Acquia DAM (Widen), including the Assets, Insights, and Portals applications
total assets
downloads in the last 12 months
The Houston Texans are a professional American football team that compete in the NFL as a member club of the American Football Conference South division. Their creative team maintains a vast library of digital imagery that’s largely game day photographs.
The creative team generates a tremendous amount of images, videos, and creative content. In a single game day alone, their photographers easily capture over 10,000 photos of fans, cheerleaders, players, game-time action, and more.
The volume of content and related workflows were too much for their existing digital asset management (DAM) solution to handle. “The previous DAM solution was almost non-existent. People couldn’t find what they needed. The interface was painfully slow. If you did find what you need, it was hard to get it. It was hard to send it to people. It was hard to download it yourself,” recalled Zach Tarrant, Team Photographer at the Houston Texans. “The tool just wasn’t a good fit for the team.”
As a result, the Texans struggled to easily get all of the people inside and outside their organization the digital assets they needed. This meant that everyone from their marketing and PR teams to coaches, players, media contacts, and other collaborators had a harder time telling the Texan’s brand story.
The Texans knew they needed a more robust DAM solution to make game day photography available as fast as possible, streamline system access, and support brand consistency. Their functionality needs were met with Acquia DAM.
The DAM challenges facing the Texans are not uncommon. In fact, Zach himself had dealt with many of the same content struggles during his time with another NFL team, the Minnesota Vikings. Having helped the Vikings overcome their DAM issues, Zach knew just the solution — Acquia DAM. He was happy with the software’s functionality, as well as the support. “Honestly, the relationships with the people that work for [Acquia] have been some of my favorite,” he shared.
In 2018, the Texans swapped their old DAM platform for the solution that Zach knew and loved during his time with the Vikings. Acquia DAM now stores all of the Texans’ recent digital assets in a reliable, single source of truth for anyone to quickly access.
Users can easily search Acquia DAM to find or discover digital assets based on very specific needs and search parameters, such as jersey color, player, and more. “People don’t always know exactly what they’re looking for,” says Zach. “They know what kind of story they want to tell. They know what they want the images to accomplish. Having this good tool empowers me to use the knowledge that I already have about our library to help them accomplish their goals with imagery.”
The Texans no longer stress about getting critical, time-sensitive images out to the world. Within minutes, Zach and his fellow photographers can snap a photo, upload it to Acquia DAM, tag it, and ensure that it’s accessible for colleagues and partners to use anywhere and everywhere. “If there’s a touchdown catch from a certain player on Sunday, by the end of the day on Monday that touchdown catch picture will pop up,” shares Zach.
Whether it’s a player needing a photo to post on Instagram, a coach looking for inspirational imagery, or anyone else needing content, Acquia DAM delivers. Zach explains, “as [Acquia] has made it easier for people to find and leverage imagery, the more it’s become an increasingly important part of how they do their job.”
“I’ve got a lot of really good, positive feedback,” says Zach about Acquia DAM. “You can just see it happening. You can see the total number of downloads going up. People are downloading things immediately. They know where it’s at. They’re used to the system. Adoption was quick and easy.”
Acquia DAM ensures that people only use approved, up-to-date videos, images, marketing collateral, creative content, and other digital assets. “It allows our stakeholders to quickly and easily adhere to internal brand standards,” states Zach. “And I think that’s something that anybody can relate to no matter what kind of company they work for.”
