Who is The University of Tulsa? 

The University of Tulsa (UTulsa) is a private, comprehensive research university with just under 4,000 students across undergraduate, graduate, and law programs. Known for its intimate class sizes and a nine-to-one student-faculty ratio, UTulsa is a leader in attracting National Merit scholars and boasts one of the top-ranked petroleum engineering programs among private universities in the U.S. 

Post-pandemic, staff reductions and shifting objectives left the team grappling with a backlog of paused projects and unclear campus needs. Implementing a ticketing system revealed the scale of the problem: over 2,500 requests in 14 months, ranging from event flyers to full marketing campaigns. 

“In January 2023, our department was suffering from a staff deficit,” said Amanda Hodges, Creative Director at UTulsa. 

A significant portion of these requests fell into what Amanda termed “pebbles”—high-volume, low-impact tasks such as business cards and digital screen promotions. These tasks consumed valuable resources and hindered the team’s ability to tackle “rocks and boulders”—the higher-impact projects crucial to advancing UTulsa’s mission. 

They turned to a MediaValet DAM integrated with Templating by Marq to help centralize the university’s marketing initiatives and enable better control over priority tasks. 

The goal of implementing a DAM at University of Tulsa was to reduce marketing workloads but it has further improved marketing operations across the campus. Through strategic use of their MediaValet DAM, UTulsa has created a scalable, efficient ecosystem that enhances collaboration, empowers departments, and safeguards brand integrity.  

Empowering Departments with Self-Serve Access 
One of the key pillars of UTulsa’s DAM use case is the self-serve access enabled by centralizing the DAM as the Marketing Resources Hub. By enabling access to Branded Portals, the team provides faculty and staff with the tools to independently access brand-approved materials such as logos, templates, and photography.  

The self-serve model not only ensures brand consistency but also reduces the burden on the central marketing team by eliminating routine requests. 

Enabling Creative Independence 

With MediaValet Templating, powered by Marq, UTulsa has streamlined the process of creating branded materials. The tool empowers a select group of university employees, known as “brand champions,” to independently produce high-quality digital screens, event flyers, and other assets. By locking critical brand elements within the templates, the team ensures consistency while granting creative freedom.  

This approach not only upholds UTulsa’s brand standards but also eliminates the need for frequent interventions by the MarCom team.  

Simplifying Asset Retrieval Across Campus: 

MediaValet’s AI-driven Face Recognition feature has been a game-changer for asset retrieval at UTulsa. By tagging individuals through facial recognition, the platform makes it effortless to find relevant photos, even from vast collections. This capability has been especially useful for projects like campaigns with graduating seniors, where the team can retrieve images spanning years of a student’s journey—from first-week group photos to graduation day.  

Self-Service/ Brand Portals: Brand Portals have revolutionized the way UTulsa’s teams access resources, offering easy entry points to brand-approved assets, templates, and guidelines. These ensure that each unit or department has access to materials specific to their needs, including logos, templates, and photography maintaining consistency. 

MediaValet Templating, powered by Marq: Templating allows for quick and controlled customization  of branded materials while locking down critical elements like logos, colors, and fonts. This ensures consistency across all outputs while enabling select staff members, known as “brand champions,” to independently produce high-quality materials. 

Amanda emphasized the benefits, stating, “The thing I love about this when we’re talking about brand integrity is that you’re able to lock down each asset, each layer here individually.” 

Face Recognition: MediaValet’s Face Recognition technology has transformed asset retrieval for UTulsa. This feature enables DAM admin to assign names to faces once, making it simple to locate photos of faculty, staff, or students across vast collections within the entire library. This functionality has been particularly impactful for projects involving alumni  or long-term campaigns, saving countless hours. 

In fact, the 2025 DAM Trends Report found that 83% of organizations that implement Face Recognition save money.

AI-Driven Tagging: Automated tagging powered by MediaValet’s AI ensures that assets are consistently and accurately labeled. This significantly improves search capabilities, helping teams find what they need quickly and efficiently. 

By shifting “pebble” tasks to the self-service portal, UTulsa’s partners across campus now have the tools to advance their own projects without compromising brand standards. “They feel empowered to move their own projects forward,” said Amanda. 

The self-service model significantly cut down ticket requests, allowing the creative team to focus on strategic initiatives. Amanda noted, “It feels amazing to stop feeding the ticket machine.” 

The integration of MediaValet and Marq has not only simplified workflows but also maintained the university’s commitment to brand consistency.  

The team has measured a 100% reduction in review cycles on their templated content without ever compromising on their branding – previously, they were facing 3-day review cycles, wasting time on low impact tasks.  

The University of Tulsa’s Success in Numbers:  

With the successful rollout and adoption of MediaValet and Marq, UTulsa is now exploring further opportunities, including leveraging Marq’s presentation features and refining their DAM taxonomy. We’re excited to help the team oversee these evolving processes, ensuring continuous improvement and scalability! 

Who is University of California, San Francisco? 

UCSF, or University of California, San Francisco, is the leading university dedicated exclusively to the health sciences.

From genomics and immunology to specialty care for women and children, UCSF brings together the world’s leading experts in nearly every area of health. They are home to five Nobel laureates who have advanced the understanding of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, aging and stem cells.

Todd Dubnicoff

Visual Communication Specialist, UCSF

---

The team was in the midst of a growth spurt and simultaneously trying to manage an evolving social media presence, more communications requirements, and a department that was spread across the city and the wider San Francisco Bay Area.

Assets were scattered across team members’ hard drives, on premise systems, and other cloud-based management solutions. In other words, they were everywhere but nowhere accessible.

Todd and his team needed a better, more centralized library and found their solution in a MediaValet DAM.

The primary user of the DAM is for the Communications Team to share and distribute content to different teams within the department, UCSF proper, social media, and across the website.

Todd’s team has used their MediaValet DAM to stand as the central hub or knowledge base for digital assets including social media and website assets, photos, illustrations, templates, educational and administrative content.

The DAM is used in three ingenious ways:

An administrative filing cabinet

Todd has implemented custom user groups to ensure that teams across the department can use the DAM where necessary (without compromising sensitive content). The admin team that support the faculty can access the DAM for headshots and logos and other needs without having to ask!

An educational vault

The DAM includes videos and illustrations of surgical procedures which the neurosurgery residents, students and even faculty can access for surgical training and presentations.

Among the video collection are patient education videos which the department can share with prospective patients or their referring doctors to help them understand available medical options.

An historical archive

By storing the archive of work from the neurosurgery department’s state-of-the-art clinical services and basic research programs, Todd’s team has provided a historical record of the department’s pioneering work.

The team at UCSF has used their MediaValet DAM to incorporate truly efficient workflows within and external to the neurosurgery department. They’ve leaned into three key MediaValet features to achieve both true efficiency and strong security.

Branded Portals

Todd’s team has created several “mini websites” that have become essential for sharing assets with people who don’t use HIPPO or the DAM.

When faculty members ask for content to share during lectures or presentations, the team has created a Branded Portal for explainer videos and animations and cut these into smaller clips for ease of explanation.

Related Assets

The team at UCSF is using Related Assets in a truly exceptional way – for security and compliance.

To take photos or video during a surgery or procedure, UCSF must have a signed patient consent form. Previously they had paper forms but now, they upload the form to the DAM and connect it with the photos and footage from the surgery through Related Assets!

The team then applies custom permission rules to user groups to ensure that only authorized people have access to this content.

*NOTE* To store patient information in the DAM, UCSF needed a HIPAA compliant DAM – MediaValet is the #1 DAM on the market for security and is vigilant about compliancy and security requirements.

Adobe Connector (CI HUB)

When it comes to distributing customized content quickly, the team at UCSF makes use of the Adobe Connector (CI HUB). The team logs into PhotoShop to make adjustments to their flyer templates and can drag and drop the relevant assets directly from MediaValet.

UCSF has used their MediaValet DAM to implement innovative ways to not just manage a huge library of images, but fastidiously support the neurosurgery department through smart governance, streamlined asset distribution and sharing, and intelligent asset reuse.

Meticulous Record Keeping

Using the Related Asset feature to connect patient consent forms to relevant content has enabled the team to not just stay compliant but truly organized.

Limiting the user groups that can access this content supports true security of sensitive information and content.

Seamless Collaboration

The MediaValet DAM is under ownership of the neurosurgery department but has positively impacted communication efficiencies, social media presence, educational content distribution and access, and collaboration across the entire organization.

Secure Assets

The team at UCSF had to find a DAM with up-to-standard security and HIPAA compliance levels which really narrowed down their options.

With MediaValet they not only check off their security requirements and ensure safekeeping of sensitive materials and information, but they’ve implemented fastidious workflows that align with these compliance measures.

Smart Asset Repurposing

Todd’s team have uploaded historic and current content from the neurosurgery department to be further used as communications, social media, and educational content.

Repurposing videos and creating clips that are housed in specific Brand Portals, the team has not only streamlined access to this information but ensured its safekeeping for further, future research and learning.

Interested in how MediaValet could help your school? Reach out to one of our expert reps today!

Who is Columbia Business School Executive Education? 

Columbia Business School Executive Education provides executives across industries and sectors with the tools, frameworks, and learnings needed to lead and excel. Designed for high-impact business leaders, their offerings include over 35 non-degree, open-enrollment programs in leadership, strategy and innovation, finance and investing, marketing and more — available in person, live online, or online — as well as a unique certificate path and custom program opportunities.

Lindsey Varghese

Director of Content Strategy, Online and Digital Programs, Executive Education at Columbia Business School

---

Columbia Business School Executive Education’s content management challenges stemmed from an inconsistent and fragmented storage system. Assets were scattered across various platforms such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and shared physical drives. With no single source of truth, the team struggled to find the right assets when needed. But it wasn’t just about having a lot of files; it was about making sure the right people had access to them, at the right time.

According to Lindsey Varghese, Director of Content Strategy, Online and Digital Programs at Executive Education at Columbia Business School, the inconsistent storage and management system resulted in inefficiencies that hindered the team’s ability to access and repurpose their rich content library.

They were facing three major challenges with their existing file management system:

Dispersed content storage: Files were spread across various platforms, making it difficult to access and share content efficiently.

Lost institutional knowledge: Inconsistent file storage and record-keeping meant that, when team members left, critical information about content location and use was lost.

Time-consuming searches: The absence of a centralized system resulted in significant time spent searching for the right assets, slowing down their workflows and content production.

To address these challenges, Columbia Business School Executive Education adopted MediaValet’s DAM platform. The DAM enabled the team to organize all their video assets in one place, making it easier to manage, access, and share them both internally and externally.

The DAM system allows them to dive deep into their existing content, identify gaps, and reuse content for new programs.

Centralized video library: MediaValet enabled Columbia Business School Executive Education to consolidate their 4,000+ video assets into a single, easily accessible system. This ensured much better video asset management and that all team members could locate and use the latest content without delays.

Improved asset reuse: The team can now repurpose existing content more effectively. As Lindsey Varghese explained:

Enhanced search capabilities: One of the most significant advantages of the DAM platform was its advanced search functionality. The team could now search within video titles and even within the content itself using AI-generated transcripts, allowing them to find relevant clips faster without having to scrub through entire videos.

Several features of MediaValet’s DAM played a crucial role in Columbia Business School Executive Education’s success:

Advanced Search capabilities: Enabled the team to search not just by video title but within the video content itself using AI-generated transcripts.

Branded Portals: Provided an elegant, branded experience for sharing content externally with clients, faculty, and partners without needing additional logins or complex file-sharing permissions.

AVI and AI-generated transcripts: The team could search not just within the video titles but within the content itself using AI-generated transcripts. This capability made it easier to find the right clips without needing to watch entire videos.

Since implementing MediaValet, Columbia Business School Executive Education has significantly streamlined its content management and workflow processes. The DAM system not only enhanced collaboration within the team but also made it easier to share assets with external stakeholders through branded portals.

This transformation has led to improved efficiency, allowing the school to focus on creating high-quality educational content rather than spending time on administrative tasks.

Improved Workflow Efficiency: With all content in one place and easy access to videos through advanced search capabilities, the team has significantly reduced the time spent locating and managing assets.

Enhanced Content Reuse: The ability to quickly identify and repurpose existing assets has enabled Columbia Business School Executive Education to reduce content creation costs and improve the efficiency of their educational offerings.

Increased Control and Accessibility: The DAM system has put the team in the “driver’s seat,” allowing them to manage their content without relying on IT. They can now control access, expiration dates, and sharing permissions more effectively.

Streamlined External Sharing: Branded Portals have improved the way Columbia Business School Executive Education shares assets with external partners, creating a more seamless and professional experience.

Who is Emory University? 

Established in 1836, Emory University is known globally as a leader in higher education and one of the nation’s top research universities. One of their most recent ventures: assisting in the research of COVID-19 and search for its vaccine. It goes without saying, we were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Rasheda Adbullah Hairston, coordinator for Emory’s Advancement and Alumni Engagement (AAE), Marketing and Digital Strategy (MDS) and Content & Creative Strategy (CCS) teams, and share her journey with MediaValet.

MDS & CCS recognized they needed a solution to address the growing number of assets requests they received from partners across the AAE division. Despite experiencing significant team growth, it was still near impossible to keep up with the demands of their 40 schools, academic units, and health care partners. Emory needed to establish a process that could scale, without compromising on security.

So, how does the leading university’s AAE marketing and creative teams keep up with the demand for assets today? Find out in Rasheda’s interview below.

Can you tell me a little bit about Emory University?

“Emory University is a private higher education institution in Atlanta, GA, with some of the world’s most renowned faculty and academic programs. Many of our researchers are instrumental in finding solutions to some of today’s most pressing issues, including helping to find the COVID-19 vaccine.

When the pandemic first happened, Emory University researchers were on the front line for the trials of the vaccine and worked closely with the CDC.”

Can you tell us more about yourself, your background and what you do at Emory?

“Yes, I’m a Project Coordinator on the Marketing and Digital Strategy team and support the CCS team in the Advancement and Alumni Engagement division. This division works with schools and units across the university to help raise money for everything from scholarships to endowments to programs that enable students to attend Emory (such as exchange students).

My team collaborates with our CCS team to strategize for and create materials such as proposals and reports, website content, digital stories, social media content and more for our partners across the division who are on the front lines of engaging alumni, soliciting, stewarding and cultivating donors. We’ve had $100,000 to $100 million proposals that the CCS team has been instrumental in writing and designing, so that the frontline fundraisers can ensure donors will give money to the university. Our donors play an important role in our ability to support our students, schools and programs across the university, so what we do really is important.”

Can you tell me how your team operated and communicated before using MediaValet?

“Before implementing MediaValet, we would filter asset requests from 40 areas across the enterprise. Requests could be anything from reports and proposals to brochures and statistic sheets – things that really help our frontline fundraisers give credibility to their asks for the donors. We stored everything on a shared server that only our team had access to, and if a request was made, we would have to go on the server to find it. While the server was organized by schools and units, the folders within each of those sections weren’t very organized, so it was challenging to search for any given asset.”

What initiated your search for a digital asset management solution (DAM)?

“Filtering all of our partners’ asset requests was becoming unmanageable. Our team, alone, has grown so much in the last few years to try to accommodate all the requests. We needed a better, more definitive process for accessing assets – and we needed them to all be in one place, where clients could easily access and download them. Equally as important was to be able to control what they could do, so which assets they could access and what they could do besides downloading, so that’s when we started to search for a DAM.”

What made you select MediaValet over alternative vendor options?

“It was our leadership that initially saw the need to make our assets more readily available for our partners and spearheaded the initiative. They looked at several DAMs, but ultimately chose MediaValet because it was the most robust and user-friendly option.”

Can you describe how you’re using MediaValet today?

“We now use MediaValet as a repository for the assets that our partners use on a regular basis. Any time there’s a new project, our designers upload the completed files to MediaValet, where the client can quickly find it. We have a thought-out category structure and clear naming convention that we encourage clients to follow, so that it’s easier to search uniformly within the DAM.

We have about 90 active users, which primarily include our own team, as well as what we call ‘super users,’ which are individuals that represent the various schools and units and act as the DAM point of contact for their teams. Super users have relatively open access, where they can manage and upload assets, and create Branded Portals and lightboxes. If they have any questions, they reach out to me as the main administrator (and anything that I can’t answer I pass on to my Customer Success Manager at MediaValet). Everyone else has guest or member permissions, as well as category restrictions that are dependent on their school unit.”

Can you share the advantages you’ve seen from implementing ‘power users’?

“One of the advantages of having a super user for each school or unit is that there’s a dedicated representative more readily accessible to upload, change, delete or manage any asset specific for that unit. If a school or unit chooses not to assign a super user, we’re still able to manage assets for them, but it’s on our timing and schedule. For example, our HR department didn’t assign a super user, as they use the DAM so rarely.

Another advantage is communicating new features. Our Customer Success Manager is great with letting us know when there are new features available, like the cropping feature that was introduced at the beginning of the year. We’re able to just pass that information along to our super users and they disseminate the information to their group.”

Can you tell me more about the process that each ‘super user’ went through to get onboarded with MediaValet?

“Absolutely, we did super user training with our Customer Success Manager, which was so helpful. We did it in groups of 10-12 to ensure that people were able to ask questions and feel confident with the system. We also established a MediaValet toolkit, which has Q&As and information about their role as a super user.”

You also mentioned your category structure – can you tell us a bit about your strategy for that?

“We used a lot of our category structure from our existing server, but we also needed to take our partners and how they would search into consideration. Just because the category structure seems intuitive as designers and creators doesn’t mean it will be intuitive for others, so we did make some compromises in how we would typically structure things. Ultimately, our goal was to ensure that MediaValet would be user friendly for everyone.”

Has there been a standout feature that you find particularly useful?

“Branded Portals really come in handy for us, especially when it comes to managing social media content and digital assets for our events. We have several major events throughout the year, like Homecoming and Emory Cares- An international service day dedicated to living Emory’s mission of serving humanity. For each of these different events we’ll create a Branded Portal, give it some ‘razzle dazzle’ with a banner and add assets from each event, like videos, images, and social media posts. We even use Branded Portal sections to separate what to post on social media each week. Branded Portals have been one of the most impressive and most used features – our team praises it often.”

What’s the next step for you with digital asset management and MediaValet?

“We already love MediaValet! When we were doing the training, I was really blown away. The feedback we’ve gotten and continue to get from super users and other DAM users, about how much they love it and use it every day is amazing. MediaValet is working really well for us right now and I’m excited to just continue to grow with it and take advantage of new features as they are introduced.”

What advice can you give to others looking into DAM?

“I would say to have flexibility. When we initially implemented MediaValet, our plan was heavily focused on using a templating integration for our designers. After some time, we decided that the templating solution wasn’t going to be a fit for us, but we worked with MediaValet to pivot our use case to using the DAM as a library for our main-use assets and that has worked out amazingly well.

Now, I continually get feedback from people on our team and leadership about how much they absolutely love MediaValet. So, in the end, it was a really good choice to pivot our use case.”

One last question, just for fun – what is your dream vacation spot and why?

“I’d love to travel around to places like Dubai, Egypt, the Maldives, Santorini, and Europe on a few-month vacation – living without a care. I just want to take three months, and just find myself in the world. That’s my dream vacation.”

Who is The University of Wollongong? 

The University of Wollongong is a leading modern university in Australia, located in Wollongong, about an hour from Sydney. Founded through community donations, it has grown into a globally recognized institution with 10 campuses across Asia and Australia. It’s ranked as the top university in New South Wales and is known for its Innovation Campus, which supports cutting-edge research and local business development.

Anthony Petre

Manager of Brand and Marketing Services, University of Wollongong

---

How does one of the top-ranked universities in the world maximize the usage of their original assets across multiple teams and regions without even breaking a sweat? This was the question we had for Anthony Petre, Manager of Brand and Marketing Services at the University of Wollongong, Australia.

As a self-proclaimed “lifer” at the University of Wollongong, Anthony wrestled for years with ad-hoc and inefficient means of sharing central marketing assets. Knowing there must be a better way to operate – one that would reflect their open and collaborative attitude – Anthony and team began their search. Intrigued what their adventure turned up? This interview shares their unique story.

First off, can you tell us a bit about the University of Wollongong?

“Yeah, sure! The University of Wollongong is one of Australia’s top modern universities. We’re based in the regional center of Wollongong, which is about an hour away from Sydney. The university was originally funded by donations from the local people, and is now one of Australia’s most global universities, with 10 campuses across China, Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and Australia.

We have a great reputation as the top-ranked university in New South Wales, and one of the top universities in the world. We’re renowned for our Innovation Campus, which incubates high-quality research and scientific discovery, and provides a place for local businesses to flourish.”

Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you do at the University of Wollongong?

“So, I’m a bit of a Wollongong “lifer”. I studied at the University of Wollongong, then transitioned into full-time work in the printing department. Now, after studying for my masters, I’ve pivoted into Marketing and Communication and managed to land a job in Strategic Marketing, which was a bit of a dream come true. I work alongside some really talented people that bring the University of Wollongong message and brand to life.

I also met my wife there, so a lot of my life milestones started at the University.”

What initiated your search for a digital asset management system?

“OK, it’s a two-part answer.

First, it was challenging to share central marketing assets – if at all. Our unit is quite collaborative and open, yet our systems didn’t really follow that attitude.

Second, even when we did share assets, it could only be done locally within our own team using network shares, WeTransfer, Dropbox or temporary sharing tools. This left a whole suite of departments that couldn’t easily access our marketing assets. We wanted to be more transparent with what assets are available and find a way to surface them for the users and communicators on campus.

MediaValet has allowed us to enable our self-service vision, which has helped create a much more open, collaborative and supportive environment.”

What made you select MediaValet over other vendor options?

“We weren’t looking to undertake a huge digital transformation – we simply wanted an impactful cloud-based DAM solution that could integrate with Single Sign-On.

We looked at a few larger solutions that needed large IT infrastructure change, development and consultants, as well as a couple of others that were on-premise software providers, but these weren’t the right fit.

MediaValet was the best fit for us, as it would allow us to scale in the most efficient way. When I say this, I mean it not only in terms of cost, but also the ability to scale across campuses, locations, user groups and access levels without having to completely reinvent the DAM. It could stretch to other use cases incredibly easily.”

What types of assets are being stored in MediaValet?

“At the moment, we store images, covering two use cases. First, we have what we call ‘marketing images’, which are generally from photoshoots, and have associated model releases for. These can be used across various channels and uses. Then, we have ’media images’, which are usually captured in association with a specific story and have more restricted uses relating to that story. We file each of these separately, as they have very different usage rights.”

Can you describe the team using MediaValet today?

“We’ve set the system up so that all UOW staff (3000+ people) have “read-only” access to the library, and then we have a more limited group of about 60-70 people across the institution, who have the ability to download and share.

This group has more advanced abilities, so we ask them to agree to and sign conditions of use because a lot of the subjects in the photography have agreed to certain usage of the images. Any user who downloads an asset is required to re-agree to the usage each time, to ensure they’re accountable to the terms of use and the brand guidelines in our playbook. This is a custom solution that we set up with the MediaValet team.

All users and permissions are integrated with Single Sign-On so that if anyone leaves the university, their staff account is made inactive, so we don’t need to audit our user list for staff who have moved on. It enables us to scale quickly, without worry about who has ongoing access to our central image library.”

Has MediaValet helped you save any time or costs?

“I couldn’t put an exact number on what we’ve saved, but there was a significant overhead associated with the way we were sharing assets in the past. When a request came in, the team would have to find an image, send it on, and if the client wasn’t happy, they’d need to find another one. It was an incredibly inefficient back and forth.

There was also a risk associated with this. If you don’t have easy access to assets, you’re more likely to create your own library, more likely to invest in your own system and more likely to need to invest in new shoots, rather than using assets that already exist.

Having a shared, central and scalable asset library has significantly reduced our overhead centrally, as well as ensure other marketing staff in the institution didn’t need to invest in either a solution or potentially duplicate shoots.”

Were there any unexpected outcomes?

“The ability to categorize assets – specifically, where assets in MediaValet inherit categories as keywords, has provided us with significant benefits. We don’t have much time to dedicate to adding metadata, so we instead dedicated time to create a strong, clean taxonomy to serve the same benefit. When it’s correctly categorized, it’s easily searchable or browsable. It’s something that we didn’t really anticipate would have such a benefit.

The other feature we’ve benefited from is the integration with Single Sign-On. It means staff administering users in the system don’t necessarily need to know all the ins and outs of MediaValet – they just need to know which user group to add them to.”

What’s your favorite MediaValet feature?

“I love the star rating feature, and I actually have a little story on that…

The University was implementing a new CMS for the main website, and Strategic Marketing was helping to support that with branding and imagery. So, to help scale image choice and usage, we pre-approved a bunch of images in MediaValet (by rating them) then extracted anything rated 4-stars and up to use in the CMS.

Another amazing feature, which was just released, is cropping! We’ve already received a ton of positive feedback on how useful and timely it is! It has allowed us to cut out steps – enabling users to crop in-platform – so they don’t have to train or use Photoshop.”

What’s next for digital asset management at the University of Wollongong?

“Next, we’re looking to scale MediaValet to our global campuses in Dubai, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and some partnerships in China and Singapore, so they can get the same benefits. We can look to add images from their campuses into the library and categorize them accordingly. Marketing teams offshore can also look to use pictures from the Wollongong campus, and vice versa.”

What advice do you have for others implementing a DAM?

“Communicate with your users and try to organize them into groups that make sense for them. One group of users might just want a simple view, and another might want more nuanced advanced features. MediaValet is very flexible in permissions and user groups, so consider who needs what and work with your Customer Success Manager to understand how that can be provisioned.”

Who is University of Windsor? 

The University of Windsor is a comprehensive, student-focused institution located in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. With over 16,000 undergraduate and graduate students, it offers more than 200 programs across various disciplines.

Naomi Pelkey

Digital Media Producer, University of Windsor

---

How does one marketing team go from spending almost 25 hours per week sharing photos, down to less than 5? This is the question we were hoping to answer with Naomi Pelkey, the Digital Media Producer for the University of Windsor.

As the creator of all kinds of content at the University of Windsor, Naomi is all too familiar with the bottlenecks that are caused when employees can’t access the photos they need. After almost 5 years with the university, she decided to lead the charge to find a new solution. This interview shares her story.

To start us off, can you let us know a bit about the University of Windsor?

“The University of Windsor is a comprehensive, student-focused university. We have just over 16,000 students, including undergrad and graduate students, and offer over 200 programs covering a broad range of specializations. We also offer Professional Studies and course-based masters programs and we pride ourselves on our strong faculty-student connection. We’re located beside the busiest international border crossings and we have arguably one of the best views of Detroit!”

Tell us a little bit more about your background and your role at the University of Windsor.

“I’ve been at the University of Windsor for four years now as a Digital Media Producer. I started in the Student Recruitment department, where my role was initially created, and then moved into the Enrollment Management department, where I now work with the Marketing and Public Relations departments. In my role, I create a lot of creative content across a lot of different platforms. MediaValet has played a critical role in sharing those creative assets with a number of different departments, as well as individuals and from inside and outside our institution.”

Can you describe the team using MediaValet?

“Currently, there are around 30 to 40 people with access to our MediaValet library across the campus, as well as our marketing department, which is in Toronto. It’s primarily used by our Marketing and Public Relations departments, as well as our “Communications Officers” in each faculty department.

Once the fall starts up, we’re looking at expanding to our everyday web users. We also have a brand relaunch in the works, so we’re planning on using MediaValet to distribute packages of on-brand campaign assets to extended departments, like engineering.”

How did the team operate before using MediaValet? What were your major pain points?

“Before implementing MediaValet, I was basically the human DAM. I had a bunch of 5-10 terabyte hard drives, and I would need to remember exactly where each photo was located, what year it was taken and in what faculty. Then I would have to plug in the hard drive and send the photos to whoever needed it.

Most of the time, I couldn’t even send the images over email. I’d have to send them one-at-a-time using file transfers on Dropbox. On average, it would take about 20 minutes per photo, so it could take two or three hours out of my day, depending on how many assets I sent that day.

I remember one week, one of the designers and I recorded the amount of time that we spent sending each other things. It was a good story for why we needed a digital asset management system because we spent about three hours Monday, two hours another day, etc. – not to mention the time we’d spend time walking back and forth between desks and different departments.”

Do you still get a lot of asset requests or is everyone self-serve?

“I’d say around 10-20% of people will still ask me for assets – either because they’re not comfortable with using MediaValet quite yet, or they’re looking for my opinion. But overall, almost everyone is self-serve and love the platform. Before implementing MediaValet, I’d sometimes get bottled down for a whole week just dealing with photo requests. Now, at most, I’ll spend about five hours a week sharing photos, which was a huge change overnight!”

What have you been able to do with that extra time?

“Oh, so many more things! I’ve been able to work on new campaigns with the marketing agency and work on new documents and policies. I finally feel like I can take time to organize and figure out what the next season is going to look like. Being able to easily upload assets to MediaValet and share them has been like a dream come true.”

What initiated your search for a DAM?

“It started when I was setting up a new server for all my video content. I needed to find a solution that could house a self-serve photo gallery so that I wouldn’t get bottlenecked with asset requests and could focus my time on implementing the server.

The designers and I had a couple of conversations with our managers and explained the bottlenecks in our workflow and how they could be alleviated with a digital asset management system. After some back-and-forth, we were able to get it approved – provided it met specific criteria.

We built an exploration team and spent six months evaluating our options. In the end, we found that MediaValet was able to best meet our needs.”

What were some of the criteria that needed to be met?

“Our main priority was for the DAM to integrate well into our whole suite of existing technology. So, for example:

Those were the major technologies that were must-haves. While other vendors offered some of the technology we needed, MediaValet had the full suite and was hands-down the easiest to use.”

What made you select MediaValet over alternative vendor options?

“We evaluated a ton of other vendors and had three or four demos. A lot of the other vendors that we looked at didn’t have the same capabilities that MediaValet had. MediaValet was comprehensive and user-friendly and blew other vendors out of the water for permissions, user groups, training, accessibility, assets, categories and so forth. MediaValet’s unlimited categories, users and user groups also played a huge role in our decision making.

We did look at a larger DAM vendor, but while they were able to meet some of our needs, they didn’t integrate with the technology we needed. As well, at a $170,000 price tag, it was a little excessive for our needs in higher education.

So, do you feel like within the first year the solution has paid off?

“Absolutely, hands down. MediaValet has more than paid for itself within the first year.”

Is there anything you’re able to do now that you couldn’t before?

“Sharing lightboxes has been a major addition – specifically, being able to create different lightboxes for each project. For example, we’re creating our 2020-2021 viewbook for the new recruits and sharing lightboxes is considerably easier than building and sharing a website.

MediaValet has been an amazing platform. I can’t believe that it took me this long to find it. It’s just been the perfect solution for us – especially with working from home during COVID. We’ve been able to share files much more efficiently – even more so than when we were working in the same space.”

Has MediaValet helped to set the University of Windsor up for business continuity while working from home?

“100%! It’s been immensely helpful to be able to share creative content for the different campaigns that were going out right before COVID. It’s something that would have been impossible if I was still using the external hard drives. We’re also not supposed to go to campus, so I would have had to take all the hard drives with me and store them in my home.”

What feedback have you heard from others about MediaValet?

“Everyone loves it and uses it every day for things like email campaigns, web content we’re creating, landing pages, PowerPoint presentations, webinars – you name it! They no longer ask me when something will need to be sent – it all just gets done seamlessly. It’s been incredibly useful for the whole team to find the photos they need.”

What are the next steps for digital asset management at the University of Windsor?

“Our next step is to branch it out further to not only new user groups but most likely different departments – I’d eventually like MediaValet to be used by the entire campus. I’m not sure when we’re going to do this, because we want to make sure that everyone is well-trained and comfortable with using the system, but so far, the platform has been a huge success! Everybody seems to really love and enjoy it.”

What do you think has contributed to the successful adoption of the platform?

“The unlimited training has been the best – hands down. It makes all our users truly understand the features and functionality available to them, rather than making them figure it out on their own. It’s ensured they’ve been able to adapt and feel confident in the system.”

Do you have any pieces of advice for others looking into DAM?

“I would spend a lot of time on understanding exactly how each individual is going to utilize the software and use that knowledge to build out your user groups and categories as much as possible. This helps give a full picture of what your library could look like. It’s so important to think about from the get-go.”