Door County Visitor Bureau Selects Widen to Streamline Destination Marketing & Tourism Communication

MADISON, Wis. - Jan. 7, 2014 - PRLog -- The Door County Visitor Bureau (DCVB), a destination marketing organization dedicated to supporting tourism and local commerce in Door County, Wisconsin, has selected the Widen Media Collective for its digital asset management (DAM) needs. By organizing a massive photo collection and providing cloud-based access to images and video clips, the new DAM system will offer a fast, efficient way to manage media requests while making sure partners and journalists get the photos they need.

An iconic tourism destination with over 300 miles of shoreline and five state parks, Door County provides four seasons of outdoor recreation and a renowned scene for arts, culture and fine dining. To capture these experiences in marketing and public relations efforts, the DCVB had accumulated thousands of digital photos and video clips.

Organizing and sharing this photo collection had become increasingly time-consuming for Jon Jarosh, the DCVB's director of communications and public relations, and manager of the tourism organization's media library.

"For each request, I had to search through our large catalog and hand pick assets, zip the images, upload them to a media server, send the link, and then the recipient still had to download and extract the images," said Jarosh. "While I was happy to fulfill each request, as the number of requests continued to increase it became apparent we needed a more efficient way to distribute images, and we needed a way to handle other media like digital video and PDFs."

After learning about DAM from a relative who was a Widen user in the agency world, Jarosh began to research a wide variety of digital asset management solutions for the DCVB. After reviewing and demoing a number of systems, Jarosh chose the Widen Media Collective.

"One of the best things about Widen DAM was the ease of use," said Jarosh. "The thumbnails were very intuitive, the system was easy to navigate and we liked the wide variety of downloading options. The fact that you don't have to be logged in as a user to access specific images is also a huge advantage. We just put together collections, attach a URL and can share the same link with multiple parties as necessary. And since we don't have an internal IT department, I especially like the fact that Widen also hosts our DAM system and manages the technical side of things on our behalf."

With 75 or more visiting journalists each year, the DCVB had accumulated over 1,000 travel articles about Door County over the past several years. The new DAM system was also an ideal place to store and organize everything written about Door County. Widen's metadata capabilities will make it possible to load PDFs into the system and tag them by location, business, activity, time of year, publication, date, author and more. This will make the PDFs searchable and make it easier for the DCVB to alert local member partners of articles in which they were mentioned.

"The depth of file types and the metadata capabilities made Widen DAM the perfect application for helping us manage our huge database of travel articles," explained Jarosh. "From what I saw, Widen offers the most opportunities to customize metadata."

The user base of the Door County Visitor Bureau will include staff members and partner agencies, which can now handle certain media requests and upload and tag new articles, saving Jarosh's team from the work of cataloging each PDF. Select vendors, bloggers and journalists will be the largest user group, and they may receive limited access to the DAM system so they can obtain high quality photos, videos and logos on demand.

"Door County is home to some of the most picturesque areas in the United States," said Al Falaschi, customer marketing manager at Widen. "Managing and sharing those captivating images and other critical pieces of marketing collateral are crucial to the promotion of tourism in the area. The Widen Media Collective is a perfect fit to help the Door County Visitor Bureau protect and promote their brand."

About Door County Visitor Bureau

The Door County Visitor Bureau is the official tourism marketing organization for Door County, Wisconsin, whose mission is to foster long-term economic growth and stability in concordance with sustainable tourism practices. For more information, visit http://www.DoorCounty.com.

About Widen Enterprises, Inc.

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Widen has honed its more than 60 years of experience in premedia services and color management specifically for assisting customers with building brand equity and supporting consistent brand representation across print and Web communications. Through its inventive suite of Web-based digital asset management applications, Widen software services provide marketing networks with real-time, Web-based access to clients' digital asset libraries, subsequently eliminating manual search and file preparation time, costs related to replacing images and videos that cannot be located, and added costs for hardware, software and upgrades. For more information, visit: http://www.widen.com.