Energizer Scales Content Operations Across Numerous Brands With Widen

Challenges

Energizer is one of the world's largest manufacturers and distributors of primary batteries, portable lights, and auto care appearance, performance, refrigerant, and fragrance products.

When their marketing team implemented Widen’s DAM system in 2015, they consolidated numerous siloed storage locations and tools into a centralized solution — and it quickly became the single source of truth for all of their brand and marketing content. Peggy Green, Assistant Manager of Creative Services at Energizer Holdings, shared, “We call our DAM system the Hive because it is just a very busy place — assets are going in and out all the time.”

Since then, the company has seen significant growth. “Energizer Holdings is best known for the Energizer batteries,” said Peggy, “but we are a multi-branded company.” In fact, they now house multiple brands — and with each acquisition, comes new teams, workflows…and content.

To support this continual growth, Peggy’s team needs strong, flexible, and connected tools. And with Widen at the center of their content operations, they are positioned to keep pace with their organizational change.

Objectives

Support global workflows
Ensure that teams have the content they need, no matter the time zone

Connect essential tools
Sync up-to-date content across systems

Automate workflows
Eliminate manual steps to optimize workflows

Flex with acquisitions
Leverage key system functionality to support business growth

Solution

A single, centralized content repository
Energizer’s DAM strategy begins by using Widen to store and manage all final brand and marketing assets. Content in the Hive includes everything from social videos and TV commercials to packaging files and deployment plans.

This ensures that everyone across their global marketing team knows where to find current content. Since their DAM system launched in 2015, their users have grown from less than 100 to over 1,000 — across marketing leadership, graphic designers, sales teams, and even external creative agencies — and they all know that assets in Widen are approved for use.

In addition, Energizer integrates Widen with other essential solutions. This allows assets stored in the DAM system to be synced across their martech stack — to create a more coordinated and automated content supply chain.

Flexible metadata 
With each new acquisition Peggy’s team develops a plan to ingest that brand’s marketing assets into their DAM system — which is no small task. After all, “you’re going to have totally different metadata for a battery than you will for a refrigerant.” But with Widen’s flexible and robust metadata capabilities, she’s able to add dependent fields where necessary to accommodate new products. “You have to find the commonalities,” she said, and go from there.

Making strategic additions to their metadata schema to organize new content — and keep it in one system — works really well for Energizer’s marketing department, where employees often change roles between teams and brands. Because Widen is used to store and manage all final content, regardless of brand, it is cemented in workflows across the organization. “You can get to any of the brands that you need, for any of the regions that you have access to, very quickly — within a matter of three clicks,” said Peggy.

Trusted partner
Over the years, Energizer’s DAM system has grown from roughly 30,000 assets, to over 200,000. And when Peggy’s team needs a little extra administration support to organize new content, she leverages Widen’s managed services. This Widen team has helped Energizer eliminate file duplicates, create a DAM system site map, and build custom dashboards in the Insights application. “They know their stuff!” said Peggy. “And they can do it very quickly.”

“You can get to any of the brands that you need, for any of the regions that you have access to, very quickly — within a matter of three clicks.”

Peggy Green
Assistant Manager Creative Services
Energizer

Benefits

Unified brand experiences
With Widen, internal teams and external agencies across their family of brands all use approved assets to build a cohesive customer experience. “We have people that access the DAM system from our marketing leadership team all the way down to the sales team and R&D,” Peggy said. “It is a powerful system that is used constantly…and is very important for everyone, especially because we’re a global company. People know that they can get what they need.”

Continual ROI
As the volume of assets in Energizer’s DAM system continues to grow, so does their return on investment. And as their content operations evolve, they will look for additional platform integration opportunities to extend the value of Widen across new workflows.

Workflows that are built to scale
The defining elements of Energizer’s DAM strategy — a flexible metadata structure, system integrations, and a trusted partnership with Widen — ensures that their Widen DAM system will scale with their evolving business needs and growth. “We would be lost without our DAM system, honestly. It’s a vital part of our business,” Peggy shared.