From commercial enterprise to government agencies, organizations today are managing a massive amount of media. In fact, the average enterprise manages 2.3 million digital assets, with 30% stored in siloed systems that hinder accessibility. To increase accessibility, teams have tagged this media with metadata to accelerate search. But what exactly is metadata tagging?
Metadata tagging is the process of creating a term that describes a keyword or phrase and assigning those tags to a media asset.
A media asset, as described in our blogs about digital asset management and media asset management, is any content that comes in one of five forms: audio, images, video, documents, or HTML. These tags don’t appear to the user but are in the source code and can be edited by the person managing these assets.
Metadata tags are an important aspect of digital asset management. This data essentially helps both internal teams find content by searching for key terms attached to these files.
It can also help external people, both partners and potential licensing customers, search through an archive to find content that’s available to them, enabling controlled access.
In this blog, we’ll be diving into these key areas to provide an in-depth understanding of metadata tagging:
- How is metadata tagging done?
- What are the benefits of automated metadata tagging?
- How to leverage AI in metadata tagging
How is metadata tagging done?
Metadata tagging is typically done by teams who manage an archive of content, using some sort of asset management system or solution. Anyone who has a lot of assets stored needs metadata tagging to quickly find and surface content. This is especially true for video content.
In fact, 89 % of businesses use video as a marketing tool with 93 % of video marketers consider video an important part of their overall strategy. It’s no surprise that global metadata management tools market size is projected to reach 36.44 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 20.9%. It’s also estimated that video accounts for 82% of all internet traffic. Managing video with metadata tagging is now an imperative.
Companies that have large video files, particularly if they are a studio or a production company, need the ability to know what is contained within lengthy run-time files. A two-and-a-half-hour movie has many scenes that need to be documented with metadata so that they can extract moments for promotional purposes or determine where third-party approvals are needed to use the content.
There are many challenges that organizations face with their structural metadata processes. These challenges include:
- Keeping a standard for tagging content as multiple people touch these assets.
- Inconsistencies in what’s tagged and what’s not.
- The extremely laborious task of tagging content manually.
- The risk of permanently losing inaccurately tagged content.
Let’s explore how these challenges, when solved, shine a light on the business value of metadata.
What is the business value of metadata?
First and foremost, the key business value of indexing media with metadata tags is classification. Classification with metadata enables teams to track key elements of an asset such as important dates related to a digital asset’s record schedule. This ensures that everyone can see what and when a file has been modified or updated. When done accurately this saves time and makes teams work more efficiently by not duplicating work.
From an information security standpoint, metadata can be a useful tool. This is often called administrative metadata, for it is used to help flag security settings, validate access to specific groups or individuals, and edit rights. This puts the owner of the content firmly in control of use and the distribution of their media assets.
Companies can use metadata to capture and improve the customer experience with their content. With descriptive tags, teams can use metadata to capture users’ ratings of content. For example, these tags can indicate that content is “valuable” or “outdated” and thereby not actively available for use.
Lastly, as you can imagine when dealing with hundreds, even thousands, of assets, information findability is paramount. Metadata streamlines search efforts by accelerating and enhancing the retrieval mechanism used within an archive. This enables users, both internal and external, more accurate search results that match a query on a certain field.
How do I create an indexing strategy?
The traditional way of creating an indexing strategy would start by:
1. Defining who’s responsible for tagging content
2. Establishing a tagging standard for past and future content
3. Creating milestones for past content tagging
To set up tags, you need to consider the following so that teams or on the same page with implementation.
Keywords
These are descriptive terms that are assigned using a free-form text field or through an enforced list. For example, a soccer match may be tagged with: soccer, goal, Stadium XYZ, 2026 Championship. These are flexible, searchable terms that can help anyone quickly find the asset by typing in relevant words.
Taxonomy
This structured metadata approach consists of hierarchical keywords. For example, it might look like this: Sport → Motorsport → Endurance → Race Event Name → Year. A user can browse categories from broad to specific, making it easier to drill down to find certain types of content.
Field-level Text
These are short descriptors and categories relevant to a particular collection of assets. For example, let’s take a corporate video collection. It might look something like the following:
Project Name: Product Launch 2026
Department: Marketing
Event Type: Press Conference
This allows context-specific details to be stored for each asset without cluttering general keywords.
Picklist
A picklist consists of descriptive terms a user can choose from. A picklist can consist of suggested terms or enforced terms. For tagging images of vehicles, this might look like this: :
- Picklist field: Vehicle Type: Car, Truck, Motorcycle, Bus.
- Users select the correct option rather than typing free-form text, which reduces inconsistencies and improves searchability.
Rights Fields
This approach is used to provide information related to usage rights or asset ownership. This might look like this:
License Type: Editorial Only
Owner: XYZ Images
Expiration Date: 12/31/2026
This ensures that content is used correctly and supports compliance workflows.
As we suggested, the manual method or “traditional” way of tagging media is not the most efficient method anymore—artificial intelligence can make this entire process faster and more accurate.
How to leverage AI in metadata tagging
With AI and its various cognitive engines from facial recognition to object detection, companies can lean on technology rather than their teams to tag assets. By having AI do most of the heavy lifting, it can cut down the time it takes to tag all of the content in your archive from months to days.
Veritone Digital Media Hub, an AI-powered media hub, harnesses AI for a one purpose—to make every media asset searchable, accessible, and ready to drive revenue. Leveraging a robust collection of cognitive engines through aiWARE, Digital Media Hub provides companies with a modern way to easily automate, curate, and activate their media files.
Some of the largest media companies in the world use Digital Media Hub for this purpose. A core aspect of Digital Media Hub is its AI tagging capability, and how users can edit this metadata and visualize it within the UI, adding structure to all the valuable unstructured data contained within media files.
For instance, the San Francisco Giants decided to digitize their decades worth of content. They quickly realized that they needed a way to tag this media so that it could then be found again. Moreover, the tagging of this content would help them surface deep cuts and long-lost footage that had not seen the light of day for many years. Rather than using 15 interns and taking a year to tag all this content manually, they adopted AI to help them streamline this effort, processing thousands of media assets much faster and enabling them to tag new assets as they are entered into the archive.
It’s not just for legacy archives, but also integral to supporting live events. Veritone and its partners worked with SPORTTOTAL Live and other stakeholders to activate 24 hours of action‑packed live racing content from the 50th ADAC TotalEnergies 24h Nürburgring. These organizations faced a monumental media challenge: continuous footage captured along a sprawling 15‑mile track from scores of manufacturers, teams, and broadcast sources.
To make this content useful and actionable, every clip needed to be aggregated, tagged, and made discoverable across multiple media types, a task that would have taken human teams days or even weeks to complete. Instead, they adopted Veritone’s AI‑powered Digital Media Hub, which automatically ingested and processed the live footage through multiple cognitive engines, generating rich metadata for searching by object, event, sponsor, and more. The result was near‑instant access for partners, sponsors, and media teams, enabling them to find exactly the moments they needed, accelerating workflows, and dramatically enhancing the reach and utility of the race footage in real time.
Beyond metadata tagging
One of the natural next steps after metadata tagging is metadata enrichment, a process that not only labels assets but gives them context and meaning.
For example, modern AI systems don’t just tag what’s in a file; they:
- Extract speech‑to‑text transcripts from audio and video.
- Detects keywords, entities, sentiment, and topics across text and media.
- Use vector embeddings to connect content by meaning (not just by tag matches).
This means related assets can be found even when they don’t share the same keywords, an enormous leap in media discoverability.
With a better view and understanding of all available assets, organizations can discover previously untapped streams of revenue, which we discuss in our blog about digital asset management.
Sources:
https://zipdo.co/digital-asset-management-industry-statistics/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/video-marketing-statistics/
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/metadata-management-tools-market-report
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/video-marketing-statistics
