Item: Canto
Rating: 8
Author: Eric Gangnath

Overall Satisfaction with Canto

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

COOLA began using the Canto platform to easily share assets internally, b2b, and to have a consumer-facing option. While primarily a creative & marketing assets platform in terms of what is stored, our entire company utilizes the system daily. With Canto in place, we are able to automate a lot of requests for assets that normally would've bogged down the creative and marketing teams. Canto solved 3 main issues for us: 1. Organize and store creative and marketing assets remotely on one platform. 2. Allow for automation to our internal team, outside sales, and b2b or other outside vendors. 3. Easily and quickly search for and share assets while also automating licensing for the assets.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Automation
Visual Database
Quick Sharepoints
Great Customer Service
Innovation in Product
Standardization of Assets
Digital Asset Storage & Licensing Management

Cons

Speed in browsing through databases.
More customization for specific use cases.
More customization with portals.

Most Important Features

Image access
Vendor image sharing via portals
b2b image sharing
Rights management on licensing

Return on Investment

Automation and time savings for creative team.
Contact points w/ outside vendors is easier.
Streamlining of assets through one singular source for internal and external use.

Alternatives Considered

Box had more usage than we needed and was more expensive of an option. The extra benefits wouldn't have been used for the added price. We didn't need as company wide implementation for workflows and so Canto fit the requirements for our intended use.

Key Insights

Do you think Canto delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Canto's feature set?

Yes

Did Canto live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Canto go as expected?

Would you buy Canto again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Premiere Pro

Likelihood to Recommend

Canto is very well suited for media and image assets. It is very visual and makes it easy to browse and find images and videos by sight. The customer-facing and b2b facing interfaces are well done and provide a lot to work with for a solid experience. I don't think Canto would be a great solution for more document-heavy uses where a visual component wasn't the primary problem that needed to be addressed. I also don't think that Canto is a great replacement for pure file storage. For instance, we use Canto on the Creative team end to store our toolkit files or final files, but we do not use Canto to house our working files. Just the final product from those working files that is approved for use or deployment to our consumers or vendor partners.

Using Canto

Users and Roles

75 - We house our entire outward-facing and shareable digital assets using Canto. Canto has allowed us to take back time spent doing duplicated repeating tasks and put ownership on each individual. There isn't a bottlenecking effect or one person who has to manage the sharing aspects and it has allowed us to be more efficient in our other specialties.

Support Headcount Required

4 - The creative and marketing team largely manages the upkeep and organization of Canto. The creative team generally uploads and tags out image and video assets and the marketing team member coordinate sharing links for curated albums out b2b or to other outside vendors we partner with. The skillsets of the team are in the creative and marketing end of our business.

Business Processes Supported

Sharing content
Rights management
Efficiency
Style guides and brand assets
Vendor specific image sharing

Innovative Uses

Uploading content from outside vendors
Linking specific files
Curating albums to share the most used image assets easily

Future Planned Uses

Vendor specific ecomm portals
Automated vendor asset uploads
Sharing image assets at a sales team level

Likelihood to Renew

Evaluating Canto and Competitors

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability

We considered several DAM systems and for the price and intended features, Canto was the choice. We didn't need as much workflow implementation because of our existing project management system. Canto offered a great way to share out content in a secure and easily accessible way.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would probably consider looking for something that was faster in load times and had more of a robust desktop use instead of browser based. For our uses and budget this was a fit.

Canto Implementation

Implementation Rating

We didn't have a thorough enough plan for ownership of uploading and tagging and some of our tags were inconsistent which led to some regression in our usage. We tightened up that plan on our end and spoke with support team on Canto's end to establish some best practices and have a much better workflow now.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a minor issue with the implementation

Implementation Issues

General awareness of the content available
Uncertainty on how to share out curated links
Unable to effectively search with the tags used -- later corrected
Hard to find style guides and portals within the interface for some team members

Canto Support

Support Rating

We have had a great personalized experience with our technical support and overall proactive interest in how we use Canto. The management team made a trip to our office and met with me and the team to check in and discuss any requests for features. That was much appreciated and I always feel like I have a quick direct line to Canto support team when needed.

Canto Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

No, we did not purchase anything additional.

Bug Resolution

Yes - We have had minor issues with toggles resetting. It hasn't impacted us very often but the smart tag features is buggy and hasn't worked out as something we can use -- so we turn it off for use.

Exceptional Examples of Canto Support

We had a speedbump in the number of portals available for our team to use and there was a misunderstanding on our end of what our plan included. We explained the issue and the Canto support team was very helpful and went above and beyond to comp us additional portals to right the problem -- even though it was just a misunderstanding on our part. Much appreciated.

Using Canto

Usability

Overall Canto is a comprehensive digital asset management system. We are able to share and store our assets easily and the search functionality is fairly intuitive. Sometimes the interface is slow and photos/videos take longer than I would like to scroll through on screen. The smart tag feature isn't something we use very often as the tags are often times not very accurate. As a one stop database for image assets Canto is good but maybe not exceptional in usability.