A&W Canada

See how A&W uses MediaValet to maintain brand consistency and make assets available to their 863 franchises.
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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.

The Challenges

Before DAM

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.

The Use Case

Finding a Solution

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

  • Improve brand consistency, enabling all users with on-brand, color-corrected assets that are relevant to their job and location.
  • Reduce administrative tasks, allowing the marketing team to focus on innovation and growing guest visits.
  • Expand access and security, offering a multi-level permission structure for various departments and partners.
  • Preserve the history of creative assets, effectively storing all marketing material without any risk of unapproved access.

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.

  • We needed to find a DAM that would give our team broad access, with high sophistication and security. MediaValet’s dedication to privacy and security, along with their commitment to customer success, made them stand out as the best solution for A&W.” 
    Amy Bears
    Assistant Manager, Direct Marketing at A&W Canada

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.

  • Since implementing MediaValet, we’ve been able to expand into more teams than initially planned. When someone is attending a conference or building a presentation, they can go right into the library and grab the logos or material they need. Folks in marketing, development, and design have all made use of MediaValet.” 

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.

  • Before implementing MediaValet, when a franchisee needed to build their own local promotions, a member of marketing would need to manually send them the assets they needed. Now, we simply create a user account for each franchisee, saving time and giving them instant access to the right logo, the right food photography and the right brand statement.” 

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.

  • MediaValet has dramatically improved the way we work with our creative agency and franchisees. Now that everyone has instant access to the assets they need, we can spend less time on administrative tasks and focus more on developing innovative menu items, advertisements and initiatives for the A&W brand.” 

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