Who is Highgate Hotels? 

Highgate Hotels is the industry-leading hotel management, investment, technology and development firm, with a diverse portfolio of hotels across North America, the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe.

With a 200+ person corporate team, and more than 500 properties, Highgate Hotels needed a central solution for its asset organization and distribution, instead they found software that improved efficiencies and improved the customer experience.

Darren McDaniel

Regional Marketing Manager, Highgate Hotels

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With a massive, global brand to support, Darren and his team had identified a significant challenge in efficiently distributing digital assets across the organization. There was a reliance on “the good old Dropbox application” that was creating inefficiencies and inhibiting the organization’s ability to scale.

Without metadata and unlimited users, there was an inability to efficiently distribute and manage digital content like images and rich media, and it was becoming a huge roadblock in scaling their digital asset library, and ultimately, connecting with the guest experience.

They needed a dedicated digital asset management system, so they turned to MediaValet.

Today, MediaValet is an integral tool for the marketing team at Highgate. It has allowed for a more effective way to manage and distribute digital content, including images and rich media, that surpasses the functionality they previously experienced with Dropbox.

Scaling the Digital Library

As the organization has been adding properties to its catalogue (5 – 6 in just the past year), it’s been crucial to have a system in place that can segment uploads and ensure they reach the right stakeholders quickly.

Improving Asset Quality

Darren’s team uses the DAM for organizing assets by property, sharing content with stakeholders, and leveraging user groups and permissions for better asset management.

The team has also made swifter decisions around asset quality and is using the system to enforce quality control on the assets being published.

Enabling External Access

Highgate Hotels is leveraging user groups to enable temporary users like influencers and photographers to upload content directly to the DAM – rather than using “twenty different applications to download and upload again”, the

It’s been innovative for content collaboration with influencers. By enabling direct asset uploads to the DAM system, the team can manage and quality control content with ease.

So far, the team at Highgate has achieved massive ROI from the following features:

Branded Portals

Branded Portals have been a significant part of theHighgate DAM strategy. Allowing for the creation of customized, branded mini libraries where specific assets can be shared with external partners has made it easier to distribute assets in a controlled and professional manner.

User Groups and Permissions

The use of user groups and permissions is a key feature for internal asset management and allows Highgate Hotels to segment asset access based on departmental or team needs, ensuring that users have access to relevant assets without being overwhelmed by unrelated content.

Direct Upload Capabilities for Influencers

When it comes to collaborating with influencers and photographers, Darren’s team has enabled them to upload assets directly to the DAM, streamlining the content collection process and improving the efficiency of acquiring high-quality assets for marketing purposes.

Darren’s team has used MediaValet to mediate their distribution inefficiencies and enable better collaboration and content collection with external contributors. But how has this impacted the business?

The adoption of MediaValet by Highgate Hotels has led to transformative results, fundamentally changing the way the organization manages and distributes its digital assets, with impactful improvements in operational efficiency and marketing strategies

Streamlined Asset Distribution
One of the most significant results has been the dramatic improvement in the efficiency of asset distribution. With MediaValet, Highgate Hotels has moved beyond the limitations of Dropbox to a more sophisticated and effective system.

“The biggest draw for MediaValet was in the efficiencies we found,” Darren said. “We were grappling with the limitations of traditional file sharing solutions,” so this efficiency has facilitated faster, more reliable access to assets across the organization, enabling quicker responses to marketing and operational needs.

Enhanced Collaboration and Productivity

MediaValet has fostered better collaboration within teams and with external partners. Branded Portals and direct upload capabilities have been particularly beneficial, allowing Highgate Hotels to work seamlessly with influencers, photographers, and other content creators.

This collaborative approach has streamlined the content collection process, reducing the time and effort required to manage incoming assets. Darren highlighted how this feature “allows us to get those assets in there really quickly,” underscoring the productivity gains achieved.

Scalability and Growth Support

As Highgate Hotels continues to grow, MediaValet has proven to be a scalable solution that supports the organization’s expanding needs. The addition of new properties and the corresponding increase in digital assets have been seamlessly accommodated by the DAM.

Darren’s account of the system’s role in “growing the database” and “distributing content more efficiently” speaks to MediaValet’s capacity to support Highgate Hotels’ dynamic growth trajectory.

Enhanced Guest Experience Through Rich Media

Ultimately, the use of MediaValet has enabled Highgate Hotels to connect more effectively with its guests through rich media content.

By efficiently managing and distributing high-quality images, videos, and other digital assets, Highgate has been able to enhance its marketing campaigns, providing a more engaging and immersive experience for potential guests. “It’s been an elevated experience for us,” Darren shared.

The DAM system enabled Highgate to scale rapidly, manage a growing digital asset library, and distribute content more efficiently. The use of portals and user groups has streamlined the asset management process, making it easier for internal and external teams to access and use digital content.

This efficiency has directly supported Highgate Hotels’ goals of enhancing the guest experience and expanding their market reach.

Who is Air North? 

Air North is a Canadian airline that offers passenger, cargo, and charter flights between twelve locations across Yukon and Western Canada. As a main driver of socio-economic development in the North, it employs over 335 staff in Yukon, as well as 120 staff in Vancouver and across other Southern destinations.

The Challenge

Air North was using various file management systems, internal servers and personal computers to manage 40 years of photos and videos. This not only created issues around discovering content, it also made it difficult to share up-to-date assets across remote workers, the media and its affiliate magazine, North of Ordinary. With an expanding team and a record year for sales, Air North needed to find a system that would better manage its valuable assets. They began to search for a DAM that could:

The Solution

With unlimited users and support, as well as an easy-to-use platform, MediaValet was the clear choice for Air North’s team. With worldwide data centers, MediaValet allowed Air North’s users, partners and affiliates to quickly access the assets they need, while enabling photographers to seamlessly upload photoshoots to the library from remote locations.

The Results

After implementing MediaValet, Air North has experienced improvements to how internal and external users upload, access and use their assets. Specifically, they’ve seen:

Who is A&W Canada? 

A&W Canada is Canada’s original and fastest-growing quick-service burger chain. It is 100 percent Canadian-owned and is one of the strongest brand names in the Canadian food service industry. A&W is the nation’s second largest hamburger chain with more than 950 locations coast-to-coast. A&W has been a customer of MediaValet since 2016.

Before becoming a user of MediaValet, A&W was experiencing inefficiencies in managing its branded assets across departments, franchisees, and with its creative agency, Rethink. With all campaign assets and product images stored in a database hosted by Rethink, it made for a lengthy asset request process. Other brand materials and logos were stored in A&W’s internal library, which lacked the ability to prevent their teams and franchisees from adding, deleting or accessing unapproved assets. For a brand as large and recognized as A&W, it’s important to preserve the integrity of branded assets.

With rapid growth of new locations and industry-leading innovation, A&W has strong brand positioning. To best support the brand, A&W needed a more reliable storage solution for branded assets that could be accessed by various internal and external partners efficiently.

With the help of Rethink, A&W began their search for a digital asset management solution. They needed a DAM that could:

With in-depth knowledge and expertise in the digital asset management field, MediaValet was the perfect fit to help A&W congregate their assets, implement asset tagging best practices, and organize its new library for long-term success. With unlimited onboarding and training with a dedicated customer success manager, A&W was impressed with the level of service that MediaValet provides their customers. They were confident that the MediaValet team could ensure high adoption among their partners and franchisees.

How They Use MediaValet Today

With MediaValet’s intuitive platform, A&W can onboard and train multiple departments, partners and franchisees with ease. Today, their library empowers A&W to address:

Brand Management

A&W’s new library provides a safe, single-source-of-truth for their brand and creative assets. Today, each asset is uploaded once in a high-resolution format and MediaValet’s in-system file rendering allows users to download the assets into various sizes and formats, such as JPGs, PNGs and MP4s. Multiple internal teams can instantly access the logos, product images and other materials they need to build on-brand prints, presentations, and more.

Agency Collaboration

A&W provides external partners, like their creative agency and menu board creators, with access to specific library categories, so they can build content using colour-corrected, up-to-date product images. A&W’s account managers at Rethink upload final artwork directly into A&W’s MediaValet library, granting the marketing team instant access to files.

Franchisee Enablement

A&W uses their library to connect their franchisees with the assets they need and improve the quality of locally-created promotions. With the ability to browse through pre-defined categories, franchisees have instant access to a broad set of marketing materials to build their promotions.

Moving Forward with DAM

With their new MediaValet library, everyone has easy access to the content they need, with the appropriate controls to prevent the unapproved use, deletion and manipulation of assets. A&W has eliminated their shared drive completely and now hosts everything in the cloud, where only select administrators have the power to delete and add new categories or assets.

Who is Brand USA? 

With 800 partners worldwide, Brand USA is a destination marketing organization focused on promoting the United States as a premier travel destination and improving its share of the global travel market.

The Challenge

With a changing tourism market, Brand USA’s marketing team developed a new strategy to better engage tourists and showcase destinations across the United States. This approach introduced a digital plan that included new websites, an updated visual identity and an increased focus on partner-generated media content. To facilitate the upcoming increase in content production, Brand USA needed a system that could enable its partners and integrate into its existing marketing technology stack.

The company needed a DAM that would:

The Solution

After evaluating top vendors, Brand USA selected MediaValet to host its 50 TBs of content. With custom-built online forms to manage and track Brand USA’s partner content donations and asset usage, MediaValet provided Brand USA’s marketing team with the functionality they needed to create engaging content while ensuring their entire collection of visual assets remained secure. Leveraging MediaValet’s Drupal integration also allowed the marketing team to quickly build and update webpages using approved images and videos from their library.

The Results

After implementing MediaValet, Brand USA’s team has streamlined content production and increased efficiency. Specifically, they’ve: