Bynder Spotlight Awards: An interview with judge Eddy Smets

The Bynder Spotlight Awards is an annual awards ceremony organised by Bynder. Only 12 customers are selected for a nomination, from a database of more than 4,000 names. Five different awards were presented on 15 June: the award for content experience, for innovation, for creativity, for business impact and for best DAM deployment. The cases were carefully examined by a small team of experts. Our own managing director, Eddy Smets, was part of this team. We interviewed him to get a better idea of how the Bynder Spotlight Awards work.

Hi Eddy, how nice that you had the honour of being part of the jury. How did that happen?

Bynder called me. We are a respected integration partner with an awful lot of DAM projects and DAM integrations to our name. This ensures that I have a good understanding of the technology and the automation processes involved. We have also been in the business for more than 15 years. Since the founding of Catena Company, DAM technology has been a strategic choice for us as the basis of further content creation automation. We have built up expertise and knowledge over the years, which allows us to assess the different nominees.

Why the partnership with Bynder? What makes it so powerful?

To understand why, we need to go back to the beginning of Catena Company. Right from the start, we offered Digital Asset Management. Mainly media companies used to need this tool, but with the increasing content volumes that need to be created today, various industries have come knocking on our door. The content explosion we are facing today has made DAM technology an indispensable link within digitalisation projects, and this is so for any company in any market or sector.

Technology for managing media assets has long appealed to a niche market. There has also been a serious (r)evolution over the years. From ‘on-premise’ solutions which had to be installed at the customer to native cloud applications. Bynder technology is one of the few that was ‘born’ in the cloud, as far back as 2013 and has since become the market leader. During their search for strategic partnerships to sustain their growth, we found each other and started working together.

A constant focus on product innovation is obviously very important for a technology partner, however, what stands out most is a superior customer experience. It is extremely user-friendly. The user interface ensures that all assets are quickly retrieved and marketers using the tool report immediate results. Furthermore, the open API that allows the technology to be easily implemented with other workflows is important to Catena. It is part of an eco-system where we integrate Bynder with PIM (Product Information Management), ERP systems, the website’s CMS or other dynamic data.

Do you all sit together or how does the evaluation process work? Do you vote award by award or give overall points?

First, you receive a detailed case of all nominations. The case contains a description of who they are, who provided the implementation and what the objectives of the project were. Furthermore, they set out the reasons why they chose Bynder. It is up to us as judges to score the three best cases per domain (business impact, innovation, creativity and content experience). We do this individually, so we do not know what score the others have given. The case that ultimately receives most points will receive the award for that particular domain.

That’s a lot of information to compare. How did you handle this?

It does indeed take some time. You read all the cases at least a couple of times and one project always stands out. It is also possible that some of the projects really make a difference in one of the domains.

With names like Lacoste, Too Good To Go and Steve Madden, it will not have been an easy choice.

Indeed, it was not easy. I find it genuinely clever how all the nominees have implemented their DAM. Technology was clearly an added value in all 12 cases. Yet there was a difference in the scalability of the projects. Some started small and gradually expanded their DAM. That’s only logical and in line with the philosophy, ‘think big, start small.’ Bynder is very scalable and can be expanded to follow the growth of customers’ businesses.

That difference, in how far the project had come and how deep they went, also determined my choice.

The nominees are all from different industries. Surely there was a common thread throughout the cases?

The demand for a DAM system always stems from the same need. They want a tool that allows them to manage and control their content creation process. All of them are international companies with widely dispersed assets. They also attach great important to having control over their content. The same benefits often recurred, time savings for instance. What also struck me is the interest those companies have in managing and distributing instructional videos to different stakeholders. Finally, it has become impossible to manage media assets manually. Images are needed in many places throughout the ecosystem. For example, on the website, social media, CMS and E-commerce. Working with Data Asset Management makes this a lot easier.

Do you have some tips for others who are secretly dreaming of receiving such an award too?

Don’t start by focusing on potentially winning an award. Take small steps in managing and administering your digital content and, above all, let technology grow with your organisation. When your organisation grows, you will be on Bynder’s radar. That’s when you can start dreaming of an award. 😉

You can find the winners of this edition on Bynder’s website.