An adventure across four east coast cities to talk with our customers about how they’re connecting content.

The real customer

FEBRUARY 2015

JOURNEY

1 2 3 4

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

New York, NY

Syracuse, NY

Toronto, CANADA

Pittsbugh, PA

Day 1: COTY Beauty

COTY started using the Media Collective seven years ago, but it wasn’t until four years ago, when Barbara Alexander was asked to organize all of COTY’s assets, that the company truly realized the Media Collective’s full potential.

As a manufacturer and marketer of fragrances, cosmetics, and skin care brands, COTY products are found in over 40 countries. Before Widen, their assets were scattered in different locations. Now every asset has to go through Barbara’s team in New York, and is fully tagged with metadata for good searchability, before being uploaded in the Media Collective and made available to teams around the world.

The Media Collective has saved COTY’s marketing team hours of time through repurposing assets and making changes to assets on-the-fly. And it’s saved them money by allowing them to discontinue use of other tools they no longer need.

Collections are a key resource for COTY’s marketing campaigns. Thanks to the flexibility and agility of Widen’s DAM system, Barbara’s team can quickly make change to their brand and marketing assets on the fly to meet the needs of a highly competitive market and customer base.

COTY Beauty

If there’s a change made to one asset,

you do it in one place [the Media

Collective] and then it’s reflected across

all the locations where the asset might

reside out on the web.”

- BARBARA ALEXANDER, GLOBAL DAM ADMINISTRATOR

“

New York, NY

Day 2: Gaylord Archival

Gaylord Archival SYRACUSE, NY

Our visit to Gaylord Brothers in Syracuse, NY, was everything we hoped. Not only were the people incredibly nice and hospitable, but the marketing team was forthcoming about what the Media Collective does for their organization.

The business efficiencies they’ve seen as a result of having a DAM system have already exceeded the cost. Thanks to digital asset management, the marketing team can now create an asset once, save the master asset in the Media Collective, and publish that asset in multiple locations to be updat-ed automatically. Gone are their days of creating and recreating an asset for each communication vehicle they use.

This approach saves their team hours of time and promotes brand consistency. Which is important because Gaylord just launched a major brand update.

Gaylord is a great example of how the Media Collective can fit organizations both big and small. Gaylord only has 10 users, but they experience the same brand asset challenges as businesses with thousands of users – being able to find assets when they need them, organizing their assets in a central location that’s accessible to the right people, and easily sharing assets anytime, anywhere.

We used to process images separately for

the website and for print. There were two

different holding cells for those processes,

so we were always maintaining both.

Now all of our assets reside in the Media

Collective. It’s been miraculous.”

- HEATHER GOODNOW, PHOTOGRAPHER

“

Day 3: Sheridan College

Sheridan College starting using the Media Collective in January of 2014. Since then, they’ve not only gained huge efficiencies as a team, they also have visibility into all of their marketing assets.

That means the groups who need Sheridan’s digital assets can see everything available to them and easily access what they want, when they want. In turn, they can also see what they don’t have and are able to identify new assets or content that needs to be created. Several groups are using the Media Collective from Alumni, to the Faculty for Professional Studies, to Career Education.

Most importantly, Stewart Dick – the Senior Designer for Sheridan’s marketing team – got his life back. No longer the gatekeeper of all Sheridan’s marketing assets, he is able to again focus time on designing and working creatively with his team.

Like Gaylord, Sheridan went through a recent brand update. The Media Collective has made sharing their new brand assets so much easier and has helped enforce brand consistency.

Sheridan College

I talked to users before setting up our

DAM system to ask how they wanted to

search for assets, and what they’d like

to see. The results were quite different,

so it was great to get that knowledge

up front and be able to apply.”

- BRITTA CHARBONNEAU, EMAIL MARKETING

“

TORONTO, CANADA

Day 4: Centria

Centria provides wall and roof system designs for architects and contractors, so product photography is an important part of their marketing communications, advertising, PR, and sales materials.

Before using the Media Collective, their team had tens of thousands of photos living on personal computers, CDs, and in paper file folders. If someone needed a product shot, it took days to find photos and even more time to scan, upload to email, and send them without crashing servers.

A year after implementing the Media Collective, the Centria marketing team is feeling the benefits of efficiencies they couldn’t have foreseen. Their workflow has been streamlined and automated like a fine-tuned machine resulting in more team interaction, more control over rights management, and improved collaboration with their sales team and ad agencies.

The Centria team anticipates even more collaboration because everyone has more ideas for using the Media Collective! They especially like our UI that is clean, modern and easy to use.

Centria

The sales team is using the Media

Collective mobile app on their ipads

to do slideshows on site for architects.

They also use the slideshow mode at

trade shows to project images for the

whole showroom. It’s been perfect

for them.”

- JULIE PAWUK, MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER

“

PITTSBURGH, PA

6911 Mangrove Lane, Madison, WI 53713 608.292.6911

marketing@widen.com

Widen’s marketing technology solutions help power the content that builds your

brand. Leveraging cloud-based resources, Widen delivers configurable, scalable

software services that give marketers the ability to easily capture, organize, share,

and analyze their content.

Organizations of all sizes use the Widen Media Collective to streamline their

workflows and connect their content. With Widen, users like LG, Roche, Trek,

Cornell University, New Orleans Tourism Marketing, The Atlanta Falcons, Red Gold

Tomatoes, and Yankee Candle have a window into their digital assets and can easily

deploy them from a central command center.

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