Since 2017, The University of New Mexico has used Asset Bank to store, organise, manage and distribute marketing and communications materials.
“Asset Bank is one of our longest-running martech contracts,” says Ethan Rule, director of university marketing at UNM. “It’s also one of the most utilised marketing tools across the campus community.”
Last year alone, UNM recorded 8,000 Asset Bank logins and 15,000 downloads, with 1,200 active users across the platform.
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The University of New Mexico (UNM) – founded in 1889 – is big in size and reputation.
Occupying nearly 800 acres near old Route 66 in Albuquerque, it’s ranked in the top 1.8% of all global universities and teaches 220 degree and certificate programmes, including more than 90 bachelor’s degrees, more than 80 master’s degrees and 49 doctoral degrees.
Here, students from the US and beyond can study everything from nuclear engineering to nursing, film studies to flamenco, museum studies to music, and evolutionary anthropology to environmental science.
“We’re a large and diverse institution,” says Ethan.
“We have around 28,000 students and thousands of staff across the main and four branch campuses. We have 14 colleges and schools, ten museums and art galleries, five libraries, 16 Division 1 athletics teams, several hospitals and clinics, and the only academic medical centre in the state.”
UNM's scale creates a challenge for the teams responsible for marketing and communications. The university manages thousands upon thousands of multimedia assets – photography, video, and branded resources. Without the right technology in place, it can be difficult to control which assets are being used and who has access to them.
“We have a decentralised structure for marketing and communication,” says Ethan.
“That means my marketing team works to represent the UNM brand at an institutional level. We’re the central hub for brand strategy, and we create and distribute the majority of digital assets that are used across campus. We also run an in-house agency available for hire by UNM schools and colleges for photos, video and graphic design.”
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But alongside this central team, there are more than 100 other people across the university with marketing and communications responsibilities for their own schools, colleges and departments. External partners, agencies and student employees may also need access to approved assets.
“That’s why a good digital asset platform is so essential,” says Ethan. “Any tool that allows us to help other staff do their jobs effectively is a big win.”
Prior to working with Asset Bank, the university used another DAM from another provider. “But there were frustrations around its set-up and usability,” says Ethan.
“Whereas, we liked Asset Bank’s clean interface, which is very straightforward,” says Ethan.
“It didn't require a lot of tech knowledge for the end user, which was big for us – and the cost was a factor.”
For Hyunju Blemel, university communication and marketing representative and working lead for Asset Bank at UNM, the accessibility of the platform has also made a significant difference.
“Having a brand asset library has made it a lot easier to share campus photos and branded materials across the university,” she says. “Since it connects to our single sign-on (SSO), anyone with a UNM email address can quickly create an account and access approved assets. We can also approve outside users, like vendors, when needed.”
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The university now operates a sophisticated permission structure designed to support both large-scale access and more specialist use cases.
Internal users who log in through SSO can access shared resources, templates and photography collections, while trusted marketing and communications partners can receive advanced permissions to access and download specific categories without approval.
“For instance, colleagues in our College of Nursing could access and see all the photos from their brand photo shoots – but colleagues in other colleges won’t necessarily be able to,” says Ethan.
“The different permission levels have been really helpful,” says Hyunju.
“For example, we can allow our clients access to their individual client folders by adding folder permissions to their email address.”
Asset Bank has also reduced repetitive requests to the marketing team.
“It’s cut down on a lot of duplicate photo requests because people can search for what they need themselves instead of emailing our office for files,” says Hyunju.
“Some files we keep restricted, but our team of admins can access our internally restricted files and share them through carts.”
Overall, the result has been a more streamlined and organised way of working.
“It’s helped create a much more organised process for managing and sharing assets across campus, especially photographs, videos, and brand resources,” says Hyunju.
For Ethan, the improvement compared to previous ways of working has been dramatic.
“Before we started using a DAM, our process was so archaic,” he says.
“For example, I might receive an email request asking: ‘I need a photo of the campus. Do you happen to have an image of this particular building?’ If I didn’t, I’d have to reach out to a designer – who would be located in a different building, and ask them to walk it over to me on a drive.
“Now the material is easily shareable on Asset Bank, rather than just sitting there on my hard drive or desktop.”
Asset Bank’s flexible file and folder structure has also made organising content much simpler. “That’s its own science right there!” says Ethan.
“It’s very functional and easy to organise. With Asset Bank, we can set up multiple folders and files without doubling our space requirements. It makes searchability way easier, too."
Over the years, both Ethan and Hyunju have seen Asset Bank continue to evolve.
“One feature that has been especially helpful is being able to preview and scrub through videos before downloading them,” says Hyunju. “Before that, you had to download the entire file just to figure out if it was the right video.”
AI-powered tagging has also transformed how users search for content.
“The AI keyword tagging feature has been so useful,” says Hyunju. “It’s made searching for photos and videos much easier, especially when managing years of content.”
Ethan agrees: “AI tagging is a big plus for us and makes it easier to search for niche items in images that people wouldn’t think of tagging themselves.”
UNM has also been able to tailor the platform to better reflect its own identity
“They’ve also worked with us to make the platform feel more like UNM’s own system,” says Hyunju. “We’ve been able to customise things like button colours and images, so it matches our branding better instead of feeling like a generic third-party platform.”
She also values the transparency and communication from the Asset Bank team.
“One example was when I asked if their AI tagging could recognise specific people in photos, similar to Google Photos,” says Hyunju.
“They explained that changes to EU laws around facial recognition and biometric data limited that functionality. I appreciated that they took the time to explain the reasoning behind it instead of just giving a quick ‘No’.
“Our relationship with Asset Bank has always felt more collaborative than transactional, which has made them easy to work with over the years.”
Crucially, Asset Bank has become a trusted single source of truth for approved university assets.
“Prior to using a DAM, we would email our marketing photos to people who would keep them on their computers, so we had no idea what they were using or why,” says Ethan. “As a result we would often see out-of-date photos used in ads, for example.”
Now, the university can quickly remove outdated or unapproved content.
“When a particular university leader leaves, or when a building is knocked down or modified, we can access Asset Bank, find that tag and remove those files immediately so that only approved images are made available to users,” says Ethan.
The system has also made image takedown requests far easier to manage.
“It doesn’t happen often, but a student may ask for their images to be removed from the university website or university literature,” says Ethan. Before Asset Bank, that process would have been almost impossible to control across so many departments. “Now, it’s much easier for my team to immediately remove specific images,” Ethan explains.
“It’s given us the ability to be really responsive to image takedowns and to keep a consistently up-to-date library.”
Earlier this year, the Asset Bank team hosted a networking session bringing together representatives from several higher education institutions.
“I don't see a lot of martech vendors doing this kind of thing for their clients, but it was really fruitful,” says Ethan.
“It was interesting to talk to other universities about how they utilise Asset Bank. We don’t all use it in the same way, so it was nice to share ideas with others who have similar needs.”
During the session, Hyunju demonstrated their Asset Bank set-up.
“Everyone seemed impressed with how we’d set it up,” says Ethan. “As a decision-maker within our department, that was reassuring to hear.”
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