Southbank Centre
Bynder's software model aligns perfectly with the needs of a modern organisation, such as Southbank Centre.
Events and Collections Systems Manager at Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre is a world-famous arts centre on the South Bank of the Thames. Created in 1951 for the Festival of Britain, Southbank Centre draws on its heritage as a festival site, with art and activities inside and outside. They encourage everyone to become involved in the arts in new and creative ways. Celebrating music, dance, art, performance and spoken word—there are events and festivals for everybody throughout the whole year. Thousands of musicians and artists perform to millions of visitors, making Southbank Centre the most popular cultural destination in the UK.
Challenges for Southbank Centre
Fluid access to and the proactive ability to manage and create high-resolution image and video files is an essential promotional component for Southbank Centre’s events.
Originally storing digital assets within various network locations, Southbank Centre’s team were sometimes faced with a game of hide and seek when locating the correct asset and permissions for reproduction. Often relying on the advice from colleagues as to where the image was saved, some members stored their work in a cloud-based file storage tool that created issues if a folder owner left the organization or inadvertently changed permissions.
Additionally, storage was unable to be enriched with metadata about the assets, such as event or venue information, which would have been greatly useful when looking for the best media file to use for top-quality promotional purposes.
The final challenge came about when the organization sought to be as proactive with their assets as possible. Manual processes were in need of a healthy dose of automation to streamline workflows.
For example, if an asset was to be embedded onto the website, Southbank Centre’s editors had to find it in one of the various locations, then download it to their machine and upload it to the website CMS.
They knew this could be automated to speed up their web publishing, and to solve this problem, while addressing asset storage and search targets, Southbank Centre looked to implement a new solution. Ideally, they were looking for a product that could integrate with other internal systems, as well as the developing new website that supported the promotion of the large number events they hosted.
How Bynder helped
Southbank Centre evaluated several solutions during the procurement process.
One aspect of Bynder that stood out was the ability to use the system as a hosting platform for media embedded in the website, which we are in the process of re-designing.Michal Obuchowski
Events and Collections Systems Manager at Southbank Centre
It is a benefit to have a CDN for images right in Bynder and not have to worry about hosting infrastructure or extra hosting costs.
Other positive factors were the ability to customize the system to the brand’s needs and corporate identity, as well as the easy-to use interface of which all users benefit.
Today, all valuable assets of Southbank Centre are securely saved in Digital Asset Management module of their brand portal, a centralized location with clear permissions and user-friendly instant search functionality.
Thanks to the customizable taxonomy and tagging function, more information can be added to each asset. As a result, the users of Southbank Centre’s brand portal can improve access, accuracy and speed.
Using Bynder's API, Southbank Centre’s team was able to prototype and implement functionality that ties together their ticketing and event management systems with Bynder assets and serve them to the web CMS as a ready-to-style package. In the future, editors will be able to simply approve (or enrich) auto-generated content coming straight from Bynder and the other systems mentioned above.
Besides Marketing and Web teams, also Design and Art Programming personnel work or will come in contact with Bynder at some point.
I like the customisation options and the ease of use of the interface. It is a breeze to on-board new staff onto the system, because of the drag-and-drop functionality and the WYSIWIG nature of Bynder's asset library. Other favourites include the quick search and the ability to share assets and collections with colleagues quickly and efficiently. Accepting assets from external sources is also very useful.Michal Obuchowski
Events and Collections Systems Manager at Southbank Centre
Benefits for Southbank Centre
With the help of Bynder’s branding automation solution, Southbank Centre’s marketing team involved in the GoLive process (the process of bringing shows and performances to life) is now able to easily locate and share the exact assets required by the web team.
The process is faster, more precise and more visual than using convoluted file naming conventions in obscure network locations, requiring less in-depth knowledge on the process to work well.
Bynder has noticeably improved workflows of the staff who are using the system in the past six months.Michal Obuchowski
Events and Collections Systems Manager at Southbank Centre
