Celebrating excellence: The winners of Canto’s Customer Appreciation Awards
| October 3, 2024
At Canto, we’re constantly inspired by the innovative and creative ways our customers use our digital asset management (DAM) platform. We’re customer-obsessed and love celebrating our customers and their remarkable achievements.
This year, we decided to elevate the annual Customer Appreciation Day on May 3 into a whole month of festivities to celebrate our incredible customers. And with that spark of an idea, the Customer Appreciation Awards were born!
Our customers around the globe, in every discipline and every industry, were asked to showcase their DAM achievements across four categories:
- The Portal Prodigy: Awarded for the most unique and memorable Canto Portal
- The Guardian of the Brand Kingdom: Awarded for the most comprehensive use of Canto’s Style Guides
- The AI Aficionado: Awarded for the most outstanding showcase of Canto AI Visual Search to create efficiency
- The Workflow Wizard: Awarded for the most clever use of one of Canto’s time-saving features.
The panel of judges, spearheaded by Canto’s Julie Neumeister, senior customer marketing manager, were blown away by the creativity, innovation, and impact of the entries. The submissions showcased the incredible ways our customers are using Canto to achieve their goals.
We’re thrilled to share our winners and showcase how they’ve been leveraging Canto. Hopefully, their creativity will spark some new ideas and inspiration for your own digital asset management journey.
The Portal Prodigy: 1/ST
Portals are one of the most popular features for organizations of all sizes. They allow you to create customizable, curated, and branded mini-libraries that are easy to share with your internal team, partners, distributors, or the media. We asked our customers to show off their best Portals and how they used them effectively.
We’re proud to share that 1/ST is our 2024 Portal Prodigy Award winner.
Part of the Stronach Group, 1/ST is a leading North American thoroughbred racing and betting company. Michael Zerbib, senior marketing manager at 1/ST, knocked it out of the park with an outstanding 2023 Pegasus World Cup media kit. He crafted a sleek landing page featuring eye-catching icons to organize content, thoughtful branding, and bold color customizations.
“The Portal streamlined our ability to share approved assets with media partners while keeping everything on-brand and visually exciting,” Michael explained.
Hats off to our other Portal Prodigies who received well-deserved honorary mentions:
- The University of Chicago
- Bumkins
- The City of Carlsbad
- Discover Newport
The Guardian of the Brand Kingdom: Affordable Homes & Communities
The brand category spotlighted how companies protect their brand identity using Canto’s interactive Style Guides, which helps organizations keep all their digital content polished, consistent, and on brand.
The winner of the 2024 The Guardian of the Brand Kingdom Award is the non-profit developer Affordable Homes & Communities!
Their interactive Style Guide wowed our judges with what they called “a marketer’s dream.” The Style Guide was incredibly comprehensive, covering all aspects of their brand with in-depth tutorials, templates, and walkthrough videos.
“We rebranded last fall, and this style guide has been a great point of reference for our staff and external partners,” said Hannah Loder, communications manager at Affordable Homes & Communities.
The AI Aficionado: YMCA of Honolulu
AI Visual Search is the best-in-class AI-powered search tool that instantly finds the perfect visuals from your library using natural language.
The panel selected YMCA Honolulu as this year’s winner of The AI Aficionado Award.
No one showcased how AI Visual Search can significantly impact efficiency better than the team at YMCA Honolulu. Lisa Zhou, the YMCA’s creative and digital marketing manager, showed us how she taps into the power of AI Visual Search to quickly track down expressive images that radiate joy and promote youth development.
“Using phrases like ‘kids jumping with smiles on their faces’ is an ideal AI Visual Search prompt,” our judges said of Lisa’s approach. “It’s a detailed query that narrows down the results to match their intent.”
The Workflow Wizard: Parents as Teachers
One of the biggest perks of having a DAM platform is the streamlined workflows – think smooth content management, easy distribution, and powerful integrations. But one organization took it a step further. They found efficiencies by leveraging Canto in a completely different way.
The 2024 Workflow Wizard Award has been awarded to Parents as Teachers!
The early childhood development program cleverly reimagined Canto’s related files feature to keep parent handouts organized. Angelique Bey, content manager and digital librarian at Parents as Teachers, can now track and edit multiple versions of the same asset without searching endlessly.
“This increase in efficiency has been extremely beneficial for the content and curricula team,” said Angelique.
Congratulations to all the Customer Appreciation Awards winners! We’d also like to thank our incredible customers for inspiring us every day.
Check out our interactive Customer Appreciation Awards flipbook for an in-depth look at all the winners and how they leveraged Canto!
If you’d like to keep up to date with future customer awards or be featured in a publication, please contact customerfeedback@canto.com.