Canon Medical

The Client

Based in Ōtawara, Tochigi, Japan, Canon Medical is a global leader in diagnostic imaging equipment, including CT, MR, X-ray, ultrasound, and healthcare informatics. With a 100-year history of innovation, they are committed to delivering solutions that improve the quality of life for all people.

Image

The Situation

Canon Medical’s marketing materials are built around accurate and up-to-date technical language and clinical imagery to support their relationship-based sales operations. Their former global brand and content specialist based in Japan shared that their sales teams “need a quick and responsive pipeline of content provided to them so they can sell the products and services at a regional level.”

The Challenge

Before Canon Medical implemented Acquia DAM across the company, their process for managing and distributing this content was disjointed and inefficient. “There were a lot of emails, lots of very fractured mechanisms to try and get content from place A to place B,” the former global brand and content specialist said. “It took a lot of time, a lot of chasing, and a lot of people were involved.”

The Solution

They knew they needed a platform to manage content on a global scale. And because their U.S. subsidiary had a 10-year history using Acquia DAM, it was an intuitive choice to extend that use across all regions. “We already had a subsidiary that was very used to it and said great things about it,” the global brand and content specialist noted. “We didn't need to shop around. We already had a perfect use case — it worked for our industry, our business.”

Centralized storage

Canon Medical’s global marketing assets are primarily used to promote product launches or events, and include product photography, collateral, video tutorials, video testimonials, PowerPoint files, logos, and other brand assets. “Our intention with the platform is that it becomes the one-stop shop for all of our marketers around the world to find everything that they need to do their jobs and to sell our products and services,” they shared.

Achieving that goal began by making a duplicate instance of the Acquia DAM site used by their U.S. subsidiary. “This was great because it meant that we were able to basically start off with a living, breathing instance of [Acquia DAM] rather than starting from scratch. But the downside of that was that we had to go through this process of revising the architecture and doing an audit of all of the content.”

The team updated the existing metadata structure, created user roles and permissions, deleted content that wasn’t relevant to a global audience, and uploaded new content. They also established a team of regional DAM admins to make coordinated, incremental improvements and encourage system adoption. 

Robust roles and governance

“We’re a heavily regulated industry, so we need to be really careful with what we do with our data, even if it’s for marketing purposes. For that reason, there's a very tight lid kept on region-by-region product releases,” the global brand and content specialist shared.

“If suddenly people are starting to use incorrect product imagery or product imagery that hasn't been launched in a country yet...it can affect the sales pipeline.” There can also be legal ramifications, especially around the use of clinical images that haven’t been completely anonymized. 

Acquia DAM’s governance tools allow Canon Medical to mitigate these risks by controlling who has access to each and every asset in the system. “If everything is set up correctly and the appropriate security measures, restrictions, and approvals are all looked after as it’s being uploaded to the DAM [system], then it can basically get as close to ‘set and forget’ as possible because only the people that should have access, have access.” 

Asset analytics

The team also needed tools to track the use of their partner content. They need to know about every single time a particular asset is used, and often need to seek approval for every instance of usage.

With the Insights app, they're able to see every time an asset is downloaded, and by whom. They can also require approval from the admin before users are able to download certain images. “That’s been very useful for us,” said the former global brand and content specialist, “because it means that we're never going to get a nasty surprise of someone utilizing a piece of content that we didn't know about, or that has been used it in an incorrect way and we weren't aware that they were using it at all.”

The Results

Controlled regional product launches

Acquia DAM’s governance tools streamline the execution of product launches across regions. “One of the reasons that we are using [Acquia DAM] is that we can control which regions have visibility and which regions have access at any point in time, just to make sure that people are always using the most current and correct imagery,” they said. “So we heavily utilize asset groups, we heavily utilize roles, and those two things working together allow us to do these staged rollouts across all of our global subsidiaries.”

Portals also help with regional content distribution. “I like using Portals because it gives me an opportunity to make a little microsite featuring all of the data that people will need. The other advantage is, of course, that...I can just generate a single link, single password, send it out through our other internal communication channels, like internal newsletters, and suddenly everyone has access to all the assets that they need in one dedicated page [that’s] very easy to understand, and structured in a way that we think makes sense for our business.”

Amplified content value

Easy, self-serve access to Acquia DAM helps Canon Medical raise the visibility of their content and maximize its value. “The content that we create...needs to be distributed to many people around the world so that we can get the most traction out of it,” the global brand and content specialist shared. “So if it's a global piece of content, we want to make sure that all of our regional markets have access to it in a timely fashion to support either events or new product introductions. And if it's created at a regional level...and still globally relevant, we want to have a mechanism for them to input that content into the global content pipeline."

Further, data from Insights helps them understand their content performance. “What are the assets that people just aren’t using? Is there a reason for that? Is there a reason why this group of 100 assets that we thought were great content has only been downloaded a handful of times? Is it because of the way that it’s structured in the system and people can’t find it? Is there something wrong with the content itself, and we need to make an update so that people have more of an appetite to use it?” By articulating and answering these questions, they are able to make more informed and strategic content decisions. 

Brand consistency

Canon Medical’s strategic use of Acquia DAM’s asset groups and roles also helps them create a cohesive brand experience. “The beauty of [Acquia DAM] is that if it’s all set up correctly, then people just won’t see things they don’t have access to...which means they will never accidentally stumble across something and use it by mistake. This means that we have the highest chance of people using the most up-to-date, the most correct, and just generally the best and highest quality content that they have available for any purpose,” the global brand and content specialist explained.

Acquia DAM also supports brand consistency by providing a way to share templated brand collateral that regional teams can tailor to their local language, culture, and health systems. And as they expand their use of the DAM system, they hope to store these regionalized materials in designated sections of the platform. 

Cost savings

The global brand and content specialist believes that the impact of Acquia DAM is reflected in the numbers. “As soon as I go into the Insights section and see how many downloads have been made in just this calendar year — not even in the last 12 months — we're looking at many, many, many thousands of downloads that people have been able to go to this platform and self-serve.”

“And each one of those downloads is potentially an email chain that reflects multiple people...so if you multiply that time out and say, I know we've had 5,000 downloads since January, that's 5,000 email requests that we haven't had to serve, and if it takes 10 minutes out of three people’s day to get that asset to them, that time very quickly scales up and it’s real dollars saved in time and man-hours.”

Canon Medical looks forward to expanding their use of Acquia DAM and their Acquia partnership. "[Acquia] has been a very, very good partner with us as we've built this system and transformed our business to deliver content across the world."