By Janus Boye
The new brand identity for CMS vendor Kontent.ai was launched earlier this week
With a new promise to deliver “an unparalleled return on your content”, CMS vendor Kontent.ai takes a different approach in a marketplace where many vendors, for good and bad, have turned to tech talk on AI, composability and going headless.
Recently they’ve introduced Mission Control, a dashboard for your content value chain, and now they’ve also completed a remarkable rebranding positioning them to firmly carve their place in the crowded marketplace.
Kontent.ai is certainly a VC-backed vendor looking for next level growth, but besides product launches and marketing changes, I also sense they are accommodating the changing ways how enterprise customers select a CMS.
A focus on your content requires changes to how you manage content, so let’s start with looking at what they’ve delivered in the product.
Introducing Mission Control to improve your content supply chain
At the surface layer, and also what Kontent.ai mentions prominently on Mission Control on their new website, is analytics and reporting, an area that has been left largely unexplored by CMS vendors. To get data insights, most organizations have turned to third-party tools from vendors like Adobe or Google, and data insights have only been available inside the CMS if you custom built something, like what we’ve seen at media organizations.
In Mission Control, Kontent.ai now offers a bird’s eye view of all content operations, so you can monitor and measure content progress, status, and pace in one place. As a dashboard, you can access key insights at a glance, including content progress, tasks done on time, and items published on time. There’s also content status, where you can review unresolved comments or tasks, refining results by contributor, status or content type. Finally, you can also track how long content spends in different workflow steps to catch bottlenecks.
As Loes Hofstee, Web Editor and early adopter of Kontent.ai’s Mission Control at Universiteit van Amsterdam says:
“The content status overview in Mission Control helps us trace unresolved comments “
That’s interesting because as you might know, many customers actually don’t use their CMS to collaborate on content. That’s something that tends to more often take place in Word/Google Doc, so might that be the bigger perspective with Mission Control? Finally getting customers to actually use a CMS to create and manage content would be a substantial change to CMS adoption. Hint: Adobe is also tackling this with their new Universal Editor for Adobe Experience Manager.
This takes us below the surface and to the actual management of content. When asked about the impact, Adam Böhm, Division Director at Kontent.ai Gold Partner ACTUM Digital and CMS Experts community member says it like this:
“Kontent.ai is putting all its focus on the M, on management. Considering the immense number of systems in martech and the ease of generating content, the key is putting it all together. Not as a one-off step at the beginning, but as an ongoing process of planning, monitoring, evaluating and adjusting. Or in other words, an ongoing process of managing digital content.
The strong focus on turning usage data into insights overlap with pain points that our clients often mention. I am convinced many content management teams dream of a feature like Mission Control.”
Before I move on, let’s talk about that name, which Kontent.ai is not alone in finding cool. Mission Control in software is commonly known as the application viewing, hiding and management feature of the macOS operating system. Also, employee communications vendor Staffbase, has a Mission Control which they simply describe as the navigation system for communication.
A reimagined identity for Kontent.ai
Kontent.ai CEO Mark Ruddock joined our recent CMS Experts meeting in Toronto and shared his perspective on the marketplace
In a conversation with Kontent.ai CEO Mark Ruddock he talks about a CMS industry at a point of inflection. To quote:
“The increasing demand for more targeted and timely content, delivered to different audiences, potentially in multiple languages, across multiple devices was running into conflict with rapidly growing needs for better governance and oversight. Companies were building increasingly large content teams, and complex content operations to solve this dilemma.
At Kontent.ai, we believed that the judicious use of AI could help automate key elements of these complex content supply chains, thereby enabling companies to increase content velocity while reducing brand risk.
While we had a clear point of view, and some great technology, we needed to cut through the noise and with our new brand, we want to be bold, to challenge status quo and also be respectful of our audience by making it easier for them to understand what made us different”
Look at that: The new logo is already in the HQ office building where Kontent.ai resides on the 5th floor above Kentico.
Still, branding and marketing is what I would label in the category of ‘vendor intangibles’, similar to vision, community, documentation, support and on the list of intangibles, I would usually put the vendor website somewhere near the bottom of the list of what’s important as a customer. Stopping short of changing their name, pretty much everything is different in the new look and feel for Kontent.ai. It’s more opinionated and refreshingly free of industry jargon and stands out in the sea of sameness among competing vendors.
As it also is for most customers implementing a new brand identity, it takes time to get through to all the corners and edges of the digital presence and as of writing, the Kontent.ai TrustCenter is still in the old branding and you’ll still easily find the old branding in the actual product for a while.
More importantly, there’s a few things in the new brand that tells us something about where Kontent.ai is heading, clues to a clearer vision and how they see the market.
CMS selection has changed
There are two big shifts in how customers are buying CMS today compared to the past. I’ll start with the process:
There is a new generation of buyers, and they don't purchase software in the same old way. Kontent.ai has certainly realized this and now focuses more on self-discovery in the buying journey. The emphasis on customer stories is more prominent, and you don’t need to talk to a salesperson from the get-go. Also, notice how ‘request a demo’ is the key call to action, and as with other vendors in the space, you need to reach out to them about pricing. One could have hoped for a bit more transparency on pricing, ideally some typical project sizing to inform the buying journey. In that spirit, some customers would also like to actually try the product, like a test-drive of a new car, but without the sales person. We are still waiting for more enterprise vendors in this space to offer free unassisted test drives of their product, e.g. to get a feel for the content creation experience.
Not only is the buying process different, but most buyers also increasingly rely on their trusted digital agency to help them guide the selection process. Kontent.ai has an established partner program, in particular with experienced digital agencies in Europe and North America. These partners are crucial to both the buyers and to Kontent.ai and given the importance, it seems likely that we’ll see a major overhaul of the partner program in the near future as it's known from the comparable vendors like Contentful, Contentstack and Storyblok. Perhaps they’ll even reinstate their MVP program?
Finally, let’s look to the future.
What’s next for Kontent.ai?
Given its name, this vendor has unsurprisingly been vocal about AI since the inception. Similar to other vendors here in circa mid-2024, it’s now a smarter use of AI and not just the ‘neat’ demos we saw in 2023 at the height of the hype.
Kontent.ai looks at what they refer to as ‘Contextual use of AI’ where they want users to benefit from AI and help them think strategically about content needs. Soon this will be combined with Mission Control, so that you can have actionable insights into content production, and perhaps even suggestions for missing content?
In line with their big launch, we’ll certainly also be looking for more customer stories, in particular with a clear benefit from using an AI-powered CMS. If there’s one thing that’s more important than ever, then it’s a steady stream of new customers keeping the partner ecosystem happy and getting the word out to a market with a big appetite for getting more value out of their content.
Learn more about Kontent.ai and their take on CMS
Our friends over at CMS Critic took a closer look at the rebrand and shared this story: Kontent.ai Aims to Lead a 'New Era of Content Management,' Relaunches Brand and Website.
It’s almost been two years since Kontent.ai was spun out of Kentico, and while they still are in the same office building in Brno, as a customer you are now dealing with a vendor that stands much more on its own feet. We’ve covered the journey from the beginning with these posts:
Kontent.ai: From headless CMS onwards to a modular content platform (August 2022)
Pan Macmillan - Adventures With Gatsby, Kontent And Netlify (2020)
SFMOMA selected Kontent to separate content from code (2020)
Finally, if you want to get out from behind the screen, expand your network and learn from the best, do consider joining one of our peer groups or upcoming conferences!
PS: You can meet Mark Ruddock at CMS Connect 24 in Montreal in August.