British entertainment pedigree doesn’t get much more prestigious than Channel 4, winner of the ‘Best DAM Deployment’ award at the 2023 Bynder Spotlight Awards. A household name across the UK, Channel 4 is a publicly-owned broadcaster that has built a reputation for hard-hitting programming tackling sensitive topics to push boundaries and reach new audiences. By bringing onboard emerging talent and weaving rich, emotive stories, the Channel 4 brand has had, and continues to have, a defining influence on British culture.
The case for Bynder DAM
40 years of brand building in a notoriously hyper-competitive space means Channel 4 has had to continuously evolve and adapt to changes in consumer behavior and trends, without losing sight of its ever-important core values. It was here, with an increased demand for digital content and a need to produce high-volume content to a consistent standard, that the need for a DAM became evident.
Before Bynder, stakeholders would have to make individual requests for visuals from our photo team, which absorbed a huge amount of time and significantly hampered the creative process. Now, with DAM we strip away that monotony and give creatives the freedom to make an informed decision on what to use and when. It saves everyone so much time.Stephen Green
Asset Manager at Channel 4
Before working with Bynder, Channel 4's asset storage solution caused a lack of transparency between creatives and created roadblocks in the production process. Housing assets on servers and hard drives, internal stakeholders had to manually dig through streams of files (often different versions of similar assets) to find the precise asset they were looking for. An inability to quickly find the correct asset can have a major impact on the production processes for reactive campaigns and content. At the same time, the non-centralized storage of files creates silos between teams, where stakeholders are unable to collaborate on an asset together.
Laying out an ambitious long-term strategy in 2020, Channel 4 wanted to meet consumer content demands, drive digital growth, and optimize internal production processes.
DAM-driven strategy
In 2020, Channel 4 launched Future4, our core long-term strategy focused on digital growth across all departments and workstreams. New foundational technology was required to support this long-term strategy, and the DAM system has quickly proven to be essential in supporting our digital growth.
Recognizing a change in behavior, Channel 4 identified the apparent need to facilitate a shift in how their audience would consume their content. As a publically-funded broadcaster with the youngest demographic in the UK (16-34-year-olds), the organization understood that focusing on online and short-form content would bring a new range of demands from internal creative teams and content output. Securing and deploying the right DAM solution was an essential step to support the roll-out of its brand strategy, promote a better, more efficient way of working, and uniting its teams to work collaboratively.
With a creator-focused YouTube channel 'Channel 4.0' a key part of this new brand strategy, it was paramount that Channel 4 could branch into this unexplored area without jeopardizing brand integrity. Adopting a DAM solution would allow stakeholders to procure and launch content without needing to constantly have their hand held by a creative to ensure they remained on-brand.
Technology for trending content
To stay relevant, we've had to change the way we create content and it takes a lot more work. We have to push out significantly more content, and in order to do that we need the right technology.
With Bynder's DAM solution at the core of its tech stack, it's become an integral part of Channel 4's way of working, changing the internal landscape from campaign ideation to execution. Bynder's DAM solution has not only helped Channel 4 conquer the chaos of proliferating content that came with their new digital strategy, but also presented an opportunity to create a truly connected ecosystem of tools. Channel 4 could reap the rewards business-wide with an array of powerful integrations and modules.
With the launch of a new digital strategy and a wider rebrand, the Brand Guidelines module has been a potent addition to Channel 4's connected ecosystem. Brand is such an integral part of Channel 4's business, and safeguarding its identity is essential across every audience touchpoint. Bringing all the critical branding guidelines together in a ‘brand hub’ directly linked to the DAM, Channel 4 stakeholders can instantly access the information they need—safe in the knowledge that it's up-to-date and relevant. Changes to brand assets in the DAM are directly reflected in the Brand Guidelines ecosystem without requiring any manual interference. Despite the need for fast, rapid content deployment, the risk of off-brand assets hitting audience eyes and damaging the brand is drastically reduced, giving creatives and channel owners autonomy.
The Creative Workflow module saves Channel 4's creatives over 30 hours a week, injecting efficiency into the production process without sacrificing quality or accountability. The ability to automate and streamline recurring processes means creatives get their assets approved faster, and marketers can get content to market quickly and scale content output as needed.
Focusing on short-form content brought a different set of challenges for Channel 4's creatives, with the shorter format bringing a reduced barrier to access and an ability to react to market trends, both highly valuable properties for the brand's target audience. However, the content's reactive nature means rapidly creating new, original omnichannel assets to support it is crucial. Storing branded assets in one central, accessible location has significantly reduced the burden on creative teams, with stakeholders now able to access distribution-ready files and significantly quicken time-to-market.
We do have embargoed content and sensitive imagery that we have to be able to manage while preserving autonomy for the user, and the DAM gives us plenty of flexibility to do this.
Optimizing the workflow methodology and promoting real-time collaboration meant that users were able to work autonomously yet together, with processes and accountable stakeholders clearly defined across the production timeline.
Why Invest in Bynder DAM?
Bynder users create, manage, and share a staggering amount of assets to support the growth of their businesses, drive revenue, and build customer loyalty. Identifying potential issues within an organization, creating a business case, and finally choosing a DAM provider is a necessary process that can seriously transform the way a business operates. 4,000+ brands have chosen Bynder as their digital ally to help them conquer the chaos of proliferating content, creating incredible content experiences, and separating themselves from the noise of competitors.
Serious scale
Customers expect a higher volume of high-quality content across every encounter they have with a brand. Bynder's DAM is built to meet modern content consumption demands without sacrificing content quality or brand consistency across touchpoints.
Pernod Ricard: With six DAM deployments across the globe, spirit powerhouse Pernod Ricard leverages an enormous 137TB of data to feed content to its 240 brands across 160 markets.
Set for speed
If brands aren't first, they're most certainly last. In an ever-competitive digital space, it's absolutely crucial to hit customer touchpoints with rich, engaging content before others do. The right people having access to the right content at the right time is mission-critical to be reactive and carve out market share.
Steve Madden: Pre-Bynder, reactive, and timely social content would often take a day to produce. Now? Creative requests are completed in two hours, slashing time-to-market. Content releases that used to take five days now take only one day, saving teams serious time.
Smart investment
Smart investments in the right technology are a proven way to boost ROI and extract additional value out of previous investments.
Omron: Bynder's composability was a natural fit for the needs of Omron, who created a connected ecosystem of applications to drive a massive surge in traffic to its website with a 38% increase in qualified leads.
Competitive advantage
When we take DAM on its own, we can view it as a 'brand portal' that organizations can use to create, manage, and distribute their assets centrally. This initial offering can be elevated with additional modules and integrations to create a competition-beating tech stack that delivers serious value to both the brand and customers.
Red Roof: Bynder's offering enabled Red Roof to stand out from the crowd with an impressive sub-one-second web page load speed, offering customers a slick experience while increasing asset circulation online by five times.
In today's competitive digital landscape, Bynder's DAM is a smart investment for brands seeking to create, manage, and distribute content more efficiently. Just as Channel 4 experienced, for brands facing an increasing demand for high-quality, on-brand content across different channels, Bynder's DAM system provides the scalability essential to meet the demands of modern content consumption. Find out more.
