The Opportunity to be Original
You do not need a DAM. The truth is you never needed one.
Big Cloud tried to convince you that you did. They made you take months to onboard. You needed to hire a “librarian” whose sole job was to convince your team to actually use it. They made a ton of money in the process. But something happened along the way. Every business found itself needing to create content. It didn’t matter what the product was, the story behind it and the democratization of the tools built to tell that story, turned every brand - and increasingly every person - into a media company.
As the needs for content began to proliferate, the tools went from arcane and expensive to amateur and free. Create in Illustrator, refine in Photoshop, post-produce in Lightroom in weeks became mock it up in Canva, edit it CapCut, and post on TikTok in hours. Today, an army of generative AI tools stand ready to unleash yet another content creation wave (whether we like it or not). The toolkit isn’t expanding. It’s broken wide open.
And yet amidst the chaos of all this creation, of tens of assets becoming thousands, and of thousands becoming infinite; there has never been a more pointed case for the original thesis we’ve held at Air since 2017: Build a tool that can act as a single source of truth in endless sea of ideation, creation, iteration, production, publication, and analysis. A tool that can automate the work around it: the sorting, finding, searching, sharing, feed-backing, and organizing. This is the work of Creative Operations and this is the challenge that Air 4.0 solves for.
There's never been a single process inside of an enterprise that is this important and does not have a system of record. There hasn't been a single point where all the different teams and ideas converge to solve this issue. Your sales team’s solution is Salesforce. Your engineering and product team’s solution is GitHub. But we haven't had a solution for creative and marketing teams. Until now.
At Air, we believe that creativity drives businesses. The most pressing challenge for businesses today is originality, and originality comes from your creative team. The only way that team can develop ideas is by having time, instead of drowning in endless requests for this asset or that version. Cloud storage wasn’t built for media collaboration. Dropbox and Google Drive don’t support visual workflows. Air 4.0 allows us to truly live into our mission of increasing the impact of creative work. With it you can translate and enrich the infinite forms of creative work being produced in teams from small businesses to global enterprises.
For a long time we’ve had the building blocks of this solution at Air. Through thousands of conversations with customers, we’ve learned and iterated upon our initial product offering. I believe today we have built a product that can stand the test of time. Creative operations is having its moment. The manifesto released at the beginning of 2024 was the flag we planted. Today, with Air 4.0, we present the base camp we’ve built where that flag once stood.
Air has declared war against tired, outdated software solutions that are no longer fit for purpose. This is a fight against ineptitude and wasted time. This is a new way of working. The future of creativity has never looked brighter.
