DAM New York 2022

All marketing materials in one central location:
Beiersdorf relies on a digital asset management system

Photos, videos, animations, and graphics: marketing departments have to manage a large number of promotional materials. And that number grows with every new product, with every new campaign, and with every new market. Storing this volume of data locally is unthinkable—especially for companies with global operations. That’s why Beiersdorf uses a digital asset management (DAM) system called Sharedien. Hosted in Azure, it ensures that marketing teams and all participating agencies worldwide have fast access. It eliminates the laborious search for materials—saving valuable time for everyone involved.

The challenge: Ensuring enough power and performance for growing data volumes

When you think of marketing, you probably have big campaigns in mind: maybe TV commercials featuring testimonials that get broadcast for months. Or poster campaigns that elaborately showcase new products and models. Or perhaps online advertising with banners that display a claim in large type. In other words, creative output in a wide variety of formats. But what you don’t think about right away is how all this data needs to be managed. But that can quickly become a decisive factor in the efficiency of the entire department—especially in large companies.

As the global market leader for skin care products, Beiersdorf is very active in marketing—and now in 60 markets worldwide. “We operate in a very customer-focused segment. Without optimal marketing, nothing will work. Consumers themselves want an experience that’s tailored to the individual. As a result, there’s a clear competitive advantage to be had from making the right use of marketing materials,” says Jasmin Quellmann, Head of Marketing Process Automation at Beiersdorf. The company is trusting her team to drive the optimization of its marketing processes with the help of new technologies. Beiersdorf’s broad international presence means it generates plenty of assets: the company’s in-house studio alone produces 3,000 images each year, on top of images from agencies and assets in a wide variety of formats—from TV commercials to graphics for e-commerce—and materials from previous campaigns. With that kind of range, asset management becomes a critical factor for implementation. To always have the right assets at hand, those assets have to be permanently available and easy to find.

That’s why Beiersdorf has relied on Sharedien by Advellence as its digital asset management system since 2012. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Advellence specializes in data integration; it set the solution up for Beiersdorf, among others. A lot has happened since 2012: “We’ve partnered with Advellence to refine Sharedien over the years,” Quellmann says. While Advellence fine-tunes the technical optimization of the solution, Beiersdorf’s marketers provide creative input from their perspective. “What we’re doing is bringing the manufacturer’s and the user’s point of view together, which enables us to refine our software in close cooperation with its users,” says Tobias Moser, Head of Sharedien. This collaboration has resulted in needs-based development of Sharedien, which was hosted on-premises in the early years. Now, in the face of an increase in parallel requests, it was time to make the move into the cloud.

The solution: A cloud-based digital asset management system as a central content hub

In 2017, Advellence completely redeveloped Sharedien and moved its infrastructure to the Azure cloud platform. There, Advellence can flexibly manage vast numbers of assets for Beiersdorf: “Sharedien is the fastest DAM tool on the market. Since it sits in the cloud, we can grow it absolutely in line with requirements. Hassle-free scaling with no effect on performance is a crucial point here,” Moser says. At the moment, the Beiersdorf DAM has a capacity of 30 TB. And Sharedien’s scalable architecture means there’s nothing standing in the way of further growth. It makes use of Azure Blob Storage. This is optimized for storing and accessing a wide variety of data.

Beiersdorf currently manages around 650,000 assets on Sharedien. Including files in different resolutions and file formats, that number quickly reaches more than a million. “There’s simply no way we could go back to decentralized storage at individual sites. In the past, we would sometimes save data on hard drives and then pass it on to the right colleagues,” Quellmann says, “but with Sharedien in the cloud, we can make sure all the assets created are stored in a centralized and organized way—and we can reuse them across channels and countries.” For real-time searches of even the largest data volumes, Sharedien relies on Elastic in Azure.

Sharedien has developed over time and is now the central content hub for marketing at Beiersdorf, including for the maintenance of image rights. Agencies connect to it to upload and download their assets, and the same goes for the company’s in-house studio. This simplifies the transmission of large files, such as TV commercials. The tool now has 9,000 users at Beiersdorf, including around 1,000 from agencies. Marketing enjoys additional support in the form of other smart features, such as constant monitoring of the solution’s performance using Azure Monitoring and automatic conversion of TTIF files to JPEGs during upload. In addition to providing data storage and a search functionality, since 2021 Sharedien has also hosted what are known as workspaces for projects: all a project’s participants are invited there to receive briefings, store the assets they produce, and also approve them.

Ever since the launch, Quellmann and Moser have received very positive feedback from marketing. “We’re freeing up more time for our employees to spend on creative activities—time they would otherwise have spent looking for assets—and they’re delighted,” Quellmann says. What’s more, the DAM system creates transparency: all markets have access to the key assets, while global marketing retains control through the central repository. In addition, Quellmann and her colleagues in marketing benefit in particular from the upswing in process efficiency: “Marketers don’t care much about data, but they do care about assets—and with those assets now stored in one place, they can quickly find what they’re looking for.”

Beiersdorf plans further automation of marketing processes

There are plans to expand the tool further. One approach will be to further integrate artificial intelligence (AI). This already provides smart suggestions for tags; in the future, it should be possible, say, to display matching assets with similar content to a given image. Another idea is to automatically integrate product copy into the images from a shoot—but customized per market. AI is also expected to help with the integration of new assets on Beiersdorf’s channels. “My passion is automation—and we want to put it to work in marketing. In the future, we aim to greatly expand the automated coordination system already in place with Sharedien,” Quellmann says. In this way, Beiersdorf will pave the way for a tailored user experience with a content hub as the central repository for all assets—and lay the foundation for further success in the company’s marketing.