Company name: WebMechanix
Headquarters: Columbia, Maryland
Founded: 2009
Employees: 75
WebMechanix is a full-service performance digital marketing agency that offers services spanning marketing, UX, design, and web development. WebMechanix focuses on performance marketing, primarily producing and managing ads for Facebook and LinkedIn. They do a lot of ad creative, landing pages, SEO work, data integrations, website redesigns, web analytics, and more.
We spoke with Dennis Zechman and Eric Znamirowski from the creative department about how Pics.io digital asset management (DAM) software helps them to manage all their marketing digital assets in one repository and saves time on looking for the necessary files.
Dennis and Eric both oversee the DAM usage but have different responsibilities in their marketing agency.
Dennis: I'm the Creative Director, ultimately responsible for all the creative output and making sure the department is moving efficiently and everyone is enabled to perform in their roles.
Eric: I'm the Creative Operations Manager and I manage the team's time. So when we have projects or internal work, I'm managing the time and keeping the process going.
- What kind of files do you manage with Pics.io?
It's primarily Google Docs, PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs, MP4s, and Adobe files — After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator — we are working with day to day.
- And what problem did you solve with the DAM system? What was the main challenge?
We had a lot of full-time team members working with creative assets, and were also working with a lot of freelancers at the same time. And we couldn't get the freelancers access to our repository of files.
We ended up having our main repository plus a separate location for all of our freelancers to upload assets. And then on top of that, all of our copy docs for our copywriters lived separately from our design files.
"So the biggest challenge that was solved was getting every contributor working in the same location, all the files living together."
So all of our creative assets were dispersed in multiple places. And anytime we had to pick up existing assets and have somebody else work on them, it put a lot of strain on Eric to go and find those assets in order to get them to the right person.
So the biggest challenge that was solved was getting every contributor working in the same location, all the files living together.
Outside of that, we're using the sharing and website features along with the commenting tools to help review work and consolidate feedback in one location.
- What does your current workflow look like now that you're using Pics.io DAM?
Our general workflow starts with copywriters creating project folders. They will then create a copy doc in that folder on Google Drive that will sync with Pics.io.
Our designers then start working on their assets. When those are ready, they'll upload them to the project folder the copywriter created.
If it's multiple assets they're sharing, they'll create a website link and share that for review. If it's just a single asset, they will use the quick share link and send that out.
Clients will then leave comments which we’ll review and apply to our working files. The updated work then gets uploaded to the existing collection within Pics.io.
- And you mentioned freelancers. How freelancers work with you?
They work in a very similar format, but we try to limit their responsibilities within the process. For example, we don't have them generating links for sharing.
They upload their work and then copy the URL of the page they're currently on for internal review. Once approved internally, a team member will generate the share link for client review.
We've also created roles specifically for each of those freelancers so we only share the client folders that they're working on.
- What are the main user roles that you have in Pics.io DAM?
We have a general Individual Contributor role which we assign to all our full-time team members. They can interact with all necessary client files and have more permissions for this.
Then we create specific roles for each individual freelancer. For this, we go in and select which collections they have access to for client confidentiality, and then also limit what they can and can't do within each collection. For instance, they can’t delete anything to mitigate the risk of accidentally deleting a collection.
- What are the advantages of a DAM system for you?
Primarily getting everyone in the same location for storing files. Having that easy access, being able to provision what collections freelancers have access to, and more control of the permissions within the system itself. We've consolidated everything into one place. And it has definitely helped us save time from going around and tracking in different places, like our server, Google Drive, and Slack.
- Maybe you can estimate how much time Pics.io saves you monthly or weekly?
At least two hours weekly and when we get busy, it could be up to four or five hours a week.
- Do you have a favorite feature?
Eric: I love websites, like being able to generate the website link and share that. We use Asana for our project management, so it's really easy to just share a link and have someone review it. We’re getting everybody to give feedback in that one place instead of either in Asana or in a Slack message, or on a Google Doc.
Dennis: I really like the website feature as well, not just from the perspective of being able to generate a link for people to review and comment on work, but also as a sales material tool. We can put together a lot of different pieces of work from different clients into a collection, turn that into a website, and then share it with our sales team. They immediately have access to this repository of assets with the tree structure to help with organization and being able to drill down to different types of assets.
- So, do you use Pics.io websites often?
Yes, quite often. For our initial setup, we put all the brand assets of our clients into individual collections and turned them into password-protected websites. We then shared those websites with the account teams internally so they have easy access to all the same branding files as the creative team. We have probably about 40 to 45 websites just for those brands.
Outside of that, it's websites we've generated for sharing work. So I'm guessing it's probably closer to 150-200 at this point.
- Thank you so much for the interview!
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