Can you give us a little background on your career evolution in product management and what led you to join Canto as Chief Product & Technology Officer a couple of years ago?
I started my career as a software engineer at IBM before moving into product management and, eventually, leading product strategies for major digital media companies including AOL, DataXu, Poppulo, and TomTom.
After selling our previous company to Vista Equity, I was looking for industries that could be both impacted by and benefit from advancements in AI. Digital Asset Management (DAM) quickly stood out. With the explosion of digital content creation, there is a significant opportunity to harness AI to better organize, manage, and unlock the full value of these assets.
Canto recently launched a Product Information Management (PIM) solution. What market factors influenced Canto’s decision to enter the PIM space at this point?
Canto has always been a customer-driven company, and we’re constantly listening to the needs of the brands we serve. Time and again, we’ve heard from our customers that managing digital assets and product information separately is slowing them down—creating inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and missed opportunities in their sales process. They’ve made it clear: they need a better way to unify and streamline these critical elements, and that’s why we built Canto PIM.
Brands are managing more content across more campaigns, more channels, and more partnerships than ever before. In a Deloitte survey, “85% of marketers say they are under pressure to create assets and deliver campaigns more quickly.” Given the mounting difficulties of accurately harnessing and optimizing content at the pace now required for success, we’re quickly reaching a stage where strategies that silo digital assets and product information from one another aren’t going to cut it.
This shift has brands clamoring for tools and approaches able to deliver newfound efficiency and keep pace with content demand—demand that’ll grow exponentially into the future. Canto PIM, our new DAM+PIM platform, fulfills this market need by bringing unity to a brands’ digital assets and product information. The solution eliminates legacy obstacles to managing and distributing that data and assets while enabling a digital-first approach for accurate and secure delivery across all ecosystems (employees, agencies, channel partners, vendors, etc). When it comes to combining DAM and PIM capabilities and empowering marketing, creative and product teams to provide better experiences at scale while realizing more value from their content, the market is ready—and so are we.
How are you approaching the integration of Image Relay’s technology into Canto’s existing Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform?
Our acquisition of Image Relay and the innovative DAM+PIM technology behind its platform has been essential in bringing Canto PIM to market. Combining our DAM strengths with Image Relay’s years of experience in the industry has resulted in a comprehensive, all-encompassing single source of truth solution that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Businesses can utilize Canto PIM to promote brand consistency and achieve more efficient and intuitive workflows, all via a single central repository housing all the brand assets and product information used across their project lifecycles. That means all materials—from product SKU details to marketing and sales assets, and from initial creative explorations to finalized assets to iterative improvements—are available to the employees and partners who need them with just a few intuitive clicks. Users can also seamlessly locate materials by leveraging our platform’s AI search functionality (powered by technology from last year’s MerlinOne acquisition).
Coming from someone within the DAM/PIM space, how do you see the future of composable architectures compared to all-in-one digital experience platforms (DXPs)?
By eliminating the barrier between DAM and PIM to offer a centralized single source of truth for all the materials that their marketers and partners require, brands can unlock agility and run circles around competitors still reliant on disconnected systems. Unified DAM+PIM capabilities and strategies also can provide analytics and insights to deliver brand experiences as tailored as those from any DXP, while providing more advantageous search and usability features.
How do you see AI transforming content operations for marketing teams in the upcoming years, particularly as content demands increase? What are some examples of how Canto’s AI capabilities are helping marketing teams streamline their workflows?
We believe AI will transform PIM by automating tedious tasks, ensuring data accuracy, and optimizing workflows in real time. Instead of manual updates, AI will intelligently categorize content, detect inconsistencies, and streamline collaboration. This shift will help brands move faster, reduce errors, and create richer product experiences—unlocking new levels of efficiency and value in a digital-first world.
AI is, of course, already driving a remarkably rapid introduction of new marketing tools, and quickly transforming the capabilities available to help teams streamline and automate workflows. For example, at Canto we’ve introduced AI Visual Search, which enables marketers and other users to enter prompts describing the visual content they’re looking for, and have AI instantly retrieve matching content from across all available content. With this intuitive interface, AI offers users a more human means of approaching digital materials and making creative choices. That efficient and natural experience is representative of the more enjoyable and productive workflows that will emerge in the near future as AI-powered tools continue to advance.
Brand consistency remains a significant challenge for marketers. How do you see the intersection of DAM, PIM, and brand management addressing these challenges?
Brand consistency is the art of ensuring that internal teams and external partners can easily access and utilize updated brand-approved materials, while making it unlikely or impossible to make mistakes. For many brands, unfortunately, getting this right has been easier said than done.
The centralization of all digital assets and product information that a unified DAM+PIM platform like ours provides empowers brands to synchronize their omnichannel experiences. This ensures that customers receive the same cohesive on-brand content no matter what social media channel, e-commerce or partner experience they engage in. The organizational power of a centralized platform includes guardrails and access controls that ensure employees and partners leverage the right materials and deliver intentional campaign experiences. With Canto PIM, performance tracking enhances that process with analytics that assess the ROI and performance of each asset and guide strategies for optimizing the impact of all brand materials on all channels, while error-proofing those optimization processes.
What are some of the unique challenges marketers face when managing digital assets and product information across different markets, languages, and regulatory environments?
Deploying brand assets and product information across global markets requires informed strategies and a careful hand. All materials must be vetted to align with cultural nuances, as well as any copyright or licensing requirements associated with particular assets. Missing the mark on a language difference or liability issue can put not only a campaign’s success but a brand’s entire reputation in peril. Leveraging a centralized DAM+PIM platform with strong safeguards in place to deploy only vetted materials to the correct regions can spare marketing leaders a lot of headaches.
Adhering to regulatory compliance mandates and protecting brand and product materials is also critical. In our case, Canto PIM offers SOC-2-certified enterprise-grade security, ensuring that data is defended by granular user permissions and security practices that meet common compliance requirements.
What are the most significant shifts you’ve observed over the past few years in how marketing teams manage and leverage their digital content?
Omnichannel marketing across an expanding collection of platforms has been redefining the scope of marketing operations. A brand’s customers are now active across more channels, and require more precise messaging and greater cohesion across campaigns. The arrival of new tooling and AI capabilities to help enable complex digital content payloads—and to rapidly optimize what works—has been another sea change to which marketing teams must acclimate.
As someone leading product strategy, how do you stay ahead of the curve in such a fast-evolving technology landscape?
We’re closely monitoring ever-evolving brand needs. That’s priority one—we must meet customers with the products they need. The marketing technology landscape is complex, but the core challenges businesses face are clear: they need better ways to manage growing content volumes while maintaining quality and efficiency.
Our investment in AI innovation is part of that product strategy, particularly in areas that can deliver immediate value. This includes developing automation capabilities that help organize large content libraries and make it significantly easier for users to find and utilize the right materials at the right time.
We’re also expanding our view beyond “traditional” DAM and PIM market verticals. For example, we see a lot of potential (and scaling demand) from organizations in healthcare and manufacturing.
The bottom line for our product strategy is staying focused on delivering practical value while continuing to innovate in ways that solve real business challenges.
What advice would you give marketing teams looking to future-proof their content management strategy, especially as they navigate increasing content demands and the complexity of managing assets across multiple channels and markets?
The best digital content and product information management strategies aren’t about chasing the newest features—they’re about choosing solutions that can grow with your brand’s requirements while making your teams more effective, both quickly and over the long haul. Take time to map out workflows, find your current content management bottlenecks, and really understand how (or whether) a new tool can address them. Marketing teams should look for solutions that have a history of modernizing with the industry at large.
A quote or advice from the author: The best digital content and product information management strategies aren’t about chasing the newest features—they’re about choosing solutions that can grow with your brand’s requirements while making your teams more effective, both quickly and over the long haul.
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Alan Beiagi, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Canto
Alan Beiagi is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Canto, a company focused on digital asset management (DAM) and product information management (PIM) solutions for brands. Alan joined Canto from Poppulo, where he was SVP and Head of Products for the employee communications software vendor. His career history in product management also includes work for DataXu (acquired by Roku) and TomTom, among others. He lives in Massachusetts. LinkedIn.