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Turbo-charging
the Racing Moments at International Speedway Corporation
The Canto Cumulus Solution for Distributing
NASCAR Photographs to Sponsors and Fans
by Geoffrey E. Bock, Principal
Bock & Company
The Excitement of Winning the Race
Chronicling the branded
experiences
For NASCAR fans, it’s the most exciting race in years.
An underdog entry, festooned with sponsors’ logos, rallies
in the final lap and flashes across the finish line in first
place. The winning team and the speedway crowd erupt in disbelief.
Many photographers are on-hand to chronicle the moments—in
the pit, along the straight-aways and turns, right at the finish,
and afterwards through the celebrations. The event makes the
national sports news that night--how the spunky, untested team
“did it” is a hot topic of conversation among NASCAR
diehards for days afterwards.
The multiple sponsors underwriting the team also profit handsomely.
In less than a week, as the excitement of the moment begins
to wane, many launch national promotional campaigns--linking
their brands with the unlikely winner’s success. Each
sponsor’s magazine ads, TV spots, and interactive Web
experiences feature exclusive sets of photographs from the race,
tuned to the firm’s branded identity.
Electrifying the photo distribution process
Although a hypothetical example,
the business case it illustrates is real. Once again, International
Speedway Corporation (ISC), the motorsports entertainment company
promoting the NASCAR event, wins another race. This is the race
against time for distributing photographs to sponsors and their
creative agencies, while the event and the winning team still
have fan power.
ISC, in fact, is turbo-charging its entire photo distribution
process by developing and deploying an electronic solution for
managing all of its digital assets. ISC makes its easy for its
customers, NASCAR and other racing sponsors, to enhance the
value of their partnerships by showcasing their sponsorship
of the winning team.
And the engine behind the turbocharged photo distribution process?
ISC relies on Cumulus from Canto to power an online image bank,
ensuring that race sponsors and their creative agencies get
rapid access to high-value photos over the Web.
Cumulus Enterprise as the
Web-based image bank
ISC maintains an enterprise-class digital asset management (DAM)
platform–Cumulus Enterprise. ISC deploys Cumulus as a
seamless and extensible electronic environment for rapidly ingesting,
indexing, storing, and distributing the photographs from motorsports
racing events across the United States. Using
Cumulus, ISC both manages the photos for its own promotional
publications, and provides value added services to its multiple
partners and affiliates within the motorsports entertainment
industry.
Doing Business as a Motorsports
Entertainment Company
Capturing the action
Among its other activities, ISC
licenses the commercial rights to all the racing photos taken
at thirteen speedways across the United States–including
the famed Daytona International Speedway in Daytona, Florida.
Every year, its photographers capture the action at 36 major
racing events–featuring stock car, open wheel, sports
car, truck, and motorcycle races.
ISC produces the signs, show
guides, programs, t-shirts, and other souvenirs–including
the action-packed photos and graphics–that bolster fan
enthusiasm. And it syndicates, under license, the images to
race sponsors and their creative agencies.
Wrestling with the transition
to digital media
Before Cumulus, managing and distributing racing photos was
a time-consuming and costly set of activities. Photo editors
searched through film-based archives to find photos from prior
races. While sponsors received the images as transparencies
or as files on CD-ROMs, they could not always find the photos
they wanted.
As ISC made the transition to a digital
production environment during the late 1990s, it confronted
two problems—reuse and the content explosion.
- First was the issue of reuse. The company realized that
when it published the same picture in posters, in show guides,
and on t-shirts, it was rescanning the image multiple times.
ISC had no way to store its
- Second was the impact of digital photography. As photographers
standardized on shooting digitally, the number of photos
from a racing event skyrocketed from 1,500 to almost 5,000
images. While ISC was suddenly awash in digital assets,
it had no ready solution for managing them.
“When it became easier to
go out and rescan a photo than to find it online, we knew we
had a problem,” says Patrick Dreyer, Manager, Publishing
Systems/New Media at ISC Publications. “We had to find
a solution to manage all of our digital assets and that could
scale as our company grew. But we didn’t have a large
budget to develop a slick solution.”
Cumulus proved to be the answer. “We selected Cumulus
as the most affordable yet scalable solution on the market,”
Dreyer continues. ISC went online with Cumulus Workgroup in
2002, beginning by focusing on its internal production processes.
Deploying Cumulus
From a workgroup
to an enterprise solution
Initially, Cumulus was simply the platform for the graphics
design department to manage all of the digital assets for its
hard copy publications. When developing souvenir brochures and
event guides, graphic designers could easily access the digital
image bank over the company’s intranet, browse through
an online catalog, and quickly find the latest racing photos.
But Dreyer had a larger vision, one that required a scalable
architecture.
He also planned to build connections over the Internet to race
sponsors. Three years later, in 2005, ISC upgraded to Cumulus
Enterprise and added Internet Client Pro to its DAM platform.
ISC was then able to open its online image bank to sponsors
and their creative agencies.
With an Internet connection in place, external photo editors
could directly access and browse through collections of digital
images over the Web. They could work on their own and download
photos as needed for their own marketing initiatives.
Designed for enterprise scale
operations
ISC currently
relies on Cumulus to manage over one million photos in its image
bank, and is adding more than 250,000 new images per year. ISC
is also digitizing many old-time racing photos from its analog
archives, to create an electronic collection of historical motorsports
events. Dreyer has designed
the Cumulus environment for enterprise scale operations. Cumulus
runs on an Apple Xserve with OS X. It supports a mirrored
RAID array of two 7.5 terabyte disks as the primary image
storage. The Cumulus server also connects to a 4 terabyte
disk for secondary storage and an 800 gigabyte juke-box for
near-line storage.
The Cumulus Developer Program
ISC devotes substantial resources
to extending the capabilities of the Cumulus environment and
adapting it to the varied needs of a motorsports entertainment
company. ISC relies on the Cumulus Developer Program (CDP) for
ongoing support and joint problem solving. When
an ISC developer encounters a difficult technical issue, he
(or she) can turn to the CDP for expert support and collaborative
problem solving. Canto assigns a technical expert to help
analyze the problem and develop a solution. If desired, developers
can also resell their Cumulus-specific applets on the Canto
website.
“We use the CDP when we
need help developing new capabilities for managing and transforming
our digital assets,” says Dreyer. “We’re
doing things with Cumulus that nobody else has yet tried to
do.”
Making It Easy for Photo Editors to
Find Digital Photos
Determining categories and keywords
Dreyer has designed the ISC’s
digital image bank to make it easy for photo editors to find
the images they need. Cumulus indexes assets in a flexible
fashion, by categories, keywords, and various other descriptors.
ISC relies on Cumulus’s indexing capability to catalogue
photos by the race sponsor, date, and location (three factors
which determine a category), twenty-seven (27) subject areas
(the keywords), and other predetermined identifiers.
“When we got started, we sat down with our photo editors
and asked, ‘How would you like to find photos online?
We worked with them to develop the list of keywords,”
Dreyer says. “We then scripted and automated the business
processes for cataloging the thousands of photos from each
racing event.”
ISC uses such descriptive terms as ‘action,’ ‘fans,’
‘finish,’ ‘hospitality,’
‘victory lane,’ and ‘pits’ as the
keywords to capture the varied activities of racing events.
Cataloging digital assets
Dreyer also developed the business
processes, supported by Cumulus and the Internet, to catalog
photos in a timely fashion.
Here’s how cataloging works.
- At the end of a day at a race,
photographers upload over the Internet all of the digital
images from their photoshoots to their personal directories
on a file server, running within the ISC network. Photographers
categorize their photos by filing them within predetermined
subfolders, located within their personal directories. The
names of the subfolders correspond to the keywords used
by Cumulus.
- Next ISC runs a script to automatically
ingest the photos into Cumulus. The script determines the
event name, track name, and keyword for an asset from the
directory names and subfolders on the file server. The event
name and track name define the Cumulus category. The folder
name determines the Cumulus keyword.
- Finally, an image librarian rapidly
reviews the newly ingested photos and adds additional identifiers,
including car number, paint color, driver’s name,
team name, and sponsors. This in-house staff person uses
a customized Cumulus application, based on Canto’s
Embedded Java Plug-in (EJaP) customization technology, to
automate many steps of the photo categorization activity.
Thus, usually within seventy-two
hours from the end of a race, ISC is able to distribute photographs
from the event to its internal photo editors, and to notify
sponsors’ marketers and external photo editors of their
availability.
Finding, accessing, and downloading
racing moments
As a result,
internal and external photo editors can easily find, access,
and download the photos they want over the Web. As shown in
Illustration
1, they can query Cumulus and search for photos based on the
predetermined categories and keywords.
Illustration 1 . Photo
editors can browse through Cumulus by categories or search by
keywords. A pop-up menu contains the list of all keywords.
Photo editors begin by connecting
to the image bank, choosing a catalog,
and accessing the thousands of photos related to a series of
events. Next, they can select a category and query the resulting
collection by keywords or other descriptors to narrow their
results to hundreds of thumbnails. There’s no limit–they
can browse through as many images as they deem relevant. Finally,
photo editors can preview selected images online, add selections
to a collection basket, and download the contents of the basket
to their own production facilities.
If they so desire, photo editors
can search across multiple categories within a catalog. For
example, they can review an ad hoc collection of ‘action’
photos where the same racing team appears at various speedways
and racing events.
The Impact of Cumulus
Current business benefits
For sponsors who want to brand the moment, the end result is
speed and efficiency. Photo editors can quickly find the ‘perfect’
asset for a marketing campaign, one that captures the enthusiasm
of the moment. By providing access over the Internet and the
Web, ISC can ensure that its customers, NASCAR and other racing
sponsors, can get the photos they need to reinforce their branded
experiences.
Cumulus is essential
for ISC’s continued growth. As Dreyer observes, “Literally,
without a system like Cumulus, we wouldn’t be in the
business of being able to support our sponsors with the photos
they need.”
Future
business benefits
And the future? Now that ISC has developed and deployed an
image bank for its valuable photos, it can reorganize and
redistribute the digital assets across many different kinds
of online environments. ISC can begin to better serve its
existing customers–and also attract new customers in
new markets.
For example, motorsports racing
fans want access to all of the lore of the speedway. Many
are even willing to pay for race highlights, team photos,
custom designed calendars (containing a collection of their
favorite racing photos), and other kinds of souvenirs. ISC
can develop and deploy an e-commerce environment where it
can provide fans with their favorite photos, either in print
or online. It can even partner with a mobile communications
carrier to offer digital download services of speedway photos
to fans.
The value of Cumulus
for motorsports entertainment
The key is having the enterprise-scale solution in place for
ingesting, cataloging, and storing the racing moments from
ISC’s speedways. For ISC, managing its digital assets
represents the beginning of the value chain—being able
to distribute and publish racing photographs in a timely fashion
and getting the right images to the right people, when and
where they need them. This value chain, in turn, begins with
Cumulus as an enterprise solution for managing digital assets
within ISC and for racing sponsors.
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