Challenges
Harvey Performance creates and manages a tremendous amount of product imagery — each of their 30,000+ products have multiple associated files, and roughly 5,000 new assets are added each year. Their marketing team uses this content to power their websites, design catalogs, build a social media presence, and support their distributors.
Before the Widen Collective, all of these assets were stored in a file directory system that was difficult to search. Retrieving an asset required knowledge of its existence and location, or the filename. Further, when a product was changed or new product was added, revised assets had to be uploaded to multiple locations. This redundant content creation was inefficient, made it difficult to maintain version control, and created ample opportunity for human error.
Harvey Performance estimated that within the marketing department alone spent roughly 12 hours every week searching for, recreating, or resizing assets! They knew they needed a more coordinated, efficient workflow to manage and distribute their content. After reviewing a number of digital asset management (DAM) platforms, they selected the Widen Collective.
Objectives
Self-serve access
Give internal and external stakeholders easy access to the content they need.
File management
Convert files on-the-fly and track versions to document file history.
Automation
Reduce content duplication that is prone to human error.
Brand accuracy
Provide a coordinated and consistent customer experience across touchpoints.
Solution
A central, searchable repository
Megan Leonardi, Manager of Digital Strategy and Technology at Harvey Performance, said her team needed “to be able to better find and leverage marketing assets that were being lost in our folder structures.” The robust metadata and intuitive search capabilities in the Collective facilitates effective asset organization and retrieval. Further, permission-based roles allows them to control the content available to each user group.
File management tools
Designers on the Harvey Performance marketing team were constantly resizing and reformatting images for specific uses. The file conversion tools in the Collective now allow these file iterations to be made on the fly, without changing the master creative file in the DAM system. “This removes the need for the creation of duplicative files to accommodate slightly different uses of the same image based on different image sizes, file type, and ratios,” Megan said. Further, version control tools track and aggregate all versions of each file, to capture the file history and clarify which is the most current.
Integrated systems
Harvey Performance used the Widen API to build custom integrations that connect the DAM platform with several of their other essential marketing technology (martech) tools, including their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, content management system (CMS), and customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Positioning the DAM system as the central source of truth for their content allows updated assets to be automatically synced across the other platforms. Additionally, the team uses embed codes to automatically publish updated assets wherever they live online.
Integrations between the Widen Coland other systems allow Megan’s team to control how and where content is distributed. “We wanted the ability to leverage a single file as the source of truth, and display the one file in many places across our websites and web applications,” Megan said. Additionally, security permissions ensure that every user can only access the content relevant to their work and needs.
“The Collective provides a better, more consistent experience for our customers, as well as creates efficiencies within the organization. Today, it allows us to power multiple customer touch points (websites, catalog, social media, email, web applications) with the same assets without worrying about version control.”
Megan Leonardi,
Manager, Digital Strategy and Technology,
Harvey Performance
Benefits
Brand consistency
Positioning the Collective as the central source of truth helps Harvey Performance ensure that only the most current, on-brand imagery is published across their customer touchpoints. “It provides a more consistent experience for our end users, making us look more polished,” Megan shared.
Content control
The integrations between the Collective and other systems allow Megan’s team to control how and where content is distributed. “We wanted the ability to leverage a single file as the source of truth, and display the one file in many places across our websites and web applications,” Megan said. Further, the file conversion and version control tools allow the team to confidently know which content to use.
Workflow efficiency
“After the implementation, we are now able to leverage a much smarter, more systems-based process to assign the correct assets to the correct products and update a version in one central location, and have that push to all instances of that asset across multiple websites and web applications. It saves major time for the marketing team,” Megan shared. Further, because users are able to access the Collective and retrieve files on their own, the marketing team no longer needs to respond to file requests, and can spend more time on creative work.
Assets
Insights
Integrations
