Building trust is tricky. And as the saying goes, trust is hard to earn but easy to lose. So what does that have to do with digital asset management (DAM)? A lot!

Each year, the Widen Summit focuses on concepts that are key to DAM success. 

In 2017, we honed in on what it takes to set better goals. Expanding on that in 2018, we learned how to tackle those goals using a strong strategy framework. This year though, we took a step back to realize that in order for people to believe in your goals and strategy, you need to first earn their trust. And this theme carried throughout our three days together — taking center stage in workshops, sessions, and keynotes. 

People. Priority. Process. Three big topics of discussion for digital marketing teams everywhere and the core of all presentations at this year’s Henry Stewart DAM Europe 2017 conference.

Widen was a sponsor of #DAMEU a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to see the familiar faces of DAM veterans like David Lipsey, John Horodyski, and Theresa Regli overseas, and downright awesome to be in London.

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.

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.

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.

Marketing Tech Talks originated at Widen as a way for our staff to learn from other marketers and marketing technologists. During Tech Talks, practitioners share their marketing strategy stories and how technology has played a role in them. The group also talks about common marketing problems and how people, process, and technology work together to create solutions.

2017 marks a year of more dedicated one-on-one support from Widen, more Workshops and Widen community events, and a couple new conferences we’ll be attending for the first time.

We know that our community of customers has great stories to tell, and they’re stories that help other DAM practitioners learn and grow. We’ve made it a point to invite our customers to the table anytime we get an opportunity to speak because their stories help others to understand just how powerful technology can lift your process, connect your teams, and save time, sanity, brain power, and money. We’re proud that our customers are joining us throughout the year!

Check out our 2017 lineup. If we’re lucky enough to cross paths in the coming months, I encourage you to join us for dinner or pop over and give us a high-five or a fist bump. We love it! 

Last week we hosted the first Widen Workshop – a one-day event for Widen customers to connect with each other and Widen staff, learn more about the Media Collective, and explore trends and topics in digital asset management (DAM) and beyond.

As employees, customers, citizens, and patients, we rely on in-the-moment, contextual, and rich digital experiences in our daily lives. If these experiences don’t meet our needs, we’re more than willing to go to another firm. To keep up, companies across verticals invest in content marketing to support creating engaging, interactive content. Digital asset management (DAM) solutions today play a central role in keeping up with this rise of interactive and rich content.

What is intelligent content? Marketing content with smart features, a process for making content do intelligent things, or a whole new philosophy to embrace about the purpose of content itself? That’s what we set out to find this year at the 2016 Intelligent Content Conference in Las Vegas.

Turns out, intelligent content is many things, but here’s the universal accepted definition from Intelligent Content guru, Ann Rockley: “Intelligent content is content that’s structurally rich and semantically categorized and therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.”