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Consumer Health Services Streamlining Digital Asset Management
Company Situation
The company is a large consumer health services company with a rapidly expanding marketing team, following the addition of a new CMO late last year. The core design team consists of eight internal designers, along with various contractors and remote workers spread across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. In addition to the design team, field employees at numerous physical centers and corporate staff (like HR) also need access to specific digital collateral. They conduct large, multi-day photo and video shoots quarterly, generating terabytes of raw content. The company's representative handles both design work and the management of their creative assets.
Existing Workflow
The team currently stores their raw footage locally on a 40-terabyte network RAID drive, which is now completely full. For working files and accessible content, they have been using MediaValet as their Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, housing about 2.5 terabytes of usable creative assets. They are coming to the end of a one-year contract with MediaValet and do not plan to renew. The design team uploads content to the DAM, while field centers and corporate staff access it strictly to download specific flyers, social media graphics, and printed collateral. They also frequently share selected B-roll and imagery with external ad agencies and UGC (User-Generated Content) creators.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
The primary issue is the sheer difficulty of organizing and sharing content. MediaValet has proven to be too rigid and cumbersome for the team's scale. The company finds it nearly impossible to easily select assets from multiple different categories or folders and share them as a single cohesive package with external vendors. Instead, they are forced to create redundant folders and duplicate files just to share them, leading to a disorganized library. Furthermore, restructuring the DAM taxonomy—such as moving parent and child folders to categorize content by solution type (restoration, transplant, replacement)—requires tedious, manual backend adjustments rather than simple drag-and-drop operations. Finally, because the local 40TB RAID is full, the IT department is installing a new 100TB local storage solution, forcing the team to be hyper-selective about what goes into the cloud DAM to avoid exorbitant storage costs and bogged-down performance.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade would replace MediaValet as the central, cloud-based hub for all usable creative assets. Instead of dealing with rigid folder structures, the design team could organize content logically by solution type or creative category. Shade's advanced permissioning and custom roles would allow the core team to upload and manage assets, while simultaneously providing restricted, view-only access to field centers and corporate staff. For external sharing, the team could easily select multiple assets across different folders and add them to a single branded Collection link, completely eliminating the need to duplicate files or create ad-hoc folders for ad agencies. Shade's AI tagging would also automatically categorize incoming shoot footage, saving the team hours of manual librarian work.
Benefits
- Streamlined External Sharing: The company can instantly curate and share specific assets with ad agencies and UGC creators using Collections, without disrupting the internal folder structure or duplicating files.
- Flexible Organization: The design team can easily reorganize their entire library by creative type or solution, using simple drag-and-drop functionality rather than complex backend settings.
- Granular Access Control: Shade allows the team to set precise permissions, ensuring that field centers and HR only see the final, approved collateral they need, while the core design team retains full access.
- Scalable Storage Integration: By utilizing Shade for the 4 to 5 terabytes of working files and keeping the massive raw files on their local 100TB storage, the team can optimize their cloud costs while maintaining lightning-fast streaming access to their active projects.