With Cumulus managing the Image Library,
the product promotions process is a thing of beauty
by Geoffrey E. Bock, Principal
Bock & Company 2006
Leave it to a cosmetics company
for which beauty is everything to discover the beauty (and importance)
of a digital asset management system. Meet Jafra Cosmetics International,
a company that produces and markets its own line of skin care,
body care, personal care, color cosmetic, and fragrance products.
Founded in 1956, Jafra sells directly through an international
network of sales consultants, encompassing nearly 410,000 women
in 22 countries. Headquartered in Westlake Village, California,
the company has regional offices in Germany, Mexico, Italy,
and the Dominican Republic for supporting its worldwide sales
operations. Jafra reported worldwide sales of US$416.2 million
for 2004, an 8 percent growth over the previous year.
In the 1990s, Jafra had begun to implement a digital production
environment when it developed a serious operational bottleneck:
marketers and graphic designers could not easily reuse photographs
and artwork when producing the printed and electronic promotional
materials for each marketing cycle.
Not a good thing for a company that prides itself as being market-driven.
"Our image library was just a mess," said Beatriz Gutai, Senior
Vice Pres ident & Chief Global Marketing Officer. "If we
needed a photo from an old catalog, it was often easier to go
out and reshoot it, rather than try to find the existing one
to reuse."
It was a mess, until Richard Williams joined the company as
its Web Producer/Designer, and he subsequently found Canto,
a company with a digital asset management system called Cumulus.
Williams chose well, as Cumulus is installed at more than 12,500
sites worldwide.
Many tasks that used to take someone 20 to 30 minutes now can
be done in 20 to 30 seconds, or less!
But to understand how these efficiencies were achieved, let's
start at the beginning.
Supporting consultants and their direct
selling organizations
Promoting a brand identity Jafra is a marketing-driven organization.
It promotes its branded identity through a network of independent
consultants who operate their own businesses.
Jafra relies on a sophisticated and integrated promotional approach
including meetings, printed marketing literature, and the Web
to create a strong corporate image. Jafra publicizes its products
to the consultants and their customers through elegant catalogs
and brochures that feature fashion photography and stylish layouts,
and that are designed to reinforce the Jafra branded appeal
in multiple markets around the world.
A new marketing campaign every
two months Selling cosmetics
is a continuous yet cyclical activity. To sustain the consultants'
enthusiasm in its current products and also to introduce new
ones, Jafra launches a new marketing campaign every two months.
Jafra begins each bi-monthly campaign with an updated version
of its cycle brochure—24 to 34 pages, featuring upwards of
50 special product promotions. Each version encompasses 30 to
40 original photographs, stock images procured from commercial
providers, and redesigned page layouts.
Jafra also annually updates its product catalog, publishing
photographs and descriptions of all 200-250 items in its product
line.
A substantial investment Jafra marketers, including an in-house
art director and graphic designers, spend two to three months
prior to the launch of each cycle brochure, designing the pages,
producing the photographs, and procuring the art work.
Once Jafra launches a new cycle brochure, marketers throughout
the company reuse the photographs and artwork for many additional
promotional campaigns. Publishing both in English and Spanish,
they develop consultant-focused magazines, product catalogs,
Web pages, and more.
An Operational Bottleneck
By the late 1990s, once it
had moved to a totally digital production process, Jafra had
developed a serious operational bottleneck. Here's what was
happening:
BEFORE CUMULUS
Before Cumulus, Jafra
faced an operational bottleneck. Photos and artwork were stored
on CD-ROMs. When a graphic designer or marketer wanted an asset,
an administrator needed to search through the CD-ROM collections
to locate the desired image.
WITH
CUMULUS
With Cumulus installed
on its corporate network, Jafra has online access to its photos
and artwork. Graphic designers and marketers can browse and
search for images on their own; they do not have to rely on
the administrator as the gatekeeper.
After
each bi-monthly catalog was published, Jafra received the photographs,
art work, and catalog page layouts as digital assets, stored
on a set of CD-ROMs. All of the assets were indexed by thumbnail
printouts that referenced the images, and were compiled into
a loose-leaf binder. To support its international marketing
initiatives, Jafra distributed copies of the binder for each
cycle brochure to its regional offices.
Jafra had not yet implemented an online environment for storing
and managing these assets. Reusing photographs and images required
many manual activities. Whether they were updating the company
Web site or producing a new printed brochure, the marketers
and graphic designers were unable to access the photographs
and art work on their own and in real time.
Beyond manual access Rather,
an administrator at the company headquarters controlled the
information flow and spent hours each week as the information
gatekeeper, manually fulfilling the many requests from other
staff members. From time to time, she would also receive a request
from a regional office. But, other than sending bi-monthly copies
of the CD-ROM binders, marketers at headquarters had no way
of coordinating the update of images with its regional offices.
Jafra needed to find a solution for managing its fast-growing
collection of digital assets. The company needed to leverage
its considerable investment in the images for the cycle brochures.
Adopting a Digital Asset Management System
The need for online
access Specifically,
Jafra needed to index and store all of its digital assets online,
and make them accessible to the marketing staff at headquarters
and at the regional offices. Marketers and graphic designers
would then be able to:
Access a shared image library
Browse through the collection of photographs, catalog
page layouts, and other art work
Select and download copies of the images to their own
electronic desktops, in the resolution required for printed
or electronic distribution.
Enter Richard Williams, whose task
it was to implement and deploy a digital asset management system.
Trained as a graphic designer, he had prior experience in managing
a digital production environment.
A comprehensive, yet affordable, solution Williams realized that Jafra needed
a comprehensive yet affordable solution, capable of managing
digital assets at company headquarters and eventually extending
it to the five regional offices. He needed to deploy an image
library, upload and index all of the images for each cycle brochure
that are initially stored on CD-ROMs, add other images that
the company produced, and make the library available to marketers
and graphic designers on demand over the company intranet as
well as the public Internet. The solution needed to work seamlessly
with both Windows and Macintosh networked desktops—marketers
and their managers used Windows clients while graphic designers
relied extensively on Macintosh systems.
Furthermore, connectivity to regional offices was an issue.
Many locations did not have high-speed Internet connections
and could not reliably download the high resolution image files.
The company needed to be able to distribute both low-resolution
and high-resolution images to remote locations in a timely,
reliable, and cost-effective manner.
Choosing Canto Cumulus Williams investigated a number of
digital asset management systems on the market, and concluded
that Cumulus from Canto was the most versatile, extensible,
and affordable solution in its class.
We looked at several other options," Williams said, "but we
did not consider them because of the differences in robustness,
and the number of file formats they supported. We selected Cumulus
as it had the most open structure, and would support all of
the different image formats we used. Moreover, Cumulus had power
and flexibility. It was well engineered and we knew we could
integrate it with most any external enterprise application."
Most important, Williams knew he could easily adapt Cumulus
to Jafra's production environment.
Adapting Cumulus to Jafra's Production
Environment
Out of the box capabilities Williams worked with a systems integrator,
Modula4, to launch a two-phased project: first to deploy Cumulus
at company headquarters, and then to expand support to the five
regional offices.
Out-of-the-box, Cumulus provided all of the needed features
for the solution.
Developing the image library The first step was developing the
image library. Cumulus provides a flexible, scalable, and extensible
framework. It supports multiple criteria for categorizing content,
and extensive querying and browsing capabilities. Marketers
no longer needed to rummage through sets of CD-ROMs. Rather,
they can assemble on-the-fly the image collections that meet
predefined criteria.
Williams and the systems integrator decided to index the digital
assets by the familiar, business-related criteria used within
the marketing department, such as: Dates, Publications, and
Subjects. Subjects would then be sub-categorized by terms such
as: Business Tools, Logos, People, and Product Lines. Product
Lines would be further tagged by Product Family and Product
Names.
Cumulus does not limit indexing to a single schema (or set of
categories). Rather it supports multiple categorization criteria.
At Jafra, Williams also indexes images by the cycle brochures
in which they are first published, their file formats, and their
creation dates.
Indexing the digital assets The second step was categorizing
the digital assets as they are uploaded and stored within the
image library. When adding a new image to the library, an indexer
needs to view the photograph or catalog page, and then enters
on a form all the product names, subject categories, and other
terms that describe the asset.
Once tagged with the descriptive terms, the asset is easily
findable within the image library.
Defining the index terms was critical. Williams used Jafra's
existing lists of product names, publications, and other marketing
terms as the categories for tagging the digital assets. Marketers
and graphic designers could thus continue to use their familiar
terminology.
Accessing the image library The third step was providing marketers
and graphic designers with an application to access the image
library. Williams has deployed both the Cumulus native Windows
and Macintosh clients, as well as Cumulus Web Publisher Pro,
a browser-based client.
At company headquarters, a select group of marketers and graphic
designers now uses the desktop clients to connect to and browse
through the image library. They have high-speed access through
the company network. In addition to searches, they need to be
able to easily download to their desktop systems the multimegabit
files required for high-quality print publications.
Other managers, contractors and staff members working from external
locations rely on the Cumulus Web browser and an Internet connection
to access the image library. They can easily browse and view
the image collections, and can download a low-resolution image,
suitable for an electronic display. Users who have the appropriate
privileges can request large image files to be copied to CD-ROMs
for distribution.
Business Benefits
An ever expanding image library As of October, 2005, the Jafra image
library contained roughly 32,000 photographs, catalog pages,
and other digital assets. Growth is at a clip of 1,500-2,000
new images a year. Modest by commercial standards, the collection
nevertheless has improved the company's strategic marketing operations.
For Jafra marketers and graphic designers, the end result is
the speed and flexibility of a self-service environment. They
no longer need to call and wait for an administrator to try
to locate the photos they want on a CD-ROM. With just a few
mouse clicks, they can find and download as needed the images
on their own.
For instance, as shown in Illustration 2, a graphic designer
can quickly locate a complete collection of images about Royal
Jelly (one of Jafra's premier products) by navigating through
the list of terms in the image library. Alternatively a marketer
can query the image library by a date range, a particular cycle
brochure, or other relevant criteria, and view a collection
of images.
Illustration 2 : A graphic designer
or marketer can use the Cumulus client to locate groups of photos
or other assets, categorized by specific index terms. He or
she can browse for images by navigating through a hierarchical
set of words and phrases.
Saving time and alleviating frustration
anymore "The image library saves a lot of
time," says Beatriz Gutai, the Jafra executive responsible for
overall marketing strategy. "It has given our people the ability
to go to the library and find things with more ease, alleviating
a lot of frustration, wasted time, and duplication of efforts."
There are fewer phone calls to an administrator. Staff members
can work at their own pace and on their own time schedules.
In a marketing-driven, fashion-oriented business, producing
the right image is essential. Cumulus provides a critical business
benefit that improves throughputs and reduces expenses. There
is no bottleneck any more.
Regional Offices are next
Providing more marketing support Jafra now needs to decrease the
required time and effort to launch new marketing campaigns in
multiple markets around the world.
"We want to speed up distribution of promotional materials
and give the regional offices more marketing support," Gutai
says.
Distributing the contents of image library Jafra plans to provide regional
offices with the electronic versions of predesigned high-quality
collateral on a bi-monthly basis. Marketers in global markets
can then translate and print the promotional materials on demand,
But simply providing Internet access to the image library is
not enough for two reasons.
Marketing support
The regional offices have limited staff and need help to
develop high quality marketing collateral in the first place.
Bandwidth Many offices have limited
Internet connectivity and cannot reliably download the many
high-resolution image files that are required for printed
brochures.
Rather, Jafra wants to create special
collections of digital assets for its global markets. And to
overcome the bandwidth limitations, it plans to duplicate a
portion of its image library, install copies at each of the
regional offices, and then update these regional image libraries
on a bi-monthly basis by distributing new images files via CD-ROMs.
Managing collections by scripting the
updates Williams will rely on the scripting
capabilities within Cumulus to manage the updates from the CD-ROMs.
The scripts will perform export/import procedures to update
the regional libraries with the new images stored on the CD-ROMs,
and also to remove old images which are no longer part of the
collection. The scripts are designed to run automatically.
Once again, Cumulus demonstrates its flexibility as a digital
asset management solution. Using Cumulus, Jafra will be able
to adapt to different business situations, manage the physical
distribution of high-quality images (stored as large files on
CD-ROMs) and support online distribution over the Internet.
For Jafra, Cumulus is the power to manage all of its digital
assets.
Lessons Learned
Jafra now
stores all of its photographs, art work, catalog page layouts,
and other digital assets in an image library.
The image
library substantially reduces overhead. Marketers, with access
to 32,000 images and growing, have become more than twenty times
more productive.
Frustration,
the result of wasted time and duplication of efforts, largely
is gone.
Categorizing
photographs, catalog pages, and other art works by familiar
terms ensures that marketers can find what they need with just
a few mouse clicks. No training is required to deliver a self-service
environment.
By scripting
predetermined procedures, Jafra can overcome the barrier of
limited network connectivity, and strengthen relationships with
regional offices.
“In the past our image library
was just a mess. If we needed a photo from an old catalog, it
was often easier to go out and reshoot it, rather than try to
find the existing one to reuse.
Now we can go to our image
library, quickly see if there's
something that's appropriate, and only shoot the photos we need.”
Beatriz
Gutai,
Senior Vice President &
Chief Global Marketing Officer
“We selected Cumulus as it had
the most open structure, and
would support all of the different image formats we used. Moreover,
Cumulus had
power and flexibility. It was well engineered and we knew we
could integrate it with most
any external enterprise application.”
“After implementing Cumulus to
manage our digital assets, I don't know how we survived before.
I truly can't see how
any design group can function without a digital asset
management system. Cumulus has provided us with great flexibility
in customization and
integration.”
Richard
Williams
Web Producer/Designer
Technology platform
Hardware
HP ProLiant
DL380 G3
with dual 3.2 Mhz Processors
3 GB
650 GB storage
(formatted
and RAID)
Network Attached
Storage
(NAS) as asset backup
Software
Cumulus 6.6 Publishing
Server Solution
“The
image library saves a lot of time”
Beatriz
Gutai,
Senior Vice President &
Chief Global Marketing Officer
About Jafra
Founded in 1956, Jafra
Cosmetics International is a direct seller of skin and body
care products, color cosmetics,
fragrances and other personal
care products. Jafra sells its
Jafra brand products through a
multi-level direct selling network
of approximately 410,000
independent consultants, who
market and sell Jafra's products
to their customers.
Jafra operates in four primary
markets: Mexico, the United
States, Europe and South
America. In Europe, Jafra
operates in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Holland and
several other countries through distributors. More information
about Jafra and its products can be found on the Company's website, www.jafra.com.
About Canto
About Canto
Founded in 1990, Canto remains the leading supplier of Digital Asset Management
products and services, with more than 13,000 server systems sold worldwide,
and more than 1,000,000 user licenses. Canto products are built
upon the multi-platform Cumulus Core metadata management engine and software
framework, which enables customers to archive and manage the digital
assets used in workflows of any size, from office work groups, to multinational
enterprises.
About Bock & Company
About Bock & Company
Geoffrey Bock, Principal of Bock & Company, focuses on business strategies for content
management and collaboration. An analyst and author with over
twenty-five years industry experience, he tracks how organizations
create, organize, and manage business information to sustain
profitable relationships.
As a consultant and thought-leader, he advises software companies,
end-user organizations, and government agencies in areas of
business planning, technology innovation, and operational excellence.
Contact us:
Phone: US +1.415.495.6545 | EU +49 (0) 30 390 485-0 | Email: info@canto.com
