Slam DAM Dunk: Canto Acquires Image Relay, Plans to Align DAM and PIM Features

DAM is hot. Red hot. Like Steph Curry from the three-point line.

The reason is clear: we’ve got too much stuff dribbling on our digital courts. Handling the “brand ball” across distributed global teams, remote workers, and diverse channels is getting increasingly complex. As such, many organizations are often one foul away from using the wrong asset or publishing outdated product details – and that's a ticket to a losing game. 

Digital Asset Management (DAM) and its co-captain, Product Information Management (PIM), have been winning solutions to this problem of scaling content. While neither category is new to the roster, they’re continuing to prove their relevance as digital content grows. And grows. 

DAMs and PIMs are like different players on the same team. Both perform well in their respective positions and are quite closely aligned, stoking collaboration and ensuring consistency (you know, picking and rolling in the paint). 

If you’re not familiar with the distinctions, DAMs manage things like images, videos, and documents; PIMs are used to maintain stores of product information. As one might guess, they indeed overlap in discrete areas, but they miss a shot or two based on their focus. Typically, an organization combines brand assets from a DAM and product details from its PIM, relying on integrations to compile and print on various frontends like websites or apps. 

One thing they do have in common is rapid transformation with AI. The last two years have seen the addition of AI-driven tools and features like automated workflows, tagging, and more, all designed to help users and organizations streamline their digital operations.

Having both DAM and PIM features more closely aligned – along with AI's force-multiplying effects – would certainly benefit large enterprises with vast digital caches of assets and product data. Now, Canto, a preeminent DAM software provider, is expanding its footprint to do just that.

Yesterday, the company announced that it has acquired industry rival Image Relay, a Vermont-based SaaS company that’s been doing novel work to unify digital asset management and product information management. The combination could be a game changer as Canto executes its vision to revolutionize the way businesses mine value from their digital content. 

Canto has been on its own shooting streak: just last year, the company acquired another competitor, MerlinOne, as it looked to inorganically scale its AI capabilities. For a company with three decades of experience in the DAM game, Canto is certainly looking to grow its fan base aggressively. Let's unpack it a little further. 

Betting big on the digital content explosion

When I say DAM is worthy of a Steph Curry allusion, then the swish should be audible from the stands – and by all accounts, it is. According to Grand View Research, the global Digital Asset Management market size was valued at over $4.2 billion in 2023, with a projected CAGR of 16.2% from 2024 to 2030.

As I previously stated, this is primarily attributed to the proliferation of remote work and distributed teams – thanks in part to a little bug called COVID – which has accelerated the adoption of DAM technology. With more employees working from various locations, cloud-based DAM solutions swept in as a secure pipeline for accessing digital assets from anywhere. 

The benefits are exceedingly clear. With a DAM, disparate users and teams can collaborate seamlessly and respond faster to shifting dynamics, specifically in fields like marketing, media, and e-commerce – industries where immediate access to up-to-date assets can impact campaign effectiveness and customer engagement.

Driving most of the attention and focus on DAMs is the rapid expansion of digital platforms and the rise of omnichannel marketing. As consumers move more fluidly across interconnected screens and devices, brands are seeking just-in-time solutions to meet buyers at every doorstep with cohesive messaging. This has resulted in swollen silos of digital content, packed with images, videos, PDFs, rich media, and more – and an onslaught of AI-generated substance to supply personalization and experimentation goals. 

To meet this surge, enterprises are now straddled with immense digital content creation needs, which require efficient structural, storage, and retrieval solutions. DAMs and PIMs provide a centralized resource for maintaining these assets in a unified system, helping content creators work together more effectively by streamlining workflows and ensuring consistency across their brand’s ecosystem of assets and product information.

Many practical factors involved with digital asset management exceed the charter of marketing and broach the realm of a brand’s sustainability, liability, and reputation. For example, images might have specified copyright or licensing associated with their usage or compliance requirements for assets in different global regions. Content may need to be authenticated in a sea of AI-generated knock-offs. There might even be sensitive cultural considerations that require specific temperature controls. 

In all of these use cases, a DAM can provide a layer of governance that enables businesses to maintain control over their asset usage, reduce redundancy or errors, and achieve a higher TCO via cost savings from lawsuits or brand damage. This translates into greater efficiency that can be realized at multiple levels within an organization.

Canto’s cantata is DAM good music

The acquisition of Image Relay is a critical step in Canto's plan to revolutionize the way businesses extract value from their digital content. The company already boasts over 3,400 customers worldwide and is, by all accounts, in a growth mode. 

That said, certain industries – such as retail, manufacturing, and CPG – have traditionally relied on separate platforms and complex integrations to manage product data associated with specific digital assets. This can result in latency and errors relative to the unique structure of each independent system. 

I’ve followed Image Relay for several years, and it’s clear why Canto has chosen this technology to harmonize the orbits of DAM and PIM. Image Relay has made notable strides in uniting the hemispheres with its unified Marketing Delivery platform, allowing customers to efficiently store, access, and share brand-approved, up-to-date product information alongside digital assets. 

Image Relay's Marketing Delivery system is purpose-built to enable things like omnichannel strategies. It's also designed to reduce product-to-market time and thus amplify revenue. Now, with Canto’s added reach, it could result in a comprehensive solution that fully aligns the two dominions.

Image Relay’s founder and CEO Skye Chalmers will join Canto to help lead the integration of the two technologies and their teams. As he noted in the press release, he’s spent 20 years at Image Relay focusing on the creation of seamless unified solutions that combine these systems. By joining forces with Canto, he sees the delivery of even greater value and efficiency for its customers.

As more enterprises embrace composable technology stacks, Canto’s unification of DAM and PIM might reduce the surface area for stacks that require greater access to both resources while selecting best-of-breed tools that perform outside of composed DXPs – many of which offer their own DAMs as part of their offerings. 

Canto clearly brings key benefits to the coupling, namely in the way of AI innovation. After the acquisition of MerlinOne, the company launched its AI Visual Search, a slick solution that enables users to find assets quickly across vast content libraries based solely on a visual description prompt. A novel approach in a growing field of generative AI applications, Visual Search effectively bridged the gap between visual content and metadata-based searches, delivering a more user-friendly experience for managing and utilizing digital assets. 

Why it matters

According to Wain Kellum, Canto’s CEO, the acquisition of Image Relay will enable the company to offer a leading-edge solution to help businesses streamline their digital operations, enhance data accuracy, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

It all sounds fantastic, but we know there’s no easy layup in the software stadium. 

Along with the growth of the general DAM market comes a slate of competitive platforms, from Adobe to Bynder. At the same time, vendors like Widen have been eaten by DXPs like Acquia, which provide integrated offerings out-of-the-box. These are appealing to large enterprises looking for scalable, reliable solutions designed to work with a broader ecosystem of purpose-built technologies.

Go across the market, and you see macro platforms like Optimizely tethering their DAM technologies with broader Content Marketing Platform (CMP) capabilities, reflecting the enterprise's focus on truly integrated solutions that accelerate and scale their marketing initiatives. Go downstream and headless CMS platforms like Directus are tacking on their own DAM solution with bring-your-own storage capabilities. 

All this choice is great, but confusion is a blocker to greatness. In the analysis and evaluation, brands have to be concerned with the ease of use, accuracy, reliability, and ultimately the control that comes with the selection of a DAM or PIM – or both. The need is compelling, but organizations require a clear vision and roadmap to truly unlock the value of such a critical decision.

There's also the question of industry scale. Right now, the largest portion of DAM adoption is in media, with the addressable U.S. market leading the revenue share. But factor in the rising potential in vectors like healthcare and manufacturing, and the possibilities for more targeted DAM and PIM solution sets could further balloon. This is where having an ambitious market vision will be a rallying point. 

As I touched on previously, AI is literally reshaping the definition of a DAM, automating everything from metadata tagging to content recognition. These AI features are evolving every DAM’s searchability, scalability, and usability, making them indispensable tools for enterprises managing vast volumes of digital assets. But the meaningful combination of DAM and PIM – and the focus on AI solutions that can unify, personalize, and ease the digital chaos – could be a key differentiator for Canto.

As Steph Curry once observed, “Basketball isn’t just a sport. It is an art, one that must be mastered to succeed.” Similarly, Digital Asset Management isn’t just a technology, but an activator for brands to power creativity and master their game. 

In that sense, Canto’s vision with Image Relay might just be a slam DAM dunk. 

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