10 Retail Content Challenges That a Modern DAM Instantly Fixes

Australian retailers are producing and publishing more content than at any other point in history. Product images, Reels, rich-media ads, TikTok how-tos, user-generated reviews, dynamic price tiles and endless-aisle screen loops now compete for the same over-stretched creative hours and cloud storage space.

Yet ask almost any head of marketing or e-commerce what slows them down and you’ll hear the same refrain: “We spend too much time looking for assets, fixing errors and chasing approvals.” Below we unpack the ten biggest content challenges local retailers face today, why they matter, and where a modern digital asset management (DAM) platform fits in.

1. Content demand is exploding

Gartner predicts that brands will need five times more digital content by 2025 to support personalisation, commerce and AI agents.​ A separate Statista outlook shows global content-marketing spend surging from US $63 billion in 2022 to US $107 billion by 2026.​

For Australian retailers this translates into:

• Dozens of hero shots for every colourway, lighting condition and social ratio.

• Weekly refreshes for marketplace listings, loyalty EDMs and location-based offers.

• Always-on short-form video to feed TikTok and Reels algorithms.

Without an organised, scalable content engine these requirements quickly outstrip headcount and budgets.

2. Dispersed assets & “version roulette”

A 2019 M-Files benchmark report found 83 percent of workers have had to recreate files because they couldn’t locate the original.​ Marketing teams waste roughly one day a week hunting through shared drives, email threads and USB sticks.​

The result? “Version roulette” where store teams download an old logo from Google Images or designers tweak an outdated PSD they found in Slack. Brand consistency suffers and precious hours disappear.

How DAM helps: Centralising every approved asset – with AI face/object recognition and smart metadata – turns frantic scavenger hunts into 30-second searches. 

3. Omnichannel brand consistency

Customers don’t think in channels; they expect the ­same price, imagery and tone whether they’re scrolling Instagram, flicking through the letterbox catalogue or standing in front of a digital shelf-edge screen.

But product shots are often re-cropped or renamed by agencies, while local store teams improvise print collateral. One stray PNG can undo months of brand-identity work.

A DAM platform attaches brand guidelines, expiry dates and usage rights to each asset, ensuring only the correct, in-date rendition can be pushed to a CMS, PIM or print portal.

4. Slow go-to-market & missed seasonal windows

Retail calendars are unforgiving: click-frenzy week, Black Friday, Boxing Day, back-to-school – miss the window and you don’t get another shot for 12 months.

When assets live in siloed systems, merchandisers waste hours requesting files; approvals bounce between email chains; final artwork is emailed to agencies the night before the launch. Delays accumulate and campaigns slip.

Teams running an integrated DAM shave days off each launch cycle by automating workflow: brief → proof → approval → publish, complete with annotated feedback and version control.

5. Catalogue & product-information complexity

Despite the surge in e-commerce, printed and digital catalogues remain retail workhorses. Matching thousands of SKUs with the latest images, copy, country-of-origin symbols and legal disclaimers is labour-intensive and error-prone if files live in multiple places.

Coles Group tackled the issue by coupling master-data platform STEP with a DAM so a single truth powers Coles Online, Liquorland and printed catalogues.​ The payoff: fewer pricing mismatches and faster updates when product data changes.

6. The retail-media gold rush needs richer assets, faster

Australian retail-media revenue is forecast to top A$3 billion by 2027 as Woolworths’ Cartology, Coles 360 and AusPost’s MarketFinder chase first-party dollars.​ These networks demand highly-targeted creative variants – often delivered within 24 hours.

Marketers suddenly need 20 versions of a tile to match audience cohorts, plus HTML5 animations and shoppable video. DAM-to-CDN services such as Canto’s Media Delivery Cloud transform, crop and serve creatives in real time, letting brands keep pace with network SLAs and avoid manual re-exports.

7. Regulatory & consumer-law risk

Under Australian Consumer Law, all advertising claims – including images, video and price displays – must be accurate and up-to-date.​ The ACCC’s December 2024 “Black Friday sweep” highlighted misleading discount imagery and warned non-compliant retailers of penalties.​

When assets are copied to local desktops or renamed “final_FINAL2.jpg”, it’s impossible to retract or update them at scale. A central DAM with expiry rules and asset-recall triggers drastically reduces the odds of an outdated pack-shot, allergy statement or price point slipping into market.

8. Personalisation & first-party-data pressure

With third-party cookies rolling off and privacy reform looming, retailers are leaning on first-party data to personalise offers. The IAB’s Retail Media State of the Nation 2024 shows 37 percent of advertisers now allocate a “considerable” share of budget to retail media – up from 26 percent in 2023.​

Personalisation means multiplying creative: dynamic hero shots for loyalty tiers, location-specific price tiles, language variants for multicultural suburbs. Only a metadata-rich DAM feeding templated creative tools can scale this safely and cost-effectively.

9. Cross-functional collaboration gaps

Creative, merchandising, e-commerce, store operations, agencies and 1 000-plus frontline staff all touch the same content, yet too often work in isolation. Misaligned calendars and duplicate cloud folders breed confusion and rework.

Modern DAM platforms embed comment threads, markup tools and granular permissions directly in the asset – so the art director, buyer and franchisee owner annotate the same file in real time rather than passing PDFs back and forth.

10. Integrating the stack: DAM + PIM + CMS + e-com

No asset lives in a vacuum. Images flow from the studio to the PIM, then to the CMS, POS, marketplace feeds and endless-aisle kiosks. If these systems don’t speak to each other, metadata is lost and humans fill the gaps with copy-paste. 

Forward-thinking retailers plug DAM APIs into their e-commerce platform (Shopify, SFCC, BigCommerce), CMS (Contentful, Sitecore, Adobe) and PIM so publish-ready assets – complete with rights, alt-text and GTINs – surface automatically where needed.

Conclusion: from chaos to competitive edge

Retail’s content burden isn’t getting lighter; if anything, GenAI will amplify the volume. Brands that continue to manage assets in siloed drives risk slower launches, inconsistent experiences and regulatory headaches.

Conversely, those that adopt an integrated DAM – fortified by CDN delivery and smart metadata – turn content chaos into a competitive edge: faster campaigns, bullet-proof compliance and a consistent brand story from feed to shelf.

As consumer expectations grow and channels multiply, a single, searchable source of truth is no longer a “nice to have” – it’s the backbone of modern retail marketing.