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Background
Over the last hundred years, the medical community has made huge strides in treating, preventing, and curing diseases that once afflicted people worldwide. One leading global biotech company has played a large role in that effort.
From its creation, this organization has made significant advancements in many areas, including the treatment of specific diseases, the distribution and availability of much-needed medicine, and the development of vaccines.
For an organization like this, making people aware of the innovations, treatments, medicines, and preventative measures like vaccines that are available to them is crucial. This helps people in need of care and also reaches those who may need care in the future, giving them an awareness of the resources available if they should need assistance.
In today’s content-driven world, the most effective way to connect with these individuals is to deploy compelling digital assets on channels they use daily, maintain a robust website and social media presence, and provide dynamic resources that they will engage with. All this content, however, is difficult to manage and maintain, especially for a growing brand with four unique businesses.
Challenges
The company’s communications team recognized the problems that could arise from the growing amount of digital assets they were producing as well as the increasing importance of content-driven channels to their overall marketing strategy.
With this in mind, they began developing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) program for organizing, managing, and distributing digital content. To do this, they purchased dedicated DAM software, created standards for a high-level metadata taxonomy, and developed core workflows to ensure assets were available to the right teams in a secure way.
Continuing Growth
After it began this DAM effort, the company continued to grow by merging with and acquiring new businesses. Recently, it rebranded many of the businesses into separate divisions. The world around the company was also changing.
New marketing channels arose every year, requiring new content in new formats and more employees to manage it. Then, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic placed a greater cultural emphasis on healthcare, increasing the importance of the organization’s digital assets even more.
Given all this change, the company’s DAM program needed to continue to grow and evolve. Assets from newly-acquired businesses needed to be added to the system. Additional terms and phrases needed to be added to the taxonomy. Workflows needed to be redefined to incorporate new distribution channels, asset formats, and user groups.
Platform Limitations
First, however, the company needed to be confident that the DAM platform it was using would continue to suit its needs. Rather than addressing their people and process issues, only to discover that their DAM platform no longer provided the functionality they needed, the communications team decided that evaluating the technology based on their high-level requirements should be their first step. The team also wanted to identify platforms that could fulfill their needs if they found they had outgrown their current one.
Solutions
To properly execute these two initiatives concurrently—evaluating their current solution and researching other DAM platforms—the company needed an infusion of staff time and DAM expertise.
Accordingly, they hired Stacks, a team of DAM librarians, managers, and directors familiar with the healthcare industry and how DAM suited the organization’s specific needs. Stacks had been managing the DAM system of one of their business units for several years and came to the communications team’s attention when that brand’s assets were added to the company’s broader DAM program.
The Stacks team executed both initiatives through a series of activities:
Uncovering Unique Requirements
The Stacks team’s first goal was to become experts in what made the company unique from a DAM perspective. They audited documentation, assets, metadata, and current systems to understand how the organization and its affiliated brands used its assets every day.
They interviewed and surveyed users and stakeholders to understand what they required from the DAM program and identify areas where current practices were inadequate. The team then categorized these deficiencies into people, process, and platform needs and reviewed them with the company’s team to gather their feedback.
Connecting the DAM Dots
Based on these unique needs, the Stacks team then connected what they knew about the company with what they knew about the healthcare industry and DAM more broadly. They leveraged their network, expertise, and experience working with other use cases, organizations, and DAM platforms on the company’s behalf.
Expert Recommendations & Support
After documenting their observations, the Stacks team presented them to the company team. They also provided recommendations for how the company could address the shortcomings in its people, processes, and existing DAM platform.
In addition, the Stacks team provided insights on how the internal team could more effectively leverage their current technology, should budget constraints and timing prevent an asset migration. They also shared a shortlist of DAM platforms that could better scale with the company’s growing needs and align with its evolving processes.
While the company team networked with platform vendors and worked on their existing processes, the Stacks team provided support, answered questions, and refined workflows. Most importantly, they assisted the company team in scoping in great detail what a platform migration would entail, giving them the capability to execute these plans quickly and efficiently when the timing was right.
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