celum
Taking Content Marketing to a New High

Michael J. Kraeftner, CEO, celum, leads the company with the same ideals that assist him in the cockpit of an airplane. Being an avid private pilot, Kraeftner knows the importance of being prepared for unforeseen circumstances and ’thinking ahead of the aircraft.’ He says, “If you want to move ahead of a whole industry, you should not only think ahead of your competitors, but also think ahead of your customers and users.” Founded as a cliché startup in a garage by Kraeftner and his friend with an intention to revolutionize how large organizations ‘think content,’ celum has grown to become one of the leading and largest Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors in the U.S. today.

“Content marketing is the way of doing marketing in the 21st century,” states Kraeftner. “Tell stories instead of spilling a slogan.” However, this approach needs a new breed of technology to support the potentially complex and costly processes that come with it; and celum offers exactly that. The company provides the content backbone and content delivery capabilities that are needed to excel in content marketing, while keeping costs under control.

Celum is the first vendor to specifically deliver Social Media Content Management, a solution that manages and remotely controls the social media bound content. Furthermore, their Product Media Management solution allows large product and marketing focused organizations to control the content around their products. “This is the heart of any content marketing initiative,” says Kraeftner.Very recently, the company unveiled celum portals, a great lightweight content exploration service and brand portal that hooks right into celum backstage, their content delivery system.

Celum portals make content accessible to a large number of users, while catering to the expectation that ‘complex processes must also be easily manageable’. celum’s technology, being built from the very first line of code to work in large and complex scenarios, on premise or in the cloud, delivers unrivalled flexibility to clients. “The most distinctive factor is celum’s content management engine, which allows multi-dimensional content management,” adds Kraeftner.

Our ultimate goal is to create a ‘master content management’ solution. In future, to ensure reusability and control in a more content-centric marketing world, all content at some point will ‘hook’ into Celum.

Many of the largest and successful companies in the world utilize celum’s solutions. This includes Volkswagen, Toyota, Dior; special brands like Swarovski, Specialized Bicycles, Oakley; renowned organizations like the Emmys and NGOs like the WWF for Nature. For the manufacturing giant 3M, marketing is a company-wide challenge as they operate in over 200 markets and have an excess of 50,000 products. With annual revenues of about $31 billion, even a one day win in time to market could mean an immediate return of up to $84 million for 3M. celum helped 3M achieve significant returns and made marketing a effortless task by delivering the product and marketing content management backbone that allowed the client to seamlessly use new channels such as social, or diversify faster into new markets.

“Celum has just departed on a fascinating journey that will take us to new shores,” says Kraeftner. The company is diversifying and will be coming up with a smaller scale content solution that will close the gap between their current Team Edition offerings and services like Dropbox. Apart from expanding their reach, they are also increasingly looking to use social to reach out more closely to clients and prospective employees alike. “Our ultimate goal is to create a ‘master content management’ solution. In future, to ensure reusability and control in a more content-centric marketing world, all content at some point will ‘hook’ into celum,” says Kraeftner.