Schulich School of Business

The Challenges

A Siloed Organization

Schulich School of Business operates in one of the most decentralized environments imaginable; a large business faculty within a major university, where every department has its own staff and its own workflows.  

Every department had its own copy of the Schulich logo. Every team stored its own headshots of faculty and leadership. Assets lived across SharePoint sites, Google Photos, local drives, and Dropbox. There was no consistent taxonomy, no version control, and no way to ensure that the right assets were being used across the organization. 

This wasn’t just an operational inconvenience; it was a direct threat to the brand refresh project the marketing team were delivering. 

Compounding the challenge was the nature of the audience. Many department leads are long-tenured academics with established ways of working — not naturally inclined to adopt new platforms, and measured against metrics entirely different from the marketing team’s. Getting buy-in wasn’t just a technology challenge; it was a change management exercise. 

The Use Case

Centralized Content for a Decentralized Institution 

Schulich implemented MediaValet in January of 2025 as the cornerstone of its brand standardization effort. Rather than trying to overhaul everything at once, the team worked department-by-department. They started by identifying champions, demonstrating quick wins, and building adoption incrementally. 

Centralizing Brand Assets Across Departments 

The most immediate impact was bringing logos, brand guidelines, faculty headshots, and creative assets into a single, governed location. Departments that had previously maintained their own copies of core brand assets could now access the approved, current versions directly from the DAM, eliminating the version control issues that had made the brand refresh so difficult to begin. 

Marketing team members reported a measurable drop in inbound requests asking for logos, headshots, and other common assets giving them back time for higher-value work. 

Empowering Creative and Production Teams 

Schulich’s internal design and video production teams were among the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. Using MediaValet’s Smart Search, they can now find B-roll footage by color, text, or by the people featured in the video, without having to contact the marketing team or dig through shared drives. Raw creative files from external agencies are also stored in the DAM, meaning teams can make minor edits independently without going back to the agency for small changes. 

Alumni Engagement Through Face Recognition 

The alumni team (Schulich’s largest department) became one of the most impactful use cases. A core part of their strategy involves hosting events, photographing alumni, and following up with personalized communications and photos. MediaValet’s AI-powered Face Recognition transformed this workflow, allowing the team to quickly identify and surface images of specific individuals across large event photo libraries without any manual sorting. 

Face Recognition for Personalized Alumni Relations 

Schulich uses MediaValet’s Face Recognition to support its alumni engagement strategy. After events, the alumni team can rapidly identify and retrieve photos of specific individuals, enabling faster, more personalized follow-up communications that strengthen donor and alumni relationships. 

Smart Search for Faster Content Discovery 

MediaValet’s AI-powered Smart Search has become a go-to tool for Schulich’s creative and video production teams. The ability to search by visual content like color, on-screen text, or people, means teams can find the right asset in seconds rather than hours, without relying on the marketing team as an intermediary. 

AI as a Change Management Tool 

At Schulich, beyond the practical time savings, AI features played a crucial role in driving adoption. For departments accustomed to legacy workflows, being able to demonstrate capabilities that simply weren’t possible in SharePoint or Dropbox gave the marketing team a compelling reason for others to make the switch. 

The Results

A Truly Collaborative System

Fewer interruptions for the marketing team. Centralizing brand assets dramatically reduced the volume of inbound requests asking for logos, headshots, and common files; freeing the team to focus on the brand refresh and higher-value work. 

Alumni team unlocked new engagement capabilities. Face Recognition enabled a faster, more personalized post-event communications workflow that wouldn’t have been possible with their previous tools. 

Creative teams became self-sufficient. Designers and video producers now source assets, B-roll, and agency deliverables directly from the DAM, massively reducing dependency on the marketing team and speeding up production. 

Impressive adoption. Measuring adoption of the DAM at Schulich goes beyond login data. They track asset views, uploads, and downloads by department using MediaValet’s analytics, segmented by user group and pairs that quantitative data with regular qualitative check-ins with department leads 

Unexpected cultural benefit. Perhaps most meaningfully, the process of implementing the DAM together became Schulich’s first real cross-departmental collaboration, breaking down silos and building relationships between teams that had previously operated in isolation. 

Next Steps

Scaling Success Across Schulich School of Business

Schulich is continuing to mature its DAM implementation as the brand refresh progresses. With more departments coming on board and the platform becoming increasingly embedded in day-to-day workflows, the team is focused on deeper adoption, improved taxonomy governance, and exploring additional MediaValet capabilities as they become available. 

If you’re interested in how MediaValet could help your team, reach out today! 

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