Zurich Insurance

The Client

Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is a leading multi-line insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries and territories. Founded 150 years ago, Zurich is transforming insurance. In addition to providing insurance protection, Zurich is increasingly offering prevention services such as those that promote well-being and enhance climate resilience. The Group has about 60,000 employees and is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. 

The Situation

Zurich wanted to promote a cohesive, newly developed brand and visual identity by sharing access to a comprehensive and well-documented collection of its most current, accurate assets on a single durable and scalable platform. 

The Challenge

The company faced multiple challenges on its path to digital transformation:

• A clunky DAM solution: Zurich's previous DAM platform was not very visual, somewhat cumbersome, and wasn't widely adopted across the organization. As a result, the company had numerous disparate systems and platforms. Zurich needed to convince people that a new DAM solution would provide them with a centralized location to find updated assets and information easily.
• Siloed work: When it came to marketing assets, every country had its own way of making assets available. The preferred method of distributing global assets was via PDFs, leading to problems with outdated versions circulating.
• Overlapping organizational initiatives: Zurich was launching a new brand identity while it launched the new DAM platform, making all of its new brand assets only visible and available in the DAM system. While this was a great chance to get people into the DAM system, the company had to take the risk that the technology would work 100% as planned.

The Solution

Zurich migrated all assets from the old to the new system. With an ambitious design approach, the company tried to make the DAM site as visual as possible by using portals and simplifying user navigation. 

Within Acquia DAM, Zurich created libraries (via saved search and dashboard buttons) to make images, videos, icons, pictograms, and more available, and portals for all brand guidelines, marketing campaigns, and projects. Additionally, it used the Templates app so employees can edit the most used assets and create their version. This results in massive time savings, as briefing an agency or in-house design resource to create something from scratch and going through rounds of amends and sign-offs takes time and budget. Using the Templates app for a simple asset doesn't require any design knowledge and can be done in minutes, while a more complex asset can just be downloaded and reused or edited/localized, reducing the time to a few hours.

Zurich also created specific, meaningful, dedicated user permissions. Using different user profiles, the company manages access for its external partners and content for specific internal audiences, such as endorsed brands, sub-brands, or various departments. This ensures secure areas for allocated user groups, where Zurich can define who can access which content. Only two users are admins with permission to upload, so assets have correct metadata, and the company can minimize potential legal infringements, particularly regarding image copyrights.

While building integrations to Microsoft Office, Adobe, and Sitecore, Zurich involved its IT team and other specialists. The teams are currently testing the option to integrate Figma, and the integrations help designers and web administrators save time while ensuring brand consistency.

Zurich has achieved international collaboration and created opportunities to uncover hidden value by opening up and showcasing what is available to avoid asset duplication and re-invention of the wheel. By centralizing brand assets, Zurich has saved local staff time and budget. Local marketing teams have access to global brand campaign assets that are ready to reuse or localize, which results in less time and external agency spending. The company has five global marketing campaigns live, with 590 assets to download. Making images, videos, pictograms, icons, and music files available for all users, the company has less need to purchase these locally and can ensure the assets are on brand.

The Results

With Acquia DAM, Zurich has been able to leverage brand consistency globally. It makes brand guidelines available to all users and provides editable and ready-to-use downloadable assets. The DAM system launched simultaneously with the new brand identity, allowing the company the flexibility to make changes without having old PDF versions circulating.

The new DAM site is well-established, and Zurich's positive feedback and impressive metrics speak for themselves. Over the past two years, the company noticed a huge improvement in the design of various assets worldwide, resulting from the DAM providing easy-to-understand brand guidelines, ready-to-use assets, and editable templates.

Comparing the time since the new DAM with the period under the previous DAM, metrics show: 

• Content authors can find images in the new DAM in an average of two minutes, compared to the prior average of 12 minutes
• The new DAM has 21,000 users compared to 4,700
• The new DAM has had 407,000 logins compared to 114,000
• The new DAM has had 1.4 million downloads compared to 112,000
   

Additionally, due to the large user group driven by the quality of the DAM system and its content, Zurich has massively increased the "reach" within the organization. This improves brand consistency and leads to higher uptake and usage of those centrally created and shared assets, increasing the efficiency and ROI of these developed templates and assets. Due to the immense increase in users, the company has reduced the system's cost per user by approximately 75%. 

The current DAM boasts:

• Over 56,000 assets
• Over 150 portals
• 13 libraries 
• 737,040 quick searches
• 1,054 downloads per day on average