Not too long ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was just a concept from science fiction movies. But today, AI is changing the status quo of entire industries — including marketing technology (martech). When it comes to digital asset management (DAM), image recognition software has a valuable and growing role in metadata creation by automatically tagging assets during the upload process.

It’s great when hard work, a commitment to excellence, and a passion for people all pay off. Especially when you’re having fun doing it! As we look back over the past year, we can see all the ways that our company, our customers, and the Widen Collective^Ⓡ community have grown. What an exceptional year we had in 2019!

Whether you’ve been using the Widen Collective^® for months or years, you might wonder: How are we doing?

We’re always proud to share the good news about our customers, especially when they’re doing great things with our technology!

Sargento recently won a 2019 MarTech Stackie Award for best marketing technology stack design. While MarTech Today spotlighted the story of how Sargento cooked up their stack, I had the chance to meet with Cami Schenck, the senior marketing manager of media and digital at Sargento Foods to learn more about the secret ingredients.

We spent a lot of quality time together in 2018 between Widen events, customer success conversations, UX field research, and more. All of these interactions gave us a lot of great insights into how we can continue to improve our products and services this year. So, if you like what we did in 2018, you’re going to love what we have in store for 2019!

Here’s a rundown of the things we’ll do, the places we’ll go, and the experiences we’ll create together this year.

2018 was a phenomenal year of growth for Widen and our Collective community! We celebrated 70 years of business and are ready for the next 70 as we work to become the most admired company in the world. We welcomed over 40 new Wideneers to the family between our North American headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin; and European headquarters in London. Our teams are proud to serve hundreds of the world’s most influential brands and a global community of 500,000 marketers, designers, salespeople, and technologists.

Businesses are creating more content to meet the demands of new channels, products, and markets. More content means more challenges. Marketing and creative teams are dealing with questions like: What content do we have? Where is it stored? Can I reuse it? Do we have it translated in German? Is this graphic available in PNG format? Is this the most recent version? While file storage tools can work as a temporary fix, more and more businesses are using a digital asset management (DAM) system to centralize, organize, govern, and distribute content.

Editor's note: This post was originally posted on March 29, 2011. We updated this article and the corresponding whitepaper to reflect the current state of the DAM industry.

The decision to implement a digital asset management (DAM) system is a step towards gaining operational and intellectual control of your digital assets and is not one to be taken lightly. It brings with it great responsibility as to how the organization’s assets will be efficiently and effectively managed in its daily operations. Yet, the decision itself to go with a DAM system enacts a chain of questions to be carefully considered before proceeding down the path to DAM.

What is a brand? Let me illustrate with a brand I'm partial to: New Balance. I used to think of New Balance as the maker of all white, extra wide “Dad” shoes. Now, as the proud owner of a dozen different pairs, I think of New Balance as a hipster modern shoe that goes with my jeans and shorts. I can wear them to church or to walk five miles. I can wear them anywhere!