Digital asset management: an upbeat option for marketers

Digital evolution

Controlling the branding is another one of the main advantages of using Canto, according to Wolfford. “Before we had Canto, the image that was sent out to the dealers might be the wrong size or had the wrong descriptive text,” he says. “Now every image is approved and tracked.”

The decision to use a formal DAM system was part of a broader evolution into the digital age. Earlier in his career at Pearl Drums, Wolfford was part of the Artist Relations Department, which deals with sponsored drummers/percussionists for Justin Timberlake, Blake Shelton, Rihanna, KISS and others. He developed an artist database and then created Pearl’s social networks, learning about that emerging field to keep pace with the rapidly changing marketing ecosystem. The Pearl DMRC has now become an indispensable part of every activity of the company involving digital media.

In addition to its SaaS product, Canto also offers an on-premise solution, Cumulus 11, first introduced in 1992. “Cumulus is more customizable and is a good match for multidepartment enterprise use, while the SaaS Canto software product is ideal for companies that want to be up and running quickly without involving IT,” says Leslie Weller, director of marketing for Canto.

Both products provide image recognition and auto-tagging, a boon for organizations that do not have the resources to dedicate staff to adding this metadata. The SaaS product uses Amazon’s Rekognition, a logical choice because Canto is hosted on Amazon Web Services. Another new feature is dynamic multimedia branding, which presents interactive views such as 3-D versions of images.

The majority of Canto’s new customers are in the marketing arena, with others focused on archival applications or product management. “Social media has definitely been a driver for DAM systems,” Weller says. “They are a smart way to keep companies competitive by allowing for more real-time marketing. With more channels and devices in everyone’s life, pushing out content quickly is becoming critical.”

DAM unifies pharma content

Novo Nordisk is a Denmark-based pharmaceutical company that produces nearly half the world’s supply of insulin. The company is committed to discovering and developing innovative products for treating chronic diseases. Novo Nordisk was using a DAM product for its marketing materials, but the system was complex and the search functionality was not adequate. Because the marketing team for each product has its own advertising agency, the digital assets were scattered among different agencies.

The review process for pharmaceutical collateral is rigorous; the materials must go through medical, legal and regulatory evaluation to verify that the stated claims can be made. To better manage the lifecycle of the assets and ensure compliance with regulations that affect marketing materials (commercial compliance), the North American affiliate of Novo Nordisk decided to upgrade the tools it was using to manage the review and approval process.

The company was already using Zinc MAPS, a commercial content compliance product from Zinc Ahead, which is now part of Veeva. “We were exploring the possibility of building our own process tool or building out a DAM and then looked at Veeva’s Vault PromoMats,” says Bernie Klemmer, director of marketing operations for the North American affiliate. “Vault PromoMats could manage the review and approval as well as store the approved content and component assets in the cloud. That made the materials available for reuse and for repurposing around the globe.” The combination would allow Novo Nordisk to go from having multiple isolated systems to a unified asset management environment.

The transition began in December 2017 and in four months, the division had migrated 6,000 reference documents from Zinc MAPS to Vault PromoMats. “Our guiding principle was to use as much out-of-box capability as we could, configuring rather than customizing or coding,” Klemmer continues. The decision was made not to migrate any of the approved content from the old system because it was stored in ZincMAPS as PDFs—i.e., the images were not the source files but served as a viewable version of the assets. “As new jobs come in, the actual digital assets will be stored in Vault PromoMats,” Klemmer explains. “In addition, as existing jobs come up for expiration we will reconsider each one and determine whether the source file should be migrated into our system.”