The History
The Marketing Asset eXchange was our brain child and labor of love for over 6 years. It was recently acquired by Marketing Associates and serves some of the largest advertising, automotive and retail companies in the U.S.
MAX has three primary goals:
- Digital Asset Management
- Workflow Management
- Marketing Distribution Mangement
Each of these “modules” facilitated the collaboration between Advertising Agency and Client and a Client’s point of sale locations (Dealers, Franchises, etc).
Some Amazing Facts:
We did some pretty cool things with this beast. As an end user, you could select a newspaper ad template, customize it with your store logo and offer details, and send it to your local newspaper. All from within your webbrowser. With no plugins. In 2002. (Yes, that’s SOO long ago! But trust us, that was big waaay back then.)
Where’s the White Paper?
One client alone has just shy of 5000 stores using the system for all of their local marketing needs. When a local store owner needs to run an ad in their local market, the old process went something like this:
- Store submits a request with corporate
- Corporate forwards on to agency
- Agency does the work, sends it to corporate.
- Corporate forwards on to store
The entire process may have taken several weeks and “Holy Cow!” if the store made a mistake on the original request.
With MAX, the process was changed to:
- Store performs point-and-click customizations.
- Store clicks: “Send to Publisher”
That’s quite an improvement when you multiply that by 5000 times.
And a Backflip Button
Of course, if you are in the advertising world, you have these crazy document formats, freakish file sizes, insanely unrealistic schedules, and towering expectations from both agencies and clients. This system dealt with all that. Terabytes of data, clustered graphic processing, uptime to beat uptime, and integration with some of the most archaic client systems this side of the 80s.
We are happy to see MAX taken to the next level with such a capable and enthusiastic steward as Marketing Associates.