Sludge. The creative engine behind your brand is likely suffering from a slow buildup of inefficient and confusing processes. The source is email. That wonderfully easy and flexible form of communication. You can message multiple people at once, attach files, and embed funny animated GIFs of goats. 

Learn from the most powerful group of people in the whole DAM world — you, the DAM practitioners. Each of you brings a unique background and skillset to the Widen DAMster community. At this year’s Widen Summit, you’ll hear about others’ DAM problems and successes as you explore new ways to use DAM to address your organizational challenges.

Technology is the future, right? Sure, technology tools are amazing! They help you achieve more than you could on your own. They keep you organized, save time, and keep your business competitive. But what about the people behind the tools?

The MarTech conference brings together 2,500+ marketing and IT executives and managers. In addition to attending sessions, our team gathered some great insights from one-on-one conversations with marketers and IT pros at our booth. Here’s a look at some of the key themes and takeaways.

There's a new opportunity for you to develop your digital asset management skills and it was informed by your DAM admin peers.

In the fall of 2016, we embarked on a training experiment to measure customer interest in training and test some material we were considering. We invited twelve admins to join us for two days before the Widen Summit in exchange for their feedback on the content and an exploration of their training needs.

Registration is officially open for the 6th annual Widen Summit, happening October 16-18, in Madison, WI. Over 200 customers and DAM admins will join us to explore new trails together while discovering the untapped potential of your Widen Collective site.

As you may have guessed from the title, today we’re sharing real-world, proven strategies on how to make your visual content easily accessible so you never “wake up” wondering where your content is ever again.

Some of you may have already caught the analogy to the movie trilogy, “The Hangover.” Since the information we’re sharing here was originally presented at the Intelligent Content Conference (ICC) in Las Vegas, NV, we thought it would be fun to include some movie references throughout the article.

Widen’s latest DAM-centric application, Workflow, is now available for subscription to anyone who uses the Collective. This application is a robust online proofing and work management application that can significantly raise the efficiency of creative project management.

Before starting up with Workflow, it’s beneficial for organizations to assess their current processes. New Workflow customers will benefit from working with Leah Ujda, our on-site Workflow consultant. Leah works with organizations to, “develop a deep understanding of how you currently do your creative work — and how you would like to do this work in an ideal future. By identifying and understanding your current processes, we can ensure the technology you’re bringing into the organization will provide a valuable, efficient, and engaging experience.”

We believe in Workflow, and the understanding Leah brings to the table, so much that we decided to have her help the Widen team!

The following is an internal case study that gives an overview of how Leah helped us transform our creative project management with Workflow. Here’s a little bit more about Leah …

For the last several months, we’ve traveled around the world observing your teams, your environment, and your culture to learn how you communicate, connect, and contribute. You’ve shared with us the big and small things you need to get it all done...so what have we learned?

The Creative Operations Exchange conference, April 2017, San Francisco, CA

It’s always awesome to visit California, but Widen’s trip in April to the inaugural Creative Ops conference in San Francisco was a great excuse to go.

Creative Operations is a new-ish term for the group more commonly known as Creative Services and is responsible for increasing efficiency and compliance in the creative production process. Moving production under the umbrella of operations is elevating its value – a good move if you ask me. While the group has always been essential to the success of the creative process, it’s also been seriously underrated in terms of creative input, output, and problem solving.