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| CASE STUDIES | July-August 2009 |
Commercial production company looks to WCM system for major upgrade to its video-rich web sites
BLINK PRODUCTIONS is a commercial production company, historically specialising in the production of television commercials, but more recently branching out into the worlds of print production, installations and music supervision. Blink was founded in 1985 by Bob Lawrie and James Studholme and over the years has been largely known for finding and developing unknown talent, launching such luminaries as Ivan Zacharias, Dominic Murphy, Dougal Wilson, Lynn Fox, Pleix and Ben Hibon amongst others.
2003 saw the launch of Colonel Blimp, Blink’s sister music video production company and in 2004, Blinkink, a subdivision specialising in the hybrid world where live action filmmaking meets modern animation and visual effects. 2008 saw the launch of Blinkart, Blink’s print and installation arm. Recent work from the Blink family includes commercials for Cadbury’s, Ford, O2, Toyota, BT, Barclays, Carphone Warehouse, YSL, Holston and Cold Play.
Challenges and objectives of the project
The company has a number of divisions that collectively make up Blink Productions. Each of these divisions has its own website.
Blink Productions had a need to redesign and relaunch its public facing range of websites for a number of reasons. Ultimately Blink’s aim was to have one new website that houses all of its divisions under one roof. As the company grows it became obvious the business needed a flexible and easy-to-manage range of sites that can be adapted to mirror the company’s growth and house all of the content it produces.
Blink is all about visuals, however, on the old sites videos could not be viewed in a large format and quality was inferior. Furthermore, the production company does not have an internal web team, which meant that external parties used to make any changes to its sites. This of course had cost and time implications, and also meant Blink had no real control over their content and sites.
Blink’s old sites were built in static Flash and were not underpinned by a content management solution. Websites built in Flash can pose several problems and challenges. Most importantly, Flash-based sites are difficult for search engines to see or index and hence can affect search engine optimisation (SEO) negatively.
It had also become increasingly difficult for the production company to talk face to face with its clients, which are advertising agencies. So it needed a new ‘shop front’ to showcase its work and communicate with agencies.
Requirements
With these challenges faced, Blink Productions had the following detailed requirements:
- To be able to show its films as big and as beautiful as can be achieved without compromising on speed or quality;
Each Director to have their own homepage and each spot should have its own thumbnail,
Each spot to be downloadable with Blink branding,
Each spot should be emailable (either as a link or as a file),
Each spot to have a ‘Request a reel’ button,
A feature that pops up after site users have viewed a spot directing the viewer to other work by the same director or to other directors with a similar style, creating a cross-reference network, - Have autonomy of management and for its non-technical staff in-house to;
Be able to make changes and updates easily and quickly through an easy-to-use admin site,
Be able to add new sites and website addresses in-house without having to rely on a third party, - A CMS that delivers high SEO results for Blink Productions as well as for every of its directors’ names.
The VYRE solution and the benefits of VYRE Unify
As part of the Blink deployment VYRE has delivered four sites on the fully-managed service model. The fully-managed service offers a one-stop-shop approach designed to provide a high return on investment and quick deployment time. As part of this service VYRE offers a wide range of services and Blink called on consultancy, web design, site implementation and hosting.
Previously, the company’s content repository and websites were entirely independent. With the introduction of VYRE Unify all of the sites are now built and managed together in one single solution. This means that Blink can easily repurpose content across sites, saving time and significantly reducing duplication in work or effort. Furthermore, the single solution approach has enabled the production company to consolidate business costs.
A key advantage of the new VYRE Unify deployment is that, after minimal training, Blink now has total control over content and the reliance on third parties to make changes is removed.
Blink staff now perform content tasks through VYRE’s user-friendly content management interface. For example, Blink staff can quickly choose which site the director’s work should be displayed on and the layout, size and order of videos and images is also easily managed with VYRE Unify’s sequencing feature. This feature enables staff to easily control and change the prominence of videos, allowing the promotion of certain videos at specific times.
In order to streamline the company’s processes, workflow has been set up for the creation, management and publishing of web content. This means that staff can easily see the status of content items and promote progress where necessary.
The VYRE Unify archive feature is new for Blink. Whereas before items would have had to be deleted, now they are automatically archived by setting archive dates for content within the CMS layer. The scheduling features also controls publication dates and time.
The search function allows users to search across the different directors, news, videos and images. The search uses taxonomy filtering and displays the results using an Ajax plugin. This provides a responsive and dynamic search experience with quicker navigation.
In the production world a ‘treatment’ is part of the pitch process and is a piece of prose that outlines the synopsis of the creative work under discussion. There are two types: the original draft treatment, created during the writing process, and the presentation treatment, created as presentation material and both can be supported by a wide range of associated media.
To provide an improved service to their clients (advertising agencies) Blink wanted to create a new ‘shop front’ to showcase their work and communicate with agencies. Therefore, as part of the Blink deployment VYRE has created a shared client workspace where pitches, documents, videos, images and directors can be linked and commented on.
On completion of the online treatment, the system automatically builds a secure link, which means sensitive content is secure and password protected. Treatments are also site-specific, which is to say that they carry the unique branding of the company’s different sites.
Finally, as the new Blink sites were built in HTML and no longer rely on Flash, SEO has been much improved and the sites are now visible to search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
Future
Due to VYRE Unify's excellent scalability, Blink Productions now has the option to change and add new features, pages or entire sites in the future. As business needs may change, so can its sites.
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| www.blinkprods.com | www.vyre.com |
