Plaid Success Story
SUCCESS STORY
Plaid Enterprises Transforms Content Ops with Aprimo DAM
Plaid Enterprises, a global manufacturer of DIY products, experienced a surge in consumer interest during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, their outdated content operations systems became a bottleneck. Plaid was using a makeshift CMS as a DAM solution, resulting in inconsistent cataloging and frustrating customer experiences. To overcome these challenges, Plaid urgently needed to adopt an industry-leading DAM solution.
Aprimo showcased how their advanced AI capabilities could solve Plaid’s findability issues. With a robust classification taxonomy and automation for smart descriptions, Aprimo significantly improved metadata accuracy. Tools like optical character recognition and visually similar search organized Plaid’s content automatically. Aprimo partnered with Plaid to minimize risks and develop an implementation plan within budget constraints. The Aprimo DAM provided immediate insights, duplicate detection, and surfaced relevant assets. The entire implementation took 6 weeks and saved $15K in asset migration costs.
Challenge
Consumer interest in Plaid’s products spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic as young and older adults discovered a love for arts and crafts. The surge in demand put a spotlight on Plaid’s outdated content operations systems. Plaid was using a CMS as a makeshift DAM, which meant that there was no single source of truth for text, video, or image assets. Products were not cataloged consistently, so sometimes tedious manual processes were needed to match up seasonal or holiday descriptors like Halloween with official product names and SKU numbers. Sales and marketing teams were spending far too much time finding and optimizing the right assets for online search or e-commerce. Additionally, instructional videos or articles were not always displayed with the right paints or tools, making for a frustrating customer experience.
Plaid needed to quickly retire the CMS it was using in favor of an industry-leading DAM. They needed to find a way to improve product data quality and accuracy across all their systems. And they needed to make it easier to deliver content across many different channels that would help build customer loyalty and community.
Solution
Aprimo demonstrated how a best-in-class DAM could solve Plaid’s findability challenges through advanced AI capabilities. A robust classification taxonomy, with automation to generate smart descriptions, greatly improved the accuracy of Plaid’s metadata tagging. Tools like optical character recognition, visually similar search, and language detection could scrape things like product SKU numbers, paint colors, descriptions, and brands to automatically organize Plaid’s content.
Aprimo also partnered with Plaid to map out a project implementation plan that minimized risk. Plaid knew it wanted to modernize its content operations but did not have an unlimited budget to store an ever-increasing volume of assets. With the Aprimo DAM, Plaid could get immediate content insights, automatically detect duplicates, and surface which items in its asset inventory were most relevant or useful.
“Aprimo’s AI increases the searchability of all our assets. The system reads product labels in images, PowerPoint, PDF, Word and Excel documents and adds this to metadata so that a single search pulls up all related information. Our assets are quickly findable and available to everyone as soon as they are uploaded.? – Shauna Lallatin, Digital Asset Coordinator
Results
The Aprimo DAM implementation, including the retirement of Plaid’s legacy CMS tool, was completed in 6 weeks. The project provided a $15K cost savings from reducing asset volume for migration. Through AI data enrichment in the Aprimo DAM, Plaid also removed the need to buy a separate product information management system to house their product data. Plaid reduced channel friction by increasing the value of their content for sales teams to use in syndication. They also enhanced their ability to grow their customer base by improving their ability to serve up relevant educational content.
?Worth the investment in money and time.?
What do you like best about Aprimo?
- Training – Aprimo has a lot of online training options and a fantastic amount of documentation to make sure we are getting the most out of our system.
- Aprimo AI – the AI increases the searchability of all our assets – the system reads product labels in images; PowerPoint, PDF, Word and Excel documents to add to the information included in the metadata we enter to allow a single search to pull up all related information.
- Customer Service – the Aprimo team has been very helpful and responsive as we were getting our system up and running. They continue working with us as new options are rolled out and activated.
What problems is Aprimo solving and how is that benefiting you?
Asset organization, file transfer – Assets are quickly and easily findable and available to everyone as soon as they are uploaded.
About Plaid Enterprises
Plaid Enterprises is one of the largest and most diverse manufacturers of creative do-it-yourself products in the world, offering an array of high-quality paints, glues, stenciling, and needlecraft tools. The company sells direct in the U.S. through its website and catalog, through major retailers like Walmart and Amazon, and international distributors.