VodafoneZiggo brings creative production in-house using Cube

About

In 2017, Vodafone and Ziggo joined forces to form one telecommunications powerhouse as VodafoneZiggo. Combined, they’re one of the biggest players in the Dutch telecommunications market and offer fixed, mobile and integrated communications and entertainment services to consumers and businesses.

Challenge

With so many services to offer and marketing channels to leverage across two brands, VodafoneZiggo saw a need to optimize their creative production organization-wide. So they set up an in-house studio to centralize the production, management and distribution of their creative campaigns, taking back some of the work from external creative vendors.

To transition to this new way of working, VodafoneZiggo looked for a cloud-based system to support with certain production tasks:

• Sharing creative work with stakeholders for review
• Storing all final deliverables including project and usage rights information
• Delivering large media files to stakeholders to download and use
• Sending TV ads to broadcasters

In order to have the internal studio work properly, we needed a smart library like Cube to organize and have control over our assets and rights usage.

Solution

Why Cube

VodafoneZiggo had frequently worked with Cube’s parent company Ambassadors before, mostly as an indirect post-production partner for video commercials. Since they already had experience with the Cube platform, they knew it fit the new studio workflow they had in mind.

How it works

At the start of each new campaign, producers create a project in the Cube workspace which is automatically set up with default folders. From rough cuts to final edits, this is where all files live, so the team always has everything within reach.

Then, when there’s new work to review, the studio team gathers feedback in one of two ways. The first is to discuss the work with stakeholders during an in-person or remote meeting. Otherwise, they can ask stakeholders to comment and annotate the work in their own time using Cube’s sharing and review tools for more detailed feedback. This process is repeated until the final version is signed off.

Once all assets are finalized, the campaign is ready for delivery. If it’s a TV campaign, producers can export the ads to Dutch broadcasters, quality-checked and formatted, all from within Cube. They can also download the assets in various formats or transfer them to other systems.

At the end of the project when it’s time to archive, producers must add metadata and rights information for all licensed creative works. That way, they can track all agreements and receive an alert when the agreements expire. All automatic, and no need to rely on agencies.

Our producers can store, share and export videos themselves without needing help from the editors.

Outcome

Creative production at VodafoneZiggo is in full swing, with Cube’s Creative Workflow at the heart of their operations.

The internal agency can manage all campaign production and media assets themselves, from start to finish. Equipped with the same time-tested tools and processes that many established agency production teams use, but adapted to the brand’s unique needs.

This means less reliance on creating and managing campaigns with different external vendors, each with different ways of working. Agencies are still an ideal partner for developing complex integrated campaigns and sourcing big ideas. But for everything else, VodafoneZiggo takes the lead at the center, working directly with only a few (post-)production partners.

For VodafoneZiggo, going in-house has led to better brand alignment, more flexibility and greater efficiency – and ultimately more effective marketing communications.