Nearly half of Americans use digital voice assistants, according to the Pew Research Center. This new channel presents opportunities and challenges for brands, one of which is delivering audio content straight into the home or office via voice command.

At Widen, we love sharing and learning from our customers’ success stories. That’s why we sat down with Alberto Orihuela, digital media specialist and digital asset management admin for Zeiss Microscopy. Alberto shared how he and the Zeiss team overcame their greatest content management challenge. Here is what he had to say!

Last October at the Widen Summit, an annual event for customers, we hosted the first-ever Best DAM contest. The contest featured five outstanding administrators that advanced digital asset management at their organization. During the contest, each admin shared information about their system, users, structure, and creativity during an eight-minute presentation in front of 200 industry professionals and four judges. Audience members and judges voted on a winner.

To compensate for the lack of other senses, e-commerce shoppers make decisions based on compelling, detailed photography. It used to take Balsam Brands weeks, if not a month, to make product photography accessible. With the Widen Collective®, photography is available in a day.

The Minnesota Vikings brand relies on powerful, quality imagery, generating thousands of photos every game. With their old digital asset management system, it could take up to three months to make those widely accessible. With the Widen Collective, those gameday images are available in 24 hours.

How Carnival Cruise Line uses content analytics to measure their sales communications performance

As businesses compete more on experience, sales teams face the challenge of communicating the experience. A great way to do that is with dynamic video content. But if your team creates content that goes against marketing conventions like “shorter videos are better,” how do you know if it’s working?  

JL Audio is a U.S. manufacturer of high-end consumer audio products. Great presentation of their products is critical for sales, so a considerable amount of their creative budget goes to photography — high-quality photography where the lighting, props, and layout are just right. These shots are divided into tabletop “catalog product shots” and more conceptual “beauty shots.”

Editor’s note: Deb Berard has moved to a new organization but her experience with DAM is still relevant to other DAMsters. Enjoy!

We caught up with Deb Berard, Senior Business Analyst and DAM admin at New Teacher Center, which is headquartered in Santa Cruz, CA. Here’s her take on the value digital asset management (DAM) brings to their team and business.

We all know that training your users on how to use the Widen Collective is important. If you don’t train them, they won’t know how to use the tool and, eventually, they’ll give up on using it altogether. But training them can be difficult if you’re unsure of where to start. The first step is always listening to users and figuring out what they need. Start by asking questions such as, “How can I help you use the Widen Collective more efficiently?” But what if the response is, “What’s the Widen Collective?” This very well may be the starting point for some organizations, as was the case with Brady Corporation.

Latrisha Eilers would print and staple a stack of 15 sheets of paper together, walk to a marketer’s desk, and then leave it there for review. It was now that person’s responsibility to review and mark up that piece of artwork. So when Latrisha, a production design supervisor at Spectrum Brands, says her creative department’s review and approval process was manual, she means it literally.