Lufthansa Aviation Training

In addition to pilots and crews from their parent company, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, LAT offers training services to around 150 other airlines, as well as a special flight academy for pilots in training, the European Flight Academy.

Marion Heckmann is Director of Marketing at Lufthansa Aviation Training. She manages all marketing activities, from strategy and positioning of the company in the market, to the management of all brands and specific marketing to target groups. We spoke with her about how Canto’s digital asset management (DAM) system supports her work, which includes online and social media activities, as well as event planning and the company’s participation in trade shows.

Can you tell us a bit about how you use Canto?

Currently, we’re using Canto internally in the marketing department and with the agencies that work with us on communications projects. In the longer term, however, we plan to integrate the DAM system throughout the company.

What gave you the initial impulse to take a closer look at how you manage digital assets?

Our company has only existed in its current form since 2017, after Lufthansa Flight Training merged with the training company of Swiss. During the merger, we had to re-evaluate all of our basic software. We didn’t have a dedicated media library that was sufficient for the scale we needed, so we were starting from scratch, so to speak.

There was a high demand for content from the very beginning, particularly from the flight school, where we were recruiting a lot of flight students. We needed fresh content for the social media campaigns on a daily basis, especially in the early stages. We had to find a tool that was capable of storing a lot of images and video footage that people could retrieve quickly and edit together.

What does a typical workflow look like for you nowadays? How is it different from the past?

Since there was no media library, we actually started out working with CDs that were sent to us. It was quite an effort to sift through these collections and check them for relevance. We had to decide what we wanted to include in the new library and how we wanted it to be indexed.

Our goal was to gather and consolidate content from various locations. Among other things, this meant that there was a lot of material coming in from other sources, for example from various drives. During this time, we also had to recreate a lot ourselves; production was very intense during that phase.

What file types other than images and videos do you manage in Canto?

Our brand assets for internal use and for agencies, for instance logos. As some videos and images are used across departments, we plan to bring other teams on board soon, so they can use Canto as well.

How did you learn about Canto, and what were the reasons you ultimately decided to go with our software?

The decision-making process itself took only two to three months; then we went straight to implementation. During the research, we took a look at what other DAM applications were already being used in the Lufthansa Group. Eurowings, for example, already had experience with Canto, and that’s how we came to know about it.

What convinced us first and foremost were the filter functions during the asset search. We were also impressed by the fact that Canto’s export functions were much more straightforward and user-friendly than those of other DAM applications. And of course, the very competitive value for money played a big role in our decision. Canto simply convinced us across the board.

I’d also like to point out that the complete onboarding process was an excellent experience. We were well guided from the beginning. Support was great, and the implementation was explained to us very well. As a result of receiving such thorough guidance, we immediately felt that we would be able to handle and maintain the system very well on our own in the future.

Speaking of implementation, how did you go about planning your structure for the media library?

The marketing staff did most of the preliminary planning internally, asking what our intended user structure would be and how we wanted to be able to find our materials. At the same time, however, we still had to consider the parts of our library that would be available to all other employees and how this could be separated.

So we developed our own logic, including a structure for keywords and search terms. Overall, it was a rather lean process, the results of which we were then able to take into the implementation, and the structure is still working smoothly today.

What does your workflow for new assets look like, from production to final distribution and deployment through Canto?

We usually receive the imagery from external photographers and producers via upload link directly into Canto. We then select which of the shots we want to keep exclusively for our marketing materials, and which should be made available to other staff for their presentations, etc. After tagging them according to the structure we’ve established, the assets are then added to the system.

We occasionally use supplementary stock images, which we put into Canto ourselves in accordance with the terms of use. We track those with Canto’s digital rights management features.

Which departments within your organization use Canto?

Maintenance and supervision of the system lie with us in marketing. We also have a media department responsible for press and PR activities. They also use Canto and manage their own content through it.

The “public” section of our Canto media library is open to all employees in the company via the intranet, and we also want the DAM system to be used that way. The Portal is managed by us in marketing, as is the press media section.

We also encourage people to upload their own materials and content from all of our ten locations. That helps us keep an overview of the content and also provides us with new sources of inspiration. Of course, there’s an extra layer of review to ensure this content meets our guidelines and to see to what extent it can be used for which purposes, but there is no doubt that the synergies are very beneficial.

How have things changed on your team since you implemented Canto?

The quick availability of content is a big plus. Lengthy searches and tedious asset requests are now a thing of the past. Colleagues and agencies can find the content they want by themselves, pulling from the assets we’ve pre-selected. That’s also very useful for in-house presentations.

What are your favorite features in Canto?

I love how straightforward and convenient downloading is — you can crop the asset to the desired ratio with just a few clicks and adjust the file size at the same time, and you don’t even need to do any math yourself. Also, the search function is a big plus and very intuitive. And with properly keyworded assets, it’s extremely fast as well. I also find it very beneficial to be able to define different workspaces and user groups.