DAM Deep Dive: MediaValet

Speaker A: 00:00:00

We all have iPhones or you know, a variant and we all have so many photos and it is hell.

Imagine if you could add somewhere where it all just magically went, was all AI tagged and coordinated, followed a proper taxonomy, discovered everything you need to know about the file, preserved the master.

Because your content is that like that's what people are dealing with.

They're your messy photo in storage is what they are dealing with inside your organization.

If you're trying to do this with SharePoint or you're trying to do this with without a dam.

If I think about putting that power not only into my hands, but everybody in my company, like, how much more revenue can I generate?

Speaker B: 00:00:52

Welcome to the damn right podcast.

I'm glad to have you here today.

Maybe we can start off by just having you tell us about yourself and who you originally were thinking of when you built this product and give us a little bit of background about the organization and yourself.

Speaker A: 00:01:07

Yeah, well thanks for, thanks for asking about it.

nvolved with MediaValay since: 2015

So I wasn't actually a co founder but I was the one that came into finance the growth of the business and to mentor the then CEO of the company.

Speaker C: 00:01:27

I am Jean Lozano.

I am the CTO of mediavale.

I've been with mediavalley before Media Valet started.

So we were an agency previously, just like a lot of SaaS companies in the martech industry.

So we were an agency called VRX Studios.

And then, you know, as we were working with customers, we realized that creating the content wasn't the problem.

Producing the content wasn't a problem, it was managing the content, distributing the content that is the bigger problem.

Speaker A: 00:02:05

We started out of another, you know, a studio actually that was, that had a, that had everybody's problem, which is content.

Right.

It's everywhere, it's hard to manage.

It needs to be everywhere and everybody needs it now.

And if you don't look after it, your brand gets fractured, you can't go to market properly, you know, and it just, it's a massive problem that everybody is just dealing with more and more every day.

The problem was in: 2010

But you know, for us to have thrown in great planes at the time would have been more than the revenue of the company.

Yeah, so,.

Speaker B: 00:02:50

Yeah,.

Speaker A: 00:02:50

So you know, so we built it ourselves and you know, Jean was The founder of that and the cto, the original father of Media Valet and put together the business plan and you know, it's.

It's been amazing.

So it really started from the perspective of Media Valet needs to be really easy to use, yet it still needs to have all the enterprise grade control and fast forward today.

That was an essential beginning for us because that's what really matters in my view, to be day, you know, if you can't, like, if you're going to win with content, you need to be able to have a broad adoption by all of your stakeholders, whether they're internal or external.

So all of that content can reach where it needs to be instantly and people can store your style at the speed of consciousness.

Speaker B: 00:03:32

Yeah.

Is there, is there a.

And I understand you, you know, as you said, you came in, you were an original founder, but is there a origin story?

Story or current like mantra that you think is really defined Media Valet, either the origin or who you are today?

Speaker A: 00:03:50

Absolutely.

I think, you know, origin still obviously plays a role in it.

But look, if we think about Media Valet today and why we're different, our, you know, I think we start from maybe a little bit different of a place than a lot of our competitors.

Our mission is to empower the everyday creator and democratize content.

I think a lot of our competitors think of their customer as that marketer, that power user.

Right.

And indeed they are.

But their customers are the critical ones to actually accomplishing the task of getting your brand everywhere and growing your business.

Right.

So that adoption is a number one metric for us and measure for us because that tells us if we're getting beyond just the power users and indeed we're giving your content wings.

Speaker C: 00:04:35

be honest, we started back in: 2010

We were born in the cloud.

We were the first DAM on Microsoft Azure.

And when we shifted from being a production agency, a Digital Agency, to SaaS, we kind of lost our way.

Why do I say that?

Because after we moved to SaaS, it was all about managing the assets and we kind of focus on that management piece on the administrator.

We were trying to cater only to the administrator.

Speaker B: 00:05:11

Then.

Speaker C: 00:05:11

Later on we realized that for the administrator to be successful, the administrator needs to be able to get DAM widely adopted within the organization.

So how do we empower that everyday creator in any organization to use or repurpose or create assets and effectively communicate them via the DAM platform?

Speaker B: 00:05:41

Who are you thinking like, give us 1, 2, 3 examples of these everyday creator cre.

Sorry, everyday creators.

Who are you imagining when you use that term?

Speaker C: 00:05:51

Yeah, so you have the salesperson doing the pitch deck, you have your marketing people like marketing, even marketing operations or brand people who need to.

Actually there's this feature called media Valet templating in our case, right.

So you have predefined brand approved templates and the only thing that what we would call an everyday creator would have to do is fill in the blanks, right.

Or update the image with the image of if it could be like an everyday creator, could be somebody as like somebody like a franchisee for example, right.

So if, if I'm a restaurant franchisee, right.

So and I want to create a menu for my restaurant and I was given a template already within MediaValet and all I have to do was edit the address of my restaurant, you know, change the photo of the some of the items within the menu.

Right.

And it's all guided to me that's an everyday creator.

Speaker A: 00:07:06

Honestly for me it's that storytelling at the speed of consciousness is just a game changer for me.

So gone is the world where I would go, oh man, I want to present this and, and hey marketing, can you send me those banners and this and that and you know, a day or two later I get it and I'm like, well, what was I going to do with that?

Again, the ability to actually think it, find it, put it in, move on and keep storytelling just.

It's so seamless for me that when I'm building presentations for our staff, when I'm building presentations for our board, when I'm building presentations for customers or external parties, everything's at my fingertips about us and won't have to ask anyone for anything.

It's just right there.

So as I think it, I do it, there's no lag and of course you're busy as a day to day, right?

You've got so much on.

This is happening in the evening or on a weekend, right?

So it's even worse that you would be asking people over the weekend or whatever, you know, of course you wait till Tuesday from Saturday, like you know, I'd rather have it done.

We all have iPhones or you know, a variant and we all have so many photos and it is hell, I don't know anybody that's happy with their photo situation.

Imagine if you could have somewhere where it all just magically went, was all AI tagged and quite coordinated, followed a proper taxonomy, discovered everything you needed to know about the file, preserved the master, right and enabled you to instantly share it through lightboxes and portals to whoever you want whenever you Want.

Wow.

And then imagine if you times that by how many employees do you have,.

Speaker B: 00:08:58

Right?

Speaker A: 00:09:00

Because your content is that that's what people are dealing with.

Messy photo in storage is what they are dealing with inside your organization.

If you're trying to do this with SharePoint or you're trying to do this with Without a Dam.

And so for me, if I think about putting that power not only into my hands, but everybody in my company, how much more revenue can I generate?

Because I'm going to bet market so much better than the competition.

Competition.

Speaker B: 00:09:31

I'd love as you know, as a CEO of a company that is focused in the DAM space, I'd love to get your perspective on sort of the five year view.

Feel free to add or subtract to that specific number as you like.

But where are DAM platforms in the industry headed?

And I'd like you to speak to three fronts and I don't want to get too complicated here, but one is the technology, two is how DAM fits within the larger tech stack and content ecosystem and 3 is the value that it's delivering to organizations.

And we can take this one at a time.

I'll remind you if you, if you forget if you want to start and I'll jump in and remind you of the others if you like.

But I'd love to get your perspective on that.

Speaker A: 00:10:12

Yeah.

So now the tech one.

Let me say that, you know, I knew Jean, he will answer that much better than.

Speaker C: 00:10:21

From a presentation perspective.

I was talking about the, our brand centers, our experience portals.

This is like an easy to use CMS with a DAM that is, you know, that the everyday creator can just use.

We're going to be adding something to that that's smaller called what we call our story portals.

Because one of the things that our customers need to be able to do is tell a story, right?

So if I need to think about it this way, if customers need to either share an asset, so that's either a web gallery or an asset distribution page.

That's one.

Number two is like on the other side of the fence is like you want to have a full portal, right?

But there's this thing in the middle that we're looking at called story portals, wherein customers just need to be able to tell a particular story.

Like this is a product launch for example, or this is an event that just happened last night.

Those are also just stories that would be templated, easy to deploy and there's a need for that.

Number two is in relation to that is we want to make it even easier by infusing AI into it by.

It would be so much nicer if I can just tell AI to spin up this story and this is a story that I want to tell and follow this template that has been provided by the marketing team.

From an integration perspective, what we are doing right now, and this is an active development is that we have what we call were embedding an ipaas, an integration platform as a service.

Right.

And other customers just integrate with an ipaas.

What we did was we looked at a bunch of IPASS providers and we made the deal with the IPASS provider that is most forward looking for us, that has a lot of AI capabilities.

Because at the end of the day we're trying to put in this capability for workflow not only within MediaValley but between systems.

And ideally it should be you can orchestrate it using AI from an MCP perspective.

What we have right now is just a read MCP which actually allows you to pull assets out.

But going forward it has to be a full read write MCP that you can just connect to whatever LLM that our customers are using and they should be able to do via their MCP interface, via their LLM interface what they would be able to do in the dac.

Right.

And lastly there's this thing called what we call mila, the Media Valet Intelligent Library Assistant.

So to a DAM admin, that's a DAM admin assistant to a regular user that is more of a helper, right.

Why?

It's like we have some early prototypes that we showed to our customers and what we are seeing is like there's that need not only for context but also memory.

Right.

It has to be able to remember what the users have been doing, what the user have been asking for so that you don't start fresh every time.

Right.

You can like, you can start a new session and you can start fresh but you know, you can always go back to a previous session and continue the work that you've been doing.

And that seems to be very important to our users.

Speaker B: 00:14:41

Yeah, much of what shapes the user experience on a daily basis in a DAM is the, let's just say the boring stuff, right?

It's not typically the thing.

It's not the big exciting stuff that might compel people to buy.

It's smaller things that are not so exciting.

And I'm curious, can you give us some insight into what's the most kind of unsexy decision you've made or features you've built or capabilities that you've really focused in on?

That you're really proud of, that you think makes a big difference in the day to day lives of your users.

Speaker C: 00:15:22

Our philosophy is we do ordinary things extraordinarily well.

If we do it that way, then we solve a lot of the bigger problems that our customers will come to us.

Something as simple as a browser upload.

I've taken a look at several DAM support articles for different products and I see that if you're using the browser, you're allowed to upload 200 and some even allow you to upload 500 assets at the same time.

Right.

But coming from a digital agency, I know that 200 to 500 is quite a low, a small amount for a photo shoot, for example.

Right.

So, and based on I asked the team, like do some customer discovery, what's the typical volume of that?

Right.

And what came back was like, oh, people upload up to between a few hundred to probably two, three thousand assets.

Right.

So of course everybody has a desktop uploader, but nothing is more convenient as being on the browser.

We have a desktop uploader, our competitors have a desktop uploader.

But when you're in the browser, we increase that limit to 4,000 assets per batch.

That solves one drag and drop and you're done.

Is it sexy?

No, it's a very trivial feature.

But that ability to scale solves like a big problem for our customers.

Speaker B: 00:17:18

Right.

Speaker C: 00:17:19

So yeah,.

Speaker B: 00:17:20

I love that that's what you chose because I, I can't tell you the number of customers we've had that, that you just make assumptions about what you're able to do.

You get in, you start using it on a daily basis and then they're disappointed with, with exactly what you just talked about, either the speed or the quantity or some.

And exactly.

That is exactly what people do every single day.

That you know, if it doesn't work well, it's a big disappointment.

And if it works seamlessly, you know, you're kind of a quiet champion.

Nobody's going to go, oh, they got the best upload experience, but it makes a big difference in their day to day lives.

Speaker C: 00:17:52

Exactly, exactly 100%.

Speaker B: 00:17:56

How would you describe your users?

And you could do this at sort of the Persona individual level, it could be organizational level.

But help us understand who gets the most value from Media Valet and who may be not a great fit for Media Valet.

Speaker A: 00:18:12

That's a great question.

And I think ultimately it takes understanding the down market.

Right.

I mean, why is dam important today?

I mean it's a 30 plus year old industry.

Right.

It's got so many rebirths.

But today we as an organization plus every organization that we work with has to move beyond what used to be, hey, let's get to hyperscale to get to scale content at scale.

It's now hyperscale at hyper efficiency.

And every organization is facing that.

Right.

So I think, you know, that backdrop is really important because we have to understand that DAM actually is a ubiquitous use case.

I'd love to say, hey, we're in this vertical or we're in that vertical, but the truth is everybody needs it and we follow our adoption stats closely.

And what's fascinating is I have SMB customers that use all the same capabilities as an enterprise customer.

They want the control, they want the ease of use, they want the, you know, the portals, they want, they want the ability.

Just they have the same problem.

So I would say that, you know, the entry point is predominantly marketers.

Right.

You know, it's going to be creative operations, going to be marketing comms, head of marketing, marketing ops.

And you know, that's the natural entry point.

Coin for down.

Speaker B: 00:19:30

Yeah.

How about the flip side of that coin?

Anybody you feel like that is definitely gets less value out of Media Valet?

Speaker A: 00:19:36

I think, I think it's a natural selection a little bit.

Right.

Like so there's going to be taste.

Right.

In some cases.

Right.

Obviously people have nuances of, of that but really for us, if we're saying we don't really want that customer, you know, it's the super complex situations like we can do enterprise but we don't want to do that super complex, massively customized enterprise with, you know, that that one's kind of not us and we've learned that we've delivered to those customers.

But you know, I think, I think if, if we think about our scale and our growth in the future, I think it detracts us a bit from it because it takes too much energy, right.

To, to build everything they need and, and it's not necessarily aligned with what everybody needs back to that ubiquitous.

So we're really focused mid market and we know if we build for mid market and make it easy to use that it's going to be great for, you know, small, medium and it's going to be great for large enterprise.

That is more, hey, give me the best of breed for this.

But I'm not trying to do this grandiose vision of a fully connected across multiple, you know, companies within my conglomerate with same taxonomies and same personalization and everything like this.

It's, it gets a Little bit too.

I think there's an orange logic for that.

Right.

Speaker B: 00:21:03

Yeah.

So that.

That might be.

I thank you for that.

I appreciate that A lot of people try to dodge that question.

I think you answered it directly and I really appreciate that.

I'd love to just dive in a little bit more about, you know, what's the.

What's.

What's a hard problem or the hard problem that you've really chosen to go after and do better than anybody else out there and tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker C: 00:21:25

The first step is to actually make assets discoverable by making the DAM healthy.

Number two is we have to make the user experience for the end user actually as simple as possible because a user interface that's catered towards administrators could be quite intimidating for a regular user.

Taxonomy, metadata, so and so, like, I have to make it as simple as possible.

And there's also a matter of taste, right, which.

Which we have realized as we try to interview and do customer discovery sessions with our customers and try to understand what would make an everyday creator, an everyday user, want to go into the dam.

And of course, there's ease of use, simplicity, and there's also that taste, like it has to cater to that marketing creative Persona.

Speaker B: 00:22:31

I'm going to back up a little bit and kind of get into maybe out of the weeds of this a bit and just say, from your perspective, when you win a deal, why do you hear from your customers that you won?

What are the sorts of things you hear about why you win deals, when you win them,.

Speaker A: 00:22:50

So why they buy?

People are actually seeing the ease of use and the robustness of Media Valet, like how cleverly it's put together and how many use cases you can cover with it.

I think we do a good job of proving that and we hear that back.

Speaker C: 00:23:05

It's a couple of things.

Number one is from a commercial perspective, it's just the licensing model is just so easy, frictionless.

Like, we don't charge by user.

You know, it's just like you pay for this and unlimited number of users is one.

The other one is they review the type of support and they do their research, go to sites, do their research, and they see like, hey, BA provides amazing support from user experience.

We replatform not only the back end, but also the front end just a little over a year ago.

And that has been one of the key factors is like, oh, it's so easy to use.

The user experience is so intuitive.

And that is one of the key selling features that we have right now.

And from An AI perspective, right?

So there's like, we index every asset, like we analyze every asset so that there's full content understanding.

So, you know, technically they call it, you know, vector search, but, you know, from a user perspective, they can just use semantic search or reverse image search.

That is the feature that they get.

Speaker B: 00:24:28

So you took us into the AI realm here.

Let me follow you there and just ask, you know, where.

Where do you see AI today providing real value to your customers?

And where do you see AI being overhyped in the marketplace?

Speaker C: 00:24:45

Oh, vivers.

Where AI is today is it's extremely useful in discoverability.

Right?

So as I mentioned, like metadata enrichment, content understanding, and even applying tribal knowledge to your metadata.

Right?

So that exists and that is ready for primetime and people are using it.

Governance is another area where AI is extremely useful today.

Like that was the example that I gave, like, hey, does this photo match photography guidelines?

It is useful.

Does this photo match our brand guidelines?

That is also very useful where its height is in the area of, you know, when we talk about AI as a system of action.

Right.

So the ability of AI to do things on behalf of a creator is kind of hyped right now.

And not only hype, but it's also because we are not consumer software, we are business software.

And there are compliance requirements that we have to meet.

Right.

And you cannot just put in the ability to generate an image and not worry about intellectual property or not worry about compliance and other items.

Right.

So that is hyped for me.

Speaker B: 00:26:31

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think as people are delving more, they're realizing the amount of control that you have to cede and grant is frequently out of alignment with probably protocols and rules that the organization has and a little bit scary at this point.

Yeah,.

Speaker C: 00:26:48

It is.

Yes,.

Speaker B: 00:26:49

I see what you're saying.

If you were advising someone who was selecting a DAM today and you weren't allowed to say, just pick Media Valet.

Speaker C: 00:27:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: 00:27:01

What would you tell them to pay attention to that they might otherwise miss?

Speaker C: 00:27:06

Yes, I think pay attention to.

There's a lot of hype regarding AI right now.

And just remove that of the equation and look at the foundations.

Right?

So AI is the future.

Yes, 100%.

But AI has to be able to have a strong foundation for it to work on.

Right.

So when I say that, like when you enrich metadata, does it have all the metadata capabilities that you would need for AI to be useful?

And not only that.

So think about it this way, right?

So when AI wasn't there, how much can you Actually, how quickly can you actually analyze assets and tag all those assets?

It's pretty slow compared to what you can do today.

Right.

And in that case, based on what you can do today, the throughput is significantly higher.

It's exponentially higher.

So will the system be able to support that level of throughput that AI is asking it to actually provide?

So, again, it's very foundational, but these are the things that you actually need to.

To look at.

Speaker B: 00:28:36

Right, right.

Yeah.

I always think the example of the copy machine going back here in history, it's thinking about, like, it's great because you can create so much more, but if your copy that you're making is bad, it's got some error or something, you're making a lot of bad stuff.

Right.

So it's similar with, like, with the metadata.

If you don't have your taxonomy, you don't have controlled vocabularies, you don't have rules in place.

Like, it could create a lot of bad stuff very efficiently.

Right?

Speaker C: 00:29:05

Yes.

But.

Speaker B: 00:29:05

If you guys got your foundation, if you got your foundation right, then it can be really productive, really efficient, really effective.

Speaker C: 00:29:12

Exactly.

Governance matters a lot in the age of AI.

Speaker B: 00:29:16

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd like to touch on before we wrap?

Speaker C: 00:29:23

No, I think it's been a very wonderful conversation, Chris.

Speaker B: 00:29:28

Yeah.

Well, thank you for the time and insights today.

It's been fun talking to you and getting some.

Some insights and some.

Some vision and.

And thanks for sharing with us more about Media Valet today.

I really appreciate it.

Speaker A: 00:29:41

Thank you.

I appreciate the time as well, Chris.

It was, it was a pleasure and, you know, happy to.

Always happy to discuss our business, our people, and the impact we're having.

So thank you for the time.