Baltimore Ravens

Challenges

Like every professional sports team and large brand, the Baltimore Ravens create and share huge amounts of digital content in order to effectively connect with their fans, customers, and partners.

In today’s world, generating excellent and engaging creative content and delivering it to the consumer quickly is a must for any effective brand, and the same is true of the Ravens. By deploying team photographers to home and away games, the Ravens were generating hundreds to thousands of beautiful and exciting photos to capture consumer’s attention after each game. The only problem: these assets were hard to find after they had been uploaded to their digital asset management (DAM) platform.

As the team continued to generate buzz on the field, the marketing and creative teams struggled to find photos they needed; many of these beautiful assets had no keywords or descriptions despite the DAM being organized well. On top of that, there was no file-naming convention in place. As new photos came in each week, the pile to look through grew larger. This meant the team was spending less time capitalizing on the excitement their brand was generating across the country and more time looking for the exciting assets that would capture the attention of fans.

Objectives

Convenience

Increase the availability of stunning visual assets to ensure they were uploaded quicker, in the right place, and with the right information

Organization

Create an intuitive and natural organizational structure to help those looking for assets speed up their searches

Standardization

‍Analyze the team’s archive and internal language to create metadata standards that could unify years of inconsistency.

Application

‍Enrich all assets — archived and incoming — with newly-developed metadata and file naming standards so that all relevant assets are easily searchable. Create a formalized Best Practice Guide to be handed to new users of the DAM.

Solution

Creation of Standards‍

The Ravens were already using Photoshelter as their DAM, but they needed help creating processes to make the platform work for their team’s needs. With this in mind, Stacks sat down with the Ravens and helped them develop a “Metadata Gold Standard”.

The results? A simple, yet effective set of standards and processes that could revolutionize the way they searched and organized game photographs. These standards and processes included:

• developing a customized list of keywords that used internal language and allowed for specific searches
• caption standards for each photograph to identify players, coaches, dates, scores, and locations
• a file naming convention to allow for more intuitive organization without the need for a new folder structure.

All these were created, formalized, and delivered by Stacks to the Ravens in a clean and simple Best Practice Guide that could quickly be shared with new members of the team or referenced when team members had questions.

Application of Standards

Once these standards were created, Stacks got to work applying them to the Ravens’ backlog of photos already living in the DAM, as well as any incoming assets from games that were played that week, with a 24-hour turnaround time. In total, the Stacks team enriched the metadata and file names of over 14,000 assets from the 2019-2020 preseason, regular season, and playoffs. Stacks applied information such as sponsor names, player and coach names, positions, and numbers, location, date, score, equipment color and name, and actions taken by the players. When assets were fully enriched, they were uploaded back into the DAM for approval and added back to the team’s library for use by the team.