How Our Chocolate Company Got Digital Marketing Assets Under Control with Cloud Transformation

As a chocolatier for the past 41 years—with physical storefronts and business partners across the United States—ensuring our technology stack stays modern is critical to our operations and growth. We recently hit a crossroads where we had to acknowledge that while our products remained as sweet and delicious as ever, working with antiquated and cumbersome data and asset management technology was a, well, more bitter experience.

The difficulty of managing these disparate tools and keeping information organized amid that chaos was impossible to overcome forever. Over the years, our back-end data became increasingly disorganized; retrieving the digital assets we, or our partners, needed was anything but seamless. This was particularly true with our business-critical product images that are used across our marketing, sales, e-commerce, and manufacturing functions.

An image of dysfunction

Our marketing asset image storage relied on a QNAP device in our data center. When it came to organizing and managing images, however, that device came up short of delivering the functionality our teams would have liked. For example, our wholesale, retail, and e-commerce teams had no mechanism for knowing who owned a specific image asset, or which version of an image asset was the most up-to-date. Simply finding a specific image within the system at all was often time-consuming. This made regular tasks such as collaborations with external partners difficult and error-prone as team members could easily share digital assets that had become outdated.

The COVID-19 pandemic and shift to remote work further exacerbated the challenge. Without a centralized and effective system for managing our myriad digital assets, our employees and external partners transferred files by email and found their own workarounds for files that were over the attachment size limit. This resulted in our assets being spread across various spreadsheets, cloud-based drop boxes, and network drives, all in addition to our existing complex systems. This extra complexity highlighted our clear need to modernize our technology and practices.

Implementing a modern cloud platform

After settling on a commitment to cloud transformation and replacing our aging asset management technology, we began researching our options and honing a modernization strategy. That process was all the more necessary because the shift would mean reinventing practices across so many of our teams. At the same time, our marketing, sales, and other teams recognized the opportunity and welcomed new processes that would enable transformative efficiency and eliminate familiar frustrations.

Our criteria began with introducing a straightforward experience for storing, tagging, searching, and using image data. We also required version control to ensure clarity as to which version of an asset was truly the latest and greatest. Combining this with permission controls and governance—enabling us to manage who is actually allowed to add and edit images—would further eliminate the confusion and errors that had kicked off this need for change. Based on this criteria and our research, we selected the cloud-based solution from Image Relay as our new digital asset management (DAM) system.

The cloud modernization strategy quickly paid off. Our marketing, sales, and other teams can now directly locate digital assets in our cloud library and use them with confidence that they are indeed the right assets. It’s resulted in a clear productivity boost. Similarly, our external partners that need those product and marketing materials—such as designers and photographers can directly upload assets into our system (where they undergo a managed approval process)—eliminating our previous mess of email attachments and disparate file locations. We’ve also made strong use of our new abilities to make shared access to image files expire after a set date, and to leverage detailed asset audit trails. With these features humming, our partners simply cannot access the wrong assets, and any past alterations to assets are easily recognized and understood.

Further centralization is the goal going forward

Our cloud transformation changed us from a company with a growing number of disjointed legacy solutions into one benefitting from seamless access to centralized assets. Looking forward, we’ll continue to capitalize on the efficiency of using fewer tools that check more boxes by leveraging the product information management (PIM) side of our new DAM implementation. While today we handle our product information manually via spreadsheets and other simple tools, we’ll soon use our PIM technology to achieve a centralized single source of truth, offering everyone from sales reps to manufacturers the access they need for the different specific product information they require. To this end, we’ve also added a digital proofing solution (also from Image Relay) that centralizes digital asset feedback and approvals, further streamlining our internal processes across teams (including R&D, Quality, Operations, and Marketing).

Like that oft-quoted Forrest Gump line, with our old technology we could open an asset file and truly never know what we were going to get. Now, with a centralized cloud-based digital asset management strategy, our teams know they have instant access to the correct asset whenever they need it, equipping our business for much better internal and partner experiences.