The Coca-Cola Co. offers a textbook case of digital asset-management technology's transforming power. The company's 116-year-old brand is built as much on images, messages, and marketing savvy as on Coke's secret formula. But as powerful as that imagery is, it was often of little use to the company's sales and marketing teams around the globe.

"We had tremendous resources that were very underutilized because people couldn't access them easily," says Phil Mooney, director of the $20 billion beverage maker's archives department. Instead, when someone wanted to reuse a classic poster or magazine ad, the image had to be shipped as an unwieldy printout or, more recently, on a CD-ROM. Worse yet, if employees couldn't find what they were looking for, they would invest in creating an image that already existed somewhere else.

Five years ago, Coca-Cola began developing an online library for its still images. Because Mooney and his staff couldn't find a software product that would do what they wanted, they built a database and a customized search tool. Soon after that database was up and running, the scope of the project grew.

Mooney wanted to deploy a registration system for logging items and creating reports on where the materials resided, whether in the database or in a museum halfway around the world. Next he wanted to address the variety of text documents the company produces, everything from press releases and speeches to policy statements. Then came discussions about videotaped commercials, co-sponsored promotional films, presentations, and other moving images.

To take the next step, the company chose IBM's Content Manager software, not only because it appeared capable of helping the soft-drink maker achieve its objectives, but also because Coca-Cola was a happy user of IBM's Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration software, and it had questions about the long-term viability of smaller players such as Excalibur Technologies (which has since merged with Intel's media division to form Convera), Bulldog (subsequently acquired by document-management vendor Documentum), and Artesia. "I had been burned earlier on a smaller project," Mooney says, and he didn't want to take that chance again.

After a deployment effort that occupied a five-person team for more than a year, Coca-Cola in October launched a digital archive that continues to be populated with more than a century's worth of materials. So far, the system contains about 10,000 still images, 8,500 documents, and 5,000 videos. Mooney hopes to double those numbers by year's end. "We're still in the toddler stage," he says. "We're trying to catch up."

Mooney says the investment in the system has been "bigger than a bread box," but is well worth the cost. In less than a year, more than 5,000 out of 30,000 potential users have registered for the system, a percentage he describes as "amazing." For those users, digital asset searches have shrunk from days to minutes, while the time it takes to develop marketing campaigns has been cut by as much as half.

Simon & Schuster Inc. also has seen an enthusiastic response to its new digital asset-management system, which is a work in progress. The effort goes back to 1999, when Steve Kotrch, director of publishing technologies at the $650 million publishing arm of Viacom Inc., brought in an archivist to create a file system to store the company's library of completed book manuscripts and associated covers. Before that, Kotrch says, content was stored all over the place "or not at all."

With the manuscript archive in place, Kotrch and CIO Anne Mander turned to Artesia to begin a digital asset-management deployment in earnest. In July 2001, the vendor debuted a system that provided Web-based access to author photos, tip sheets, catalogs, and cover art. During the subsequent months, additional assets such as newly completed manuscripts, movie trailers for films of books published by Simon & Schuster, posters, and other advertising materials brought the number of asset types stored in the system to 40.

The total data stored reached 1.5 tera-bytes. Another one-half terabyte will be added this year when the digital archive created in 1999 is added. Once that's done, all that will remain are the manuscripts and related images that were collected between the digital archive's creation in 1999 and the digital asset-management system's debut two years later.