Colgate-Palmolive selects eMAM as the solution for Media Asset Management

Background

Colgate has been utilizing multimedia to communicate to its employees for over 30 years, resulting in an abundance of media assets on a variety of tape formats.   This rich media was in danger of deterioration and access to the content was challenging as the equipment necessary to playback the older formats became obsolete and difficult to find.  

Charged with maintaining this corporate legacy, Colgate-Palmolive’s Corporate Communications department sought an effective and reliable digital asset management system to preserve the integrity, provide ease of availability and archive the wealth of Colgate’s legacy media assets.  eMAM™ from Empress Media Asset Management (Empress) is a feature-rich, enterprise class software system that solved the problem.  

Challenges:

1.     Preservation and access to legacy media

Colgate-Palmolive has content on 8mm and 35mm film, betacam, VHS, DAT, and a variety of other formats.    These recordings physically degrade over time, so the historic images and videos can be in danger of being lost.   There is no easy way for staff to search or preview the content.   For many of these formats, Colgate-Palmolive does not have equipment in-house to view the content.   Even if viewable/accessible, there is no system in place to re-purpose, store or share with others.

2.     Lack of a digital workflow tool for studio acquisition

The in-house studio at Colgate-Palmolive corporate headquarters is not equipped to reformat content into needed formats or to distribute the content worldwide as needed.

3.     Inefficiency in sharing and distributing video on corporate intranet

Colgate-Palmolive staff had a labor intensive process to post video content to its employee intranet with a limited number of technically trained resources to complete the process.  

4.     Non secure content distribution from worldwide videographers

Colgate-Palmolive has a global network of videographers producing content for regional and global uses.   Videos were sent to the corporate headquarters on physical media or using various internet tools.    There was no way to ensure the security of these internal communications.

5.     Challenge for IT support, maintenance, training, and infrastructure for support of various systems.

There are major labor and equipment costs involved with the utilization of a variety of different systems for various aspects of media content acquisition, sharing, and distribution.

Solutions:

Colgate’s selection of eMAM included the installation of the eMAM suite of tools including eMAM Mobile and eMAM Feeder.  In addition, Empress staff coordinated the installation of a Rorke Data 32 TB Storage Area Network to solve their challenges:

1.     Preservation and access to legacy media

eMAM now provides access to the digitized content through their corporate standard web browser.  Users can now search and browse all the legacy material and repurpose as needed without the need for plugins or software download.  eMAM’s user friendly interface allows users to quickly locate assets and directly share using eMAM’s eBIN Smart eMail tool.  

2.     A digital workflow tool for studio acquisition

Content in eMAM can be transcoded in real-time simultaneously to different formats.   Server “watch folders” have been setup, supporting “drag & drop” file upload which triggers delivery to a choice of predefined destinations.  

3.     Efficiently sharing and distributing video on corporate intranet

Users can use eBIN and other eMAM tools to easily post content to the intranet or send mixed media emails (video/audio/images/documents).   eMAM has become the framework for unifying their digital workflow needs.  

4.     Secure content distribution from worldwide videographers

eMAM Feeder was designed in close collaboration with Colgate-Palmolive to meet their worldwide ingest requirements.    eMAM Feeder provides a simple interface enabling contract producers to upload their content directly into eMAM – without the need to provide VPN or other user access to the Colgate Wide Area Network.  eMAM Feeder also supports selection of predefined projects/categories and includes the ability to add metadata tags.

5.     Reduced need for IT support, maintenance, training, and infrastructure for support of various systems.  

IT staff and resources assigned to support the various media players, flash plugins, and other systems could now be reassigned as eMAM has become the corporate global standard for video distribution.   The challenge of supporting video on iPad / iPhone has been eliminated through the implementation of eMAM which supports native iOS video.

Results and ROI

Workplace efficiency

Regarding the project, Steve Baez, Associate Director – Corporate Communications at Colgate-Palmolive commented: “We have been extremely pleased working with the Empress team.  I consider them as Business Partners collaborating to implement eMAM.

They truly have made it easy for us to get this done.

Having Empress deliver a solution (their software and 3rd party hardware platform) as a complete turnkey solution allowed us to focus on the business integration of eMAM. This was a tremendous benefit to us and key to the project's success. 

In addition to the interface being simple and easy to use with minimal training, it is web-based, meaning our IT organization does not have to deal with software downloads, or version control.

Furthermore, the eBIN functionality has been a significant plus.  When sending a video, we are no longer concerned with the recipients PC type, the asset file type, size, codec, etc.

By integrating their media player into a simple email, eMAM delivers a seamless viewing experience to all recipients regardless of their platform. This includes mobile devices as well.

I view eMAM as a long term business strategy integral to our workflow.”