Cloudinary Assets Brings New AI-Powered Features to its API-First ‘Intelligent DAM’

Seems like we’ve been talking a lot about DAMs these days. 

Why? 

Because there’s so much DAM stuff to deal with.

It’s true. Many large enterprises have thousands – even millions – of digital assets spread across a myriad of systems and databases. At the same time, marketing teams are under increasing pressure to work faster while maintaining control and governance.

Over the last two years, digital asset management systems have been stepping up to meet this challenge, enhancing their product capabilities with an abundance of AI capabilities. This evolution in functionality, driven largely by AI, is impacting productivity for teams and driving greater value for brands. 

In that same stretch, I've seen numerous demos from pure-play DAM platforms and DXPs with dedicated DAM features, many of which were on display at DAM New York 2024 just a few weeks ago. 

While there are many horizontal plays within the DAM market landscape, there are certainly niche products that understand the unique needs and challenges of the markets they serve, providing a more immersive UX that’s discretely geared toward those requirements. These tend to be pure-play solutions with a penchant for integration. 

Such is the case with Cloudinary, an image and video platform that enables some of the world’s most engaging brands to deliver transformative visual experiences at an enterprise scale. With more than two million users and 10,000 customers (including Adidas, Etsy, Fiverr, Rivian, and more), Cloudinary helps organizations manage huge asset volumes, improve collaboration, save thousands of hours on repetitive tasks, and increase conversions.

During DAM New York, Cloudinary announced some new and interesting capabilities to Cloudinary Assets, the company’s intelligent, API-first digital asset management platform. These innovative features are designed to streamline every stage of the asset lifecycle, including customizable creative review and approval workflows, portals for controlling asset sharing, and intuitive AI solutions that automate manual tasks. 

If you're not familiar with Assets, here's a quick video overview:

As an ecosystem, Cloudinary Assets complements the company's other nifty resources. This includes a programmable media feature for automating video and image lifecycles and a robust video API that allows developers to programmatically access and manipulate video content on the web with uploading, storage, encoding, and delivery optimizations.

Cloudinary has long embraced the promise of composable architectures, which has guided its innovation path and strategy (more on that in a minute). As such, its new features are purpose-built to deliver greater flexibility for customers within their martech stacks – one of the many reasons why it was recently named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Intelligent Digital Asset Management

“Today’s visual economy demands that brands harness the full power of their images and videos to engage and connect with consumers, and these modern experiences require a modern DAM,” said Rob Daynes, Managing Director of Digital Asset Management at Cloudinary. “When powerful martech tools work together in harmony, the professionals that rely on them can too. This raises the bar for the kinds of experiences they can build to truly distinguish themselves in their market.”

Will these new features pay off for Cloudinary customers? According to the company, they will – big time. They project that a brand's launch cycles could accelerate profoundly, dropping from weeks or days to minutes. Asset costs could be reduced by up to 60%. And here's the clincher: users could save up to 75% of their time toiling in asset management, driving a significant ROI through enhanced productivity. 

These are some sweet value props. Can Assets deliver the goods?

I'm sure Cloudinary would say (resoundingly): “You bet your assets.” But let’s dig in a little deeper. 

An API-first DAM for composable architectures

Recently, Cloudinary commissioned an independent DAM survey, revealing that 86% of respondents consider a highly integratable DAM to be extremely or very important. That makes sense based on all the dynamics I’ve already outlined.

“Highly integratable” is a kind of synonym for composable, which is indeed reflected in Cloudinary’s grounding API-first posture. This architectural approach has long been the company’s guiding light, and is codified by its early membership in the MACH Alliance. The platform offers a robust ecosystem of more than 300 partners, integrations, and plug-ins with many of the marketing ecosystem’s most popular tools.

Cloudinary sees its DAM as a “single source of truth” for all visual assets, consolidating the often disparate visual asset technologies managed across teams in one highly connected and intelligent platform. With its rich focus on the image and video asset category, its composable capabilities give it an edge when fitting into a diverse martech stack with distributed data.

Powerful and practical AI capabilities

There are several places where AI is augmenting Cloudinary’s DAM features to improve efficiency while delivering greater control and confidence for marketing teams. 

First, Cloudinary’s embedded AI automates the creative review and approval workflows by enabling auto-tagging and visual search for simpler asset classification and discovery. Its AI-powered content moderation and credentialing – with C2PA compliance – helps ensure brand compliance and customer confidence in every asset, even as library volumes increase and user-generated content (UGC) and AI content proliferate.

Its DAM also has a deep bench of practical AI capabilities that accelerate time to market for visual storytellers. These include automating manual tasks at scale, such as cropping, resizing, and delivering assets in the ideal file format and quality.

With Cloudinary’s cutting-edge generative AI capabilities – available within its visual workspace, Studio – any DAM user can create unlimited on-brand customizations of a single asset or collection of assets for any use case. Accurate previews eliminate publishing risk and ensure that assets transformed by generative AI automation (such as background removal and fill, object removal and replacement, product recoloring, or image quality enhancement) will look flawless once delivered to the consumer.

What are the new features in Assets?

Here’s a quick rundown, starting with robust creative review and approval capabilities. Marketing teams will benefit from a more centralized and collaborative workflow automation solution, allowing them to customize and match their own review and approval processes for images, videos, PDFs, and other content and file types – and even include both internal and external stakeholders. It also sports enterprise-grade security and auditing, so brands in highly regulated industries can maintain strict governance. 

Managing metadata and adding AI-generated captioning are powerful tools in Cloudinary Assets

Content moderation is critical for marketing teams, particularly as assets grow exponentially. As such, Cloudinary has juiced its platform with AI-powered moderation tools, helping brands meet compliance by automating things like credentialing and compliance checks. Teams can also maintain higher standards while coping with the challenging realities of UGC and other assets entering the ecosystem.

Powered by Cloudinary’s proprietary MediaFlows solution, the enhanced asset workflow automation is a no-code solution that sets up actions when uploading assets – or times actions to occur by specific criteria such as expiration date, changes to metadata, and other details. Asset workflow automation can also be customized with more complex workflows and integrations by upgrading to the full suite of MediaFlows capabilities. 

Asset workflow automation offers granular control of specific asset actions and details

On the frontend, there’s also something called Cloudinary Portals, which makes it easy to securely curate and share assets with everyone on your team or specified stakeholders. Portals enables business users to create fully branded digital experiences across media sharing, brand guideline portals, press portals, partner and sales enablement centers, and more.

On the video side, there are some cool GenAI video editing features. These advancements are intended to support the 80% of brands planning to expand their use of video. This includes incredibly handy tools for generating smart previews, transcriptions, captioning, and auto-translations – so brands can reach everyone on any device with more accessible experiences. Cloudinary also supports multiple video file formats, including short-form, long-form, e-commerce, information and how-to, and other applications. 

Why it matters

“DAM done differently.” That’s how Cloudinary visualizes its platform promise. It’s catchy, and it certainly reflects the company's culture of innovation.

AI is the name of the game when it comes to the DAM roadmap and horizon. As the competitive field continues to expand, pure-play providers, DXPs, and PaaS solutions will continue to leverage high-utility AI features to provide differentiated value to customers. 

Most of that value will be derived from enhancements in speed, productivity, and governance. But platforms like Cloudinary might have an advantage relative to their decade-long focus on digital imagery and video, and its persistent posture of composability. Being API-first is a key determiner for buyers and evaluators looking for MACH-centric solutions that fit the bill within composable stacks, and Cloudinary has long been a champion of composability.

Still, the DAM market is getting thicker. With Canto’s acquisition of Image Relay, there’s a motion towards consolidating power at the pure-play enterprise level. Meanwhile, DXPs and Content Marketing Platforms (CMPs) like Acquia continue to roll out more high-utility AI-driven features like native video editing – making it less cumbersome for brands to simply add and access these features. Downstream, PaaS players like Directus are offering built-in choice with their own integrated DAM, just as other legacy CMS platforms continue to improve their own capabilities. 

The good news: demand is growing, and innovation will pay off for marketing teams and brands.

If you’re evaluating platforms, consider your goals relative to composability. Cloudinary's API-first posture puts them squarely in that league, but they're also enhancing the key features that really add up in a good DAM: asset lifecycle management, customizable workflows, roles-based permissions, and of course, AI and machine learning capabilities. 

In terms of trust, it's hard to find a more best-of-breed, pure-play DAM provider than Cloudinary. They clearly understand the value of image and video assets at the enterprise level, and they're striving to lead the way with emerging technologies in the DAM field. 

Bottom line: It’s a safe bet for covering your assets. 

Looking for guidance on Cloudinary?  Talk to us. 

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