Canto offers Portakabin greater control over digital assets

The in-house creative studio at Portakabin handles project briefs that come in from marketing managers across the UK and Europe. Their content requests range from email campaigns and website videos to product brochures and the occasional direct mail campaign. After receiving the creative brief, the team would dispatch photographers to shoot a particular project.

“From my early days of joining the studio at Portakabin, I could see immediately there were improvements to be made,” says Matt Barker, Creative Manager at Portakabin. “Nothing was really centralized or organized in an efficient way. There was a high risk of losing files or even duplication. It was important to ensure we had a way of centralizing assets with version control, and also a fast and efficient way of sharing them.

Although Portakabin had a digital asset management (DAM) platform in place, it didn’t provide the workflow features they needed to complete projects efficiently. Moving assets to and from those workflows proved complicated, which led to bottlenecks and a disjointed user experience. As a result, the DAM wasn’t really even being used to manage assets.

That sent the Portakabin team in search of an alternative solution, which led them to Canto.

With Canto in place, the creative studio set up a centralized library for all of the creative assets. After photographers finished gathering images, approved assets can now be uploaded directly into Canto and shared over project-specific portals. That makes it easy for designers, colleagues, and suppliers and share the information,” Matt says. “Thanks to our new workflow process, we know that everything in Canto is 100% approved and can be shared with confidence.”

Improving organization and searches with metadata

Canto’s organization and search features play a big role in streamlining the creative process for the Portakabin team. With assets coming in from all over the UK and Europe, it was crucial for designers, copywriters, and marketing managers to be able to find the information they needed quickly. By using a combination of project numbers, product numbers, and acronyms, the team implemented a system of metadata that made it easy to locate specific images.

Locating materials associated with a campaign proved to be even easier, thanks to Canto’s character recognition features. Any documents related to a campaign are automatically scanned for relevant keywords, providing another quick way to reference content.

“That’s a great feature we like,” Matt says. “Being able to search the content of any PDF we upload to Canto has already proven to be very powerful. In some cases, we may have a keyword but don’t have any other information to locate an archived project. This feature has been of great use multiple times.”

Canto’s smart tagging capabilities provided another effective means of locating the right image whenever it’s needed. Although the team initially worried about having too many tags, allowing Canto to automatically assign tags based on image contents helped people to sort through the vast library much more quickly and then fine-tune their search based on the results.

Controlling brand integrity

Centralizing assets within Canto also allowed Portakabin to take a more proactive approach to brand management. Following the company’s rebrand in 2016, the creative studio took on the responsibility of managing all brand assets to maintain integrity and consistency.

For people outside the business, like design partners, suppliers, and agencies, Portakabin provides links to the main library to save valuable production time. “I think we’ve made the people we work with savvy in our Canto world, so they’re now in our bubble,” Matt says. “They can go and find their own images with specific keywords or image numbers.”

Leveraging the power of video

Canto’s ability to embed video assets into web content also helped the Portakabin team solve a challenge related to a virtual factory tour of their York facility. The tour took visitors through every part of the factory and allowed them to watch video clips at certain hotspots that featured machinery in action or interviews with employees. While it would have been easy to use a platform like YouTube, they wanted to avoid having unrelated suggested videos pop up after the clip finished.

After explaining the problem to the Canto team, they implemented a feature that allowed them to embed the video directly from the Canto library. This solution also gave them the ability to easily edit videos seamlessly in the background without disrupting the virtual tour experience.

“The advantage of not having any suggested video content at the end of the videos is brilliant,” Matt says. “It’s just a nice, clean solution for us, so that was great.”

Integrating Canto into its creative studio’s process has helped Portakabin streamline content creation and manage its brand more effectively. The platform allows team members to upload and organize approved files, quickly find the assets they need for a project, and easily share access to people from other departments or organizations.

“It’s great,” Matt says. “We’re able to keep all the assets together for one particular project in one area, which is perfect for us.”

Canto has also made it easier for the Portakabin team to accommodate hybrid working arrangements and improved collaboration with external partners. “Whether we’re in the office or remote, there’s still that workflow and that process in place,” Matt points out. “We definitely couldn’t have done it without Canto.”

With Canto in place, Portakabin is well-positioned to continue managing its brand and scaling its business successfully in markets around the world.