Want a surefire way to make your legal team love you? Learn how to properly manage stock photos and other licensed assets with your digital asset management (DAM) system.

Implementing a DAM system can feel like a big undertaking. After all, the last thing you want to do is start your journey off on the wrong foot. But have no fear. Many others have been in your shoes, wrestling with the complexity of it all, and lived to tell their stories. In fact, they have some pretty sound advice. Check out what these ten implementation survivors have to say about the key to a successful DAM implementation!

WatchGuard is a company that’s more than nice to have around. For over 20 years, they’ve provided simple, smart solutions that have taken the world of cyber security by storm. Backed by big-data visibility, their products and services help businesses of all sizes feel confident that their network and WiFi are safe and secure from the villains and perpetrators of cyberspace. But, like all superheroes, WatchGuard’s success was not without a few challenges (and victories) of their own.

“We’ve been able to provide people with materials, templated materials, that deliver on our brand equities on a much stronger basis than what we were doing earlier, where people were pulling things out of nowhere and putting them all together.” –– Josh Hafer, Heaven Hill Brands

Gartner reports that “managing marketing assets and scaling content operations are top priorities for marketing leaders today, which is driving increased investment in digital asset management (DAM) platforms.”

Digital asset management (DAM) can be an intimidating subject.

The goal is clear. Help people find and use the digital assets they need. But the metadata, taxonomy, roles, permissions, and integrations to make that possible can give even the savviest teams hesitation. Then you factor in the unique organizational structures, workflows, technologies, and change management and it’s no surprise that some DAM programs stall.

“The company was growing at a really fast rate, and we knew we couldn’t keep up with doing things the way we’ve always done it,” — Jeanne Duncan, Masco Coatings Group

Digital asset management was new to Jeanne Duncan and her team at Masco Coatings Group. She’s worked at the manufacturing company for 19 years, and throughout most of that time, they had gotten by without a digital asset system. Their creative team relied on those who worked there for a long time and just knew where to find things. “The company was growing at a really fast rate, and we knew we couldn’t keep up with doing things the way we’ve always done it,” says Jeanne.

Sandra De Biasi is the project manager of digital assets and graphics at Varian, a Fortune 500 company and provider of radiation oncology treatment software and hardware.

At Varian, she manages their digital asset management system, which has played an integral role in managing the company’s brand assets during their recent corporate rebrand. Here’s her exciting story about how monitoring content analytics in their DAM system helped secure their valuable brand assets.

Widen was among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q2 2018. In this evaluation, Widen was cited as a Strong Performer among the top thirteen DAM solution providers.

Forrester’s analysts noted Widen’s “attractive UI” that “reference customers praised.” Moreover, Forrester says, “Partners we surveyed ranked Widen as one of the top DAM solutions they implement.” The analysts also note that “…Widen has made significant improvements to its capabilities since our last evaluation, especially in the areas of metadata, search, and work-in-progress functionality.”

Founded in Madison, Wisconsin, Widen recently opened its European headquarters in London to expand the company’s global presence and better support customers in different time zones. Recently, the company launched a string of innovations including:

“We looked at our workflow, and things that we were doing manually, we thought, ‘Okay, we can do that using the DAM.’" — Sheryl Connor, Exactech

Eight weeks before the Exactech national sales meeting, Sheryl Connor and her small team set out to implement their Widen Collective® digital asset management system. It’s the busiest time of year for their creative team, but they were inspired to launch the new system at the big event. Sheryl and the team decided to focus on their international customers and the product launch materials they needed for 2018 and got to work implementing the DAM system.