Two years ago, the advertising and marketing teams at Nissan were receiving as many as 200 asset-download and re-use requests per day from offices around the world. The team was overloaded and overwhelmed with support calls to manage inbound requests which prevented them from innovating or expanding on current processes.
The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance produces one in every nine cars sold around the world. Within the Alliance, the Nissan brand wanted better control of and visibility into its ad management process. Nissan needed to know where and when ads were being used and distributed, while also dealing with production costs and translation issues. A daunting task, to say the least.
“Here in the U.S. we were managing all of the global video assets, whether ingested from our own teams or agencies,” says Mark “Biz” Woodie, senior planner for the digital asset team at Infiniti. Nissan’s luxury vehicle division. “My team was so swamped with requests, overloaded with managing separate, incompatible DAM systems. We had such poor visibility into what was being used and downloaded.”
All this came at a time when Nissan was embarking on a three-year plan to drive growth across the company, including expanding into multiple global markets. Priority number one for Woodie and his team? “We had to be sure we could re-use assets produced in the U.S. by our agencies across the globe,” he notes.
A huge volume of huge files
Because of the sheer volume of ad content, they needed to ensure fast and secure file transfers could be executed globally. Nissan’s team engages daily with more than 200 media partners and thousands of agency and production teams around the world. They needed visibility and sharing permissions for all advertising assets.
Contained within these assets are multiformat videos including some created for social media, some 4K content, large multi-layered packaged files, and substantial files containing 3D models of vehicles. In addition to this massive load, the 3D models and vehicle specific files are shared for insertion into graphics files and video game content. The team needed the ability to manage global campaigns and the associated content across regions in an organized fashion.
They began looking for a solution that could facilitate exponential growth and increased use of large assets. “We needed a centralized, cloud-based server where we could collaborate with our agencies,” says Mark Winters, senior planner, global digital marketing at Nissan. The solution came from Adstream, which had solved similar asset management challenges for large brands such as Warner Brothers and Procter & Gamble.
At the time, the Adstream DAM solution needed to manage both the aforementioned file load along with restricted and unrestricted cross-media assets, 20 percent of which were under stringent royalty usage rights. “We were able to partner globally with the team at Nissan to push their ad processes, workflows and management into full throttle,” explains Ian Belzar, solutions development director at Adstream. “We needed to fulfill specific requirements around permissions and access rights. It was up to us to ensure all regional teams were optimizing DAM benefits for maximum agency engagement.”
Maximizing asset usage
For the automaker, there were four paramount goals: maximize the utilization of assets; reduce costs; increase reliability and boost efficient use of resources.
Nissan had already identified areas to repurpose content created in the U.S. for global use. Woodie explains, “By ensuring our advertising assets are being fully utilized by our marketing and sales teams worldwide—through the DNA (the custom name of the Adstream DAM solution) team—we are maximizing our ROI and our Adstream platform will pay for itself.”
Adstream and Nissan were able to reduce annual costs by consolidating the separate DNA and VG (Virtual Garage) platforms under the Adstream DAM umbrella. Overall system reliability improved as a by-product of having one company, Adstream, oversee system software and back-end server management within its highly secure platform. In the end, this has led to better use of human and capital resources as team members no longer have to deal with more than 200 requests per day.
Ultimately, streamlining the asset management process for Nissan led to increased brand safety and integrity. Many marketing teams of all sizes will ultimately face the same challenge: how to expand and maintain brand integrity. By implementing a custom workflow and content management process designed by Adstream, Nissan will not only protect its brand but will ensure cost savings.
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Morgan Martins is the marketing director for Adstream North America. A Strategic B2B marketer and highly creative leader, she brings over 15 years of experience in executing marketing and communications campaigns and strategies for Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, not-for-profit organizations and technology companies.
