From DAM to automated retail content

Welcome everyone to today's webinar with the title “From DAM to Automated Retail Content.” This is a webinar where we will zoom in on the integration between WoodWing Assets, our digital asset management system from WoodWing, and Relayter, a content automation platform made for retailers.

This is how you'll be able to understand the integration and, of course, how retailers can enable content automation at scale with the integration between a DAM and a content automation platform.

Thank you for joining us today. I am Magdalena and I will be guiding today's session.

Before we begin, I would like to make sure that you know this webinar is being recorded and all registrants and attendees will receive the recording a few days after this webinar airs.

We'll have a dedicated Q&A session at the end of this webinar and I would like to ask you to feel free to ask any questions using the chat panel on the right side of this webinar platform.

I'm pleased to announce the speakers for today's webinar. It is a great pleasure to introduce Paul Walker, one of my dear colleagues at WoodWing. He is our Product Development Manager.

He'll be showcasing a little bit about how WoodWing Assets fits into the whole retail content automation sequence.

Then we have two guest speakers from Relayter: Quincy Siemer, who is Operations Director at Relayter, and Ryan Poser, who is Customer Success Manager at Relayter.

Quincy will talk in detail about the challenges they see in the market, especially in retail marketing teams dealing with content production.

Ryan will actually showcase the integration between WoodWing Assets and Relayter with a nice example.

At the end, we will have a few minutes to discuss and showcase a use case from an actual customer using Relayter and Assets.

The agenda you can see on the slides is first the retail content production landscape today, focusing on the challenges that retail marketing teams are facing.

Then we move from Assets to automation, where my colleague Paul will zoom in on the topic, and finally Ryan will showcase how the integration works in practice.

Without further ado, I'd like to ask our guest speaker Quincy to come onto this virtual stage and speak more about the retail market.

Hello Quincy.

Thank you for introducing me.

Before we dive into technical systems and integrations, we would like to talk about how retail marketing has been changing over time.

What we see is retailers dealing with more promotions, more channels, endless deadlines, and increasingly personalized and variant content.

Meanwhile, clients expect faster delivery, relevant offers, and more localized and personalized experiences.

But what we do see is that marketing teams are still working in manual workflows, spreadsheets hooked together, and fragmented systems.

This means chaos starts really quickly because one single campaign can lead to hundreds of different assets.

The challenge is not even producing all those assets. The real challenge starts when prices change, products become unavailable, and things get updated along the way. Suddenly, teams are updating everything manually.

The hidden problem behind this is disconnected data. The problem is not that retailers lack data, but that the data is not connected.

Product data lives somewhere, images are stored somewhere else, and promotions are managed separately.

This means there's a lot of copy-and-pasting, duplicate work, and error-prone processes.

Is this something that sounds familiar?

“Is this the final version?” is a question many teams ask regularly.

This is also one of the things that happens because of omnichannel production. Omnichannel production sounds great because you have specialists for every channel, but it also creates misalignment and duplicated feedback loops.

Which is a real pity because we're all working on the same campaigns and the same promotions, but not necessarily together.

All of this combined means teams have to produce more and faster while staying the same size.

The pressure keeps increasing for marketing teams, increasing stress and slowing down campaigns while creativity disappears.

So now it's time for me to have Paul join me to give more insights on how WoodWing, in combination with Relayter, addresses one of those issues.

Thank you, Quincy.

First of all, let's look at the value of DAM.

There are a few key things that, whenever you're considering a DAM, you should focus on. We've got five main points and we're going to cover each of these:

Bringing everything together, making sure you've got structure, enabling collaboration, and ensuring security, compliance, and reporting.

There's a hidden word in all of this that we'll come back to several times: scale.

First of all, centralizing your digital asset management means one DAM for all. It's about bringing your entire organization into one space and making sure it's secure and resistant to hacking.

We all read stories about evolving creative needs. First it might have been JPEGs, then Adobe formats came along, and then someone says: “Hey, can you do 3D?”

The key thing about DAM is bringing together all your material — text, images, video — and having it organized in a way that allows you to relate it together, package it, and use metadata to present it to systems like Relayter.

This helps creatives during work in progress. Some people use a DAM as a final resting place, but one of the things we encourage is using it as a working environment for assets.

One of the key things starts with external content providers.

We work with retailers who ingest tens of thousands of assets per day from external brands. The first step is getting them into your own system where your teams can work with them seamlessly.

That includes using Adobe tools, automated tools, and AI tools to prepare and crop material, adjust color balancing, and ensure images match your house style.

This is where DAM becomes essential. You bring everything together, curate the material, and make it your own before sending it through workflows.

Then comes real-time automation at scale.

There are more workflows and more demands from teams to produce content ever quicker and for more channels.

We are an API-first system. That's key. Whether you want to bring in MCP or third-party tools, you can access the DAM via API.

Rule-based workflows are important because the retail market is always evolving. You need systems that can move swiftly and adapt.

DAM helps you lead with innovation and automate processes.

Some retail clients ingest 40,000 to 50,000 assets per day. You simply can't manage that manually.

You need automated workflows to process, categorize, and present content while still keeping humans in the loop for validation.

Relayter can then take the curated material from DAM and produce print and digital output at scale.

Real-time updates are critical because retailers often have distributed teams working across regions or countries.

As creatives finalize assets, marketing teams can immediately access them, reducing time-to-market and lowering production costs.

Having all your assets in one place is no good unless you have structured data.

WoodWing Assets connects with various PIMs. And because it's API-first, connecting to new systems is easy.

Once assets are linked through metadata like product codes, you can use that structure to support workflows and integrations.

This is exactly what allows Relayter to pick up images and product data and generate retail content automatically.

Now let's look at the impact of DAM.

The key takeaway is having a single source of truth. Somewhere your entire organization can go without second-guessing whether they're using the correct asset version.

WoodWing Assets supports versioning, so you always know which asset is current.

Another key benefit is faster access to content.

We've worked with clients whose previous systems took days to process content requests, causing missed opportunities.

Permissions also ensure that marketing teams only see final assets while everyone still works from the same centralized environment.

Reducing duplication is another major benefit.

We worked with a global client with 143 offices worldwide and found almost 20% duplication in their assets.

With a centralized DAM, teams can find and reuse existing assets instead of recreating them.

And above all, the ecosystem must scale as fast as your business grows.

WoodWing Assets is cloud-based and fully scalable, so you're never limited by hardware or infrastructure.

Now I'll hand over to Ryan for a live demo.

Thank you very much, Paul.

Hello everyone, my name is Ryan Poser. I work in customer success at Relayter.

I handle customer relationships from onboarding all the way through go-live.

I'll now show you Relayter in a live demo.

In a broad sense, what exactly do we do at Relayter?

We automate content for any channel at scale.

We take all types of data — product data, promotions, assets — and use that to generate promotional materials like leaflets, posters, videos, and more.

I'll show you how the integration with WoodWing Assets works.

Here we are in WoodWing where we uploaded three images.

For example, I have this image of a KitKat product that I want to use in Relayter for promotional materials.

We upload the image into WoodWing Assets and connect it using an SKU field.

Once we paste the SKU, the asset is immediately synchronized to Relayter.

The asset also receives a WoodWing Asset ID, confirming that it's linked.

If the image is removed from WoodWing Assets later, it will also disappear in Relayter.

The product now has two linked images and we can choose which one becomes the primary image.

Now let's move into campaign production.

Within Relayter, campaigns contain multiple channels such as leaflets, digital out-of-home, POS materials, and more.

All of these channels are connected to a single dataset containing product data and linked assets.

Inside a briefing, which is essentially a large data sheet, we define promotions, discounts, and campaign logic.

Based on predefined rules and branding guidelines, we can automatically generate content.

We just added the KitKat image, so now we can link it to a KitKat promotion.

We connect the asset to the promotion and then start generating content.

We can create leaflets manually or automatically.

For demonstrations, automation is easier to show.

The system automatically builds pages and assigns promotions to layouts.

Designers can still adjust layouts manually by dragging, resizing, or reorganizing content blocks.

Once approved, the layouts are pushed into the design process.

The design studio can further optimize spacing, image positioning, and typography.

Reviewers can place sticky notes with comments and designers can respond directly within the platform.

This creates a collaborative review workflow between planning, design, and approval teams.

Another powerful feature is variant data.

We can automatically generate localized versions of the same layout.

For example, one leaflet layout can produce English, German, and French versions automatically while maintaining the same structure.

Different regions can even have unique pricing or styling while still using one centralized dataset.

Using the same campaign data, we can also create POS materials like shelf barkers, A4 posters, web banners, and price labels.

With one click, dozens of promotional items can be generated simultaneously.

This is how we take assets from WoodWing Assets, push them into Relayter, and automatically generate content at scale with built-in workflows and review processes.

Thank you Ryan. That was a fantastic demo.

Now let's look at a customer example.

We have a great example from Kruidvat, a retailer operating in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France with over 1,300 stores.

We connected all their product data and assets into scalable workflows.

Every campaign results in output for eight different channels, including print leaflets, social media, narrowcasting, out-of-home advertising, and in-store materials.

More than 300 people work within the platform across different departments.

The trading department defines promotions, often more than 500 promotions weekly.

We integrate this data from their promotion management system into Relayter.

The commercial planning department then builds leaflet structures.

They produce print and digital versions optimized for mobile.

The print leaflet is created first because it contains the full promotion set.

Some layouts are manually adjusted for creativity while mobile-first layouts can be fully automated.

After planning, the process moves into design and review.

Different departments receive different permissions. Trading teams can update prices and promotions while marketing teams provide creative feedback.

After the Dutch leaflet is finalized, the system automatically generates translated versions such as French.

All changes made during review are pushed back into the central briefing so every channel stays updated.

This allows mobile-first content to be generated fully automatically.

Before using Relayter, all these channels were produced separately.

Now they produce one master leaflet and reuse the same data across all channels.

This reduced design costs by 30 to 40% annually.

But more importantly, retailers can now produce significantly more content with the same teams and investment.

We then moved into the Q&A session where attendees asked about publishing workflows, integrations with digital channels, DAM integrations, implementation timelines, and differentiators compared to competing platforms.

The Relayter team explained that content can be exported directly to print systems, websites, social media platforms, or narrowcasting systems, depending on client requirements.

Relayter is fully API-based and integrates with a wide variety of systems and channels.

Implementation typically takes three to six months depending on the complexity of the existing infrastructure.

The session concluded with thanks to all speakers and a reminder that attendees would receive the webinar recording afterward.

Note: this transcript has been auto-corrected using AI, it may contain mistakes.