Martech Interview with Warren Daniels, Chief Marketing Officer at Bynder

The Digital Asset Management space has evolved into something greater than serving its key objective. How can one tap into the potential of that?

The acceleration of digital commerce, rising customer expectations, and the skyrocketing demand for content (that’s shared across more channels in more variety with more end-user touchpoints) are impacting all sectors.

1. Can you tell us more about yourself and your career before Bynder?

I’ve been in the B2B marketing space for over 23 years. Before joining Bynder in 2020, I worked in a range of organizations from startups and scaleups to the vendor side focusing on channel marketing and on-prem SaaS, such as IBM and SAP. Working in both small team settings and fast-growing software firms, I was exposed to the entire marketing mix – demand generation, branding and communications, and product marketing – which has helped me create a strong, professional foundation going into my role as CMO at Bynder. 

2. Could you tell us more about Bynder and your role there as a CMO?

I began working at Bynder two years ago as the Vice President of Worldwide Demand Generation, then took over the CMO role at the end of last year. I’m responsible for leading and overseeing efforts in branding and demand generation across the organization, in addition to scaling demand, supporting business goals, and elevating the brand as a leader in digital asset management (DAM). Elevating Bynder to ensure its relevance to buyers and communicating our values of new thinking and innovation is another significant component of my position as CMO.

3. Which industries do you mainly cater to?

In today’s digital era, marketing, branding, and content are relevant to each and every industry.

The acceleration of digital commerce, rising customer expectations, and the skyrocketing demand for content (that’s shared across more channels in more variety with more end-user touchpoints) are impacting all sectors.

That being said, Bynder’s most prevalent industries include consumer products, industrials, financial services, technology, and healthcare. Across the board, Bynder enables exceptional content experiences that result in strong end-customer engagements, such as clicks, conversations, and purchases.

4. What are the products and technology solutions that Bynder offers?

The heart of Bynder lies in our DAM platform, and every product we offer is built off of the solution. Acting as the single source of truth, Bynder DAM helps marketing teams create, manage, and distribute content that’s on-brand and consistent in order to deliver the best content experience possible. 

Bynder DAM is equipped with powerful workflow capabilities, such as content workflows created in March of this year when we acquired the content operations platform, GatherContent. Our DAM solution also includes pre-built integrations, such as e-commerce workflows with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, marketing automation, and work management modules like Wrike, Asana, and Monday.com. 

With these pre-built applications, Bynder’s portfolio makes it as easy as possible for marketers to create, manage, and distribute content to end-users and buyers. This is especially critical for improving time-to-market through distribution channels like email, social media, print, and in-store. Instead of creating multiple variations of an advertisement, for example, creators can simply use Bynder’s dynamic asset transformation (DAT) integration, which automatically resizes and optimizes assets based on one derivative. 

5. What makes Bynder unique? Why should brands choose Bynder to thrive through exceptional content experiences?

In 2023 Bynder will be celebrating its 10-year anniversary of pioneering in the cloud DAM space. Since then, we’ve been globally recognized as a best-of-breed vendor, including being named to the Forrester Wave™ Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience in Q1 2022 where Bynder earned an achievement in leading with strong usability and portal capabilities. 

Bynder continues to dominate the DAM market in terms of innovation and product development, such as DAT, and adding greater value through the GatherContent acquisition. Other players tend to have broader offerings that can be integrated with their DAM solution. In the past, DAM was simply seen as a place to store and organize content. But today, with Bynder’s innovation, it has grown to be so much more than that. 

Bynder DAM is now, truly, the heart of our digital ecosystem to help marketing teams deliver exceptional content experiences and support their investments in customer and digital experiences. And innovation doesn’t stop there. Customer feedback is critical to the technology upgrades and decisions we make at Bynder, so we believe in close connections with our customers to take their feedback into consideration for future development in the DAM market. 

6. Bynder has been named a “Leader” in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Q1 2022 report by Forrester Research, Inc. How do you manage to stay relevant in such a fast-paced industry?

The heart of our technology lies in customer centricity to help us better stand out against competitors, as we recognize the fact that the people who use our solutions are looking for consumer-grade business applications that are intuitive and easy to use. We view their input as an opportunity to develop a community of advocates that guide our decision-making on product upgrades, innovation, and development.

7. How are you evolving the Bynder brand to meet market demand?

We are witnessing a new era of digital acceleration. In recent history, brands have invested heavily to improve the online customer experience – which has led to increased customer expectations and the evolution of online buying behavior.

Brands looking to differentiate themselves now need to do more than just ensure a seamless digital experience. 

With an ever-increasing volume of channels and end-user touchpoints, there is a growing demand to deliver more content consistently to more channels—with greater agility. Taming the content beast is a challenge pushing organizations to their limit. 

In response, we’ve come up with our new proposition: Unite. Create. Thrive. This Is the foundation of what we do. It summarizes our what, our why, and how. It defines and inspires the way we work. 

8. Could you tell us more about your work culture, and what makes Bynder’s culture unique?

Bynder places collaboration and trust at the core of what every employee – no matter their title – contributes each day. We believe in a supportive work environment that provides our “Byndies” with the flexibility needed for a better work-life balance. 

Bynder fosters “can-do” attitudes in all of our employees through internal support and training. A core component of our value and belief system is creating a culture of being pioneers and innovators for us to continue developing products that allow us to dominate and lead the DAM market. Encouraging employees to bring their true, authentic selves to work each day has significantly supported this mission. 

And, as you’d expect, we have market-leading benefits like unlimited holidays, work where you need policy and so on. 

9. In your opinion, what are the most exciting topics in MarTech right now? How do you keep up with the constantly changing landscape?

For me, it’s content experience. Better content experiences will completely change how marketers are measuring performance, the value content brings, and how data (driven by their experience) can be used in the future to automate the production of assets and deliver them in real-time. For this to happen in the most effective way possible, it’s important for brands to continue talking with their customers and buyers and home in on the idea of “selling to yourself.” 

As a vendor, that idea is critical for retention, ROI, and staying competitive in the ever-changing marketplace. Creating personal and individualized experiences for all consumers will continue to be an area of significant interest moving forward – especially at Bynder. 

10. How do you stay motivated? What are your key learnings from your career so far?

As cliché as it may sound, I wake up every morning with the mindset of bringing a better version of myself than the day prior. Developing this mindset wouldn’t have been as successful if I didn’t have the opportunity to learn from and support others on my team. Mentoring them and helping them develop professionally is one of the best parts of my career, and it truly motivates me to better myself, one step at a time. 

Working at a rocket ship like Bynder – which recently celebrated achieving eight consecutive quarters of over 25% growth – really helps me stay motivated. When the results are great and you can see the valuable contribution of your whole team, it really adds value to your professional life. 

I’ve learned that looking at real-world and current scenarios helps us decide on what we need to do or change to be better prepared for the next phase of change over the next few years. This usually involves putting our heads together to decide how we want to evolve and position the company. In fact, in challenging times, the best solutions have always come from other people. Leveraging your team’s experience and ideas truly do lead to better outcomes in the end. 

11. What is the biggest piece of advice you would want to give to company leaders?

I would coach company leaders to focus on creating a marketing-led organization over anything else. Marketing, if done right, is a critical tool for driving demand for growth. They should also feel comfortable hiring new representatives for marketing activities, as they are the true masters of figuring out what the organization needs to drive that demand and make it successful.