Accelerating Content Productivity – Learning from Jaguar Land Rover

Market leading cost savings, exemplary efficiency gains, and an increase in car sales - impressive achievements for Jaguar Land Rover through digital asset management. We explore how.

  1. chevron left iconAccelerating Content Productivity – Learning from Jaguar Land Rover
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Lucy Campbell-WoodwardJune 18, 2019
  • Digital Asset Management
  • Content Management
  • Content Marketing

The impact of micro moments can be hard to quantify in the workplace. Even the most avid follower of time and motion studies would be hard pressed to account for the cost of a single extra click or unspoken thought. But bring thousands, or perhaps millions, of those micro moments together and a company is suddenly faced with an enormous chunk of time and money that it can either win or lose.

A great example of this, point and case, is the effect that unique, joint venture agency, Spark44, and a digital asset management (DAM) platform has had on Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) business results.

In 2011 Spark44 faced the rather intimidating task of increasing car sales across a widening global audience while saving JLR money. The agency not only met this challenge for its one and only client, but achieved market leading cost savings, exemplary efficiency gains, and an increase in car sales that would make even the most seasoned salesman turn green with envy.

Engine Trouble

In 2011, the brand was "not in a good place" in terms of brand messaging and erosion according to Ahmed Hasan, Head of Digital Marketing at Spark44. In an on demand webinar, Director of Operations at Spark44, Jerry Melichar, admits that while it may seem straightforward to get from brief to asset, the process used to be a mess. Getting from brief to asset was a struggle. Version control became an issue as briefs would be emailed back and forth, amended and shared with others. There were word documents all over the place. In the end, some project kick offs even had to be abandoned because of missing information. Despite the synergies created by their unique joint venture agency/client model, there were some serious operational gaps requiring radical improvement. The need for efficiency was ripe and this is exactly where Spark44 looked to tighten things up.

“Our creative directors demand excellence, which takes time. We wanted to support the creative process without breaking it. Effectively, we needed to buy time.” – Ahmed Hasan, Head of Digital Marketing, Spark44, censhare Customer Success Story

Changing Gears

The answer? Hard work, attention to detail and the smart use of technology. censhare (yes, that’s us!) allowed them to form a centralized system acting as a single source of truth became the hub of all operations – as a web CMS and for all its digital assets, workflow governance, resource and project management, and email distribution. In addition, it is also used by 10,000 people within JLR as a product information portal – holding information on the group’s hundreds of vehicles, options and accessories.

Firing on all cylinders

In total, 11,000 people across Spark 44 and JLR use censhare on a daily basis. It holds 300,000 assets and serves around 10,000 downloads each month. Content approval management now adheres to a traffic light system which alerts users to how important a task is – reminding them that their actions affect the speed of production. Managers can see what employees across the 18 different offices are working on, so work can be moved around as resources become available and everyone is fully utilized. This transparency also reduces the risk of brand erosion over time - with different markets requiring content suiting local economy, culture and language(s), the centralized system has allowed JLR to embrace personalized and targeted marketing without putting their brand on the line.

And things are going well. Spark44 campaigns have won awards worldwide for JLR campaigns. Vehicle sales have doubled from 300,000 to 600,000 annually, content production has become 68% more efficient, and, wait for it, cost savings for JLR amount to £55m since 2011.

A Purring Engine

These improvements are, on the surface, little more than common sense. But to operationalize, a powerful central resource is needed that can hold, maintain, manage and distribute the vast number of resources held by a large and diverse brand like JLR. And not only does it have to be powerful, it has to be intelligent.

The intelligence comes from the semantic database that establishes the relationships between assets and the contexts in which they are used. It’s also vital that these relationships should be flexible, to allow new contexts to be absorbed and assets to be adapted quickly to various markets depending on local need and flavour. Some can be incredibly subtle – the same image shared between North America and South Korea may feature tiny but vital amendments – in the case of JLR this could be amber headlights and tinted rear windows in the former that are not present in the latter.

Even seemingly mundane processes such as brief creation can be improved by an intelligent asset hub. Instead of fixed forms that need to be created afresh when new criteria are added, a handful of comprehensive templates can be stored but which only show completed fields so as to keep the brief uncluttered and clear. Equally, new project collateral can be mirrored from past versions to keep project set up admin to a minimum in terms of both effort and cost.

There are two really great resources available to you on the Jaguar Land Rover and Spark44 success story – a downloadable case study providing a comprehensive overview of Spark44’s and JLR’s use of censhare and business results, and an on demand webinar with Jerry Melichar, who walks listeners through his team’s development and provides a practial glimpse into their daily use of the digital asset management platform in fine detail. He also shares the motivation behind the agency’s journey towards ‘one source of truth’ in its creative operations in order to deliver a transparent and globally consistent approach through its aims of eliminating waste and departmental silos.

You can access both the success story and on demand webinar on our Resource pages here.

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Lucy Campbell-Woodward
Lucy is Head of Marketing for censhare, and leads the global team in the aligned planning and implementation of censhare's marekting strategy. Having joined the team in 2017, Lucy has played a pivotal role in the censhare Marketing team for a good few years now, and stepped up into a leadership role in 2022.

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