Sponsored Interview: The Set speaks to Travolution about the importance of its DAM

Kasia Rudnik, director of marketing for The Set, talks about how Canto helps maintain consistency during a time of brand extensions

Hi Kasia – before we talk about Canto, can I ask for a brief outline of The Set

Sure! We are a hotel affiliation company representing 18 independent luxury hotels and resorts around the globe. We support them as part of the Set offering with GDS connectivity, PR and marketing, access to a loyalty scheme, while also allowing them to promote their property individually. We sell them through our brand dotcom and also work closely with luxury travel advisers around the globe

And what is your relationship with Canto?

We used Canto to manage, organize, and distribute digital assets across teams and partners. It has been a vital part of our growth story ever since I joined The Set five years ago, and one aspect of Canto I really like is the flexibility it offers us – it’s helped support us as we’ve evolved as a business and a brand. We have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline which the Canto platform is going to help us deliver.

I take from that Canto is important to The Set, but can you be more specific? What exactly does it do for you and how do you use it?

There are a couple of things to look at – first off, we have around 90,000 digital assets that need managing, and Canto allows us to organize these assets so they are searchable.

A lot of these assets are generated by our hotel members, and we’ve found over the years that the image quality can be inconsistent. Canto allows us to offer hotels an upload link into the platform from where our team can assess the assets and then create a folder for all that are approved. 

This is a great feature because hotels can keep updating the images we hold using the upload link – the team gets notified when a new asset for assessment arrives – so we are not chasing them, or struggling to access their Google Drive or manually downloading them onto our desktops when they send us new images.

So you have folders of approved assets held within Canto – how are the images used?

We use Canto mostly for internal use, so when we produce marketing campaigns for The Set, LinkedIn posts, other social media channels, the team has access to approved imagery.

But we also use Canto as our brand bible. We can organize and store The Set assets such as logos, templates, presentations, standard operating procedures.

So with Canto it’s become a lot easier and quicker to create campaigns for The Set, populating branded templates with approved imagery within the same platform. 

You said, “mostly for internal use”…Where else does Canto help?

We also use Canto as the host for the press library, so approved media can access approved images. This is great for the hotels, because not all of them will have the resources to manage their own press office. And for us it helps to raise the profile for The Set – someone comes to us for a picture of the Cafe Royal London, they realise we also work with Andronis Concept in Santorini, the Myconian Deos in Mykonos and others.

Also, I mentioned we work with travel advisers. In fact, our biggest commercial relationships are with travel advisors. We work with some of the big luxury agents such as Virtuoso and Smartflyer.  This is the focus of the global sales team, but it’s not just about building relationships, it’s about helping these advisers to sell the hotels we represent, and we allow agents we’ve authorised to access the images in the press gallery to help them sell to clients. 

We’ve also launched a new initiative for advisers, The Set by Invitation, where chosen advisers get access to special benefits that can be passed on to the client.

Is The Set by Invitation part of the brand extension you mentioned earlier, and where does Canto fit into this?

We’ve also started an exclusive, invitation-only cultural series called The Set Society, where we invite design or hospitality icons to share their stories with our partners and contacts. The first one featured Sir Paul Smith.

These brand extensions, and there are more to come, all rely on Canto as it gives the team “a single source of truth” for all our assets as we move forward through the brand extensions. Because we insist on manually checking all the images we get from our hotels before we authorise them for use, there is no chance of a substandard, off-brand image slipping through.

And because we’re also using Canto, we can keep our brand bible up to date which will help maintain the consistency that we need as we expand the brand into new markets and product areas.

Finally, what would you say to anyone who needs a platform to manage their digital assets?

Having a tool like Canto makes life easier for staff across the business functions, not just sales and marketing. This single source of truth keeps all our approved assets in the same place, and we think that we’re seeing a 25% reduction in time spent on creative support and asset rework.

We are able the share all new assets with our partners, and our hotels like having the upload link so they can keep their property assets up to date, reflecting any changes that happen at the property level. In turn, Canto allows us the keep The Set and its brand extensions fresh, while maintaining the consistency which is essential as we enter an exciting period of growth.

Canto is a leader in digital asset management (DAM), helping global brands centralise, organise, and share digital content through an intuitive, AI-powered platform. From pioneering early DAM solutions to leading AI innovation, Canto continues to shape how modern organisations manage and activate their content. Backed by best-in-class support, Canto empowers brands in travel, hospitality, retail, and beyond to maximise the value of their growing content libraries. For more information, visit canto.com.