The massive growth in digital marketing has created many new opportunities for businesses, but also new challenges. Marketers have more distribution channels and more file formats and types to deal with, all the while trying to stay on-brand and consistent.

I recently became the first ever Customer Success Manager (CSM) at IO Integration. This means it is now officially my job to make sure that IOI customers stay IOI customers. It means making sure our clients have solutions, technologies, and services that are aligned with their desired outcomes. Fortunately, I have a team of smart, driven, innovative, and customer-minded individuals to help me help our customers. When marketing and creative operations leaders come to us for advice on making technology decisions, I know we have the expertise and experience to guide them to the best solutions to meet their needs. But, I also know that a great CSM possesses a quality that is more than a line item on a resume, and that is a passion for helping customers. I now have a role where I get to focus that passion and enthusiasm into continuously sharing information and advising customers on ways their companies can achieve long-term success with their marketing and creative operations technology investments.

Understanding why accurate metadata is essential to your organization can make the difference between success and failure. One of the most basic functions of a proper metadata structure is to directly help with the searching and finding of assets quickly and easily, it sounds simple, but you wouldn’t believe how many organizations struggle with this very fundamental issue. Also, making sure you are entering correct metadata is crucial, one simple mistake can effectively render hundreds of assets to be inaccurate. An example would be that you or your client are merely embarrassed by using an incorrect image. Imagine you have a campaign with multiple professional athletes, and in an ad that references Kyrie Irving, there is a photo of Kevin Durant. Not the end of the world, but a definite knock on your credibility to accurately use the correct image. But there can also be much more severe and costly consequences as we get into rights management and having the proper license to use a specific photograph or image. Running a national advertisement without rights to a particular image could cost your company serious $$$$ in fines and legal fees!

As promised I present to you the second half of the topic, “Digital Challenges that Retailers Need to Overcome” (if you missed the first half I encourage you to click here and begin and read our blog entitled: The Digital Revolution and its Impact on Retailers)

(This is the first article of a 2-part series on retailing in the digital age) It’s no secret that retail is going through a fairly significant digital revolution. Finding the balance between brick and mortar stores and ecommerce is still proving to be a challenge for many of the world’s leading retailers. Everyone can watch this play out in the news cycle. We’ve seen the beloved Toys R Us go out of business this year and as recently as this month have seen the highs and lows of retailers as Walmart and JC Penney stock went the opposite directions the same day when their quarterly earnings came out.

This past spring censhare’s forward thinking CEO, Dieter Reichert, addressed the attendees of the Digital Innovators Summit in Berlin about one of technology’s hottest topics: Artificial Intelligence or AI is it is most often called.