobody can find it. Next is the recreation trap. Now this one's pretty scary because I feel like this is the one that happens probably most often. You or your team member can't find what exists. So you say, alright. I'm just gonna do it myself. I'm gonna rebuild it from scratch. So whether that's a new brief or a new design file, it has to go through another round of approvals again and gets delivered later than you would have liked. But somewhere in that library is sitting the original file completely relevant and wanting to be used but invisible. So discoverability is really the problem that's gonna cost your team big here because it's not just the hours that are wasted recreating that work, but the inconsistency that it creates. Because every time a team creates an asset independently when they just do it themselves and kinda go off memory of what happened before, that's an opportunity for your brand to slip. So the recreation trap is sneaky because it doesn't necessarily feel like a process failure at the moment. It feels like efficiency. It feels like we're getting things done. But that's just more assets that you're uploading, more assets that probably are not uploaded correctly, and that's the trap. It means that the search problem is really never getting solved. It just is the recreation cycle over and over. So that leads us to our third terrifying workflow. And this one is honestly a personal favorite of mine because I feel like it reveals something really important about how content content operations are actually built within your organization, and that's the brand update overwhelm. We've gone through this, and I'm sure you have gone through this where you either get a new logo, you get a new product, or you're renaming a product. You're pivoting into a new campaign. And what does that actually mean? It means that there are 20 hero images that need a different headline. So that's one change, but everywhere. And we all know that content is everywhere these days. So that probably looks like someone or maybe a team of someones are spending days, weeks finding and replacing that across potentially thousands of individual files, downloading, editing, reuploading, rerouting for approvals, it means that the launch that you're working on that's really timely could possibly get delayed. And perhaps some of those assets are old by the time that they even make it to the channel. Several weeks for a change that in theory should have had a quick conversation and a quick confirmation. Sound familiar? Okay. So that all leads us to the distribution drag. So just when you think you've made it out of this corn maze, you get to actually execute the content. But then we come face to face with the distribution drag. So getting content to the right place, whether that's a partner portal, your sales team, your storefront, your website, agency, There's probably a manual handoff for most teams every single time that they have to do this. So someone downloads the file, zips them, sends a link to the partner that uses them, but then two weeks later, you had to update something. Uh-oh. That means that we have to make sure that we notify anyone who ever had access to those pieces of content. And perhaps the partner didn't get the memo, and they use an old version. That is just exhausting and really frustrating. So the distribution drag is that last mile failure of content operations. Your team did everything right. They created great content. They got it approved. They got it uploaded, but then it got stuck in that distribution. Okay. So those are the four rooms in our haunted house right now. Organization, recreation, brand update, and distribution. Here's the good news. Every single one of those does have a fix, and it's probably not the usual fixes that you have been heard of... Been told in the past, whether that's hire more people, run a library cleanup every thirty, sixty, ninety days, or, you know, bring a process stock that probably doesn't get looked at as much as it should. This is... What we're looking at is really an automation fix, and we're gonna go into depth on how to do that for each one of these haunted haunted houses. Okay. So let's get into the fix. We've talked about how we have these four manual processes. So there are steps for each one of those and how you change it. So I'll get into each one of these in practice and where to start. Okay. Our first, the organization nightmare. How do we fix that? Because tagging is such manual work that really none of us have time for, we need to have the fix happen at inception and perhaps automatically. So what this looks like is enrichment that happens automatically at the moment of the upload before the asset ever becomes part of the problem. So let's think about this. When a file comes in, we want our system to generate metadata for it. We know that we have capabilities out there to do that, so we want that to be part of the process. It can check whether or not the asset is in the right place, whether anyone could realistically find it, or whether it's connected to a campaign or product that it's needing to belong to. So if something's missing, flag it. It gets flagged right away, not six months later when something or someone is going looking for it. So the second piece here is that visibility. Right? So you really need almost a live health score of your library. We wanna know what's complete, what's incomplete, where the gaps are without something... Someone having to run a quarterly audit because that's so time consuming. And, again, with the human element, things can slip through the cracks. So the organizational nightmare when we think about this and and where to start to see how perhaps deep you're in it, I want you to take a look at the last ninety days of uploads. That's a good start for most people. If you upload a ton of content, maybe it's thirty. If you don't, maybe go further back in time. But ninety days is typically a good starting point. How many arrived without complete metadata? Everyone in the chat, just write a quick blurb if you feel like, yes. Yes. It arrived without, the proper metadata, or, no, I always upload with metadata. The next thing to think about is those assets that you uploaded within those past ninety days. How many could someone find the next day? If you uploaded it, how many people would be able to find it realistically? This is gonna give you a baseline and tell you how big of a problem this organizational nightmare is for your specific team. The recreation trap. Okay. Again, this is more of that findability problem that we talked about. So if you're recreating it, it means that you probably couldn't find it. So the fix has to work even when the assets are never tagged because we still need to be able to find it to solve for this recreation trap. So we need to get to the bottom of the problem, and that's exactly it. Right? No tagging. That's a separate issue. But what we wanna be able to do instead of having to recreate it every time is that we need search to be a little bit more dynamic. We need it to be what someone's looking for, not what someone named it because we all know that that could just be the file name. It could be a SKU number. It could be a number of different things. So what you can do here is perhaps upload a reference image or describe what you need and get back everything that is visually similar to what you're looking for without any tagging required. Because most teams have accepted that an untagged content is really invisible. This is gonna change that assumption. If you're able to explain just from memory what you're looking for because you know that exists, you can find it, or upload something that's similar and come back with different assets that are in that same vein, that's gonna really change that assumption. The content that was sitting in this dark room is gonna become findable. So it's gonna be less of a ghost than you've normally been used to in the past. So where to start for this recreation trap? What I want you to do is pick an asset that your team is constantly recreating. So for most people, that could be a campaign hero. It could be a product shot, co branded, partner content. Search for it and see what you already have. Because if you have many duplicates, this could be a good thing to to invest your time in. Our next is the brand update overwhelm. So this to me is more of a bulk problem. Right? Because one change has to reach a large number of assets at once. And doing that by hand or by building a spreadsheet, running imports, that's not gonna scale. That's just something that is really a big process that you have to do every time. So the fix is bulk operations that work from instructions, that work from you telling exactly what you need. So you wanna describe the change, and then there, the system can find every affected record and show you the full scope of what you're looking at. Then you can review it, confirm it, and run it. This confirmation step cannot be understated because we really need your involvement to make sure that you are not handing over control. You're just removing the manual labor and keeping the decision to the human. Very important. So a place for you to start to say, is this something that I should be working on, is identify the next big change that you have coming up. How many assets do you think would need to be touched by hand in order to do that? That number is usually where the automation can really help you, and you can prioritize that. Okay. So our last haunted house here is the distribution. So let's fix it. Let's let's unhaunt it right now. So this is that the content's ready, and the failure is the hand off. So how can we change that? How can we flip that on its head? What you can do is create a portal that surfaces the right approved content dynamically. That's a really important piece. You want it to reflect updates as they happen and give partners and agencies and regional teams access to what's current without having to constantly say, here's another link. Here's another link. Here's another link. So it's not this static link. It's really gonna be a folder that refreshes on its own. So anytime they go in there or anytime you go in there to access it, you know that it's the most up to date content. When your library updates, the portal updates. So no one's working from a file or a folder or a download section. They are working in a portal that is dynamic. So where to start when we think about this? If you look at your last three major content distributions, where was the handoff, and where did version confusion creep in? That's gonna be a good idea where portal replacement can really help that manual process here. Okay. So we've talked about our haunted rooms in our haunted house. We talked about the four scary workflows that you're dealing with and ways to escape them. Now you're thinking, okay. That's a lot for me to do, and I feel a little bit overwhelmed, and I don't necessarily know where to begin. Let's help you. I wanted you to look at two things specifically. Which workflow is causing the most downstream pain? Meaning, it blocks other work from being done or creates visible inconsistencies within your business. And which do you think has the clearest cause and effect? Where can you say, if we automated this step, we'd be so much better. We'd be so much more efficient. For most teams, it is gonna be the organization nightmare because that's the highest level start. Right? Everything else works better with clean metadata. We can pretty much say that consistently and and with good good confidence. But it is also the longest horizon fix. So some teams tend to start with recreation trap or the distribution drag where results are showing up faster. There's no universally right answer for this. It's gonna be really specific to what your team's dealing with and their needs. But I will say start wherever your team is gonna be most accepting and ready for change. Because at the end of the day, if we don't have leadership support or if we don't have buy in, change management is always gonna be the biggest blocker here. So above all, automation is a change management problem. So just think about that. Let's take a look at the fixes again because what I want you to look at is the real enrichment that happens on its own. So if we don't have to spend all that time worrying about metadata and we can search without tags or you can make bulk changes in a simple... With an in simple instruction. You can have a portal that is constantly staying current. Each one of those is a project that used to be a tool of its own. Right? So we were solving for these, but then different tools popped up. And now we live in a world where we want to get back to simplification. We don't wanna have to worry about all... Managing all these different tools, and we want things to talk to one another. So what you wanna look for is a place where everything can live all in one solution. And it all comes down to your content because at the end of the day, that's the physical piece that needs to be stored. Everything else can fit into that. So a digital asset management tool or a DAM that is really built around this idea of workflow efficiency is gonna be really helpful. So you wanna have a DAM that can really have organization, these four workflows of the organization, the recreation, the brand updates, distribution, take those processes away and put them into one that can really be a seamless process for you. So I'm very excited because I get to give you a sneak peek into something that the team has been working on. It's called Canto Global Assistant. And I am going to pause right now, and I'm gonna share a quick video because I'm really excited for you to see it. Most digital asset management solutions store content. Seeing what's broken, incomplete, or not ready to go live is another problem entirely. Meet Canto Global Assistant, the agentic AI layer built inside Canto. Not a chatbot, a teammate that's always on. Global assistant highlights every gap in your library, assets, or products. The moment you log in, it sees what you miss, flags it for you, and fixes what you choose. One instruction, thousands of assets enriched, tagged, and ready to go in real time. And when content is ready to go out, your assistant gets it there. Describe the portal you need and have it built on brand in minutes. This is the age of a Gentic Dam. This is Canto Global Assistant. I am hyped. You just got an exclusive first look at Canto Global Assistant. So now that you've gotten a little bit of a sneak peek of what Global Assistant can do, I wanna talk about those scary workflows and how this is gonna really help you solve those processes. So when we think about the organizational nightmare, we wanna have a healthy library. We wanna we wanna have a dashboard that can just flag things for us and show us where the gaps are and surface it at the front so we don't have to go searching for it and then realize our issue. Our issues are... And our health is at the very forefront. When you think about the brand update, that same instruction driven approach we want to have for bulk changes. So really just describe what you need and review it. No spreadsheets. No one to one edits. That's really gonna help us when we think about having to update things on a brand wide level. When it comes to distribution, describe the portal you need. Boom. Build it in, like, the amount of time is gonna be comp... Like, insanely comparative to what you've done before. So that handoff is gonna be a lot easier when you can have a portal that you can describe what you need and help you build it. And then last but not least, I think the thing that has always been the biggest time for us is that recreation. So instead of, going back and having that lack of search and having to recreate it on your own, when you work with Canto Global Assistant and AI visual search, what it can do is combine and really help your team work smarter across your content. So you can see what's already in your library and stay organized and get those assets found instead of rebuilt. And, really, this is just the beginning. I said, again, this is a sneak peek of how we can solve some of these main core scary manual workflows that you're dealing with today and, really make your library ready and discoverable and help you get the content out the door. And tomorrow, we'll be able to do so much more. And we do have some time for some questions, so I'm gonna go get into the questions now. Alright. Let's see if we can answer some questions live. I am excited to get them going on. So if you have any questions, feel free to put them in now. I do know, we had a couple that I've been asked on multiple, occasions where if you have, you know, messy data to begin with when it comes to this automation, do we still have messy data when we're getting into the automation? And it is a great question because sometimes they are, you know, being able... You know, messy automation can really amplify that point. So what I want you to start is at the end of the day, someone's always gonna, you know, own that workflow, and really have a a rough agreement on what approved means. So just pick one workflow that you work with. You don't need a perfect taxonomy, or a spotless library. That's really the point of starting small. So if you wanna pick one change, try to fix it, and go from there. Alright. I see Anne in the chat. Anne, unfortunately, this does not work with our workflow or multiple clients in our system. This is actually something that we could talk about offline because I do think that this could be a place for you. We work with, a lot of agencies, and I know that you have a lot of different clients and different systems in place. So we can definitely, think about how we can potentially use what we call portals to help you out. So, I will definitely be able to follow-up with you and answer your question specifically just because it feels like it needs maybe a little bit more nuance. Alright. Let's see what I can see here. Let's see. Okay. This one's a good one that I think a lot of people have because it says if AI is making changes at this scale, how do we keep governance and brand control intact? Brand control is something that is of the most importance, and it's something that I would definitely want answer to being in marketing myself. So the short version is that automation really shouldn't mean that you give up control. However, we want... We're talking about bulk changes. It's something that you can describe the change and and have that full scope. But at the end of the day, we really want the human and the person in charge to be able to confirm that before anything goes live. So having the human be the gatekeeper, and having the system do the bulk changes is always gonna be the most important thing. We really want a process that allows you to do your best work. So what what we want to do is be able to have this system look at the data, clean up the data, but you as a human give it the give it the okay because that's always gonna be, a really important factor when it comes to double checking all of our work. Let's see what we got. Alright. We did. We answered that one. Let's see. Let's share this one. How do you make the case for automation when the cost of manual work doesn't show up, as a line item on anyone's budget? I think that this one is something that I fear we all deal with on a day to day basis because the time that we spend really can't be quantified, but it's really our most valuable asset. So no one is getting an invoice of saying, I spent x amount of time searching and probably not something that you'd really want to admit. So what I would try to do is stop trying to prove the whole problem and price it out of a piece of it. What you wanna do is when you're thinking about your last brand update, how many people touched it? How many days did it take? What else didn't get done because you were doing this? And I think that that really is going to say, okay. This really needs to update from a process change, when we think about this. And the real story perhaps doesn't have a number associated to it, but it is what's gonna get the leadership's attention, the manual work. And and I worked with a a brand a while back who we we have done a case study with, and they did quantify the time. And they said, you know, we hire we hire contractors, and they're spending... You know, they're hired for x amount of dollars. And we asked them how long it takes them to find something, and they gave us this amount of time. So when you think about timing, their hourly wage or salary, if you break it down and times it, I think it really can add up pretty quickly and something that you might want to just think about when when you see that there. Okay. We answered this one. Let's see. Okay. We we hinted at, the global assistant, which I do want to chat more about. So we'll follow-up with you more, and you... Honestly, on this call, you got a very sneak peek, and it is something that we are, excited to have you share... Have shared and learned more about. And so what... When we think about, the Canto global assistant, it actually is gonna sit inside of Canto. And so you don't have to go, you know, x, y, and z searching for places. It's gonna be something that is almost like your teammates, someone that you work with it. So this is something that we can, dive into a little bit more specific, Jesse. And I think it's in... A a great question because it's really gonna redefine how we are thinking about digital asset management and how we think about what our assets should do for us and what we should be doing and what we should let, you know, perhaps a global assistant control. So we talked about those workflows. Those are something that we could potentially hand off but still have our involvement in, like I was mentioning of of still having that human involvement. But looking at your system, looking at your information, and making sure that it has the health that it needs to and the involvement from you that you need to. So what do you want to, take off your plate? Because we talked about those workflows. But, Global Assistant, the way that it works, and the way that we can we can share with you more is that it's gonna live in Camto. It's gonna be part of your team, and it's gonna be a really great way to to help you out. Alright. I think those were the most of them, that we had talked about today. So I think we have answered the majority of your questions. I do want to, just put a quick poll if this is something that you wanna learn more and you wanna set up some time to learn more about Canto and some of these workflows that you're experiencing. Feel free to, answer this question here. But I am very happy that I got to be here and chat with you today about the scary workflows. I forgot my haunted... I had little cat ears because I was gonna be in the holiday spirit, but I forgot those so they are not next to me. But thank you all for joining, and I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day. And if you have any questions, we will follow-up, with a email so that you can have the recording and any questions that you might have and give you some, information about Canto Global Assistant because everyone on this call, this webinar is the first to see a little sneak peek here. So thank you again for your time and really looking to, seeing you interact with us in the future. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, in the email. So thank you so much, and we will chat soon. Bye.