The Back Story: Imagine the scenario: You’re in the midst of a time-sensitive marketing project and you need a certain piece of collateral. You know it’s…somewhere, but you can’t remember where exactly. Suddenly, your project grinds to a halt.
That’s what was happening at Red Gold, a retailer of tomato products such as ketchup, sauces, and canned goods. The brand encompasses roughly 4,000 items, including a number of private label brands that live under the Red Gold name—which means its asset library is enormous. The problem was that its assets weren’t being stored digitally, which made it difficult to keep everything organized.
“Assets were not stored in one location and they were very difficult to find,” says Susan Geiselman, digital asset coordinator at Red Gold. “They were also stored in a wide range of media and some of that media, unfortunately, had become outdated, like floppy disks—and some of it was so far outdated, it couldn’t event be opened.”
Red Gold literally had physical books of CDs and DVDs, as well as inconsistently named folders stored on a variety of internal shared drives. To locate a specific photograph, for example, you needed to know the name of the photographer and remember about when the desired photo had been taken to have any chance of finding it—and even if you did find what you were looking for, it might not be the right or final version. There was also the danger of losing files completely and having to make them again from scratch.
The impact on time management was palpable.
“A creative person could be taken off a project and waste a considerable amount of time looking for assets we know we own and then either not find it or not be able to open it and then have to re-create it,” Geiselman says. “And if we’re talking about a complex project that could take a lot of time.”
The Objective: What Red Gold needed was a well-organized, easy-to-access digital asset management (DAM) system—which is vital to the smooth operation of any marketing department.
Which is why the brand called on Widen Enterprises to transition its massive store of digital images, videos, presentations, and other cyber files into a DAM that would give Red Gold’s creatives the ability to, as Geiselman put it, share and “locate any asset at a moment’s notice” and “be more agile and responsive” with their projects.
The Solution: With its new DAM in place—Red Gold launched it roughly six months ago—the retailer’s creatives can focus on being creative, rather than rooting around for missing files.
“It also reduces the amount of delivery time to the customers of our marketing department and enables us to operate more efficiently, and empowers our customers to be more self-sufficient,” says Brian White, Red Gold’s senior manager of applications and project management. “Now they can go right to the DAM and download whatever they need without having to bother the marketing team.”
According to Al Falaschi, customer marketing manager at Widen, Red Gold’s pre-DAM situation is far from unique.
“The proliferation of [digital] assets and the expansion of the need for digital assets usually precedes the question of, ‘How are we going to organize all this?’ Falaschi says. “And usually, ultimately, companies end up finding the need for a better way to organize, manage, and distribute these assets, rather than looking through the ‘shoe box.’”
The Takeaway: The bottom line is, digital marketing calls for digital media—and digital media calls for smart digital storage and management.
“[DAM] provides a single place to find the right asset for the right purposes in a timely manner, helps with reducing file duplication, and saves storage costs as well as the cost of recreating lost assets both internally and with external ad agencies,” White says.
It’s also a load off the IT department’s plate.
“Because team members can locate their own graphics and assets, they’re not coming and asking us every 10 or 15 minutes to retrieve an asset and send it to them,” White says. “They can get it for themselves.”
