Who is SONOS? 

Considered as the pioneers of wireless audio, SONOS wireless speakers bring every room and everyone together with incredible sound for music, TV, and more. Retailing across 60+ countries, SONOS works with a bold vision for the future of home sound and has invented the technology needed to make it a reality.

Matthew Lawson

Global Marketing Operations Specialist, SONOS

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Originally, Sonos was using a third-party creative production company’s asset library as a makeshift DAM, which was insufficient for their growing needs.

Sonos had to rely on another party for asset management, leading to complicated processes for asset search and access and incrementally increasing costs.

The system in place had poor search capabilities, and without a central, accessible library it was leading to duplicated and outdated assets. Additionally, the old system had weak security controls which was creating unnecessary vulnerabilities for the organizations’ sensitive, unreleased product information.

The team wanted a dedicated DAM system that could enable true ownership and control of their asset library, and they found MediaValet.

Since implementing MediaValet, the team at SONOS has used it as a central source of truth. The repository serves the entire global organization with all go-to-market assets, ensuring all materials, from product renders to videos to retail guidelines, are centrally stored and updated, and more importantly – easy to access.

Basically, everything that can even relate to one asset or a seasonal campaign is hosted in the library.

It’s enabled the organization in multiple ways:

Archiving outdated assets: With the old system in place the team was grappling with constant duplications leading to a bloated library that was incredibly difficult to search. Of the 20,000 assets migrated to MediaValet, 80% were archived. Splitting the library into hot and cold storage has enabled the team to save a LOT of time finding what they actually need.

Enhancing collaboration between internal and external stakeholders: SONOS currently has 5,000 users on their MediaValet DAM, and despite being a huge operation, the platform has facilitated collaboration across different teams and external partners.

With controlled access to the necessary assets the team has maintained visibility and security without compromising on distribution and collaboration with the numerous external partners, and agencies they work with.

Amplifying brand consistency: SONOS is a global brand and with that comes high pressure to ensure true consistency. The MediaValet DAM is an essential tool in ensuring up-to-date, approved assets go live, across the company’s wide-spread markets.

The team at SONOS uses the DAM to control access and permissions, version control, and can prevent unauthorized access to or publishing of sensitive or unready materials.

Expiry dates for brand protection: The team has incorporated licensing, expiration dates, use terms directly into the metadata of their assets, facilitating detailed tracking of asset usage, which is crucial for compliance and cost management.

With their DAM taxonomy set up, an expired asset can’t even be downloaded so it cannot be distributed. This saves the organization from inadvertently breaking licensing agreements or contracts.

User groups for global access: SONOS has a lot of regional products and campaigns across North America, the EU region, Southeast Asia and newer growth markets. By locally applying custom user groups and permissions they have enabled different partners and agencies without losing the bird’s eye view of their operations.

Lightboxes for project organization: Lightboxes within the DAM enable teams around the world to organize, share, and manipulate assets and projects in their own way, without affecting the main asset library.

Working in smaller spaces, teams can access everything they need and collaborate on projects however suits them best.

Since moving away from traditional file sharing systems like Box and Google Drive, SONOS has been able to wrangle their asset library into something incredibly accessible yet secure.

As a retail giant, ensuring their brand remains protected yet amplified is a fine line to tread but with MediaValet, they’ve managed to achieve true asset control.

Their MediaValet DAM has enabled:

Streamlined asset access and sharing: The implementation of MediaValet has significantly simplified the process of sharing digital assets among teams and with external partners, reducing dependency on manual sharing methods like email.

Self-serve on a global scale: The DAM has enabled teams outside of the US continue their work without relying on teams based in different time zones.

Improved operational efficiency: With better asset tracking, intuitive metadata and attributes, and a central system, Sonos has enhanced its ability to manage and utilize digital assets effectively, leading to more streamlined operations and better control over asset distribution.

Stronger brand protections: As the organization really began to prioritize security, MediaValet has helped to support their needs. Single sign-on integration with Okta means internal employees have secure access, and custom user group permissions mean that external stakeholders can only access required assets.

Interested in how a MediaValet DAM could help your organization? Reach out to a rep today to learn more!

Who is Razer? 

With a fan base on every continent, Razer is the world’s leading lifestyle brand for gamers, offering hardware, software and services to give gamers an edge over the competition, and coining the tagline “For Gamers. By Gamers.”

The Challenge

Razer was facing challenges managing photos and videos on their legacy storage solution. It couldn’t scale to meet their expanding global distribution network and made it difficult for Razer’s worldwide marketing team to collaborate efficiently. With a global footprint across 15 offices, Razer needed a better way to manage their digital assets. They wanted a system that would:

The Solution

After a thorough evaluation involving multiple DAM vendors, it was clear to Razer that MediaValet best aligned with their goals and functionality needs. With unlimited users, flexible permissions and worldwide data centers, MediaValet was able to address Razer’s global footprint and give employees, partners and retailers secure access to the assets they need to set up Razer products in retail and etail.

MediaValet’s ability to customize the platform’s look and feel, as well as comprehensive integrations into a wide spread of business tools, such as Hootsuite and Wordpress, also allowed Razer to easily integrate its new enterprise DAM, without making drastic changes to employee workflow.

The Results

After implementing MediaValet, Razer has seen benefits to their marketing programs, including:

Who is BaseCamp Franchising? 

BaseCamp Franchising is a U.S.-based company headquartered in North Salt Lake, Utah, operating two upscale resale clothing brands: Kid to Kid and Uptown Cheapskate. With over 225 locations across 30 U.S. states and internationally, the company specializes in sustainable fashion retail through franchising.

Amy Logreen

Marketing Director, BaseCamp Franchising

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How does a single marketing team create and distribute 4000+ campaign assets to over 200 franchisees – all while adjusting to a temporary 90% reduction of staff? This is the question we had for Amy Lofgreen, Marketing Director at BaseCamp Franchising.

In October 2019, Amy helped the BaseCamp marketing team find and implement a digital asset management system to help them with ongoing challenges with its franchisees. Little did they know how indispensable the system would be in March 2020, when a global pandemic was announced. This interview shares her story.

To start us off, can you tell us a bit about BaseCamp Franchising?

“Of course! We’re a franchise of about 200 resell retail stores. We have a young adult brand, Uptown Cheapskate, and also a children’s brand, Kid to Kid.

We always do what we can to help the customer, as well as our franchisees, have the best experience they can with our stores. A challenge with some resellers is that you have to go through 20 things before you find something great. We provide training to all of the people buying products to resell in our stores so that what you’ll find on the racks is actually something in-season that you would find in a store right now. It’s a very sustainable business that keeps all the money local. We’re really proud of what we do, and how we help communities and the environment.”

We’re always curious, what initially caused you to start evaluating the marketing team’s tech stack?

“It was maybe a year and a half before I moved to the marketing department, and I vividly remember how it happened!

The executive team was sharing their concerns with me about the marketing team. We have always had a really good group of people on our marketing team, but there had been frequent mistakes – things like the wrong phone number, the wrong image, etc. – but with 200 stores and 2 brands it’s bound to happen. After evaluating the situation, it was clear that the problem wasn’t with the people, but rather the system they were using – we, as a leadership team, were failing them, not the other way around. We knew we had to get the marketing team a better solution.

I set out to find a few alternative products and solutions to our challenge, before handing it off to one of our Marketing leaders to make a selection. After vetting a few products, they ultimately decided on Wrike. So, long before I was on the marketing team, they adopted Wrike and a lot of the pain points that they had diminished during that time.

In the future, we knew that our DAM would need to connect to Wrike – we wanted to build connections, not just another barrier that we’d have to hurdle over.”

So, now that you had Wrike in place, why was MediaValet added to your tech stack?

“While Wrike was able to help, the franchisees felt they didn’t have enough assets for the many posts and advertisements they were making monthly. They needed to jump through a ton of hoops to get their marketing needs met.

The largest stumble that we continued to have was that while we were creating great assets, the franchisees didn’t even know they were there to use. We invested in creating beautiful content, yet off-brand content was still being produced by franchisees – not because they wanted to break brand standards, but because they needed to get the information out to the customer quickly. The goal of our DAM project was for the marketing team to become more franchisee-centric, and to do it incredibly quickly so the franchisees weren’t waiting a year or longer for things to get better. This was the major keystone of the project.

What I didn’t realize though, was how many hours were being spent by my team just trying to find assets. I assumed they knew where everything was, but quickly realized that there was only one person that actually had our server memorized. As a result, she was relied on to answer everyone’s questions about where assets were. Now, once any set of assets are added to our DAM, she’s never asked for those assets ever again.

The extra time we got back from implementing a DAM has created more bandwidth of my team to get to all sorts of projects done that were unfeasible before. We were so optimistic about what we were going to achieve in 2020…and then COVID hit.”

How has MediaValet helped you during the crisis?

“February was our annual meeting, so between October and February, I wanted to make sure that we could have MediaValet up and running quickly. Little did we know what was coming our way. We were so thankful that MediaValet was completely functional as March 11th, 2020 rolled around.

They announced a pandemic on March 12th, and I informed the team that everyone was going to be working late that day. I could see that stores are going to be closing at a fast rate, and if they weren’t closing, we would need to change everything we were doing. Resell is not an industry where people will feel confident if they feel like germs are floating about – and we were very sensitive to that.

So, that day, we created a Branded Portal containing 60+ newly-created assets for counter displays, standing displays, new store hours – anything the 200 franchisees would need. And before we even left that night, our franchisees were already printing and using the new signs in their stores – this would have never been possible without MediaValet. I get really emotional, because it’s a time when you really need to support your franchisees, and thanks to MediaValet, we were able to be there for them.

Before the crisis, my team would work 530 hours per week, and when COVID hit, our hours were drastically reduced to 53, due to reduced sales and the overall economic environment. Despite this, I still needed to get a new Q2 and Q3 for two brands out, as well as create both closing and reopening kits. The challenge with these kits was that we weren’t entirely sure when the stores would re-open – would we be using summer or fall images? As a result, we had to make multiple kits so they would be relevant in warm weather or cooler weather.

So, during that time, we created assets that would normally take up about three quarters of a normal year for two brands (which was about 4000 assets), on our reduced schedule. Miraculously, we were able to hit our deadline for Q3 and complete our reopen kits nine hours before the first store even asked for them. That would have been completely impossible without MediaValet.”

Have you experienced anything unexpected?

“I wasn’t expecting the amount of praise and positive feedback we’ve received from our franchisees during this time. Their vision of marketing has changed significantly now that they feel they’re supported with the assets they need to be successful. They continually express that our marketing standards have increased significantly. In reality, our marketing team isn’t creating better work – MediaValet is just showcasing the amazing marketing they were already creating.

The franchisees used to not trust marketing. Now, on an almost-daily basis, they’re praising me and my team. MediaValet has completely changed the relationship between our franchisees and the marketing team.”

So, what’s the next step for BaseCamp and digital asset management?

“We’re going to be re-doing our internal website, which is clunky and hard-to-search, and moving everything our franchisees need, including documents, over to our DAM. Specifically, we’ll be using Branded Portals to curate content for franchisees from each department. I’m hoping the old site will be gone before 2021!

Another feature that’s been picked up by our franchisees is the new cropping tool. I upload every asset from our photoshoots, which aren’t always social-media-ready, but our franchisees post multiple times a day and need quick, continual access to photos. I’ve created a cropping template for every element of social media (for example, Instagram posts and stories), and then they can easily create their own social media posts in optimal sizes.

The last thing I’m working on is getting my creative team onboarded. They’re currently working on servers, which can – and have – crashed, leaving links broken and designs unsaved.”

Ok last question, any pieces of advice you’d like to give to others looking into DAM?

“We implemented multiple technologies at the same time as MediaValet, and MediaValet was head-and-shoulders above the rest when it came to onboarding. In fact, when COVID came around in early March, MediaValet was the only one that was ready to go. Everyone says that they provide white-glove service, but MediaValet actually does it.

I’ll admit, I’ve set-up platforms before, so I really didn’t think I’d need much help, but I’m so happy I took advantage of MediaValet’s onboarding. My Customer Success Manager walked me through the onboarding process and got us from point A to point Z without the blink of an eye or any sense of frustration.

My rep was so patient with me and helped me rethink how I should set things up so it would work for each franchisee. Some franchisees owned multiple stores in both brands, so we had to come up with a unique way to set up permissions for each person. My Customer Success Manager did all the hard work and trained me and the team. It’s so easy now because we got it right the first time.”