Challenges
NKT’s marketing team produces print collateral, videos, technical documentation, and campaigns that feature product imagery and photography from their large-scale installation projects. This content is used across multiple websites, social media, and other channels.
Despite the significant scale and reach of their marketing efforts, NKT lacked a central repository for their creative content, resulting in a variety of workflow bottlenecks and challenges. Niklas Rademacher, the Director Group Marketing at NKT, shared that, “Life was difficult before [the Collective]. We were storing our assets and imagery in various places. We had different servers, different countries, different marketing teams, and different agencies who all had their own repositories.”
Locating the right file was time-consuming, if not impossible. As a result, people used outdated content saved on their computers, and their brand experience was suffering. “It wasn't only inefficient,” said Niklas, “but it was actually impacting the quality of our websites.” With the Collective, NKT hoped to change the way their global teams work and achieve cohesive brand messaging.
Objectives
Organize content in one system
A central hub of all photos, videos, and other creative content
Make it searchable
Develop strong metadata to make finding content effortless
Create a scalable workflow
Reduce workflow inefficiencies and bottlenecks
Solution
Empower users
The Collective has combined all of NKT’s siloed storage locations into a single, searchable repository. Teams now know where and how to find the content they need, whenever they need it. Access to high-use assets has been further simplified with Portals. To quickly provide users with easily-digestible brand information, NKT worked with Widen’s Design Services team to build their brand portal, which houses essential creative assets and a simplified brand style guide. And they encourage ongoing user engagement with an intuitive onboarding process and training materials that allow users to learn at their own pace. Together, these strategies help users find the current, approved content they need, with confidence.
Integrate technology systems
NKT identified opportunities to automate manual workflows by connecting the Collective with systems that support their website. An integration with their content management system (CMS) tool, Magnolia, allows data between the two platforms to sync automatically, eliminating the need to download files from one system and upload them to the other. If a file is updated or replaced in the DAM system, it is pushed to the CMS and immediately published online using embed codes, or HTML to display assets.
In addition, they leveraged the Widen API to build an integration that supports the publication of their extensive online library of technical documents. This customized process uses a nightly cron job and embed codes to automatically post new or updated files to their website — and it crops each asset to align with its ideal focal point. These website integrations have generated over 5 million embed views in the last 12 months alone. “It was a key point for us to have an integrated DAM system with our website,” Niklas shared, “and we are extremely happy about it.”
Continual optimization
Niklas and his team rely on Insights to understand how their Collective site is being used. They are able to see key asset activity — like total uploads, downloads, and shares — at a glance. If there are large dips in these metrics, Niklas and team determine why they’ve fluctuated and identify users or departments that might need additional training. Monitoring these metrics also allows NKT to make adjustments to the system to keep users engaged and maximize the value of their DAM investment. “The most important thing for us is if we measure internally that people actually use the DAM system.”
“We run large-scale construction projects and amass a lot of content from internal sources and agencies for our various channels. We needed a way to bring it all together.”
Niklas Rademacher,
Director Group Marketing at NKT Group
Benefits
Consistent messaging
Digital assets are the building blocks of every brand experience. Widen helps NKT ensure that teams across the company are using the same files in their projects and campaigns. With easy, self-serve access to the most current and approved content, no one is tempted to use old files stored on local drives, and teams are able to build a cohesive and effective brand experience.
Greater content value
By using the Collective to store both digital assets like photography and final creative files, NKT has encouraged the reuse and repurpose of their best performing content. “We have both the underlying assets in terms of imagery, but we also store all the items that we can then create to amplify the images in other files and documents,” said Niklas. Now, instead of starting from scratch each time, they leverage elements from existing assets in new ways. This brings agility to their workflows and extends the value of their content.
Sustainable workflows
The Collective is designed to scale as NKT’s content needs change and grow, and it has been essential in supporting the shift to working remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. Their previous DAM system was server-based and Niklas shared, “the way we used to work would have been an immense struggle from home, simply because accessing images on a server takes much longer to load — it’s almost impossible. But we don’t have that situation anymore.” Now that the Collective is built into NKT’s content creation process, they are better able to coordinate efforts across stakeholders, including regional teams, freelancers, and agencies.
Assets
Insights
Portals
Integrations
