INSIDE AIRBNB'S APPROACH TO DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT AND THE CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY STACK
Adapted from an Orange Logic webinar hosted by Misti Vogt. Questions have been consolidated and rewritten for clarity, and Christy's responses have been lightly edited for readability while preserving her original insights and examples.
As marketing organizations produce more content across more channels, digital asset management is evolving beyond a central repository. DAM is becoming an essential part of the broader technology ecosystem, connecting creative production, asset management, rights governance, and content distribution.
At Airbnb, that means supporting the tools and workflows that help creative teams produce, manage, and distribute content without getting caught up in the technology behind it.
Christy brings a unique perspective to this challenge. With a background in photography, rights management, and digital asset operations at Condé Nast, she now leads work across Airbnb's creative technology ecosystem, helping connect the systems, people, and processes that power its marketing organization.
Christy: I studied photography in New York and earned my BFA, but becoming a professional photographer in New York City is challenging. I eventually pivoted into rights management and photo research at a small book publisher, which led me to Condé Nast.
At Condé Nast, I managed contracts and rights information before moving into digital asset management. We worked with a lot of editorial content and were also monetizing our intellectual property.
When I joined Airbnb, I moved into a different area of the business: marketing creative. Today, our team helps manage the tools that support creative production, including DAM and MAM. My background combines photography, operations, assets, and rights management, and now I'm helping lead a team that brings those different areas together into one ecosystem.
Christy: The foundational reason for having a DAM is that it's a great way to organize and store assets for easy retrieval. A lot of companies have assets stored in various places, making them difficult to find, bring together, and reuse.
Centralization provides brand consistency, enables collaboration, and helps teams execute on strategy. It also supports processes like asset approvals, version control, and distribution.
The value of DAM is really about being able to go to market with your assets. Without having everything centralized and easily accessible, you're not able to quickly execute on marketing demands.
Christy: At my previous company, we worked primarily with editorial assets that needed to be shared across international versions of magazines and brands. Our DAM was great for storing, organizing, and reusing content, but it wasn't really a production DAM. It wasn't designed for creators to upload assets the same day and have editors and producers quickly retrieve them.
Coming into Airbnb, that experience shaped what I look for. Can the DAM support production workflows? Can it scale across different asset types? Is it user-friendly enough that creators and designers can easily access content and understand the metadata associated with it?
You also need to think about security, rights information, analytics, reporting, and emerging file formats. Technology is constantly changing, and if your DAM can't support new asset types, it's going to slow you down tremendously.
Another important consideration is team size. Our DAM team isn't very large, and I think that's true for a lot of organizations. You want a system that can accomplish what you need without having to hire 10 people to support different aspects of the work. Simple automations should be something your DAM can handle, freeing up your team to focus on areas where the human element is more important.
Christy: We've all experienced that there's not one tool that can do everything. There's not one tool that can be your DAM, CMS, and CRM.
Some tools are better at accomplishing certain things than others, so being able to integrate them through APIs and automations is really important. You want those systems to talk to each other seamlessly.
Even common integrations with tools like Google Sheets or Slack can make people more efficient. Being able to automate exports or notifications frees up time and reduces the need to constantly move between systems.
Ideally, those connections are so seamless that users don't even realize something is happening in another system.
Christy: I think it comes down to being able to justify the return on investment.
If you can show what it cost to produce a piece of content, all the different places and channels where it's been used, and the revenue coming from it, that helps demonstrate the value.
Even showing time savings in someone's day-to-day work can be powerful. The ability to reuse your intellectual property is a cost-saving measure.
When you can quantify those benefits, you can change someone's perspective from seeing DAM as just a marketing effort to recognizing it as a broader business investment.
Christy: Our team supports marketing creative at Airbnb, so we have to look at every tooling need across both marketing and creative. That includes everything from tools used to produce content to tools used to render or mock it up.
At the end of the day, assets and data are flowing from one system to the next. We're all sharing the same information over and over again, so it doesn't make sense for those teams to operate in silos.
We have different areas of focus within our team. Some people work directly with creatives to understand their needs around rendering, editing, and retouching. Scott is our official librarian and governance expert. He has that institutional knowledge of what you can and cannot do with an asset and where to find it.
My role is looking at the breadth of the ecosystem and ensuring that the teams and tools work together seamlessly.
We want someone coming into Airbnb to be able to do their job without worrying about how information moves from one system to another. They don't need to know what's happening behind the scenes. That's where our team comes in. We're making all those connection points that users don't even realize are happening.
Our job is to help creative teams operate more efficiently and effectively so they can focus on the creative aspects of their work instead of the technical details.
Christy: You can configure DAMs to export different size versions that are fairly standard or frequently requested. That's where we're using automation.
For creative versions, we don't necessarily enforce a standard set of sizes. We might have an original raw file, a retouch, and then a final retouch. We use different mechanisms to track those versions, including Orange Logic's versioning capabilities and file-naming conventions.
For review and approval, it depends on where the content is ultimately going. We use different applications, including Figma, Frame.io, and Keynote.
The format and final use of the content often determine which tool makes the most sense. We're not trying to automate every creative iteration. We're automating standard exports while giving creatives the flexibility to work in the tools they need.
Christy: We're constantly seeing new file formats emerge, especially with motion graphics. We need to make sure those formats are supported so our users can continue to reuse content.
A good example is Lottie. It was a file format that wasn't initially supported within Orange Logic, but Misti and the Orange Logic team helped us configure the system to render those files in the formats we needed.
I think partnering with your vendors is really important. When we see a new motion graphics tool or emerging file format, we want to be able to ask, "Can we make sure this is something we'll be able to support going forward?"
If it's going to become part of our marketing strategy, we need to be able to archive that content and ensure our systems support it.
It's not just about file formats, either. AI is constantly changing how we're producing assets, so keeping up with emerging technology is going to be instrumental.
Christy: There are some really great AI tools out there, but you have to keep rights management in mind.
For example, with Midjourney, people may not realize that prompts shared through Discord can be public. If you're working on something sensitive, that information could potentially reveal things about your company.
There are also copyright considerations around the content used to train generative AI models. That can create legal questions for organizations using AI-generated content.
I understand why everyone wants to quickly create things for concepting. AI is definitely a game changer. But you need policies around what can and cannot be used, and you need to know when an asset was created using AI.
From our team's perspective, many of us come from creative backgrounds and understand rights management. We know how important it is to protect the company from potential liability when using tools that may incorporate copyrighted work.
Christy: In creative-driven organizations, there's always a need to produce content and work with creators. But people don't always think about what rights they need when they're negotiating contracts.
In most cases, getting the broadest rights possible is the best option. But sometimes you're limited. You might have rights to use an asset for marketing and PR, but not television, for example.
Being able to track those different rights levels is critical to understanding what you can reuse. You may need to go back and renegotiate rights, so your DAM needs to support that information and help users quickly determine what they're allowed to do with an asset.
One capability I've seen through working with Orange Logic is the ability to track rights expiration dates. Some agreements are only valid for a finite amount of time, and having automated notifications when rights are approaching expiration is incredibly useful.
It gives you the opportunity to decide whether you want to renegotiate or let those rights expire.
Christy: Beyond the rights to the content itself, you may have underlying copyrighted work within an asset.
That could include logos, brands, people pictured, or artwork appearing in the background. AI is starting to help identify those elements, which can make it easier to determine what additional rights or releases you may need.
At Condé Nast, we had a lot of content for Architectural Digest featuring people's homes. You might have a beautiful photograph of a home, but in the background there's a painting by a famous artist.
If you wanted to reuse that image, you might need to work with the Artists Rights Society to secure permission to feature that painting.
One of my roles at Condé Nast was actually looking through images to identify potential copyrighted work. That was 15 or 20 years ago, and thinking about how AI can now help with something I used to do manually is mind-blowing.
Christy: Within Airbnb, there's a team dedicated to AI. They provide best practices and guidance on responsible use, including what AI capabilities and tools are approved.
That applies to everything from AI functionality within our DAM to tools like Zoom's AI companion for summarizing meetings.
The goal is to protect the company and ensure we're following policies, guidelines, and ethical standards.
We also recognize that AI is constantly evolving. We don't want everyone bringing in thousands of different AI tools. We need to govern our toolset so we're not using four different generative AI solutions or five different versions of ChatGPT.
That's where AI governance is really crucial. It's about responsible use, protecting company information, understanding copyright implications, and avoiding unnecessary tool proliferation.
AI saves time and changes how we work, but people don't always realize the implications of using tools that may expose information publicly or incorporate copyrighted work.
Having an AI council gives us a team that understands those risks and can help everyone navigate them responsibly.
Christy: With emerging technology, files are going to get bigger, and organizations are going to need to execute on things more quickly.
Your DAM needs to evolve to handle growing asset volumes, larger file sizes, and new types of content. We're seeing more tools come to market for AI and motion graphics, so your DAM also needs to connect with those tools and support the workflows around them.
Security and compliance are equally important. Companies need to ensure their DAM can protect private data and support requirements like GDPR, including data deletion when necessary.
It's really about making sure your DAM can scale with your organization while staying secure and compliant.
Christy: You have to be able to train it.
Everyone has a different taxonomy and metadata schema. Not every AI tool is going to automatically know what your company's taxonomy is, which is why you need to feed it that information, train it, and constantly refine it.
It's always evolving. Companies introduce new lines of business, new products, and new services, and their taxonomy needs to change with them.
You want to make sure your AI is prepared for those changes because it may not recognize a new data point or business area that it hasn't encountered before.
Christy: I think being able to share experiences is really valuable because we're all seeing similar challenges.
Hearing how other organizations are approaching those challenges can help justify something you've been working on or spark an idea you hadn't considered before.
That's why conversations like this are so helpful. We're all learning from each other as the technology and our needs continue to evolve.