Adobe adds Experience Manager ‘content hub’ to help find, reuse digital assets

Adobe wants to make it easier to store, access, and “remix” marketing assets with the addition of a new content hub in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). 

The content hub is accessible as part of AEM Assets, Adobe’s digital asset management tool, and connects with GenStudio — a separate app for managing marketing content. Unveiled last year, GenStudio is currently in trial by customers.

The content hub has several main features.

Users can search and browse for assets using smart tags that automatically provide key terms for an image. Here, AI is used to detect the contents, such as objects featured, settings (such as “outdoors”), or colors.

Adobe’s lightweight content creation and editing app Express is integrated to make changes to existing assets. Express can be opened directly from within the content hub to make quick changes, creating variations to meet different use cases. This also enables access to Firefly generative AI features in Express that Adobe said will make it even easier to change content. 

“That becomes a really awesome tool for marketers in downstream cases to quickly make a change…without having to flip through five different software [applications],” said Haresh Kumar, senior director for strategy and product marketing for Adobe Experience Manager. Any change made to an asset can then be sent for approval before being used, he said, shortening a process that could otherwise take days.  

Within the content hub, users can also manage permissions for sensitive assets and apply governance controls to ensure AI-generated content meets brand standards. The hub also contains analytics to track asset usage across an organization and understand how content is used. 

Organizations typically store 44TB of data in their digital asset management system, according to a recent IDC survey, with another 143TB scattered across individual user devices, corporate shared drives, and social media platforms, said Marci Maddox, research vice president for digital experience strategies at IDC. 

“Adobe’s Content Hub addresses this issue by promoting reuse and reducing inadvertent duplication of creative efforts,” said Maddox. “By breaking down content silos and fostering collaboration, the content hub empowers teams to work more efficiently, leverage existing assets effectively, and ultimately, deliver a more cohesive brand experience with digital media.”

The creation of digital assets is vital for an organization to tell a “personalized, contextual and relevant story to an increasingly discerning audience,” said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “It can also be pure chaos. This is why features like Content Hub are a proving to be a welcome resource for customer experience teams not traditionally part of a digital asset management workflow.”

Miller said that the hub complements the broader AEM Assets application, which serves as the “big firepower solution” when it comes to digital asset management. 

“Content Hub acknowledges that not every nail requires the biggest hammer out there,” she said. “For informal engagement hubs, they need a hammer…, just a smaller, easier one to wield.”

The Content Hub is now generally available to Adobe AEM Assets customers.

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