Sitecore Symposium is the largest Sitecore event of the year and this year was held in person in Chicago. The event had nearly 2,500 attendees and was a great experience as this was my first time attending.

I was absolutely ecstatic to be chosen to be a speaker of a breakout session. I have been working with Sitecore Content Hub for the past 18 months and the project related to my session for nearly a year.

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Introduction

Every brand has the ability to produce advertisements to sell their products. When done correctly advertisements improve brand recognition and they do so regardless of the product being advertised.

Shown here are some of advertisements for major global brands that are probably familiar to most people.

Brands are global, and in the interconnected world we live means, customers can be anywhere

The problem – How do we connect distributed global teams together?

For this project we are working with a global brand, so all advert types have guidelines and a similar look and feel, however, production is in silo’s

In this scenario, each country or market produces their own adverts increasing the duplication of effort and production time

Looking at the map shown here each country currently builds advertisements in the just mentioned siloed approach.

• This leads to no overall control from a global view
• Duplication of processes for each country
• Multiple tools doing the same job
• Speed would also be a factor as a user would need to move assets from system to system to accomplish the task

So, how can we improve this

Would it not be great If there was a solution?

Sitecore Content Hub

The problem

Our heroes love in a connected world that means that users can be anywhere. Starting with our designer Alex who is based on the west coast (UTC – 8). Next our global marketer Sophia who is based in Spain (UTC + 2)

This team is globally distributed! At 8:00 AM for Alex its 6:00 PM for Sophia! How are they supposed to work together.

Having a global team is not uncommon for large organizations in our distributed and remote world. Lets have a look at how Sitecore Content Hub enables our heroes to collaborate together effectively

In the scenario here Alex builds the advert templates and these are sent within Content Hub to Sophia for approval.

Using the built in workflow within Content Hub an approval process would be triggered allowing the advert to be reviewed.

After approval of the advert by Sophia all of the markets can use the template directly within Content Hub to build a publication regardless of location.

Looking at the map now each country is connected through Content Hub.

• This is a single global platform shared by all users.
• Every country has a core set of processes and that can be enabled quickly.
• There is a reduction in the number of tools needed to accomplish tasks.
• Speed was a factor before, but now users get what they need rapidly from a platform available 24 hours per day.

Build a global advert generation platform

Let’s have a look at what the existing flow looked like with the project we are working on.

What is shown here is how a single market or entity used to operate.

We had separate systems for creating HTML banners, Print publications and Video advertisements.

Each system would require designers to build adverts in isolation and there was no connection, every system was disconnected and siloed.

Centrally they did have a DAM solution however this solution requires assets to be searched for and downloaded in the correct size for the advertisement.

They then need to be re uploaded into each source platform before they could be used.

Users then would make any changes in each platform before they were ready for download for distribution.

The issues here are

• No centralised control or rights management of assets – How does the organisation know who has access for instance
• Manual download and upload of assets between systems
• Multiple platforms that are all being licenced, supported and used

It causes so much duplication and no control.

What does the flow look like now?

What’s shown here will be global for all markets. Previously each market had up-to 3 tools to fulfil these needs. Multiple that by the 60 markets this will be rolled out to means we are replacing up-to 180 platforms with 1.

Focusing on Print and starting with Design Assets

Normal flow would be that a designer would create an InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop layout. Then using the extensions built by Chili themselves create a Chili package for import to Sitecore Content Hub.
Moving to Sitecore Content Hub we now would create a new template and import the Chili package. Chili uses an XML format for documents and on upload, this will be processed and validation would start verifying the contents.

When they are ready the template creator makes changes using the inbuilt editors. After performing any actions like saving, these changes are communicated directly back to the Chili API for validation before the valid XML is saved in Content Hub.
When the template is ready. Users can now start creating publications.

Sitecore Content Publisher is fully integrated with Chili and we didn’t want to re create any of the work.
We wanted to find the process for the users that follow the business processes.
This all starts down at the schema level in Content Hub – We developed custom entities and have relations to the Chili Publications and Assets.

Then custom pages have been built for users to directly interact with the assets and templates in a single view.

• First part of information we require is the Chili Template.
• Second are the assets that they want dynamically injected into the template.

Clicking a generate button then triggers Azure functions and the Chili API to intelligently embed images and any content.
This is all serverless and built for scalability. The best part is this happens in seconds.

Within the same page a rendition will be refreshed and a preview is automatically shown.
Users click on the image and the native Chili editor window opens allowing users to update image placement, text and show or hide layers using conditional fields.

Its all simple to use and updates dynamically on the screen.
Finally when they are happy with the changes, they generate PDF’s and other outputs all directly from Content Hub.

Scaling an advert globally

Here is the real power of this solution

The example here is for a print advert and you can see our very simple formula

We have a Template and when we combine that with an Image allows us to generate a Publication

• Sitecore enables us under 1 roof to build a publication in minutes
• Globally distributed teams can all maximise efficiency by using this single solution

You might have this publication that has been approved for North America that another user wants to create a variation of for the UK.

They can update content, or change the image to be market specific – Whatever they need to do.

Pushing this further by localising this variation to as many linked markets as they want to. Here 4 markets now all have an advertisement for them that has been build from a single core publication

We then go 1 step further by creating a 2^nd variation for the French market
Same as before this can be updated by the user. Localisation happens again, 2 further markets now have an advertisement in the market language

We don’t stop there a 3^rd variation is created for the Italian market which can be updated.
After localisation we have an additional localisation for the Swiss Italian users.

Country links can then be established as shown here with Canada and Switzerland.

Shown here is an example but 1 publication could be used to create multiple variations of an advertisement, further localised to a market. For our customer 1 publication is the foundation for upto 60 market specific advertisements.

For Print the customer in our pilot market had over 300 templates for every product they sell. Image changes, text placement and logos were the reasons.
Now with the power of Sitecore Content Hub and dynamic flexibility of Chili Publish we now have a handful.
As it’s a global brand the future markets will be enabled quickly as the advertisements all have the same look and feel.

Conclusion

Sitecore Content Hub is a very powerful solution that would benefit any business.

It’s a single eco system and has Chili Publish integrated as Sitecore Content Publisher

As I said towards the start…

Every brand has the requirement to produce advertisements to sell their products, however maybe not the ability effectively. When done correctly advertisements improve brand recognition and they do so regardless of the product being advertised.

Thank you for reading my blog and please get in contact if this is a challenge you are trying to solve.