CIO Applications Interview with Amplifi.io’s CEO Ken Garff
Today’s extended marketing and communications, sales, B2B, B2C, and other teams all rely heavily on a brand’s digital content in order to fuel growth. It’s not enough to just create good digital assets. Everything also needs to be accessible and delivered to the right places, in the right shapes and formats in a timely manner. This is a double-burden on marketers who must create more and more content, and also manage the growing complexities of digital asset delivery
California-based Amplifi.io suggests that the overall success of a modern brand begins with a highly organized approach to organizing and leveraging digital assets. Amplifi.io delivers a commerce-focused digital asset management (DAM) solution built to help brands adapt and meet the new standards.
In an interview with CIO Applications, Kenneth Garff, CEO of Amplifi.io, discussed the issues associated with modern DAM, as well as the practices and technology that his company offers to address them.
Could you talk about the unique value proposition delivered by Amplifi.io in the DAM space?
Sure. A massive increase in the quantity of digital assets, as well as the number of people who need to access it, has recently changed DAM software dynamics. Modern marketers need to rapidly organize images, video, documents, logos, PDFs, and other content. They need to deliver it all too quickly and efficiently. Before we built our software, we carefully studied digital asset creation and go-to-market workflows at over 100 different brands. We then designed a solution to solve the many problems we identified. Since then, we have continued to learn and improve. The technology in Amplifi.io leverages smart automation and AI to achieve asset organization and delivery. Our customers also like the fact that we can offer best practice guidance along with the software.
Our DAM offering is a secure and easy-to-use content portal which empowers employees and partners to self-serve the content they need and even customize certain assets. We also offer API connectivity for upstream and downstream systems.
Amplifi.io is 100 percent browser-based and is delivered as a turnkey, software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription without the need for dedicated IT resources, servers, special storage, or any installed software.
What are the challenges associated with DAM and how does Amplifi.io help its customers streamline it?
Shoppers navigate and research across many channels, including web, mobile, social, and retail venues before making a purchase. So a brand’s story can have a lot of stops on the way to its audience. Unfortunately, this can create opportunities for your content to get warped or drift off brand.
“Managing your digital assets is now a critical business process and it should be easy, efficient and satisfying. It may be time for a smart DAM and higher content ROI.”
Here are the top five issues we hear about:
- Assets are spread across multiple silos
- Employees and partners can’t find the right content
- Management, conversion, and sharing processes are inefficient
- Copyright, brand accuracy, or content mistakes are common
- Business is hurt by loss, accidental duplication, and other media related bottlenecks
Amplifi.io helps solve all these issues by offering a single, easy-to-use solution to manage assets and product marketing information. Centralizing content increases accessibility and ROI, and reduces waste and bottlenecks.
In addition to digital assets, Amplifi.io also provides marketing-related information. Unlike most DAM systems that only manage digital files, Amplifi.io offers unique technology to also manage relevant data and deliver it along with digital assets for a more complete marketing story.
Amplifi.io distributes both digital assets and any related data, from a single source. This is an important differentiator for us. With Amplifi.io, people and computer systems can easily locate and access content. Assets can even flow out from the DAM using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). All this is especially useful for brands with lots of SKUs, campaigns and other topical content to manage.
Any categories, lists or product data in an ERP, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), or Product Information Management (PIM) system will easily import into Amplifi.io. We automatically synchronize categories so digital assets will aggregate around existing campaigns, topics or products. This helps the DAM use a vocabulary already familiar across the organization. Metadata has a place in any DAM, but we believe it shouldn’t be the obstacle it has become. Automating and accelerating organizational processes adds greatly to system usability and adoption.
Amplifi.io helps marketers control their digital assets, deliver their story to diverse markets, and protect their brand. It’s difficult to put an exact value on brand safety, but most will agree it’s high.
Share a case study that illustrates the pain points of your customers and how Amplifi.io addressed them.
Black Diamond Equipment is a world-class manufacturer of climbing, skiing and outdoor equipment with more than 2500 global retail partners. They came to us looking for a better way to organize and deliver their digital assets. Manual processes burdened their B2B and B2C teams. Product-related information was separate from digital assets and the content was spread across multiple systems. Their goal was to speed up time-to-market and make content accessible directly to partners, and increase sales.
Once armed with Amplifi.io, Black Diamond Equipment was able to deploy a global marketing content hub that feels like a part of their brand. They centralized all their approved digital assets and product marketing information. Retail partners can now simply hit one button to download all the relevant and approved content. This reduced serious bottlenecks across their global go-to-market teams and the feedback has been very positive.
What are Amplifi.io’s future plans? Any technological advancements we can look forward to?
At Amplifi.io, we aim to free marketers from inefficient DAM burdens so they can focus on the more creative aspects of marketing. In 2019, we plan to release new tools to accelerate social media asset management and support for new media formats like virtual reality (VR) and 3D. We are also working to improve asset analytics including a new ‘reverse lookup’ tool to help brands better understand how their content gets used across the greater Web. We are developing ahead of the market, but that’s the way we like it. We want to continually push on what is possible.
From an organizational standpoint, we are expanding operations with new sales and technical personnel in California, and abroad. Even with the growth, our customers can expect us to remain responsive to their smallest requests. Amplifi.io is totally committed to helping brands meet the growing digital content demand both now and in the future.
