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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#810: Bynder's Luke Roberts on brand and content governance in a 1:1 omnichannel world
00:29:02
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The agile brand. Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind.
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The brands you know and love.
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I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can.
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Find us as well.
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And make sure you check out our sponsor, Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in. What if the biggest threat to your brand's integrity isn't a competitor, but the.
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Sheer volume of unmanaged, ungoverned and untraceable content your own teams are creating every single day?
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Agility requires more than just speed.
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It demands a solid foundation of control and intelligence. It's the ability to create, adapt and deploy content at the pace of the market without sacrificing governance, consistency or compliance.
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Today we're going to talk about the.
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Content paradox facing modern enterprises. While the demand for personalized omnichannel experiences is causing content creation to accelerate at an unprecedented rate, the systems to manage, govern and measure its impact often can't keep up. We're going to explore how to turn this content chaos into a competitive advantage, the role of AI not just as a creation tool, but as a workflow.
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Agent, and why the future of marketing.
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Will be measured in outcomes, not output.
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To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Luke Roberts, Global Director, Digital Strategies and Growth at Binder.
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Luke, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me today.
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B
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely top of many people's minds. So looking forward to diving in. But before we do, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Binder?
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Yeah, well I wanted to say I'm first very excited to be here. I love the insight that you bring to this podcast and today's topic is really something I'm passionate about and it's honestly the main reason I joined binder just over nine months ago. Before that I spent nearly 18 years at Mazda Corporation across local, regional and global roles and most recently focusing on global content and digital transformation. And that's where the experience I bring to my role at Binder today and I'm quite lucky, you know, I get to work with some of the biggest brands and the brightest Minds and how we think about and strategically deploy binder across their content supply chain. And it's a great topic today. Super, super excited to get into it.
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Yeah, well, let's dive in then and want to start at the strategic level and really just talking about what I teed up in the intro, which is content and content creation and management as a competitive advantage. So many people have thought of digital asset management as a sophisticated library or a digital filing cabinet, so to speak. Your binder's data suggests that in a digital first economy, a strategic digital asset manager, or dam, is now a core competitive advantage. So why has this perception shifted so dramatically? And what's the real business risk for brands that still see it as just a storage tool?
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C
Yeah, it's a great point. And that's for some time, DAM was really seen as a place to store finished content. So some even joke it was a place where content went to die. But in reality, it's very different today if you think about it. Digital first economy. Content is the business. It fuels every digital experience, Marketing campaign, product launch, brand interaction. And to put this into perspective, brands are investing heavily in content. And they're not just creating one asset for one channel. They're producing thousands of variations across formats, regions, languages, audiences. And the volume and complexity has exploded. And we're seeing this ourselves with over 50% of the digital assets in the binder platform uploaded in the last 18 months alone. And it's no longer just about storage anymore. Just recently, the Black Friday shopping period, I'm sure you're probably familiar, it's a big rush. Binder process, 2.6 billion optimized asset delivery requests. And that's, that's 100% year on year growth versus last year. And that level of demand simply didn't exist a few years ago. So talking about competitive advantage, but also talking about risk, right, with that scale becomes risk and it becomes a competitive advantage. At the same time, if you can manage that and without a true system of record, content is fragmented across drives, inboxes, agencies, teams waste time searching for assets or even worse, using the wrong versions. That leads to brand inconsistency or financial exposure. So really, at the end of the day, brands that see DAM as storage, they're not just behind, they're introducing complexity and chaos to everything that drives market share today. And that is a digital experience.
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B
Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. Wow. 100%. I mean, I, I believe, I believe that figure just because, you know, it's one of the. And I know, I know we'll get to this in a minute. But you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a good thing, but also a challenging thing. Right. And so, you know, you, you talk about DAM being again, not just a, not just a filing cabinet, but a system of record that unifies content and also connects all of those Martech investment, you know, those Martech stacks with all the, all the components to it that now everyone's tying together for personalization and all that. For marketing leaders out there listening, how does a well implemented digital asset management strategy make the rest of their Martech stack from, you know, CMS DXP to their marketing automation E commerce? How does it make all those things more effective and deliver on that ROI that everyone needs as well?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. And when marketing leaders think about DAM as a system of record, what they're really talking about is it's the foundation that makes the entire Martech stack work smarter. So if you have content centralized, governed and brand approved, then it can be activated right across the enterprise and that unites teams across regions, agencies, partners, and it integrates, as you mentioned, the best of breed upstream creative tools, but also the downstream activation platforms. And that really means that teams always have the right content in the right context and format and ideally in the tools that they already use. Right. So they don't have to switch from tool to tool, they have the access assets from where, from where they work. And then that case they can be automatically optimized to each channel which supports personalization and micro audience targeting much easier. I know that's on the agenda of many C suite and marketing professionals out there. And this connected ecosystem that's not only making more teams more efficient and productive, it's, it links content to performance. And if marketers have clear insights into what assets or campaigns drive results, it enables more informed data decision making. Right. It's making it on fact and over opinion. So really it's really a strategic DAM turns your Martech stack from a collection of different tools into a high speed content engine. And you know, speaking about, you know, we're on a, on a podcast, I was lucky enough to interview Jackie, a VP of E Commerce at Helzberg Diamonds last year. And you know, I was super inspired to hear that by integrating DAM with their PIM and marketing automation tools, they didn't just simplify the workflows, but they cut their time to market by 50%.
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Oh wow.
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And supported a 25% online revenue growth. And you know, that's huge at the end of the day and it shows the power of a strategic dam where, you know, it's not just governing the assets, but it's actually making your entire Martech system and teams perform better.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And so let's talk a little bit more about that part too. You know, getting a little more tactical as far as how people and the processes work. But also, you know, there's this thing called AI that I'm sure, you know, everyone listening has heard a little bit about over the last few years. You know, generative AI is, has been the, you know, AI has been around for decades, but you know, generative AI has been really the core focus lately and big part of that has been on content creation and I think the, the number that you, that you put out there, you know, 100% increase in, in assets and you know, all that stuff year over year. Again, I'm not surprised by it because, you know, gen AI has made content creation so much easier and, and accessible. But in addition to all this focus on content creation, you know, there's also opportunity for agentic AI. Certainly, you know, I feel like that's the buzzword of, of 2026, but there's also some real tangible benefits with it as well. And so there's opportunity for agentic AI to be embedded in workflows. Can you give a practical example of how an AI agent can help a global marketing team manage things like compliance, routing, tagging, all of that. Basically taking on some of that manual and frankly, error prone work that often slows them down.
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Down.
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Yeah, for sure. And, and as you said, there's a lot of buzz and noise around generative AI and that's understandable. I know it's been a topic of some of your previous podcasts as well that I've enjoyed listening to. And you know, just to give some context right around AI to, to kick off, you know, at Binder we realized early that AI was a one way door. You know, it wasn't just another feature. It's a, it's a fundamental shift in how content operations run and we needed to focus on that. You know, the appointment of Binder Labs worked with over 60 enterprise customers and documented more than 200 real world use cases. And that led us to developing our Gentec platform and that's hosting a growing number of agents currently. Enrichment, transformation, governance and compliance. And so to help answer this question and bring this to life, you know, imagine a brand new close to 90,000 assets. It's used across five markets. They're under pressure. There's been recent regulations that come into play around accessibility and compliance to that. Which means every single asset published on a website needs accurate alt text and needs to be localized, translated and consistent across the markets. And when done manually, you talk about error prone and slowed down. We've been told that this, this work has been soul crushing. Right, Right. And if it's outsourced, it can also break the bank. Right. And this is where AI agents can change the game. And the enrichment agent, for example, can be guided through simple natural language prompts to really see through the pixels and automatically analyze each asset as it enters the dam. And it automatically generates the metadata, it creates the compliant alt text, it translates across multiple languages and all aligned to the local market requirements and brand tone of voice. So I mean, this gives you an example of if you have a DAM as a system of record one, you can add these AI capabilities, but you can also execute this at scale. And when you enrich your assets, they become instantly searchable and governed. But this isn't just for new content. Right. You can then apply this across your entire media library. And that's the power of agentic.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And so, you know, the, the natural question then is, you know, all of those soul crushing, you know, to use your words. And I've, I've felt that pain myself and I'm sure many, many have. Yeah. With all of those kinds of tasks, you know, people, humans being freed up from doing many if not all of those, you know, what does this free those human teams to do that is more valuable, beneficial, strategic. And how does this change the skills and focus that are needed in marketing and creative teams moving forward?
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Yeah, well, this is where the conversation gets really interesting because the biggest impact of AI isn't just about efficiency. It's really what gives people back. In a human LED AI powered model, how we see that your AI can become the best employee you ever hire. Right. It works 24 7. It understands your context, your brand rules, your markets. Agents are really there not to replace teams, but augment them. And what we mean by that is that they spend less time tagging and checking assets to more time driving real impact. And that matters, right, because marketing creative teams are investing significantly in teams. And if you look at a global team of say, you know, 200 users, that's, that's easily $15 million in annual investment in salaries. And if you're saving 30 minutes, we see a lot more than that. But just using the example of 30 minutes per person per week, that recovers close to, you know, $200,000 in productivity every year. And that's real value without adding, adding headcount. So I think the key point here is that AI doesn't replace your human judgment, taste and creativity. It should really amplify it. And if it handles the work machines are good at like speed, scale, consistency, AI allows people to really do what they do best. And they should be building stronger brands, right? Making better decisions and hopefully creating experiences that really, that really matter.
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Let's talk a little bit about how we measure success here. And so, you know, rather than measuring success by the sheer volume of assets produced, because again, we can, we can produce almost limitless assets at this point. It's really just depending on the, the credits that we want to spend with AI or something like that at this point, you know, what are the key outcome based metrics rather than output metrics that executives should be tracking to understand the real business impact of their content operations?
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Yeah, well, for a long time, right, marketing success was measured by output. You know, how many assets did we produce, how many campaigns did we launch? But really in the digital first world, that's no longer meaningful. And what really matters is impact. And speaking to customers, they're obsessed about this. They're like, how can we have bigger impact with, with less effort, right? And you know, the first place leaders should look really is, is how quickly can teams move from idea to launch, you know, especially across regions and channels. Another critical and sometimes overlooked metric is, is brand and go to Market effectiveness, you know, is off brand content in circulation do go to market teams such as internal sales teams or external retailers. Do they have the right content when they need it in the right context and how they should use it? And in terms of talking about real business value, of course, you need to look at engagement right from conversion is equally as critical and the assets optimized and flowing seamlessly into CMS and E commerce, driving personalization. And we have a standout example you probably know, Inspire brands or otherwise known as Duncan and Baskin Robbins. They have 33,000 locations globally and over 30,000 assets created annually. So by adopting Binder as a system of record, they were able to accelerate time to market by 20% and they deliver 1.2 billion assets monthly across two and a half thousand websites. And they're generating millions in speed of market gains and improved campaign roi. So that's really bringing some hard numbers in terms of value driven from an optimized content ecosystem. And you know, this isn't just for large brands either. You know, this is a big company example and obviously it's a big scale. But it's the same for small consumer brands or regulated industries like financial services or manufacturers. If you treat DAM as a strategic system to drive efficiency and consistency, that's really where the competitive advantage lives.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I mean, I definitely agree and I think that that is one of the nice thing about a lot of these aspects of AI adoption is it definitely helps at the large enterprise scale. You know, like most of my work is with larger enterprise orgs, but it also helps with smaller organizations. I mean, they have fewer people, they have fewer resources at a small business versus the scale. You know, it kind of helps regardless of the size, which I think is a really powerful aspect of this. I think another thing, regardless of size is just the waste that is often. You know, again, because just because you can doesn't mean you should create stuff. But you know, based on your work as well as data from the reports like the Binder report, the state of damage, where do you see the most significant content waste? And particularly in large organizations, you know, those things content created or assets created that are never used, but they kind of take up search results and all of that. You know, how can a. How can using the right system make that waste reducible?
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Yeah, it's very important and it's a big one. Right? So we see two big sources of content waste. The most expensive is content that gets created and never used. And the most invisible is the times teams lose. Right. Every day Searching for files or recreating assets that already exist or even second guessing what's approved. You mentioned there the state of DAM industry survey. We've got a new output coming very soon, within the next month, which we're excited to share about. A lot of insights around AI as well. But you know, almost 40% of organizations measure ROI from AI and DAM through time savings.
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Right.
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And 35% point to improved search and discovery. So that really tells you how much time is being lost. Right, right. And you know that loss rarely shows up on a balance sheet and at scale it could add up to millions. Right. In productivity loss. And then from the creative side, we see a significant portion of digital assets never activated after being created and that has a direct hit right on, on, on marketing budgets, agency fees and the like. So the problem is, is most organizations don't see this waste because they're scattered across drives or agencies or other tools and there's no clear view. So once that waste is visible, it can be reduced and, and teams stop recreating content that already exists. They design for reuse as well and, and they remove what's not, not used and hopefully in turn invest in what actually performs.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So looking out a little bit, looking ahead, you know, as, as brands continue to not only create content, but also focus on, on things like hyper personalization at scale and just different types and variations of content, how do you see, you know, a content engine becoming this foundation? You know, how do you make the case to an executive to do that as opposed to, oh well, you know, maybe there's, maybe there's some potential alternatives. But you know, how does this intelligent content engine really become non negotiable and really a foundation for this omnichannel customer experience?
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Yeah, it's great to look ahead and it's a big question mark, but it's also focusing, you know, what do we do today in order to set us up for that? And you know, we see the biggest shift won't be whether brands personalize, it would be whether they can do it effectively at scale. Right. And we know that things like hyper personalization means exponential growth in asset variants and really without a centralized, intelligent and strategically deployed system of record that can turn into fragmentation and brand chaos quite quickly. And as AI driven automation and agentic workflows mature, you know, we move from storing and delivering assets to a complete active orchestration. Right. Being able to understand context like audience channels, markets and regulations. It means that assets can automatically be enriched, transformed and delivered in the right format to the Right. Audience. And that means content. That content flowing seamlessly into cms, E Commerce, your marketing automation. And really personalization becomes operational rather than aspirational and teams can actually test, learn and adapt in the near real time because the performance is connected back to the system of record. So that's important to be talking about if you're not setting up that foundation. As this volume increases. Instead of marketing teams focusing on things like strategy and storytelling and experience design, you know, they're going to get caught up, right, with the scale and complexity. So, you know, develop a content engine that will handle the scale, the governance and execution and that's how brands are going to stay agile without burning out their teams and their budgets.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And finally, you know, I want to talk about the, the mindset shift. And you know, you touched on this earlier. As far as a lot of marketing in the past has been measured by outputs and you know, again, we launched X number of campaigns this year or something and certainly a lot of leaders are evolving to more outcomes driven thinking as well. But you know, what do you think is the biggest mindset shift that a marketing leader needs to make to really prepare their, you know, not only themselves, but their organization for a future where content is more fluid, it's more intelligent and it's more automated?
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Yeah, well, the biggest mindset shift marketing leaders need to make right now is moving from thinking about content as outputs to thinking about content as a system. You know, and for years, success was about producing the big assets, the big great campaigns and the reality in the future. And already today, success is really about building the infrastructure that allows content to flow, adapt and perform continuously. And you're right, content is no longer static or finished. Right. It is fluid, it's intelligent and needs to be constantly evolving. So leaders need to stop asking how do we create more content? And start asking how do we design a content engine that scales, one that's future proof, it embeds governance and automation from the start rather than bolting it on later and realizing it doesn't, it doesn't work.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Well, Luke, thanks so much for joining today. Got a couple questions as we wrap up here. The first one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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It's a great question. And I think the brands that thrive won't be the ones experimenting in AI and isolation. So they're really the ones treating content as a core business capability. And that means investing in systems, data and operating models that allows real creativity, intelligence, to work together and really seeing AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacer. And I believe that that foundation is really what's going to prepare teams not just for the next campaign, but really for the next five years and next decade.
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Yeah, love it.
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Well, last question for you before we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Yeah, well, for me, agility really comes back to feedback systems and learning. And I'm always learning, right. I'm always listening to customers, colleagues, friends and family as well. And what's happening in the market. It's moving fast. AI, new technologies are changing how brands work all the time. So really being able to use that insight and adapt quickly is is key to agility. I've really enjoyed being part of the podcast and really hope we've inspired listeners to see digital asset management in a new light. So really appreciate you having me Greg and wish you all the best.
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Yeah, thanks so much. Again, I'd like to thank Luke Roberts, Global Director, Digital Strategies and Growth at Binder, for joining the show. You can learn more about Luke and Binder by following the links in the show notes.
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This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work or if you need a speaker speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until until next time, stay curious and stay agile.