How Pivot Point Revolutionized Their Creative Process with the MediaBeacon Adobe Connector
When the new Adobe Connector became available as part of MediaBeacon, the folks at Pivot Point saw an opportunity to improve their creative process while helping
MediaBeacon further the development of the connector.
Case Study Summary
Pivot Point is a publisher for the hair and beauty industry. They serve the licensure, or undergraduate, community where they publish content for about 2,500 schools across ~80 countries. They create books, e-books, learning objects, and have a large online learning enterprise where they publish content and track engagement. They also serve the professional market, including the curation of content and distribution to platforms for product manufacturers.
Since Pivot Point has many touchpoints in the licensure and professional market, they have a large pool of digital assets that they need to manage, including existing content to be repurposed for different markets.
“We might develop a whole educational program with 12 areas of study and 150 lessons produced for the U.S.,” explains John Bernin, Sr. Director of Digital Innovation & Asset Management at Pivot Point. “And then it has to be adapted to meet the standards of the U.K. or Europe or other markets.”
To manage all this content and the different versions, Pivot Point needed a digital asset management (DAM) solution.
The Need for Digital Asset Management
Before using MediaBeacon DAM, the designers at Pivot Point were working on siloed servers, so they didn’t have a single place to store and search for images and files. If you didn’t know exactly where an image was stored, you had very little chance of finding it.
The major challenges Pivot Point needed to solve with DAM were:
- Couldn’t find the assets they needed to create or update content.
- Sometimes, a designer would work on a document only to find out that they were working on the
wrong one. - Couldn’t quickly redeploy objects to another workflow or designer without the need to download a massive number of documents.
- Didn’t have versioning to understand if the most current version was being used.
- Designers were using separate, disconnected workflows for their creative work so there was no way to streamline the process.
Pivot Point wanted to use a DAM as part of their creative process, so the ability to store and track Adobe files was a top priority.
One of the major reasons we chose MediaBeacon was the ability to track Adobe objects, show document reports, and see what objects were being used in InDesign documents.
After implementing MediaBeacon, all of the assets for Pivot Point were stored in a single location, so no one had to waste time searching for, recreating, or using the wrong version of files.
The Digital Asset & Illustration Innovation Manager for Pivot Point, Denise Podlin, guided her team on how to tag assets before adding them to MediaBeacon. While this type of work was different than what designers were used to, it was necessary to help support the evaluation of the creative process. They had to shift their thinking from using and searching through a folder structure to a method of finding assets using keyword searches.
“It took some getting used to versus the old method of just throwing a file on a server,” says graphic designer Annette Baase. “But I soon realized how important it was in order to be able to find the files later as we revamped our creative process.”
The team at Pivot Point was using MediaBeacon as repository where they would download files to add to InDesign files and using features like rating images and making saved selections, but they still needed a solution to support their entire design process.
The Need for a Creative Process
When the new Adobe Connector became available as part of MediaBeacon, the folks at Pivot Point saw an opportunity to improve their creative process while helping MediaBeacon further the development of the connector. Before incorporating the MediaBeacon Adobe Connector into their creative workflow, individual designers had their own process and they were not consistent with each other.
“We needed to streamline our creative process,” says Denise. “In order to get the connector to work correctly, we had to all be using the same workflow for our design.” Denise and team started observing the different workflows to identify how to create a single workflow by eliminating unnecessary steps, adjusting steps, and merging steps in their processes based on current workflows from
different designers.
With a streamlined creative workflow in place, the team at Pivot Point could start using the MediaBeacon Adobe connector to save time and improve efficiency in their efforts.
After updating the workflow and incorporating the connector, the team was able to store all of their layout and linked files in MediaBeacon so that a designer has all the assets they need directly through the connector in InDesign.
With the new creative workflow and MediaBeacon Adobe Connector:
- There are no broken connects or links when approvers are alerted to review the file.
- The most up to date version of the files are being used, and different versions can be accessed to see the changes.
- They can easily send IDML documents to translation services so that they can incorporate external workflows without confusion.
- They can update linked files automatically in the layout, so they don’t have to go back in and replace files.
In order to start using this functionality, the designers had to go through a culture shift, undoing the many years of shortcuts, bad or good, that they had developed in order to build the procedures and methods of how they work together so they could better leverage the tool. “There was this ‘aha’ moment when the whole team realized how well it was working for them,” said Denise. “I can’t tell you how excited our designers are with the new process and the Adobe Connector.”
The Benefits
- Files can automatically update InDesign documents with new edits to Illustrator and Photoshop files with one click, as opposed to tracking changes, notifications, and manual document updates.
- Documents can easily be updated and swiftly sent through the approval cycle.
- Files that are FPO can automatically relink with final files instead of having to delete and add a new file. “To have to reposition 20-30 images after they have already been placed exactly how I wanted them was such a time-consuming thing” says Annette. “That probably saved at least two hours for that one file.”
- The correct versions of files are always being used since they are stored and accessed from a single location. This eliminated errors like going to press with the wrong document. “It’s just so much easier to find what you need,” says Annette. “It saves time in so many different ways.”
After updating their workflow and partnering with MediaBeacon to develop the Adobe Connector, the team at Pivot Point is able to experience the benefits of a streamlined process that made the life of the designers more efficient and enjoyable.
