Global CPG brand recaptures $10M in agency costs by modernizing global DAM with Ntara and Aprimo
The challenge
Kimberly-Clark manages a portfolio of globally recognized consumer brands across baby care, personal care, and hygiene. At that scale, digital assets (product photography, video, packaging files, campaign creative, etc.) are core business infrastructure. They determine how quickly teams launch and dictate how much the company spends creating new assets versus leveraging existing ones.
When Kimberly-Clark began evaluating its digital asset management environment, the stakes were clear. An outdated DAM had created a fragmented content ecosystem with compounding consequences.
Teams across over 100 countries couldn’t find approved assets. So, they worked around the system or re-created content from scratch, driving agency spend higher.
Rights management was untracked, posing a significant legal risk. Every photo shoot generates contracts with defined usage windows for each asset. With no mechanism to enforce expiration dates at scale, legal risk accumulated silently across hundreds of thousands of assets.
Without a reliable source of governed content, brand consistency suffered and launch timelines stretched.
The company needed more than a DAM platform upgrade. Kimberly-Clark needed a strategic partner who could design the governance model, manage the migration, navigate the organizational complexity of a Fortune 200 company, and do it all while parallel M&A activity was actively reshaping the business.
Kimberly-Clark selected Aprimo as its modern DAM platform and brought in Ntara to lead the implementation.
Designing governance for a global, multi-brand environment
Our first task was to understand how 62 brands across five regions comprised of 122 countries thought about content. That required engaging stakeholders across marketing, legal, ecommerce, IT, and both the consumer and professional divisions in locations spread around the world through a series of workshops. It required mapping how assets were created, described, approved, and distributed across the organization.
What emerged from that discovery process was a dynamic metadata model that adapts to asset type, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all taxonomy in a multi-brand, global environment. For example, a photo of a celebrity licensed for use on product packaging automatically surfaces fields for model identity, approved usage channels, and expiration date A brand logo file presents only the fields relevant to that asset class. The resulting system makes correct behavior the path of least resistance, whether users are in North America, Asia, or Europe, or part of an external agency. What’s more, this model is scalable. So, new brands and products can be onboarded to the Aprimo DAM flexibly and efficiently.
Migrating 509,486 assets from the legacy system to this new model required methodical mapping and validation across metadata schemas that didn’t align. We led that migration iteratively, preserving data integrity throughout.
Solving digital rights management at enterprise scale
For a company operating across over 100 markets with more than 90 agencies feeding content into a shared system, rights management is a major legal and financial risk. Any asset used outside its contracted window creates liability. At Kimberly-Clark’s volume, the exposure across hundreds of thousands of assets was significant and largely invisible in the legacy environment.
We addressed this at the infrastructure level, integrating a dedicated rights management system directly with Aprimo. This enabled automated enforcement, rather than relying on individual users to manually track contract terms. Assets featuring model talent are now validated against live rights data automatically.
Users now enter only minimal contract information in the DAM, then validation, updates, and corrections to data are applied automatically. Additional rights data is also populated automatically, reducing both manual tagging efforts and the risk of human error (and making their legal team happy along the way). If data is missing, it’s added; if it’s wrong, it’s corrected.
The outcome: teams across every region can pull assets with confidence that what they’re using is approved, compliant, and up to date.
Managing change across 700+ users and a global agency ecosystem
A successful DAM implementation isn’t measured at go-live. It’s measured by how many people consistently use it. With 1500+ internal users and a network of third-party agencies ingesting content into the platform, adoption was as much a strategic challenge as a technical one.
We structured a full change management program around user roles, creating tailored training tracks for internal teams and separate documentation and onboarding sessions for agency partners. We established adoption benchmarks and satisfaction from the outset, so Kimberly-Clark could track progress and surface friction early.
Throughout the project—and through significant scope changes driven by M&A activity, divestitures, and operating model restructuring—Ntara stayed engaged. We continued adjusting the program to match the business as it evolved.
Results
Kimberly-Clark’s first regional activation launched in North America in late 2024. The results since then demonstrate what ROI-focused implementation looks like in practice.
$10M+
in agency cost savings from asset reuse
3X
growth of assets in the platform since launch
800%
increase in monthly active users versus legacy DAM
4 min
saved per individual search
266%
increase in daily use of the DAM system
2,300+
hours saved annually and counting
These numbers are from one year post-launch. As Kimberly-Clark extends the program to additional markets, the compounding value of governed, reusable content will scale as well.
In their own words
“Ntara’s ROI-focused approach to software implementations was critical to the successful deployment of our new DAM. By putting ROI at the center of our approach from the start, it enabled program teams to report critical project milestones in conjunction with incremental ROI benefits—maintaining momentum and investment from our business leaders.
Ntara has been with us every step of the way, including supporting us through significant scope changes as a result of divestitures, acquisitions, and operating model changes. I can’t recommend them enough as a partner.”
Daniel Winstead
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, CONTENT PLATFORMS, KIMBERLY-CLARK Global DTS
Request a quote
