Smithers-Oasis Selects Widen DAM to Globally Manage Their Marketing Materials

MADISON, WI--(Marketwired - Jan 28, 2014) - Smithers-Oasis, the world's leading manufacturer and marketer of floral foam, floral design and postharvest care and handling products, has selected the Widen Media Collective for its digital asset management (DAM) needs.

By organizing a massive collection of a variety of file types to a global audience, the new DAM system will offer a fast, easy to use, and brandable portal to manage media requests for all of Smither-Oasis' global brands.

The company has multiple brands including: Floralife^® postharvest products, providing a complete line of postharvest care and handling products to the floral industry since 1938, OASIS^® Floral Products, providing floral foam products and floral accessories to wholesalers and retail florists around the world, and OASIS^® Grower Solutions, providing propagation media to the greenhouse and grower industry worldwide. With multiple business units, spread out globally, all creating large amounts of branded images and multimedia files, a central repository became a critical need to keep everyone connected. While the business units are separate entities, they are all in the same industry and are all independently creating assets. 

Because of the geographic spread of Smithers-Oasis' many global locations, the creation, management, and collaboration on marketing materials was very decentralized. The ability for all of the company's marketing professionals to go to one place and reach a consensus on digital asset creation and usage was a challenge.

After acknowledging the need to make a change from the system they had in place, Smithers-Oasis began their search for a dedicated DAM solution, initially evaluating eight potential vendors. With global access, support, format conversions, multi-lingual interface, multi-lingual searching, and ease of use as their primary concerns, the separate business units collectively chose the Widen Media Collective.

"The ability to upload one file format, and being able to transcode and download multiple other formats was a critical feature, and Widen offered the best solution," stated Catherine Jakaitis, global marketing manager for Floralife, a brand of Smithers-Oasis. "Some of our business units are very active in social media and utilize videos, where other units are more print oriented. So the solution we chose needed to be very versatile with both traditional and new media types." 

The DAM system will be used to service a global network of marketing professionals within the organization with plans in the future to also incorporate direct access by customers. Primarily, these users will have on-demand access to login, search and download product images, PowerPoint presentation, videos, literature, logos, and labels.

"We were looking for a company that was forward thinking, that was already being proactive in finding new solutions and implementing them," stated Joanie Maclean global marketing coordinator for Floralife. "Every time we thought of a feature we'd like to see, Widen knew about it and already had a plan on adding it in the future. In addition, in terms of social and new media, the Widen Media Collective was the only DAM system we looked at where you could share to social networks directly from the platform." 

"We take great pride in making sure we keep up with current and future marketing trends to ensure we're on the innovation side of the our own digital asset management industry," stated Al Falaschi, Widen's customer marketing manager. "It was great to see Smithers-Oasis recognized it in our product, service and philosophy, and felt it was a good fit for their current and future media and asset management needs."

About Smithers-Oasis
Smithers-Oasis, established in 1954 in Kent, Ohio, is the inventor and world's leading manufacturer and marketer of floral foam products for fresh, silk and dried flowers. The company's global brands include Floralife^® postharvest products, providing a complete line of postharvest care and handling products to the floral industry since 1938; OASIS^® Floral Products, providing floral foam products and floral accessories to wholesalers and retail florists around the world; and OASIS^® Grower Solutions, providing propagation media to the greenhouse and grower industry worldwide. Smithers-Oasis Company is headquartered in Kent, Ohio, with research, manufacturing and marketing offices located in Kent, Ohio and throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

About Widen Enterprises, Inc.
Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Widen has honed its more than 60 years of experience in premedia services and color management specifically for assisting customers with building brand equity and supporting consistent brand representation across print and Web communications. Through its inventive suite of Web-based digital asset management applications, Widen software services provide marketing networks with real-time, Web-based access to clients' digital asset libraries, subsequently eliminating manual search and file preparation time, costs related to replacing images and videos that cannot be located, and added costs for hardware, software and upgrades. For more information, visit: http://www.widen.com.