McCormick

The Client

McCormick is a Fortune 500 company that manufactures, markets, and distributes spices, seasoning mixes, condiments, and other flavorful products worldwide. 

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The Situation

With over 14,000 employees and numerous brands around the globe, McCormick’s marketing initiatives extend across websites, online retailers, digital ads, social media, in-store displays, and more.

Leah Carlson, who leads creative operations at McCormick, shared, “It’s not an exaggeration to say that product content really is the beginning of everything in our content supply chain. It’s how our products come to life – and it’s a critical component of our business strategy.”

The Challenge

With the rise of e-commerce, however, the scale and velocity of McCormick’s content workflows have increased. Customers now use multiple channels to research and make purchases — and their experience needs to be consistent at every touchpoint. 

“Efforts across marketing, creative, and e-commerce teams need to come together to ensure the target audience can easily find the product, picture what life is with it, and have confidence it’s going to live up to expectations,” Leah shared.

The Solution

McCormick rises to this omnichannel challenge with the support of Acquia DAM and PIM, or “DAM for products.” 

DAM to organize brand and marketing content

When Leah joined McCormick, they didn’t have a central repository for their brand, marketing, and product content. 

Siloed tools made it hard to find the most current version of any file and hindered collaboration. It was also difficult to control how content was used across teams and ensure a unified brand experience.

McCormick decided to invest in a digital asset management (DAM) solution to address these content challenges, and implemented Acquia DAM in 2017. “It quickly became the single source of truth for all of our brand and marketing content, globally,” Leah shared. “It’s allowed us to achieve efficiencies across content workflows because everyone knows where to find approved content and can access it on their own.” 

DAM for products, with the Entries app

Around the time that McCormick selected Acquia DAM, they also implemented Salsify, their PIM system. Salsify is integrated with Acquia DAM so that approved assets can flow into Salsify automatically, eliminating several manual steps. “Salsify is our tool to syndicate digital assets from the DAM system, along with other product information, across a wide range of digital sites and channels,” Leah explained. 

However, at McCormick, Salsify is only used to store the assets that are syndicated to e-commerce destinations, which is a subset of their product content. So for a bottle of Frank’s Hot Sauce, this would include a handful of images, specs, and marketing copy. The rest of their content for this product — everything from packing labels and CGI images to creative ad content and recipe images — would not be stored in Salsify.

“With the depth and breadth of all of these different types of files, product content spans beyond our Salsify PIM syndication for us,” Leah said. “So we decided to implement Entries to help us build a comprehensive, aggregated view of all of that content for each product.”

With the addition of the Entries app, or Acquia PIM, they repositioned their DAM system as DAM for products, so that all of their content creators and consumers know they can find all the product content they need, in one system.

The Results

360-degree view of product content

“With DAM for products, we’re able to build and share a 360-degree view of everything associated with every product,” Leah shared. “From specs, marketing copy, and packaging files to brand materials, ads, static assets, videos, and recipes — it’s all in a single location.”

With Acquia DAM and PIM, McCormick is able to break down content silos and eliminate confusion around where product content should live. Further, users can transition between the DAM and PIM applications, seamlessly. “Wherever you are in [the system], you can find the assets you’re looking for or the product information you need,” Leah explained.

Enhanced collaboration across end-to-end content operations

Content creation at McCormick spans numerous teams and regions. For example, a recent product launch brought together bottle components that were computer-engineered in the U.S., labels from South East Asia, and photography assets from EMEA. 

“We just couldn’t have done this efficiently without one centralized repository,” Leah said. “And other external content sharing tools — like Google Drive or WeTransfer — don’t work for us. They aren’t centrally used or governed, and they’re not approved because of IP restrictions. With DAM for products, all our stakeholders have access to the product content they need.”

Unified brand experiences 

“Product content is used everywhere — throughout our customer journey,” Leah explained. “And at every touchpoint we need to have relevant, accurate, and consistent content to build an engaging customer experience that drives our sales.” 

With DAM for products, content creators throughout McCormick know that the assets in Acquia DAM and PIM can be used to build unified, cohesive, and effective customer experiences.

Leah shared a recent example: “I’m working with the internal creative team and our partner agency to produce a video that will be used globally. I’ve had to source several inputs and components from various regions — and we need to make sure all of the assets and information are accurate. If the wrong bottle or wrong label is used during the shoot, it will be an added expense to swap it out or reproduce it later. So it’s critical that there’s a reliable, comprehensive, and global resource for all of the content.”

Increased content use to drive ROI

With Acquia DAM and PIM as their central source of truth, McCormick expands the visibility of their content, allowing them to maximize the value of their assets through greater use. 

“Our product content is in demand by all internal stakeholders because it’s used and repurposed by a wide range of internal teams and external partners to extend existing content or build new,” Leah shared. “We see double the return on investment in [Acquia DAM and PIM] each year in the savings we get by repurposing content across our global regions,”

To date, this equates to over $241,000 in annual cost avoidance. And as their content creation continues to expand, so will these savings

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