Empathy is central to Widen’s values and culture. It is reflected in our respect for teammates, our exceptional customer service, and our commitment to employing people with developmental disabilities. Our CEO, Matthew Gonnering, speaks about the importance of empathy in business, in his TEDx talk.

So our interest in building software that’s accessible to all users is a natural extension of our mindset around empathy and inclusion. We’d like to share where we are in our effort to meet accessibility standards across our digital asset management (DAM) platform, the Widen Collective^®.

Widen was named a “Strong Performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q4 2019. The report evaluated the 14 most significant digital asset management (DAM) vendors against 28 criteria grouped into three categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence. Widen was recognized for its solid usability, good workflow capabilities, and strong brand portal creation capabilities.

“Widen's strengths include strong brand portal creation capabilities and solid overall platform usability,” said the report. “These are key capabilities that democratize the DAM solution beyond traditional power users or creatives and make it a more meaningful system for business users.”
Forrester also cited Widen’s “good workflow capabilities” and noted that Widen’s “DAM-manager-as-a-service” offering is unique. According to Forrester, “Customer references noted that the UI was ‘great and intuitive.’” In addition to earning the highest possible score in the usability and user interface criterion, Widen scored the highest possible ranking in the delivery model criterion.

Widen believes that it has advanced its DAM offering by:

Your company’s brand is the culmination of every experience a person has with your organization. It tells the world who your company is, and what you do. It is a differentiator that identifies your products or services as distinct from others in your market. And it’s a compass for making business decisions. 

A range of elements — both tangible and intangible — contribute to a brand, including tone, voice, and visual design. And each of these elements are thoughtfully and strategically developed over time, using brand assets. 

Visual aesthetics matter. Within 0.05 seconds, users have already made a decision about your website. The same goes for your digital asset management (DAM) system. That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of Widen design services. This new service offering helps organizations elevate their DAM sites with engaging design that enhances user experience and drives user adoption. 

While it’s easy to see the importance that design plays in user adoption, it can often be hard to prioritize it when you’re balancing everything else that comes with launching or relaunching a DAM system. With design services, customers partner with the Widen team to create inspiring and informative on-brand designs aimed at giving users a memorable DAM experience. 

Today’s brands run on imagery: logos, company photos, product imagery, social media assets, and more. Together, they tell a unique story about a company’s products and services.

Without these images, this story is a lot harder to tell. That’s why it’s critical to store all of these visual brand assets in a secure and central location.

Locating the current version of a creative file can often feel like a wild goose chase. You might have a dozen to choose from, each with a slightly different headline, or logo, or font. Why have they all been updated recently? Did the company font change? Was the headline rewritten based on analytics? Which one do you use?

Trying to manage various versions of brand assets can be downright maddening. 

Fortunately, version control can help you easily organize every last asset and retrieve the one you need, instantly.

A lot of hard work goes into launching profitable products. Many teams and stakeholders are involved — including product management and product marketing. These two roles kind of sound like different ways of saying the same thing, like Gershwin's tomato and tomahto. But they actually are more like apples and oranges...they are separate disciplines with distinct responsibilities.

So where exactly does one role stop and the other start? This can vary between companies, but there are some key areas of focus that make each role unique.

Impactful visual imagery — from photographs to logos — are crucial to today’s brands. What would Nike be without the swoosh, or Frosted Flakes without Tony the Tiger? Well, they wouldn’t be the same brand. Marketers need to have easy, secure, and reliable access to these assets. And this is possible by using image metadata.

Business environments today are tough. Things change fast. From a new competitor on the scene to shifting market conditions, technologies, and buyer dynamics, there’s a lot that’s simply out of our control. Because of this, organizations are putting more and more emphasis on the things they can control — like their brand. 

Brand management, once a practice reserved for the Coca-Colas and Nikes of the world, is now a commonplace practice for any organization looking to win the hearts, minds, and spend of their target audiences. And, just as you see with other business priorities, it helps to put a dedicated person like a brand manager in place to ensure it succeeds. 

If you want to get somewhere in the quickest way possible, you map your course. The same is true for metadata. 

Metadata powers search within a digital asset management (DAM) system. Without it, your assets become unfindable and ultimately, unusable. But we know entering metadata can be time-consuming. So how do you ensure you’re entering metadata in the quickest way possible? Metadata mapping.