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Distell
Distell Group Limited is South Africa’s leading producer and marketer of fine wines, spirits, ciders and ready-to-drinks (RTDs). The Group is listed on JSE Limited. Distell employs over 4 200 people and has an annual turnover in excess of ZAR 12 billion. Brands include: Amarula, Two Oceans, Bisquit, Nederburg, Klipdrift, Three Ships, Savanna and Hunters.
Challenges faced
Distell has seen a steady increase in the proliferation of rich media content at the company over the past 10 years and realised that some form of intervention would need to take place in order to effectively manage the lifecycle of these assets.
Coupled to this the nature of Distell’s business - that is the crafting of premium alcoholic beverage brands – produces an immense amount of valuable brand asset material and collateral that needs to be controlled and protected.
It soon became clear that any initiative would need to focus on Distell’s Marketing department, which is by far the largest producer of rich media content at the company.
The purpose of Distell’s Brand Asset Management project is to deliver a technology solution to support and enable the Distell marketing department to effectively manage Distell’s creative assets from origination through to delivery, archiving and disposal.
Project Objectives
The project aims to address the following challenges at Distell:
• Increased need for global distribution of digital marketing assets
• Over-reliance on third party storage of creative intellectual property
• Maintain control of intellectual property
• Fragmentation and limitation of existing approaches and solutions
• Increased consumer demand for a richer media experience
• Difficulty in finding rich media
• Large file size transfer constraints
• Cumbersome creative approval processes
• Increased proliferation of video content
VYRE Solution
VYRE worked with Distell to solve the challenges around managing over 40 individual brands along with their related brand guidelines and assets. Both Unify and On Brand options were investigated as part of the overall project for Distell.
On Brand was chosen due to a number of key objectives:
- Speed of deployment
- Ability to gradually roll out individual brands
- Ability to deploy modules incrementally
- Tight project deadlines
VYRE On Brand
The out-of-the-box On Brand solution provides clear benefits above and beyond your typical DAM or BAM system, Virgin Holidays and many other existing clients have also recently adopted the solution and the key reasons for this are:
Speed of deployment
Proof that On Brand deploys quickly and easily can be seen by the speed that Distell have managed to deploy over 20 brands within just a few months. Their old solution made it hard for users to locate and manage the many thousands of brands and their related assets. Internal users and agencies have been actively adding assets to their system in ernest. Typically DAM systems also need to be designed, installed, configured and hardware bought which all leads to longer deployment times and increased costs.
Metadata
Distell had a clear idea of the metadata they wanted - combined with our best practice OOTB taxonomy they were able to get a system that met their needs without lengthy consultation or project management. On Brand gives our clients the flexibility of a tailored solution all wrapped up in a quick to deploy software as a service model.
Ease of use
A definite issue for many clients is that their current solution is difficult to use and often leads to users being unable to find approved assets. Many of these applications (bespoke, in-house or document management based) are not designed for ease of use for both the ingested and finding of assets. This leads to overcomplexity and silo'd information. On Brand gets your users straight to the right assets within a few clicks. Combine this with a user interface that is clean, simple and straightforward means that training is virtually non-existent.
Search
Having the ability to get their assets into the system and enriched was a key part of the project for Distell. However, giving users a simple yet powerful set of search tools was a significant part of the project too. On Brand meets this head on with its built-in set of enterprise search features. Distell's users can now search for assets using predictive, faceted, keyword, synonym based searches and many other features that mean literally within a few clicks they find exactly what they need.
Collaboration
Being able to share assets for the new system was also a key requirement. On Brand provides a number of collaborative features out of the box that get users working together on asset approvals, publishing and projects. Users can share an asset or groups of assets in lightboxes/collections. They can designate rights on their collections and/or make them private to invited users or public for the whole set of brand users to see. They also needed to be able to share assets with non-registered users.
Brand Consistency
The On Brand Guidelines module provides a complete article management tool that can be used for brand guidelines, presentation building, product guidelines and many others. This tool gives users the ability to create a structured set of articles and folders in a WYSIWYG editor based environment. Distell have quickly deployed a large number of brand guidelines for their deployed products and brands. These have included everything from guidelines on global positioning strategies, logo use, colour swatches, typefaces information right through to product and positioning frameworks.
The Future
Distell are working vigorously to deploy a further set of brands on their solution. Currently they have over 20 brands on their On Brand system - each of these growing in asset, guideline and user numbers daily. Feedback so far has been positive and we envisage that further roll out of the Creative Workflow and Reporting modules only increases user adoption and positive feedback.
