censhare
Hearst - UK's Largest Publishing House Is Well Equipped for the Future
Hearst Magazines UK, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation headquartered in London, ranks among the market leaders in the UK magazine and periodical sector with its extensive portfolio of print magazines. In connection with the digital versions of such prestigious brands as Harper's Bazaar, Country Living, Esquire, ELLE, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, Hearst is the largest publisher active in the online market, and is meanwhile reaching every third woman and every fourth adult in the UK – which currently translates as 44 million users per month.
The established consumer magazine "Good Housekeeping" founded in 1922 has a readership of some 24 million. Based on cooking recipes, nutrition and consumer tips, fashion and finances it serves its readers with practical ideas and advice for modern housekeeping. The magazine is linked with the Good Housekeeping Institute, which, in addition to a culinary school and a shop with its own range of products, also includes a laboratory in which new products such as foods or technical equipment are tested.
It was already eight years ago that company management recognized the integration of digitalization as the indispensable core of its own business model, and, in this context, opted for the flexible and forward looking censhare concept. Increased digital capabilities not only aimed to achieve time and cost savings, but also to ensure the optimization of the quality standards and the topicality of editorial content based on more efficient workflows .
Although the classic print format continues to form the core of the market strategy , the publisher also addressed the demands of target groups that want to access the provided content any time, any place – whether printed or digitalized, whether on TV, PC or mobile phone. In order to make readers and advertising customers even more loyal to the brands, the company wanted to not only be positioned as a provider of exceptional content, but also as a multimedia service provider.
Another concern was to systematically process the results of product testing determined at the Good Housekeeping Institute with one, single tool, and in such a manner that the data, including the information on buying sources and supplementary or similar products, can be fed into all channels and be called up via all media.
Here too, censhare also provided the right solutions with its Digital Asset Management , Product Information Management and Omnichannel Content Management , and enabled, according to the estimation of the publishing house "a massive cultural change across the entire business" – also for in-house reorganization: censhare, in summary, offers Hearst everything that is relevant for production.
Thanks to the censhare programs it was now possible to share information and ideas without time losses throughout the entire corporation, while optimizing the utilization of resources, streamlining work sequences and integrating outsourced services and thereby reducing the dependence on external partners. As the management input involved in the coordination of conventional technologies was eliminated, it was possible to save over 3,500 working hours – capacities that were freed up for the conception of business strategies. A further summary came to the conclusion that this advantage benefitted the entire company. The introduction of censhare resulted in a complete cultural shift, and completely new ways of thinking within the Hearst media company.
Migros - State of the Art Communication Management
Migros was founded by Gottlieb Duttweiler in the year 1925 and has evolved into Switzerland's largest retailer in the meantime. More than 86,000 employees generate some CHF 25 billion per year. Migros is organized as a cooperative and is supported by around 2 million cooperative members. The company operates throughout Switzerland and is represented by 10 regionally organized cooperatives. The Migros Group comprises supermarkets, specialized markets and product centers, as well as retailing and travel organizations. With a total of some 600 sales outlets, Migros operates in all four language regions of Switzerland.
Apart from its commercial activities, Migros is also actively engaged as a corporate citizen in the areas of culture, society, recreation and education. With its so-called "culture percent" concept ("Kulturprozent“), as well as various funding initiatives the company makes a strong contribution to the quality of life of its customers. It therefore comes as no great surprise that Migros was elected as Switzerland's most trusted brand in the year 2012. The exemplary, multimedia based communication with its customers certainly contributed to this success. To cite a few examples, these activities include the print magazines "Migros-Magazin" and "Vivai", the Migros website, the consumer platform Migipedia.ch as well as social media, or also the M-Infoline and the M-Cumulus bonus program. These media allow users, consumers and customers to obtain information, as well as communicating among each other or dialoging with the company.
In order to ensure state of the art communication with its customers, Migros decided to upgrade its content management in the year 2011. With its Digital Experience Platform, censhare proved to be the perfect partner, and the only provider offering a standardized system solution featuring a modular structure. This was a very important criterion for Migros, as this enabled package to be compiled that was customized to specific needs, while offering flexible future expansion options in all directions.
As a central system, the censhare platform replaced the high number of systems that were involved in the advertising materials production process to date. In the process, system complexity has been reduced, which has resulted in tremendous improvements in production reliability and the quality of the communication materials. Articles, and advertising images as well as additional product information can now be managed and administrated in media neutral form at a central instance. Regardless as to whether the data are required for processing a flyer, poster advertising, the weekly “Migros-Magazin”, the accompanying web portal or other online media - they are always at hand in the appropriate form for the respective advertising materials. Layout adjustments can also be performed conveniently and at all times. Various workflows , such as the web-based goods-to-print process or the automated PDF distribution of outlet specific POS posters are also supported.
Today, Migros staff as well as advertising agencies, translators and photographers are all working on one and the same communication platform. Thanks to censhare solutions it is possible to seamlessly integrate all individuals involved in the planning , creation and production of advertising materials. In this way, the current status of a production is transparent and traceable at all times and for every party involved. After files have been created, they are stored centrally, can be subsequently processed and can be retrieved at all times and from any place with system access - both in their original form as well as in all documents in which they were used. In addition, the user friendly system structure enables the efficient cooperation of all parties involved and makes a significant contribution to keeping error rates in the production process low, while avoiding redundancy.
Based on censhare, Migros is currently successfully producing various advertising materials for 10 different national regions in three language versions. This includes the price flyer for the print version of the Migros magazine with a weekly circulation of around 2.2 million copies, various posters, POS material as well as additional flyers and in the online area the “Migros-Magazin” web portal and the distribution of offers for the Migros app.
According to Gabriel Gübeli, Head of Promotions Management at Migros, the implementation of censhare has mainly resulted in three positive effects:
On the one hand, we were able to reduce the costs of advertising material production by a tremendous measure. In the case of hosting this was in excess of 70%, while we achieved savings of 15% at the agency. Moreover, the entire process is now far more efficient thanks to system support, and has also become highly transparent, as everything is traceable at all times.
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