Managing marketing content in the age of AI

Content, content everywhere. Now, how exactly are we supposed to organize and manage it all? For the answer to that question and more, we're talking to Erica Gunn, CMO at digital asset management vendor Canto. Welcome to Conversations with MarTech.

Hi, uh, my name is Erica Gunn and I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Canto. And Canto is a software company that specializes in digital asset management. Mostly we sell software to marketers who have a big library of digital assets. Think of anything that you would use in a campaign, anything from videos, images, copy blocks, uh, that you need to be able to manage and distribute at scale.

I've been with the company for about 5 years now. I have a little bit of a storied background where I've been in marketing for maybe about 10 years-ish, but I've also done work in IT and operations as well. I've worked for nonprofits, I've worked for retail, I've worked in software. So I've done a little bit of everything, which I think allows me to bring kind of a unique perspective to marketing.

As opposed to my entire career being in marketing. But I really enjoy marketing. It's a fun place to be, and right now there's a lot of interesting things happening. So it's kind of a challenging place to be, but fun at the same time.

All right, thanks for being here, Erica, for a little conversation. Let's start with those libraries you talked about in your opening. There has been an explosion in content in recent years, and now AI is part of the reason. We can all create like a white paper in seconds.

So that's going to create more content. But you've got an explosion in channels, social, video. Each of those has a somewhat unique content need because they can't all ask for the same size. They can't all ask for - you've got a global economy, so you got need for localization around the world.

You've got - what do you hear from customers? Right. Because the challenges of creating and managing all this content have just - it's got to drive people nuts. Well, it is an interesting time to be in marketing for that reason, right?

And I think what we hear a lot from customers is how overwhelming it can be because we're really being asked to do a lot at a time, as you mentioned, that there's a proliferation of content, a proliferation of channels. But everyone also seems to think that if you just plug in AI, you don't need the people anymore. And so you've got all of the things happening, but marketers are really having to to argue for their headcount as well, because you really do - it is a time where people really need a lot of human judgment to be in place as well.

And so I think the word we hear a lot is that people are just really overwhelmed. But what's really changed in the last couple of years is velocity. So while AI has made it easier to generate content, it's actually made the management of that content harder, right? And so the problem has become harder.

And you're not just dealing with more assets, as we said, more versions, more variations, and a lot of uncertainty around what's approved, what's on brand, what you're actually licensed to use, for example. And as you mentioned, localization is a challenge and brands - it's really important for brands to show up everywhere authentically, oftentimes in many, many markets. And that's not just about translating copy, it's about imagery, adjusting tone, making sure A campaign that works in one country lands appropriately in another.

And so it's a massive operational lift that a lot of teams are just barely keeping up with manually and without the right technology infrastructure in place, it's easy to get overwhelmed and get really lost in all of the chaos that's created with all of this content. Yeah, localization isn't just translating the content. There's a nuance, there's a cultural thing, and then you've got, you know, all sorts of different flavors of You take popular languages like English and Spanish.

There's British English, there's American English, there's Canadian English, there's Australian English. It's a lot to keep track of. Even within just in the United States, right? Your campaign might show up differently in Texas than it will show up in New York, right?

And so there's local nuances as well, and being able to consider that and manage your ad assets and deploy your campaigns in a way that show up as authentic is super important to anyone's buyers. And then to make the challenge even exponentially more difficult, you've got agencies who have multiple clients, so they're dealing with assets from all different brands. You've got certain regulated industries - healthcare, financial services - that be very careful about what they say and how they say it.

So that's another wrinkle that gets thrown into all this. Sure, absolutely. We have quite a few customers that are agencies, and we do operate well with healthcare and financial services and the like, and they are very different problems, right? So for agencies, kind of the core problem is really context switching at scale.

So you're not just managing one brand, you might be managing 20 brands at one time, and each of your clients has different brand guidelines, their own approval workflows, their own way of doing things. So it's, you know, it, it's a lot to switch context going from customer to customer or from client to client. So for agencies, the organizational structure of how you manage content is just as important as having the right assets in the first place. I would say for regulated industries like pharma, financial services, or healthcare, they have a completely different pressure.

So everything has to be approved and version controlled and auditable. So it's not just like, did I use the right image or did I use the right logo? It's, can we prove that this version has been, has gone through legal and compliance review and it can, do we have that audit trail? So that's more of a documentation and governance challenge as much as a creative challenge.

So that it does, they're, they're both challenging in its own way, but for very different reasons, I would say. This episode of Conversations with MarTech is brought to you by Semrush. Meet your unfair advantage and use Semrush, uniting search and AI discovery into one powerful marketing growth engine, delivering richer data, more keywords, deeper AI insights, and prioritized next steps. With Semrush, you can turn brand visibility into coordinated action.

Get a 14-day free trial and a discount. Visit martech.org/semrush-coupon or Scan the QR code. So we talked about AI as one of the forces beyond, behind the content explosion, but it can also play an important role in helping manage like all of these things you talked about, right?

Managing content, keeping track of what can be used. How are you guys at Canto leveraging AI to help solve this problem that your customers have? Yeah, we, we are very thoughtful about it and we tend to be pretty disciplined about where we apply AI within our product. Which is actually more important, I think, than just bolting it on everywhere.

I think AI is a little bit of a buzz expression these days, and a lot of people are exhausted by it. And I think it's important that you be thoughtful about where it makes sense within your product. And, and we have a team of folks that do just that. So the place where AI creates the most immediate value in a digital asset management platform is around, uh, findability.

So historically, you know, your assets are only as findable as the person who tagged them, and tagging used to be fairly manual. And sure, you had things like facial recognition and some auto-tagging where you could tell that's a dog or that's a backpack, right? But AI allows you to go really way deeper than that. And, uh, you know, you can automatically tag assets at bulk.

You can automatically group and organize, uh, like assets. Um, you can recognize what's in an image. You can understand the context. Uh, so when someone searches for something in natural language, they can find exactly what they're looking for instead of couple hundred vaguely related results.

You can find precisely what you're looking for using natural language. And the other area that I think is important that we spend a lot of time thinking about is your workflow acceleration. So things like suggesting crop variations for different channels, specs, like what, you know, you've got a different variation maybe for what would show up in LinkedIn than you would for a display ad. And and being able to kind of manage that again at scale.

Flagging when an asset might be coming near usage expiration timelines, surfacing similar assets. You can say, I've got - here's a product that I'm looking for, find everything similar to that product so that your teams aren't recreating things that already exist. So it's less about replacing the creative work, but more about removing the friction around that work. And driving workflow acceleration.

So I mean, we're pretty careful about making sure that AI is augmenting the human judgment, not just replacing the human judgment, especially for brand-sensitive or regulated content. But there is an opportunity to kind of have a lot of your workflow and a lot of your creative deliverables really supercharged with AI. And we've got a really smart team that spends a lot of time working with our customers to build just that. Yeah, there's two things you said that really strike a chord with how I think about AI.

One is you mentioned the bolt-on AI that I think we've all experienced, right? Like, this tool didn't used to have AI and now there's an icon that I click on. The icon. I like when it operates in the background.

You mentioned findability. Like, if I in one search get what I'm looking for, I don't care if AI did it or how it was done. Right? But I think the market needs to put AI everywhere, need to show people they're using AI.

Yeah, hopefully that's an evolution, right? I mean, hopefully in 5 years we're not really talking about that. It's kind of like when you're out shopping for a raincoat, you're looking for a raincoat. You're not out there shopping for Gore-Tex, right?

You don't go into REI, I'd like to buy some, they say no, you just, you want a raincoat that's gonna keep you dry, right? And so, Right now, I think everyone's got to drop the AI icon on things, but hopefully in the future, as we're, you know, rebuilding and innovating amazing software and amazing workflow accelerating systems, you don't care. You don't really care if it's got GORE-TEX or not, right? Yeah, I think the other thing that you mentioned was the workflows.

Yeah, LLMs are useful. They can help you do the kind of mind-numbing tasks very quickly. They can help you out if you're not feeling your most creative. But it's really like, it's the workflow.

It's like, you created this thing for me, what happens to it next? Because everything has to go somewhere else and be seen by someone else. And that's, I think that's been the step that a lot of marketing organizations and probably organizations outside of marketing too have struggled with is like, how do I get this like really integrated with what I'm really trying to do? Especially with all the channels, right?

I mean, there's so many new channels out there and you don't get a new hire every time a new channel pops up that you have to manage or feed, right? So being able to build workflow accelerators that allow you to respond to market changes without necessarily having to manually figure out every single new process has kind of been a game changer for a lot of our customers. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about your marketing.

So what are you guys seeing that works? Where are you meeting your future customers and what messages are resonating today? Yeah. Well, so what's working best for us right now is actually leaning into the current, the problem itself because our customers are marketers.

So that's always kind of an interesting place to be, right? They can tell if you've got some generic demand gen play, they can see it a mile away. They're not fooled by it. And so we've always prided ourselves on being authentic and being kind of the subject matter expert, but approaching the market with a lot of authenticity and providing genuine insight about the challenges that, that our customers are facing every day.

What's interesting about Canto is we've, we originated digital asset management, so we have been around in the industry longer than anybody else, and I think our expertise shows that, but we like to bring that We like to bring thought leadership to the market so that we are authentic partners in solving business problems for our customers and not just a vendor. What's evolved recently is a lot of the conversation is happening on LLMs and AI response - AI agent kind of responses like the Google AI summary, for example, when you're searching for something.

So a lot of people are completing their research or doing a majority of their research before they even ever get to your website. So content right now is super important for us and building the right thought leadership content that shows up in those search results and that shows up in those AI summaries is, is important so that people understand your brand and recognize your brand. And community is interesting. It's a lot of people are having these conversations again before they ever come to your website.

So being authentic in LinkedIn communities, participating in Reddit, things along those lines have really been a great place for us to be a participant in the conversation. And again, not as a vendor, but as, as, as an authentic thought leader in the space. So, you know, in terms of where we're meeting our future customers, you know, events still really matter. We do a lot of events.

We like to do vertical-specific events when we can. For example, We do, we have a lot of customers in the retail and CPG space. So being at those specific events has been really important because again, that's where you're meeting people and having conversations and understanding their needs. Higher ed is another place where we do a lot of business.

So there's a lot of vertical-specific higher ed events. And then we can really go deep on industry context. And I think that kind of personalization and depth in my specific problem that I'm trying to solve for my industry, Being able to have those deeper conversations has been meaningful to our customers and is where we can build, not just sell a product, but actually sustain a relationship with those customers for years. Now, you mentioned people doing their research on LLMs before they even get to your site.

So they are, I would think, more educated when they get to your site. You didn't have to do the maybe handholding and nurturing that you did. Years ago, well, not too many years ago, but how does that show up on your end? Is deal velocity faster?

Like someone you didn't know existed is now so much closer, ready to buy. Is that - Yeah, what's interesting is you still have to do the, all the handholding and the nurturing. It's just, it's in a different way, right? I mean, people used to maybe search for what is digital asset management and then they would see a Canto ad and then they would click on it and then come to your website and then you'd inform them on your website.

Now you're having to publish all the content on YouTube and on social and on your website and on LinkedIn, and it's all got to come together to feed an LLM response. So you're still feeding, you're still doing the work. It's just not as important that you've got a linear path on your website. And what's interesting is by the time people come to your website, it's because they already know your brand because you've already educated them, but just in a different way.

And I think that's kind of the, the interesting shift that's happened specifically for B2B marketers of having to say, I still have to do the work and content is the most important thing you can be doing right now. But, but it doesn't look like it looked even 18 months ago. It shows up in a very different way. And yes, then customers are showing up informed and the job your website does is fundamentally different, right?

Does it become more transactional? I, I'm not sure yet. I'm not sure we know yet. Yet, but we're in that evolution right now.

It's also really hard in the B2B context because the buying process is still complicated despite all the things we just talked about. There's still half a dozen people that gotta, you know, sign off on it. So it's not like, here I am, here's my credit card, let's get this done. Like it might be in some other sectors.

And so many customers now have AI compliance committees. So that's an extra buying step that didn't happen before because they wanna make sure that if you've got AI, and by the way, everyone does, that their data is being managed properly and that there's a compliance layer for how their data is being managed and that it's not being shared. And how are you - are you - is there a learning algorithm within your platform? Are you remembering confidential things about my data?

Is it being shared with anybody else? So that's a whole additional step that again, 2 years ago was not a part of the process. So you get eager buyers, but Does it take longer now? I think it does.

Very interesting. Erica Gunn, CMO at Kanto. Thanks for joining us on Conversations with MarTech. Thanks for having me.