XINET - Digital Asset Management: Customer Case Studies

THE MARKETING STORE BOLSTERS CREATIVITY AND CUSTOMER SERVICE WITH XINET WEBNATIVE SUITE

The Marketing Store is one of the largest privately-held integrated marketing communications companies in the world, with more than 800 employees in 12 offices worldwide.

Steve Dennis
The Marketing Store

As Senior Vice President – Creative Services, Steve Dennis oversees the department that brings to life the creative teams’ ideas, with responsibilities that include overseeing the studio, print production, and project management agency-wide. Dennis’ prior experience with Xinet’s digital asset management (DAM) system at Foote, Cone & Belding convinced him to implement Xinet^® WebNative^® Suite in 2004 at the Marketing Store. It was so successful internally that the organization was able to commercialize it as a value-added tool called checkout^TMS.

Prior to installing WebNative Suite, The Marketing Store experienced the common frustrations and inefficiencies familiar to agencies that don’t use DAM systems. For example, Dennis and his studio manager frequently received requests from account executives looking for logos, case studies, or other assets that could easily have been located, had a DAM system already been in place. After providing internal agency training to bring the team up-to-speed on how WebNative Suite worked, it was rolled out agency wide.

WebNative Suite is not only used on the production side, but also by creatives and account executives who may need to access the assets locally or off-site, at any time of day or night. With WebNative Suite, The Marketing Store was able to save the equivalent of two full time employees and the agency’s productivity and utilization are at all time highs.

“Xinet WebNative is the sizzle. We train all of our agency employees on it and teach them to use it to communicate with their clients. We recently had one instance where we created a custom volume for a project one of our account executives was working on with her client. The account executive received an e-mail from the client about how thrilled they were that we offered this service; the client had no idea that we had the ability to share documents that they can see visually,” said Dennis.

Since the Xinet installation proved to be a success within the agency, The Marketing

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Store commercialized the system as “checkout^TMS ,” a service for clients. The Marketing Store has centralized all of their digital assets from around the world on a central server located in Chicago, and are in the process of rolling out checkout^TMS globally so that each office where content is created will have local access to gain the production benefits of the system.

Not only has the solution proved to be an invaluable internal tool, but it has morphed into a product/service that The Marketing Store provides for its clients. During the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, The Marketing Store successfully hosted all of McDonald’s Beijing Olympics’ assets. It was a McDonald’s global initiative to distribute all of their Beijing assets and they chose to use checkout^TMS as the vehicle for this purpose. This included more than 400 gigabytes of data downloaded from five continents, 40 countries, multiple agencies and multiple printers – an ideal solution for Global Brand Guardianship. “checkout^TMS is the backbone to our relationship with clients. We are making it a point to tell clients this is how we work, and that it is a way for them to have 24/7 access to all of the creative assets that we create on their behalf,” said Dennis.

“I’m thrilled with the WebNative Suite. I think it’s a perfect solution for the agency business. We’ve been using it for quite a while now and it’s been very successful for us. The account executives and creatives love WebNative, but I also love the backend and all the production benefits we get. It’s a great pragmatic solution that delivers real results,” Dennis summarized.