Every year, we recognize Customer and Alliance Partners who use our solutions to drive marketing excellence at their respective companies and in the Aprimo community with the Aprimo Excellence (APEX) award. This blog series highlights past APEX award winners and where they are now.
DAM Is Good for CVS’s Health
Laura Patterson of CVS Health, one of the largest retail and health care companies in the United States, took home the APEX award for MVP of the Year in 2019. Laura and her team have been using Aprimo DAM to get their assets to market faster, manage asset use and compliance in a global market, and much more.
Aprimo sat down with Laura to see how she and her team has been thriving since she won her APEX award.
Who: Laura Patterson, Manager of Digital Asset Department at CVS Health
Aprimo Solutions: Aprimo DAM; Productivity Management
What challenges did CVS face before using Aprimo solutions?
We had stood up an in-house DAM before Aprimo, so there were a couple challenges there. It was great to have that single source of truth and to get all our processes into one place. But a couple of our downfalls were that we built the DAM behind our firewall: it was only accessible within the CVS Health network, so we couldn’t get any external vendors using it because it wasn’t cloud-based. We also had some functionality challenges. Converting to different file types wasn’t an option, we were limited to only two file types in our DAM, and there were a lot of other quirks that ended up creating many challenges. Mainly, though, there was no easy way to share requested assets with anyone who wasn’t already a user. Aprimo resolved all of those issues.
Which Aprimo solutions did you implement?
We have both Productivity Management and DAM. It’s really exciting to see how we’re connecting projects to assets in ways that allow us to better track the progress and activity with those assets. For example, when an asset is rights managed or has an expiration, I am able to see project names and numbers to easily see which marketing materials the asset was used in. Because of that, when that expiration date hits, I can see which stores that project is in and inform our store ops teams to remove any materials using the expired asset so that we can remain compliant. I received feedback from our VP that the rollout, implementation, and use of the Aprimo DAM has been the quietest, smoothest, and most efficient software rollout he has seen yet. Our users have been responding really positively to the DAM because its efficient organization helps us get everything to market faster. Once we have marketing operations fully operational it’s going to be a game changer for us at CVS Health.
How was the process of convincing senior leadership to sign off on a DAM?
For our original DAM, I had to engage leadership for over a year to convince them that we needed a DAM at all. It took a lot of research, documents, and power point presentations to convince leadership that we needed a way to manage our assets. After all that, we got the go-ahead. Our Leadership team had approached me about the Aprimo DAM. There was interest from another group to purchase it and I was brought in to evaluate its capabilities and to see if switching to Aprimo made sense for us. I was the final decision maker to determine if we would move forward with the Aprimo DAM or continue with our existing software.
Have you identified other strong business cases for Aprimo since winning the APEX award?
We’re looking at making a fairly large shift in how we use the DAM now. Currently, the DAM houses all of our final creative assets, not project files or working files. It’s just the logos, the icons, the final pieces, but all of the actual working files live on shared servers, which is how our creative team is tracking those files down. We’re finding that we’re running out of storage space year over year because of what we’re creating, which has a pretty big cost implication. So we’re in the process of working with the engineering team to develop ways that we can use the Aprimo connector more heavily and implementing some more out-of-the-box thinking on how to move between Productivity Management and the DAM. We want to move over hundreds of thousands of files to Aprimo DAM, which is a massive undertaking and an exciting technical challenge. Aprimo has gone above and beyond for my team and it is truly appreciated.
Aprimo is incredible. Not just the tool, but the team. Steve and the development team are eager to work with us and make Aprimo better. I just really appreciate the relationship and the partnership we share with the Aprimo team.
The Annual APEX Awards
Aprimo presents the Aprimo Excellence award every year to customers who use Aprimo solutions to drive marketing excellence. Want to learn more about how to win an APEX award yourself? Contact your Aprimo CSD to get started.
And if you know a company in the Aprimo community who deserves an APEX award, please nominate them for one!