Ben & Jerry’s Packaging Rebrand Prompts Digital Asset Management Overhaul
Ben & Jerry’s investments in digital asset management are paying off after a recent packaging rebrand.
The ice cream company, a wholly-owned autonomous subsidiary of Unilever, found itself faced with needing to overhaul its digital image library in order to pre-emptively separate out the old packaging assets from the new rebranded assets, global retail technology manager Chris Lamotte and global content and community manager Sarah Badger shared with CGT.
They have an existing partnership with solution provider Image Relay that helps employees share product photos across 38 countries more intuitively and securely. The platform also makes it easier to quantify ROI and reduce errors through improved organization, according to Lamotte and Badger.
For this latest rebrand, Ben & Jerry’s used the moment to take a closer look at updating the folder structure of their library to simplify the process. The company hangs on to all of its assets for historical reference; although they wanted designers to have access to these images, they also wanted to archive out-of-date assets and prevent them from appearing in general access searches.
Assets in Image Relay are tagged with metadata, which helps reduce errors (such as the time a photo meant for Brazil with a Portuguese flavor descriptor was used in Germany). The platform also provides a historical archive, which allows the brand to save older packaging images it might want to someday use for a social media campaign — without running the risk of someone accidentally using out-of-date art.
Attaching that metadata is now the team’s biggest internal challenge, especially since it’s much easier to apply it when first uploading an image than to go into the system and add it later.
“Image Relay is also working on incorporating more AI into their solution, and I think there’s an opportunity for us to tap into it to solve some of those problems,” Badger said. “For example, we would love it if AI could be used to read the flavor names off a package asset and automatically tag it with that flavor name. It can be daunting to receive 600 photos that you need to tag manually. It takes a very long time. If AI could make that easier, it would be a huge relief.”
The service has saved Badger time when quantifying the ROI of photo shoots, since it makes it easy to see how many assets were uploaded during certain dates. The brand uses it to sync with external agencies, photographers and franchisees.
“We produce something akin to a newsletter called Rolling Cone that goes out to all our franchisees, [and it] helped us overcome the IT challenge of providing everyone who gets Rolling Cone with single sign-on access to an Image Relay folder created specifically for franchisees, with no need for extra dedicated logins,” Lamotte said. “This IT automation has resulted in far more seamless management of our network and more contented franchisees all around.”
