The Six Day Series is a global track cycling brand, holding six day events in locations including London, Berlin and Brisbane, and with competitive cycling’s rocketing popularity, it is growing fast. Events consist of a set format of races across six days, including men, women and Under 21-specific disciplines covered by teams of photographers and videographers.
Fast deployment eases business pain
Six Day opted for an ‘out-of-the-box’ implementation of Imagen, with a reskin of an existing theme so that it fitted with brand values but could be up and running extremely rapidly. Thanks to a powerful (and easy-to-use) point and click personalisation interface, this theme could be customised with page elements without any coding or development work.
Another vital factor in the incredibly rapid deployment time was that the Six Day Series was just starting up and had around 1,600 media assets initially, a figure that has scaled up exponentially.
As Six Day explains: “We’ve scaled up enormously from those early days, implementing a workflow led by the content team. Each event across the globe has teams of photographers covering the six days, all briefed to upload directly into Imagen, so we can get assets to a central point within 24 hours at most. Imagen has simplified collating, checking and aggregating content around specific events, which has been a huge advantage for us.”
Finding the right content with ease
Before deploying Imagen, the company had a typical pre-MAM scenario – sets of informal Dropbox folders, which were a poor fit for the task at hand. The Dropbox folders didn’t provide shareable content at all, and there was no system for tagging or searching media.
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This last issue began to become more pressing as the volume of assets increased, and hunting for specific images – such as cycling legend Mark Cavendish competing at a particular location – became a tedious exercise in manual labour.
“Imagen’s native search capability was the biggest improvement,” adds Six Day, “as finding assets used to be very time consuming, and once found, sharing them was complex. With Imagen, I can now find a specific rider in seconds, then create a link and share all our related assets in just a few clicks.
“This is fantastic for press enquiries, but also really valuable across the board – sponsors get track branding, which we can now pick out of action sequences incredibly easily, which allows them to pick and choose hero images for their marketing materials. In short, we can now get to the content we want quickly.”
Enhanced security and accessibility
Another benefit of migrating to Imagen is that all Six Day Series assets are now securely stored in the cloud, removing the change of accidental deletion or loss in Dropbox. As the company grows, the value of the back-catalogue (and the total value of the assets) continues to rise, making Imagen’s inherent security a vital and ongoing positive attribute.
The power of the cloud – and Imagen’s browser-based, secure access to it – has been a real boon for workflows too. Crucially, it allows photographers and videographers to upload assets locally, quickly and easily thanks to its intuitive UI. Tagging requirements have also been automated to include location, event day (1-6), and date as standard, while different permissions within Imagen have been used to simplify and streamline business requirements.
For example, while all groups can view content, sponsors have a dedicated area with only ‘polished’ content available, as some of the raw assets required for broadcast would be unsuitable for direct sharing onto social feeds, for example. Sponsors also have logos and brand guidelines immediately to hand in this area.
Social tools provided as standard
The ability to share content quickly and easily via social media is, of course, a vital marketing tool for all enterprises, and it’s particularly essential for a sporting event like the Six Day Series. Because Imagen simplifies this process – by being able to generate shareable links direct from search queries – Six Day Series have been able to super-charge their social channels, as well as provide riders with their own assets to share.
“Riders have really seen the value of sharing competition highlights,” says Six Day. “They can talk about how they performed and generate exposure for all of us. It’s a great tool to attract other new riders to the events, and also generates brilliant feedback, where riders can suggest camera angles and shots they think would work for them, and we can brief photographers to deliver those.
“We’ve found using Imagen’s sharing tools has really upped our game when communicating with almost everyone, from riders to sales prospects, sponsors and venues – we’re not just sending an email with a couple of files attached, we’re sending an entire brand experience. It creates a good impression and sets a professional tone.”
The Six Day Series exemplifies how an entirely ‘off-the-shelf’ Imagen implementation can deliver significant business benefits, delivered at speed while still allowing plenty of scope for future growth.
