Alongside more than 300 customers at our annual Bynder Connect conference, Heineken South Africa’s Martech Product Manager, Anneen Dedekind, outlined five key principles to ensure maximum user adoption and ROI from Bynder, as well as the transformational benefits of embedding the digital asset management platform at the heart of Heineken’s martech stack.
1. “Create once, use multiple times”
Applying to both content production and localization, this ethos reflects one of the biggest value drivers from Bynder’s DAM for Heineken. Teams across its 50+ markets can now easily access, localize, and reuse its latest and greatest assets, ensuring consistent brand representation and maximum content ROI.
It's the underlying principle that delivers on our needs for cost efficiency at scale, quality control, brand consistency, and speed to market.
Heineken’s “learn, share, and reapply” approach reinforces this mantra. Teams identify top-performing assets through audits and retrospectives, which are then localized by other markets using Bynder Studio, and are ready for quick distribution to various channels.
The result is less duplication, reduced costs, shorter production timelines, and faster campaign rollouts—helping Heineken maintain agility while scaling content experiences globally.
2. Tailor the DAM experience to the user
By leveraging Bynder’s robust access and usage permissions, Heineken ensures that users can only access the assets relevant to their roles.
That means our brand teams can control the access and distribution of open files to the relevant users, safeguarding brand consistency and quality control while still achieving content distribution at scale.
By tailoring the DAM experience according to a user’s job role, Heineken can enhance content governance, providing users with a cleaner, clutter-free DAM environment. This drives higher content reuse and ROI while removing the risk of incorrect assets being published.
3. Content quality is a shared responsibility
Delivering high-quality, consistently on-brand content experiences across Heineken’s vast portfolio requires a collaborative approach, and Bynder is central to making this happen.
Brand guidelines are centralized in Bynder, ensuring that every team member knows how to bring Heineken’s branding to life and create assets that consistently amplify brand impact. Likewise, maintaining a robust file taxonomy structure that reflects the company’s “lingua franca” has been critical in accelerating asset searching and discovery, ultimately improving time-to-market.
4. Enable your DAM champions
We have three DAM administrators. It's not their only day job; they do it within the context of their other roles, but having three gives us effective coverage.
As a large enterprise, Heineken has created a dedicated taskforce of “DAM champions” to ensure users are getting maximum ROI from the platform as their use case evolves.
For example, they use Bynder’s ‘Waiting Room’ feature to ensure that every asset uploaded to the DAM meets Heineken’s strict quality standards, eliminating the risk of off-brand or incorrect assets being published. This governance process safeguards asset quality and builds trust in the system, encouraging users to fully embrace it for long-term success.
5. Continuous improvement
Recognizing that user needs and business priorities are always evolving, Heineken embraces a culture of continuous improvement to ensure the DAM remains user-friendly and laser-focused on supporting the company’s business goals.
We listen to our users continuously. Our training is available on the DAM platform and we run a quarterly community of practice where we address particular pain points and educate about new functionality and opportunities on how to use the DAM.
With Bynder’s features and functionalities also constantly evolving—especially in the AI space—Heineken is able to maximize the value of Bynder and ensure positive user experiences that drive further adoption.
Proving the ROI: How Heineken translates trends into topical content within 24 hours
During the talk, Heineken South Africa proved how Bynder supports one of its key ROI drivers: creating timely, personalized content experiences at scale. From major sports events to the holiday season, Heineken needs to translate consumer trends and timely moments into creative brand campaigns, so speed and efficiency are critical.
Using Bynder Studio, Heineken set itself an ambitious goal: turning briefs into personalized, on-brand social content within just 24 hours.
Bynder Studio served as our workbench, and we utilized Bynder Content Workflow to keep the team aligned and the process streamlined.
Heineken uses social listening insights to uncover trending topics, which are then used to create data-driven briefs that the brand team can review and approve. From there, the creative team creates on-brand image and video templates in Bynder Studio for other markets to adapt and use, enabling high-volume, localized production in minutes.
We proved the model works, getting all those people to do what they need to do within 24 hours. I consider [Bynder Studio] a massive use case and an amazing opportunity for cost efficiency
The ‘24-hour challenge’ proved to be a resounding success, shortening go-to-market timelines and delivering timely, topical social content for Heineken’s subbrands:
- Three Ships Whisky: Data insights showed a strong soccer fan base among consumers of this Cape Town distillery. Soccer-themed social ads were then crafted ahead of the upcoming soccer season.
- Klipdrift Brandy: As sponsors of the South African rugby team, Klipdrift Brandy created a series of social visuals promoting the partnership and amplifying the brand’s visibility with fans during the 2024 championship.
- Benini: Mindfulness-inspired TikTok content was created with Bynder Studio to connected with its “female glow-getter” audience
The results of Heineken’s DAM journey so far
Two years after implementation, Bynder is the single system of record embedded at the heart of Heineken’s martech stack, with impressive results:
- Over 100,000 assets uploaded and 200,000 downloads
- Hundreds of users onboarded and trained worldwide
- Teams across the globe now create, adapt, and review assets in Bynder, ultimately translating content into business growth
Bynder plays a critical strategic role in driving the distribution of our assets at scale whilst maintaining brand consistency.
What’s next for Heineken South Africa?
With Bynder now firmly established as the company’s single system of record for all digital content, Heineken South Africa plans to expand its use case with Bynder’s 100+ pre-built integrations to continue scaling its content operations and enable content-led growth.
Our goal is to embed Bynder as the catalyst for exceptional content experiences. We’re planning to integrate with Shopify; we’re looking at automated content delivery, and we’re also exploring asset transformations.
Ready to embark on your own DAM journey with Bynder? Book a demo today
Bynder’s best-of-breed digital asset management platform powers 4000+ of the world’s most iconic brands to conquer content chaos and deliver exceptional content experiences. Recognized for its usability and wide range of integrations, Bynder’s AI-powered DAM enables our customers to transform their digital ecosystem and drive more value from content operations.
