Challenges
Acushnet is a global company with teams and partners across continents. Both internal and external stakeholders rely on brand and marketing assets to promote and sell Acushnet products.
Without a centralized location to manage all of this content, assets were stored across numerous tools and devices. Their former Communications Specialist, Veronica Ryan, shared, “With multiple locations and no way to make sure people were uploading tagged assets in their systems, teams were left to a blind search.” And as result, they resorted to using whatever files they had saved locally, even if they were outdated or off-brand.
Acushnet knew they needed better tools to manage their content and maintain brand consistency. After researching and comparing digital asset management (DAM) vendors, they implemented the Collective in 2016.
Objectives
Brand
Promote Acushnet’s dedication to superior performance and quality via digital assets across all touchpoints
Beat the competition
Retail and trade partners preferred how other brands shared assets
Launch new products
Support global markets with product launch campaign materials
Simplify
Create one system for all marketing and communication assets
Solution
Robust governance
The Collective gives internal teams and external partners secure access to marketing content in a single, centralized location. This includes regional teams, who modify creative assets for their local markets. Veronica shared that she uses the system’s robust security settings — including asset groups and user roles — to control the assets that each user can access.
“I find it amazing that you can go into a collection that you shared with two different users that see completely different assets based on their permission levels,” Veronica shared. Security settings not only simplify the user experience but also reduce the risk of unauthorized use by ensuring users won’t stumble upon product content that isn’t intended for them or their market.
Curated portals
To streamline content distribution to specific audiences, Acushnet uses Widen's Portals application. With Portals, they can share a select number of assets in a branded microsite. So instead of sending an email to global teams with multiple links to assets in multiple systems, everyone receives one link to a portal that contains all the content they need for a campaign or product launch.
“Digging through assets on our old
system was quite a journey. With multiple locations and no way to make sure people were uploading tagged assets in their systems, teams were left to a blind search.”
Veronica Ryan, Acushnet
Asset analytics
The Insights app in the Collective tracks system utilization to help Acushnet understand who is using the system, and how. It also supports risk management. “We had an incident … where we realized there was a slight error in the legal copy in one of our assets,” Veronica shared. “I was able to go in and see who had downloaded it using Insights.”
She then reached out to those individuals, told them to discontinue their use of the old asset, and shared a link to the new version in the DAM system. With the data from Insights, she was able to quickly resolve a potentially complicated issue.
Benefits
Streamlined sharing
With secure, self-serve access to a centralized repository, Acushnet teams and partners around the world now have secure and immediate access to the latest marketing materials. “We are able to easily provide our global teams with assets in a quick fashion,” Veronica shared. And Portals further streamlines content distribution by providing an easy way to share a select number of assets with both internal and external users.
Cohesive messaging
Giving regional teams and distributors access to approved and current content has allowed Acushnet to enhance unity within campaigns and across their brand experience. “Widen has really helped our team bring all of our assets to one spot so that we can access things in a faster, quicker manner and have sharing capabilities that keep us on-brand.”
Assets
Portals
Insights
