AI-Powered DAM: Real-Life Success Stories

As your company operations scale, your digital assets grow equally, often at an expedited rate. Your digital asset management workflows snowball and soon overburden your staff and system. Without a scalable and AI-powered digital asset management (DAM) system, managing all the new digital assets created daily and retrieving existing ones becomes challenging and bottlenecks your operations.

Many companies that have been in this position have leveraged intelligent asset management systems to maneuver and avoid operational inefficiencies. Here are some real-life DAM success stories from companies that have effectively utilized Aprimo, the industry’s leading AI-powered DAM for modern businesses.

Hachette Book Group (HBG): Bridging Clumsy to Refined 

Before HBG partnered with Aprimo, it used an old DAM system that was so lackluster its business users shunned it altogether and sourced other viable tools. The old system was too slow to load assets, searching and finding assets required multiple field entries, and search results were too random and populated. Even the company’s staff often bypassed it and searched and downloaded assets from external websites because it was faster.

Such logjams were incredibly frustrating to the publishing company, mainly because the digital distribution of book covers to retail platforms and booksellers is at the heart of its operations.  It is a top publisher of general-interest books in the U.S., so it has a large pool of digital assets from the close to a million books it has published.

All these books come with hundreds of metadata fields, but the most essential descriptive metadata is the cover page, as it’s the most influential purchase driver. HBG must swiftly search and distribute book cover images to resellers and e-commerce platforms for their online catalogs. Its old system was crippling to its distribution operations, given the system’s limited search and image identification functionalities. 

HBG’s Experience After Transitioning to Aprimo

The company’s AI-powered DAM success with Aprimo was almost instantaneous. After the transition to a new system over a weekend, HBG sent thousands of book covers seamlessly the next day. Today, the publishing giant automatically distributes book covers overnight to multiple retailers. 

The AI-powered DAM identified and rooted out significant redundancies, such as hundreds of duplicate assets, corrupt files, wrongly cataloged files, and incorrect identifiers. Thanks to Aprimo’s user-friendly interface, the onboarding process was seamless, and the company only required basic training to onboard over 800 users. 

Since the transition, HBG has significantly reduced its lead time. Processes that previously needed hours to complete now take around 20 minutes. The New York-headquarted book publisher has a single-source asset system that automates processes such as distribution, file replication, and naming conventions. 

Plaid Enterprises: A Satisfying Content Ops Transformation

Plaid Enterprises is a renowned manufacturer and seller of DIY tools and products, such as resin and glues, paints, brushes, and needlecraft tools. It owns many famous brands among DIY enthusiasts, including Mod Podge, Apple Barrel, Bucilla Stitchery, Kicks Studio, and FolkArt. 

The company’s  asset management challenges became especially difficult two years ago when the demand for DIY tools and products skyrocketed. At the time, the company’s version of DAM was actually a content management system that couldn’t sustain an immediate need for rapid product cataloging and searchability.  

Without a single source of truth for all digital assets — a centralized repository where all content components are stored, managed, and accessed — staff was forced to retrieve product information from different sources manually. These manual processes triggered numerous cataloging errors, especially during seasonal demand when certain products needed new identifiers and descriptors to match the holiday themes. 

Searching for an asset took much too long. This frustrated sales and marketing teams, who often needed to access different assets to update product details such as sales discounts. Worse still, Plaid’s DIY articles and videos many times displayed different assets from the featured ones. This upset customers, who count on the accuracy of DIY instructional resources. 

Plaid’s Transformation After Switching to Aprimo DAM 

A brand like Plaid, with thousands of assorted products, must harness the power of artificial intelligence technologies like automation to sustain operational efficiency, especially when it comes to findability. Aprimo’s advanced AI capabilities effectively bridged this gap. 

Aprimo leveraged its automation capacity to catalog and generate smart descriptors for all products the DIY product manufacturer sells. This completely transformed the company's metadata tagging capacity and accuracy. Now, Plaid can automatically apply metatags to its many products without confusing product details. 

Aprimo's AI-powered DAM enhanced the searchability of all Plaid products. It automatically scans product labels in different asset formats for PDFs, images, PowerPoint, Excel, and Word and integrates them into the metadata. Through this, the company’s staff in different departments can use a keyword most relevant to them to search for an asset and get accurate results. 

Thanks to Aprimo DAM, Plaid enjoys optimum file sharing, product searchability, and asset organization capacities.  

Pacific Life: Bye, Marketing Isolation; Hello, Collaboration on a Single Platform

It’s common for global companies to run separate marketing teams to manage the immense marketing content workflows involved, from preparing and approving content drafts to ensuring compliance. Although the different teams operate under the same department, the variations in their tasks often require them to use different work processes, which results in assorted workflows. 

Merging these separate workflows to collaborate without a centralized DAM system is tedious and time-consuming. Pacific Life, a long-established financial and insurance services company, lived this reality. 

Three separate divisions managed its marketing operations. And without a DAM system, Pacific Life found itself with multiple data silos from different workflows. It made collaboration among the three marketing divisions difficult, which significantly curtailed the marketing department’s productivity. 

Manually sharing assets among the three divisions triggered additional unscheduled workflows that teams had to complete. Often, teams deferred ongoing operations to work on urgent tasks they had not planned for. This created chaos, and Pacific Life had to find a digital solution that streamlined all marketing operations of its three divisions. And this is where Aprimo saved the day. 

Aprimo’s Customized Solution for Pacific Life 

Aprimo leveraged its Productivity Management platform to set up Pacific Life’s three marketing divisions on one system. This integration created a single source of truth for the three divisions, which totaled 350 staffers, comprising project managers, creatives, project requesters, and designers.

With enhanced collaboration, productivity increased exponentially, and the project traffic coordinator's lead time was reduced by 66%. Further, the integration optimized marketing operations for over 20 workflows, which empowered the three divisions to work faster and achieve peak operational efficiency. 

Today, Pacific Life’s marketing teams collaborate in real time when creating content for different ad campaigns. They no longer deal with countless spin-off tasks as they did before DAM integration. This way, they can prioritize the more productive operations and leave simple functions to Aprimo DAM. 

National Park Foundation (NPF): Curating Compelling Digital Experiences To Win Hearts 

The National Park Foundation relies on storytelling to inspire people to donate to its noble mission of supporting and protecting over 400 parks across the country. However, the organization had a tough time storing and retrieving videos, images, and other relevant information required to convey engaging stories.

Without a centralized DAM system to store all relevant digital assets, the company had to manually retrieve files from distributed sources such as email, external websites, online uploads from private visitors or professional photographers, and employees’ devices. 

Only a few NPF employees were tasked with assembling all relevant content and assessing its viability. This monotonous process tied up their productive time, which they would have used to design and deliver powerful digital experiences that sway people to donate. 

Worse still, due to a lack of a central system to facilitate knowledge transfer, these employees would leave with the asset management knowledge they’d learned if they left the foundation. Training new workers for this role was lengthy and inefficient because NPF lacked a centralized repository to reference past training data. 

Analyzing an asset’s details, like the licensing regulations, was taxing, given the different sources the digital assets came from. As such, the organization couldn’t easily satisfy compliance standards, which limited its ability to leverage certain digital assets in its awareness campaigns.

Aprimo’s Solution 

Aprimo digital asset management platform solved content management challenges for the leading nonprofit. The DAM system created a central location where NPF’s employees can upload, download, and review digital assets without first browsing through multiple folders and sub-folders.  

The DAM system also integrates with NPF’s content management system (CMS), which allows users to access all digital assets without clicking out of the CMS. This has benefited NPF tremendously — the nonprofit has already integrated 10,000 files into cloud storage. 

Additionally, DAM has curbed content pollution and duplication, as all teams can access the digital repository in real-time. The system prevents teams from purchasing assets already in storage or using an asset that’s already deployed. 

Experience Your Own DAM Success Story

The above real-life DAM examples speak of Aprimo’s commitment to intelligent asset management practices that elevate content marketing, creation, and management for modern-day businesses. Learn for yourself how AI DAM can transform asset management, improve efficiency, and drive business results. Request a demo today and join the hundreds of top brands that are living examples of DAM case studies. 

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