For grocers, the most influential sales tool is the weekly ad. As consumers, we see them in our mailbox, in the Sunday newspaper, and in online ads presenting us with deals and enticing coupons for our favorite brands.

What consumers don’t see is the tremendous amount of coordination and management required to organize the overwhelming amount of photos and images, product details, and brand standards. This effort is critical to ensure that ads are accurate, produced on time, comply with brand standards, and support strategic sales objectives.

With hundreds of sources of product information, style guides and high- resolution photos, one of the world’s largest grocers required a lead time of 30 days or more to produce its weekly inserts, circulars and digital ads. In that time, changes in the market often altered customer demand for featured items or limited the supply of advertised products, forcing costly mid-production changes and delays.

Executives issued the challenge to streamline the management of the digital content and media required to produce these promotions more efficiently. In short, they called for decreased production time while maintaining perfect accuracy and brand compliance.

After carefully vetting a number of options, this leading grocer turned to Genus Technologies. As an IBM Premier partner, Genus Technologies offered the expertise to build a solution combining their flagship digital asset management software, Genus Media Upshot^TM, on top of an existing foundation of IBM’s Enterprise Content Manager (IBM ECM).

Genus Technologies consolidated the management of all images, photos, product descriptions and layouts in a single, easy-to-access enterprise digital asset management (DAM) solution using the customer’s existing ECM infrastructure.  

Further, Genus created seamless integration with Adobe^® Creative Cloud^® software, enabling design teams to produce layouts using the required photos and images without leaving Adobe InDesign^®.

North America’s largest grocer now plans, manages and produces its consumer product marketing materials, including circulars and rich-media promotions, faster and less expensively than ever in its 100-plus years of operation. The Genus Technologies solution does this by:

• Managing all media, including photos, audio, video and other assets, in one portal
• Decreasing search and access times with tagging, metadata and unique identifiers
• Making all assets traceable and highly visible across the enterprise
• Pre-positioning all assets so they are consumption-ready, where and when they are needed
• Serving as the cornerstone for the company’s enterprise strategy based on the success it has achieved

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe InDesign

Genus Media Upshot

IBM Demandtec Promotion Execution

IBM Marketing Operations

IBM Content Manager