The world’s largest tea business—with an impressive portfolio of 36 iconic brands—recently shared its story with us about how Bynder’s AI Search capabilities transformed its content operations while generating major time and cost savings.
The company has around 17,000 employees and operates in more than 100 countries. In 2022, it was acquired by a private equity firm. As part of the acquisition, the global tea specialists were tasked with transforming and upgrading its content ecosystem, including a major data and digital asset migration away from its existing digital infrastructure.
Challenges that needed solving
Aside from the acquisition, its previous digital ecosystem was becoming unfit for the multinational’s size and scale as a fast-paced consumer goods company. For each of its 36 brands, the business works with a global network of retailers to promote and sell its products both in-store and online. Huge volumes of e-commerce and product assets need to be fed to retailers every day to keep up with demand and sell its goods effectively.
Yet there were siloed ways of working across teams, a lack of brand control over how assets were used, and too many manual steps involved in distributing assets quickly to its network of retailers.
This gave the company an opportunity to take a new approach to content operations. One that supported its entire brand portfolio, allowing it to efficiently scale and deliver winning on-brand content experiences across all marketing and e-commerce channels without extra resources.
Offering brand consistency and flexibility
As a global leader in the beverages industry, the business needs to deliver digital assets that are consistent with its brand identity, while also enabling retailers to customize assets for different markets and channels. Ultimately, there was a clear need for an enterprise-grade solution that supported the scale and complexity of its multi-branded content operations, delivering digital assets to retailers quickly and accurately.
To achieve that, the new solution had to seamlessly integrate with the company’s Product Information Management (PIM) tool, ensuring an automated exchange of digital assets and product data across its content ecosystem before being distributed to retailers and partners. This would ultimately lead to faster time to market for its products and better shopping experiences for customers.
Seeking a best-of-breed solution that could effectively meet the above needs, the global tea specialists also had to make sure that the transition from its existing digital infrastructure caused minimal disruption to day-to-day operations and did not negatively impact its customer experiences and bottom-line revenue.
The size and scope of the operation was initially expected to take approximately six months, with much of the work planned to be outsourced to an external agency.
Building a new connected ecosystem with Bynder’s AI-powered DAM
After weighing up its options, the business decided to implement Bynder’s AI-powered digital asset management (DAM) platform at the heart of its new content ecosystem – integrated with Salsify’s Product Information Management (PIM) tool. Bynder and its industry-leading AI capabilities have been critical in supporting the company’s multi-branded e-commerce operations at a fraction of the time, cost, and resources compared to before, ultimately setting the business up for future growth.
By leveraging Bynder’s AI Search functionality to assist with the migration of digital assets from its previous system, the business was able to save thousands in external agency costs by completing the project internally.
We first needed to start with an ecosystem mentality that has the users in mind. Bynder became the core of our content ecosystem, housing the data (assets) required to share with retailers, which is our ultimate goal.
*All quotes are attributed to the company’s Global Marketing Technology Project Manager.
How Bynder’s Search by Image did the work of an external agency in a fraction of the time
Whether it’s marketing materials or e-commerce product shots, each digital asset needs to include the right metadata (e.g. product information, usage rights, etc.) so it can be fed and synced with Salsify’s PIM solution, and subsequently sent to retailers. Bynder’s DAM serves as the starting point for sharing every digital asset, providing a single source of truth for teams to access and distribute on-brand, publish-ready content.
Bynder’s AI Search functionality was transformative during the migration from its existing digital infrastructure. Before onboarding Bynder, metadata was easily lost when exchanging assets between teams and adjacent systems, making it almost impossible to locate the right assets manually.
Using Bynder’s AI-powered capabilities to help automate the migration process, teams could instead upload an image to Bynder, and Search by Image automatically identified similar or identical assets in the DAM – without needing to search by keyword. This helped the team recognize what had already been submitted to the retailers before migration, and pinpoint assets with missing metadata. Originally seen as a near-impossible task without outsourcing the work to an external agency and taking months to complete, Bynder’s AI-powered DAM intelligently streamlined the process in a fraction of the time.
I didn’t know this functionality existed… Bynder’s AI Search by Image functionality, and how it’s improved our use of PIM, has been a lifesaver.
This helped employees recognize what had already been submitted to the retailers and pinpoint assets with missing metadata. Originally seen as a near-impossible task, Bynder’s AI-assisted DAM streamlined the process in a fraction of the time.
The transformative impact of AI Search on content governance is clear; what was expected to take six months has been achieved in weeks.
Duplicate Finder: No more duplicate uploads, making content governance effortless
The company’s digital assets always need to be accurate, up-to-date, and enriched with the right metadata before being fed into its PIM system. To meet these strict standards, Bynder automatically detects and removes any duplicate files upon upload to the DAM (easily done when you’re a large enterprise) so employees no longer have to manually spend time auditing its library and keeping the DAM clean.
By automating much of the manual work involved in distributing content from Bynder, to PIM, and subsequently to retailers, Bynder’s AI capabilities have been a game changer for the company beyond the initial migration—and they see it as a critical tool to scale operations. Its thousands of employees can now access and distribute publish-ready assets to retailers in record time, enabling quicker time-to-market of products, and more time back in the day to focus on higher-value strategic work.
For a global consumer company of its size and scale, these high-level benefits of speed, agility, and efficiency across the content lifecycle are directly impacting its bottom-line results.
Bynder’s AI Search Experience is a 21st-century requirement, to be honest. It is fast and furious, and modern e-commerce requires this quick solution to stay competitive.
Ready to let Bynder’s AI-powered DAM do the heavy lifting at your company?
Detecting duplicate assets, text-in-image searching, and AI-assisted content creation – these are just a few of the cutting-edge AI capabilities you can now take advantage of in Bynder. Want to see for yourself? Book a demo today. You can also learn more in our complete guide to Bynder’s AI and automation features.
