Protecting the Health and Well-Being of Opella
Interview with Penjo Chhimi, Creative Asset Manager, Opella US.
Situation: On a worldwide campaign for public health
Opella (formerly Sanofi Consumer Healthcare) US is on a mission to build a healthier future by helping people help themselves. The multinational consumer healthcare company leverages the best in science, together with their world-class pharmaceutical quality standards, to deliver consumer-driven, innovative medicines and products. Opella has a large presence in over 150 countries with more than 9,000 employees globally. The brand works with numerous marketing agencies, both internal and external. To maintain a consistent brand image, they developed a syndication program for their digital media assets.
Challenge: A costly oversight exposes the need for centralized digital rights management (DRM)
The discovery of an expired asset in syndication sparked an internal audit to identify all published assets with their associated rights. Opella then manually compared assets in their DAM against syndicated media, identified whether any had expired and, if so, took them down. This time-consuming and costly manual effort caused them to more closely examine the root cause of the problem: that digital asset rights were managed by agencies and not visible in-house. If Opella wanted to reuse an asset, they had to go back to the agency and ask for the associated rights, which took time and left room for errors. To protect the brand, they determined that they needed to develop a DRM strategy that would give them complete visibility and control.
“It took a long time to generate a spreadsheet mapping out every single asset that was produced and syndicated, then manually compare them. It cost us time, it cost us money. This highlighted the immediate need for a rights management tool in our DAM.”
Solution: A two-phased initiative to take control of DRM
Phase 1: Bring rights management in-house
Opella’s first step was to bring all rights agreements in-house, centralizing them in their DAM. Their immediate goals for this phase were to:
- Ensure consistent and uniform data handling of rights
- Eliminate delays with the ability to quickly retrieve rights
- Reduce potential errors and oversights that opened them up to non-compliance risk
While bringing rights into their DAM was a significant step forward in gaining visibility and control, rights clearance was still largely manual. Resources were required to manage requests for use, download the rights information, and send it back to the requester. The process remained time-consuming, inefficient, and open to error.
Opella wanted a DRM system that would act as a safeguard against potential legal issues while at the same time enhancing operational efficiency. Ideally, it would have real-time tracking and alert functionality to ensure compliance and eliminate the need for manual checks.
Phase 2: Integrate advanced DRM with their DAM
The second phase was to identify and onboard a technology solution for DRM. Opella US selected FADEL Brand Vision – Rights Cloud to connect to their Acquia DAM.
“Our progress has been profound. Rights clearance has evolved from asking our agencies to provide data from a physical printout sitting in a filing cabinet, to bringing rights in-house and storing them in our DAM. With the implementation of Rights Cloud, all the talent information and rights agreements are housed in one centralized location. Users can run instant clearance checks resulting in a faster and more agile way of working.”
Results: Efficient, user-friendly processes empower all users to protect the Opella brand
Rapid adoption. The intuitive design of Brand Vision – Rights Cloud requires very little learning curve. This has accelerated adoption, allowing Opella to quickly roll out their program to enforce compliant processes.
Real-time visibility. Dashboards give the brand and agencies at-a-glance insights into which assets are available for use along with any restrictions that may apply, e.g. expirations, geographies, and channels.
Better collaboration. With a single, centralized location for brand information and assets, teams are able to collaborate more efficiently and instantly clear asset rights.
Faster time to market. Campaigns can proceed from planning to distribution with greater agility because of brand and agency self-service capabilities.
“It’s a win/win for the brand and agencies. Rights information is visible across the board and all the data is in one place for brands and agencies to collaborate. Plus, we can rest assured that our campaigns are compliant, protecting the Opella brand.”
Consistent rights management. Rights Cloud provides a standardized format for recording rights, ensuring that rights are captured in their entirety at ingestion.
On-demand reporting. Opella can run instant audits, giving them confidence in their compliance across markets and channels. Analytics into asset performance support faster and more informed decision-making.
“Rights Cloud provides proactive reports that identify assets that are out in syndication. If there are violations or upcoming expiration dates, we can request renewals or take them down, plus we can shut them off in our DAM so they are no longer available for syndication because the assets disappear downstream.”
