66% less time to edit images and publish them on your e-commerce site.
99% less time to replace incorrect or obsolete files.
A dream? Magic? Not in the slightest.
This article will tell you how Whirlpool Group brand KitchenAid achieved these results thanks to THRON.
Quality images and videos convey the value of a brand and its products, inspiring consumers and driving them to purchase. But for this to happen, a brand has to create quality contents and distribute them consistently across every channel, first and foremost, e-commerce.
However, keeping channels such as e-commerce sites updated at all times demands a vast amount of manual work. On the other hand, the alignment of the various channels can’t be neglected without adverse impacts on user experience.
This is no news to our clients, such as KitchenAid, a Whirlpool Group brand and leader on the small food preparation appliances market. Manual management of e-commerce site alignment implies:
If you’ve been reading carefully, a few lines back we made a couple of mistakes. Or rather, we didn’t tell the whole story.
We said that keeping digital channels updated involves a great deal of work, which can’t be avoided without impacting the user experience.
We should have used the conditional tense. In fact, with a DAM Software with smart image cropping functions, all this work is a thing of the past, with a quality user experience guaranteed.
Before they chose THRON, for KitchenAid cropping and editing every single product photo was as time-consuming as it was unavoidable.
The visual designers had to work on every single product photo to align it to those already present in the digital showroom. In fact, the automatic cropping provided by ordinary tools did not guarantee the uniformity of the digital assets and thus a satisfactory user experience.
What’s more, whenever colleagues updated an asset, the e-commerce managers had to repeat the “inefficiency treble”. They had to take down the obsolete photo, download the updated one from the company files and import it into the online shops’ media gallery.
For the Whirlpool group brand, choosing THRON and its RTIE (Real Time Image Editor) brought immense operational benefits. The company’s marketers can delegate activities like the resizing of every photo to our DAM Platform’s smart editor. In addition, the RTIE automatically creates the focus on the product.
Specifically, thanks to its artificial intelligence, it automatically crops product images, focusing on the object in the photo and removing superfluous spaces or features. This means all the product images on an e-commerce site are presented in the same size. With no manual work.
In fact, automatic cropping of product images means no manual work on the original photograph. In other words: editors are no longer forced to fine tune all photoshoots by hand to ensure their uniform presentation on the front end.
Product photos are uploaded to THRON, which centralises the management of contents and distributes them directly on the final channels. This means the file is “physically” present on the platform in just one copy, and is published on the various channels by THRON. Thanks to this approach, the platform enables the automatic adjustment of the individual asset’s format and attributes during distribution, making it perfect for every channel but without creating pointless duplications.
Thanks to the THRON delivery function, KitchenAid can be sure of the real-time updating of its channels. In fact, whenever a new version of an asset is uploaded, THRON aligns all the brand’s touchpoints in real time.
And there’s more, because the centralisation of contents , enables working by means of shared workflows. This makes the DAM Platform a collaborative space. In other words, everyone works on the same file, which is present in only one copy.
No risk of uploading the wrong versions to the web, with major benefits for the brand’s image and business objectives.
THRON PLATFORM supports the content strategy to create, organise, distribute and analyse digital assets efficiently and with no duplication.
RTIE is the THRON smart editor that allows images to be personalised and optimised for the web during distribution itself. So there is no need to create copies of a given image or edit it to ensure it’s perfect for every channel.
The Real Time Image Editor enables marketers, for example, to personalise images by modifying their size or characteristics such as background colour, format or quality.
Making sure that photos distributed on web channels are the same size and offer the same user experience is much more than a fussy marketers’ fad.
In fact, apart from purely aesthetic considerations, in the digital commerce world the quality and care with which a product is presented are fundamental. Together with consistent brand communications, they play a major role in persuading a user to make a purchase.
Shortening the times needed to put these factors into practice can generate important benefits for the marketing function, which is freed from time-consuming activities to concentrate on more strategic projects.
Before they switched to THRON, it took the KitchenAid editors three days’ (manual) work to edit and publish the perfect version of every asset for every channel. Smart cropping slashed this time to one day. This means a time saving of 66%.
The correction, fine tuning tuning and replacement of an obsolete version – which took a whole day’s work before THRON arrived at KitchenAid – have been delegated to the DAM Platform, which does the job in just 5 minutes. The user just replaces the version of a content in the platform, and the automatic update function automatically brings it into line in real time on all channels. Here the difference is even greater: 99% less time.
Figures that speak for themselves and prove that technology – and THRON PLATFORM in particular – is once again the key to improving our daily lives, as both marketers and customers.