Throughout a unique digital experience for the guests of Switzerland

Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland Tourism is the national tourism marketing organization of Switzerland and is present worldwide with over 280 employees in 35 offices, in 23 markets. Switzerland Tourism is the organization that promotes the demand for tourism activities in Switzerland at home and abroad. This is done through the development and implementation of various marketing programs and the profiling of the strong tourism brand Switzerland.

Industry

Tourism

Employees

approximately 270

Internationally active

in 23 markets

Key figures

> 90'000 digital assets
> 24 TB asset volume

Challenges

Switzerland Tourism's basic mission is to trigger travel desires and attract new guests to Switzerland. Content marketing is the linchpin of the strategic orientation. This includes digital and analog communication with a lot of image and video material, which is produced in-house but also partly purchased.

After Unic was commissioned with the new website in 2019 and Sitecore was implemented as the content management system (CMS) in 2020, the task for us was to merge the extensive library of images and videos, which had previously been managed in two different systems. The countless media assets should be able to be used by different users, such as destinations, partners, international travel trade media or service providers such as mountain railroads, museums, hotels etc.

Until now, centrally created assets and advertising templates have been adapted by the markets, but their derivatives have not been stored centrally, which is why there is no overview of all advertising materials produced worldwide. Switzerland Tourism would like to counteract this in the future.

In the future, creative assets such as images, graphics, logos, icons, CI/CD guidelines and templates will be managed in the digital asset management system. The elaborately produced videos, which previously found their place in the Swiss Video Library, are also to be given a new home.

With this project, Switzerland Tourism would like to take the opportunity to manage all media assets in a centrally accessible system. The intuitive maintenance of metadata as well as the distribution of assets in line with the target group play an important role. A digital asset management system (DAM) seamlessly integrated into the system landscape will be used for this purpose.

All in all, Switzerland Tourism wants to offer visitors to the website a unique visitor experience, with high-quality and professionally verified content.

Solution

Central data hub

CELUM's Digital Asset Management System was implemented as a central data hub and source for the existing peripheral systems. Through the flexibly preconfigured upload link, various external image and video suppliers can load their content directly into the DAM system. There, it is processed, supplemented with metadata and released internally or publicly.

Simple integration of assets

CI HUB provides easy connectivity to Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Cloud. Thanks to this connection, image data can be quickly integrated into Office documents and print media production with Creative Apps is made possible.

Less maintenance effort thanks to AI

By connecting to Microsoft Azure services, Switzerland Tourism can use the advanced image recognition technology «Computer Vision» of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services (AI services) to automatically keyword the images in CELUM-DAM. In addition, the multilingual metadata is also automatically translated into different languages such as German, English, Dutch, Spanish, French, or Italian.

Direct website integration & proof of use.

The Sitecore Connector is the main interface, it allows CMS users to embed images directly into the website without having to upload or download them first. This connector has been extended with a cropping module, which directly crops the images in the appropriate format for the website. In addition, images placed in Sitecore are tagged with a usage notice in the CELUM DAM, so DAM users can always see which images are used where in Sitecore.

Copyright and terms of use overview

Copyright checking workflows implemented in Sitecore (content management system) identify expiring asset usage rights in a timely manner. Thanks to this feature, copyright information can be easily complied with without any additional effort.

Sophisticated authorization concept

The user authorizations from both systems (DAM and Swiss Video Library) were merged and completely revised. This resulted in an authorization concept with 143 hierarchically structured user groups and 24 roles. Switzerland Tourism employees now log in via Active Directory. For external users, manually configurable user accounts were implemented, where only selected content is made available via the brix extension «Smart Collections». In addition, thanks to the «Log-in Management» extension, it is possible to define the validity period of the log-in for external users.

Integration into the existing system landscape

A unique visitor experience requires seamless system integrations. The connection of the two main systems, CELUM (Digital Asset Management System) and Sitecore (Content Management System) was therefore essential. In the future, images should be automatically transferred from CELUM to Sitecore DXP, from where they can also be distributed to other channels. The company comspace therefore developed a connector that keeps the data volumes in Sitecore as low as possible despite large images, does not impair the loading times during content delivery and does not let the server load get out of hand. In addition, users can access the content in the CELUM DAM directly via the Sitecore interface.

Image focus and cropping function

Given the diverse communication channels, different image size requirements arise. To handle the complex image management, Switzerland Tourism uses the AI cloud service Cloudinary. Using machine learning, Cloudinary analyzes each image and automatically generates required derivations based on various parameters. Based on the focus point, Cloudinary independently decides on compression and image cropping. Editors upload only the original image, while Cloudinary handles the processing. This approach particularly helps to save memory and ensures consistent high-quality images for each output channel.

System landscape

Find out which extensions developed by brix are used to implement the complex requirements for increased efficiency and quality assurance.

List of all extensions used

Success

Central data source

Redundancies, multiple efforts and other inefficient aspects are a thing of the past. Assets are now uploaded, maintained, and shared in a single, centralized system. This means that the desired image and video material is always available to internal and external stakeholders in all versions and derivatives.

AI-powered metadata maintenance

Content management staff save a lot of work in completing their metadata since implementing brix Developed CELUM Extensions MS Azure Autotagger & MS Azure Autotranslator. Thanks to MS Azure Cognitive Services AI services, tags are automatically suggested based on the image content and translated into the desired language. Expensive translation services are now a thing of the past.

Up-to-date information at all times

A big challenge with a rich website is accessing the most up-to-date information. Thanks to CELUM's central DAM system, Switzerland Tourism's content managers can ensure that only the latest information with the appropriate usage rights is used. Thanks to versioning, the historical information of the assets is not lost. The administration effort decreases enormously and the visitors of the website get a unique user experience thanks to up-to-date content.

Easy release processes

Approval workflows make it easy to know the status of assets at all times. Content management staff can collaborate more easily on asset refinement and ensure that only assets with fully maintained metadata are used.

Find the optimal solution for your data centralization.

«A DAM system can increase your efficiency and quality by providing a central data hub and source. We will be happy to advise you so that you can find the best solution for your needs.»

Philipp Böhner
Sales Manager