Widen: A Data Driven Approach to DAM

Digital data is growing at an exponential rate today, giving organizations challenges that goes beyond just managing them. The problem lies in organizations having multiple copies and versions of the same content stored in various places, making it difficult to manage and retrieve it on request. Headquartered in Madison, WI, Widen offers a Cloud-based SaaS Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that can overcome these challenges by simplifying content creation, review, distribution, and analysis from a central hub.

Widen’s flagship product—the Widen Collective—brings together all the customer images, videos and creative files in a single platform, allowing users to easily upload, find, download, review, and share the documents. As a highly-configurable and flexible solution, the Widen Collective is designed for marketing and creative teams of any size to streamline their workflows. “Widen is built on a foundation of practical functionality, innovation, and skillful expertise,” says Matthew Gonnering, CEO, Widen. The solution goes beyond a media library to ensure accessibility and delivery of the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

The solution allows clients to give their site a personalized brand experience while controlling access with user roles and permission levels.

The customers can automatically resize and crop digital assets and paste it into any web page for seamlessly publishing contents across the web. Moreover, the solution allows seamless data-driven decision making with real-time analytics. It provides seamless visibility into asset performance, help see when and how visitors engage with assets, and also identifies the websites that use the client’s digital assets. With Widen’s on-the-fly conversion feature, customers can also manage one master high-resolution (hi-res) file in the DAM and then convert it to the correct format for each dealer. The company leverages the power of Amazon Web Services for effective, global delivery of content of all sizes.

Widen's history of delivering easy-to-use and cost-effective DAM solutions goes back to 1948; assisting firms seamlessly store, search, and share their digital content. One of their client, Poly-Wood, a manufacturer of outdoor furniture, had multiple copies and versions of images stored in various places. Many of the firm’s dealers had different dimension and format requirements for images. Widen assisted Ply-Wood by providing a central source for storing for all of their assets with search functionality, allowing entire organization to type in any commonly thought of terms, like style, color, material, and SKU number, to search for assets. Also, it allowed delivering files in the correct format and size for Ply-Wood’s international dealer network that has different delivery requirements.

Widen maintains out-of-the-box integrations to other systems with WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Salesforce, and Adobe Creative Cloud integrations. With the powerful support during all stages of DAM migration, the company plans to further simplify the paradigm of digital asset management for businesses in the days to come.