Citizen Watch streamlines the distribution of digital assets with the Widen Collective^®

Challenges

In 2012, Citizen Watch needed a system to store all of their digital assets. “At the point where we started, we didn’t even own our watch images,” said Brenda Abbott, Art Director at Citizen Watch Company. Whenever their marketing team needed an asset, they had to call their creative agency and pay for each use. Further, the assets that Citizen Watch stored locally were hard to find and rarely the master file they needed. “It was not cost effective and it was a waste of time for everybody.”

The marketing team was consumed by asset requests from retailers. And responding to each request meant they had to find it, load it, zip it, and send it. They needed a better way.

Objectives

Ownership: eliminate dependency on creative agencies to access digital assets

Organization: find assets quickly and easily

Distribution: give retailers self-service access to approved artwork

E-commerce:  improve the digital shopping experience by providing high-quality images

Solution

The Widen Collective provides a one-stop shop for digital assets.

Citizen Watch selected the Widen Collective as their digital asset management (DAM) system because of its ease-of-use and overall fit. “I was there when we first setup Widen, and it’s expanded substantially in the five years that we’ve been on it,” said Brenda.

They use roles and permissions to give different levels of access to internal teams, retailers, and e-commerce. And they use Portals to push their advertising priorities, and bundle everything related to the product. This includes web banners, billboards, commercials, and print ads. Brenda shared, “It’s an easier way to group it all together and make it visually pleasing.”

In the last several years the marketing team has been completing more creative work in-house, and requests for custom art have quadrupled. To streamline this process, Citizen Watch uses Widen Workflow.

The Collective also brings efficiency to their distribution of current promotional assets to retailers. Through integration with their e-commerce platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, all assets come out of the DAM and are synced with the most recent version.

And before, during and after the implementation of the Collective, Citizen Watch has relied on the support of Widen's Customer Success teams. They have found Widen's chat support to be a great way to get their questions answered, quickly. And when the Bulova section of their DAM became overwhelming to manage, they partnered with Widen's Professional Services team to cleanup the metadata, user roles and asset groups.

Benefits

Control of their digital assets
The Collective allows Citizen Watch to own and control their digital assets. “This was a big deal for us, to be able to put it somewhere where everyone can access,” said Brenda. Now they can easily find what they need and use it.

Further, the Collective helps them control brand quality across their three subsidiaries, with an area in the DAM for each brand. “Three custom URLs all with a shared backend helps keep each brand’s identity,” Brenda remarked.

Self-sufficient retailers and internal teams
The Collective allows over 3,000 independent retailers to access the artwork they need to promote and sell Citizen watches. This has drastically reduced the time their marketing team spends answering emails and sending images, allowing them to focus on creative work instead. “We go about our day differently,” Brenda emphasized.

An integral part of Citizen Watch Company’s business
“We have made the DAM such an integral part of our business that there’s no way we can do without it,” Benda explained. The marketing team has more time to work, retailers have self-service access to the artwork they need to sell watches, and their e-commerce platform is populated with assets straight from the Collective. Just as Citizen Watch Company’s marketing initiatives have grown over five years, so has the Collective’s ability to support them.

“We have made the DAM such an integral part of our business that there’s no way we can do without it.”

– Brenda Abbott, Art Director at Citizen Watch Company