Subaru

Challenges

Subaru of America – the company that markets and distributes Subaru vehicles in the U.S. – has operated in the country for nearly 55 years, building vehicles customers can rely on while being a part of a greater good.

While the Subaru brand identity has changed over its half century in business, there is no doubt now that the company rallies behind its commitment to its Love Promise and the idea that Subaru is More Than a Car Company®.

With so much history, it is no surprise that the automaker’s communications department accumulated a lot of data over the years. In fact, by 2021 Subaru had more than 250,000 valuable historical digital assets stored on a 4TB hard drive. Unfortunately, after years of use and a multitude of users, it was difficult for the team to find a specific asset when needed. As a result, historical assets were often duplicated, creating conflicting and inaccurate file names, adding to the confusion.

The automaker needed a digital asset management (DAM) system to organize and manage its files to continue to ensure the integrity of its brand. Subaru hired Stacks to organize, de-duplicate and enrich its assets, and build out a scalable content library that aligned with the continuing demands of its marketing efforts.

Objectives

Content Optimization

With no standardized process for storing and searching for digital assets, Subaru needed to improve the quality of every asset on the hard drive.

By creating metadata standards, a new folder structure and informative file naming conventions, searching for a specific asset would become an efficient and accurate process.

Finding the Right Platform

Subaru required a DAM platform to store its assets. The platform needed to allow for simple external search and file sharing, advanced permissions and security and make it easy for end-users to access its contents.

Solution

Single Source of Truth

Over the course of three workshops, the Subaru and Stacks teams identified top priorities and defined the needs and workflows of key stakeholders.

Through robust taxonomy exercises and in-depth asset discovery, they established a new set of standards intuitive to the brand and optimized for efficient and effective search. They also determined which DAM platform would best suit the automaker’s needs.

Benefits

A Path to Continued Success

Together, the Subaru and Stacks teams built a digital asset library representative of the company’s decades worth of unique branding and its leading position in the automotive industry. After carefully curating over 250,000 assets, they removed thousands of duplicates, rectified conflicting and missing information, and scaled the library down to its most essential and valuable assets.

Now on a DAM platform that can support both its current and future needs, Subaru has an easily navigable branded portal with its desired security and permissions.

With continued support from the Stacks team to ingest, manage and maintain the integrity of its library, Subaru has more control and a better understanding of its creative assets than ever before. Its new digital content library enables essential search, download and external sharing capabilities and gives teams valuable time back to devote to the advancement of their brand.