Kohler Case Study:

Staying On-Brand in the Midst of Exponential Growth

Situation

  • Bold Innovation A luxury brand founded back in the 1800s, this manufacturing powerhouse has developed a strong reputation for the elegance and sophistication of its products.
  • Bold Advertising A strategic part of their marketing communications strategy, their image is carried out across all of their striking advertising that is created inhouse with an internal creative agency.
  • All About Content Hundreds of thousands of assets are being used to make up this company’s advertising campaigns, many with different usage rights defined in contracts and license agreements that are stored in Legal as PDFs.

Challenge

  • Conservative and Risk Adverse With a highly regarded brand it is critical to protect the brand from any negative association
  • Lack of visibility Brand managers do not have good visibility into what can be used and how across the thousands of assets, models, and photographers
  • Overage fees The company found that in some cases it was paying talent more than they were originally paid for the shoot due to overage fees from finding expired assets in use in published advertising
  • Cumbersome manual processes The manual clearance process that involved emailing business affairs, operations, and legal would often drive up costs and cause bottlenecks in production

Solution

  • Automated the rights clearance process directly within OpenText to slim down the process, reduce the number of parties involved, and eliminate misuse
  • Mitigated risk and reduce costs with notifications on asset expirations
  • Gained business intelligence around talent, social profiles, and asset associations in order to identify trends, optimize costs, and monitor and protect the brand

“With the power of Rights Cloud we are able to support global product launches, empower content reuse and track expirations with ease.” Kenneth Wilson, Associate Manager, Communications Libraries and DAM, Kohler