Big Interview: VisitScotland on the importance of its DAM

Grant Paterson from VisitScotland chats to Travolution about how marketing solutions with Canto helped catapult operations for the destination

Question: Hi Grant – welcome to Travolution. Before we drill down into the details of DAM, could you outline your role at VisitScotland?

My role at VisitScotland is Digital Asset Manager, I oversee a library of over 90,000 images and video, governing how they're distributed to two audiences: industry partners promoting Scotland, and media — print, digital, social, and influencer

My work helps my colleagues across the organisation support VisitScotland’s core purpose, to grow Scotland’s visitor economy.

As Scotland’s national tourism and events organisation, we do this in a number of ways including promoting Scotland as a must-visit, must-return destination.

This includes delivering marketing activity to inspire both international and domestic audiences. The assets I help manage are the visual currency of that proposition.

In September 2025, to help make it easier to manage these assets, we migrated to a new DAM platform, moving away from a purely tag-based system to structured metadata, separate fields for title, description, rights, and categorisation rather than one undifferentiated tag pool. That separation delivers far stronger search precision, and clean structured metadata also reduces AI hallucination risk.

I act as in-house subject matter expert for our DAM platform. Looking after governance, workflows, taxonomy, training and tailoring that to each team's function, since a creative studios needs differ from a marketing team. It's a cross-department capability, embedded rather than siloed.

Question: So what did VisitScotland want from its DAM, and can you share any data to highlight the scale of the improvement?

The brief was an AI-enabled content hub that automated manual workflows and integrated with our CMS, creative tools, and Microsoft 365, with governance built in across every touchpoint.

Less than a year in, the headline figure is internal efficiency: 90 staff with daily access, saving up to two hours each per day, that’s 180 hours recovered every working day. That's before full workflow integration, completed metadata enrichment, or our AI tools are fully live, so the trajectory is still climbing.

Question: Where does that efficiency uplift come from?

The single biggest driver is rights and permissions. We source content from commissioned shoots, influencers, third-party libraries, and social platforms, each with different usage rights. Managing that manually at scale is legally risky and slow, and

getting it wrong means fines, litigation, or reputational damage. Defining rights at the point of upload, rather than checking them later, removes that risk at source. It means is governance built in at the start, not bolted on at the end.

Beyond that, integrations rolling out over the next twelve months - CMS, creative tools, Microsoft 365 - remove the friction of switching between systems to find, download, and place an asset, then discovering it doesn't even fit the brief.

I spent fifteen years in publishing before this role, working perpetually up against the wire isn't a badge of honour, it's a drain. The right DAM removes the hurdles and expands the options.

Question: So that covers internal efficiencies — but what about external discovery? How is this helping deliver on increasing the volume, spend and spread of visitors to Scotland?

This is where DAM moves from back-office function to front-line marketing infrastructure.

For Glasgow 2026, we're building a dedicated portal where press and media access approved, rights-cleared content directly. Paired with a direct-from-camera workflow, assets can flow from pitch-side capture to international media within minutes, with the same infrastructure pushing content straight to social channels without manual handling. Partners receive ready-to-use, optimised content with usage safeguarded and metrics captured automatically.

Early data shows 2,600 active users, around 500 of whom engage weekly, with most returning on a one- to two-year cycle. Glasgow 2026 establishes the model for future events, including The Open, the Tour de France Grand Départ, and UEFA EURO 2028, giving the infrastructure we build now significant long-term value.

Question: Can you give us a sense of your target markets, the type of content that performs best, and how imagery can help persuade someone coming to Glasgow for the Games to extend their trip?

For VisitScotland, our key markets are the USA, Germany, France, and Australia, with China emerging fast. Each market has different content expectations, which is exactly why well-tagged, well-governed content matters operationally. Hero landscapes, lifestyle and people, food and drink, event action, and short-form vertical video perform best. Audiences are sophisticated at spotting content that doesn't feel real, so authenticity is the asset. Our job is to capture and govern it, not manufacture it.

We use themed collections, such as events, film and TV (including a dedicated Outlander filming-locations set), and our current ‘Naturally Becoming’ wellbeing campaign to guide a visitor from the Games in Glasgow to a distillery in Speyside to sea kayaking on the west coast, through one coherent content thread.

Question: Have you any examples of how a well-run DAM can improve the return on investment of a specific campaign?

ROI in DAM is cumulative - friction removed at every stage compounds. A few examples: building a campaign collection used to mean tagging each asset individually; now anyone can assemble and publish, so time goes into selecting content, not administering it. AI-assisted search also surfaces existing footage we'd otherwise have re-shot. The Outlander collection is the clearest case. It was built entirely from assets shot for other projects and repurposed into one of our most effective evergreen tools.

We're also integrating with our legal release-form software, so nothing enters the library without permissions captured at source. This is helps close the loop on rights exposure. And shoot-to-distribution time is shrinking from a couple of days towards same-day, which matters most for event-driven content where relevance has a short shelf life.

Question: Finally, how do you see the role of digital assets evolving during the era of generative AI, and how will VisitScotland adapt to maintain its presence and deliver its targets?

We see this primarily as a governance challenge, not just a technology opportunity. Two developments matter: C2PA, which gives every asset a verifiable record of origin, and the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency rules, enforceable from August 2026, with penalties starting at €7.5 million or 1.5% of global turnover for anyone distributing AI-generated content into the EU.

Both reinforce what we're already building toward: real landscapes, real communities, real experiences. That's why the campaign is called Wellbeing comes naturally— because that's what Scotland is, and our job is to make sure that story reaches the right person at the right moment.