When assets become a liability: Getting value out of every asset

More than 800 websites and newspapers are published using the CUE media enterprise platform by Stibo DX. Many of our customers have decades, sometimes even centuries, of reporting and storytelling history. They were there, when the defining moments of our society happened. They served their community, and they documented it all. 

Such a rich history brings with it a plethora of content. And much of this has already been or is in the process of being digitized – from newspapers and magazines, to photo archives, and much more. These assets represent what makes these very publishers unique – it is the assets crafted by your contributors that are your DNA. But it also represents one of the most expensive parts of publishing: Creating the content. And once these assets have become digitized, they become a liability unless actively used: These millions of assets cost money to store. 

Then there’s the modern assets. From reporters in the field, quickly off-loading a bunch of images from their phones. Maybe they were busy with other, important things, maybe they forgot – but there’s a large risk that the metadata might be insufficient. Which leads to poor utilization of assets, decreased search engine optimization (SEO), and poor accessibility. This means that your staff won’t be able to find and utilize your assets, and your audience won’t be able to find your content. 

Content archival and retrieval is core to any DAM, but what drives us in creating CUE DAM for your newsroom is the ability to efficiently utilize your assets. So, no matter the reason why metadata is missing, we’ve built CUE DAM to assist with AI image analysis. By using AI vision, we identify key parts of the images and automatically enrich the metadata, meaning that these assets can be found when needed and even reused – further increasing the yield from the asset while supporting the credibility of you as a publisher by showing to your audience that you are a core part of their community. 

You can go even further and get fully-automated semantic tagging with a configurable threshold via our integration with Geneea – or better yet, have fully-automated IPTC media topics tagging. This allows you to curate your content in more meaningful ways and set up rules and automations to support your editorial workflows. 

Foundational to the CUE experience is that you have full control over when and how to use AI, and also when it comes to enriching your metadata. But even the best AI models can sometimes get things wrong. While LLM’s and AI models improve greatly over time, they are infamous for sometimes hallucinating. At best, wrong metadata means your search results are impacted negatively, at worst, your captions display factually incorrect information that you have to correct, undermining trust in your brand, which costs time to do. That is why it is a core part of CUE DAM that you can always see where metadata is coming from, and whether it has been assisted or created by AI. This gives you a full overview of making the right editorial decisions. 

We are thrilled to keep increasing our offering around asset enrichment. Up next is true asset centralization, transcription, and later we’ll improve our capabilities for both audio and video with scene detection, automatic thumbnails, and many more features to come. 

If you’re as excited as me of the ability to turn unused and underutilized assets from something that’s simply a storage cost to assets of value and efficiently manage and utilize your assets, reach out to my colleagues to get a demo of CUE DAM, our AI features, and the rest of the CUE Media Enterprise Platform.