MLB Case Study

Imagine how much rich media history there is to preserve for the sport that’s been considered ‘America’s Favorite Past Time’ for over 150 years: The All-Star athletes that come and go, the once-in-a-lifetime games like No-No’s, serendipitous fan-player interactions—the entire evolution of the game.

It’s a hard job, but it’s the MLB Photos Team’s job to document, organize, distribute, and protect the media that tells the story of the organization’s evolution as a collective, while simultaneously building the brands of their teams, their players, their coaches, and the supporting brand staff who develop the fandoms audiences can’t stop rooting for.

In today’s digital age, and especially in the sports industry where moments happen faster than the eye can blink, every creative content marketing lead has two main priorities:

1. Capturing every angle, and…
2. Equipping your content creators and social media leads with tools and resources (and backup plans!) that allow them to deliver and access media on the fly.

Almost 15 years ago the MLB Photos team asked us for help with three things:

1. Simplifying their media team’s production workflow
2. Increasing interdepartmental productivity
3. Operationalizing creative processes to own the moment on the field and on social faster.

We introduced them to our digital asset management platform and the rest, as they say, is history.

Learn more below about how we’ve protected MLB’s valuable content for over a decade!

Key Highlights

• Securely protect and preserve over two million media assets that tell the 150-year history of baseball.
• Enable real-time collaboration across 600 internal and external stakeholders and partners.
• Develop key product features and tech integrations that allow faster and easier access to and distribution of media, leading to increased immediate and long-term social growth and engagement.

The Challenge

• Find a seamlessly accessible, highly-secure media database with customizable visibility and access features.
• Provide seamless platform training and ongoing user experience to over 600 stakeholders across MLB clubs, MLB departments, and external partners to make optimal use of PhotoShelter archive.
• Find a DAM that seamlessly integrates with the organization’s tech stack, allowing anyone to access and share assets instantly. Ultimately, to increase audience engagement and growth at scale.

How We Help

The Results

• Our customizable, scalable, secure DAM platform works as a central creative hub for enterprise organizations.
• Our team of DAM experts meets your team where they are—we offer a user-friendly platform onboarding experience and ongoing support for all types of users—from an administrator to public gallery viewers.
• PhotoShelter for Brands integrates with over 10 other creative production and cloud storage platforms (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, WordPress, Slate, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Premiere Pro, Socialie, and more!) which provide teams easier and faster content access, creation, and sharing.

Helping Creatives Thrive in Real-Time

The shift to remote work hit almost every organization dealing with live events pretty hard, so having tech tools at the ready to help team members collaborate and keep their project assets organized was key.

“One of the best things we’ve done is to have our digital content uploaded to our PhotoShelter site (and that’s not just a plug, it’s true). It’s been invaluable to have that content at our fingertips while we’re all working from home – most of us unexpectedly. The Integrated Account feature has played an essential role in elevating the functionality of this tool. It’s allowed us to continue to evolve and enhance our photographers’ ability to execute tasks without that additional workload.””

– Jessica Carroll, MLB Photos Senior Director

We’ve established key partnerships with platforms like Greenfly and Slate to allow live event content creators and sports industry (professional and higher ed, alike) marketers to create content on the fly and share it with their key stakeholders and influencers instantly to help boost their social engagement.

“We have athletes performing at the highest level, and I want our photography to be a reflection of that. Our mission is to leverage current technology to deliver high-quality images in the moment. Once it goes into PhotoShelter, then we have the integration with Greenfly (for real-time social sharing), where we push photos through to our player social program. We also work with our licensing partner, Getty Images to push photos out to our licensing and sponsorship partners and our broadcast partners like Fox and ESPN. They use our photos for tune-in…So, our stakeholders span a lot of external partners as well as internal.”

– Jessica Carroll, MLB Photos Senior Director

Powerful Tools Increase Process Agility

If you’re on a creative marketing team, chances are you’d be rich if you got a dollar every time someone asked you where to find an image or video in your content library, right? We’ve heard all the frustrations around dealing with a disorganized media library and quick one-off requests, so our customer success team is prepared to make your user experience easy, seamless, and headache-free.

“Many people outside of the photo industry are unaware that a photographer’s work does not stop when they put down the camera, especially in this day and age of digital. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done on the content management side once the photos have been taken. This is where I see an opportunity for us to leverage the advances in technology and find ways to work smarter and not harder.”

– Jessica Carroll, MLB Photos Senior Director