North Plains’ first EMEA customer conference was held on May 22 in London, UK and was a resounding success. With over 80 customers in attendance from across Europe, this was the first conference that brought together the customers across North Plains’ product portfolio – Xinet, Telescope and On Brand. It was an intimate gathering that allowed our customers to make some great connections – both with the North Plains staff as well as with each other. It also gave them the opportunity to learn about all the North Plains products.

James Christopher, CEO kicked off the event with an overview of North Plains’ strategy and provided an update on the developments of the company in the last 12 months. A lot of changes have happened and James made it clear that North Plains is dedicated to the future of all the products and ensuring that our customers will continue to be given the best solutions to manage their visual assets as the market continues to change.

James was followed by keynote speaker Geoff Ramm, who is known as the ‘Billy Connolly of marketing.’ Geoff was a dynamic presenter, engaging the audience with marketing stories and ideas that were both thought provoking and entertaining. It’s a changing marketing world and Geoff provided some thought-provoking stories about how to stand out in today’s fast-paced marketing world.

Much of the conference focused on product insights from our various customers. With three panel sessions that showcased how our customers are leveraging our products for creative production, control and distribution and brand asset management, our attendees got some great insights about how our products are being used in different organizations. Highlights included:

• Michelle Taylor from Xerox, Neil McCutcheon from Christie’s and Nick Gowler from Pearson Education joined Senior Product Manager, Andrew Salop on stage to discuss the need for a WIP-DAM like Xinet to support the fast-paced, heavy asset world of creative media production
• Simon Jenkinson from FutureBrand and Stephen McKillop from Diageo provided valuable insights into Brand Asset management and showed how they gained significant ROI from their installations of OnBrand and Unify respectively.
• Nikolas Stathopoulos from Hachette Book Group UK and David Bercovici from North Plains presented an in-depth look at the Telescope implementation at Hachette. The key takeaway from this session was the simple but immense benefit an enterprise like Hachette was able to gain from being able to better manage their assets. With an enterprise DAM, they now have a single source of truth for all of their publishing assets. Hachette has plans to move ahead with further phases of their DAM project to gain even more ROI for their business.

The day was rounded out with a product update that led into a lively Q&A panel with James, Andy Peters, General Manager of Europe & Middle East, and CTO Mohan Taylor. It was obvious to see that the content presented over the day had provoked a lot of interest based on the many questions that were posed and this session could have gone on for much longer.

But it wasn’t a conference with all work and no play. We ended the day with a little cocktail reception where all attendees gathered at the bar to enjoy well-deserved (and delicious!) cocktails while listening to a live band, and continuing the discussions from the day.

All in all, we couldn’t have asked for a better first EMEA user conference, but now the focus moves to our annual global conference coming in October. Stay Tuned. All we will say for now is Niagara Falls – be there or be square!

Exactly one year ago today, North Plains announced the acquisition of a Berkeley-based company that developed Digital Asset Management (DAM) software for work-in-progress marketing assets. It was utilized by advertising agencies as well as creative production groups worldwide. That company? Xinet.

Today, not only has the Xinet staff been embraced into the North Plains family, but Xinet is also an integral component of our portfolio of best-of-breed solutions to help our customers successfully leverage their rich media assets. Since the acquisition, we’ve had a chance to expand on the technology and develop interoperability between Xinet and our other products. As the next step in Xinet’s evolution, North Plains has expanded Xinet from a single product into a product line with the introduction of Xinet Digital and Xinet Central.

Xinet Central and Xinet Digital were developed to enable easier collaboration and improve the management of rich media assets across creative teams within the global digital agencies as well as with their clients.

• Xinet Digital is a hosted solution based on our Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Brand Asset Management (BAM) product, On Brand, that lets agencies easily set up branded client portals to manage and evolve digital campaign assets.  It provides a bridge between agency creative work and clients so that they can access deliverables anytime and from anywhere.

• Xinet Central utilizes our new ConnectR technology to aggregate rich media assets from disparate Xinet servers to provide centralized access across the enterprise. It allows content-producing enterprises and large agencies using Xinet for creative production to easily collaborate with one another by enabling repository access, visibility and communication.

You can read more about the two products on our Xinet page. Needless to say, we’re proud of where we’ve taken Xinet thus far. However, we know there’s much more work to be done and we encourage you to watch this space for more interesting news and features about Xinet’s upcoming plans.

We’ve been busy these last couple of weeks! As 2013 progresses along, we are excited at the opportunity to showcase all our North Plains products – Xinet, Telescope and On Brand – at various tradeshows and events and show off our ability to meet the needs of marketers at all stages of the Creative Marketing Lifecycle.

The last week of February provided us the opportunity to get live feedback from prospects and customers about the direction of our products. We participated at the Createasphere event in California. There were some very informative speaking sessions and our esteemed Director of Customer Success, Tim Padilla, also moderated a discussion panel on “DAM is not Software”. We also had a great time exhibiting our product line at the exhibition hall and created some great buzz with our iPad Mini give away contest that we held with our partners IO Integration and GLOBALedit. Congratulations to our winners below:

We also participated at the Technology For Marketing & Advertising event in London, UK that same week. This year, to stand out from the rest of the crowd, we created a make-believe storefront that indicated North Plains is “open for business”, and showcased all of our products to prospects in the EMEA region.

We mixed a little fun with our distinctive messaging, and gave away sweets when anyone dropped by our booth to look at our suite of products. Many prospects commented it was a refreshing take on booth design, and rose above a sea of similar commercial looks.

Bon-bons aside, we did have a powerful message to deliver, and participated in two speaker sessions during the two-day conference. On Tuesday, February 26, Ruth Knight, International Sales & Marketing Director, and Mohan Taylor, Principal Consultant, Office of the CTO, jointly presented the topic: “The 4P’s you may not have heard of: Transforming Marketing into a Profit Centre Through Marketing Resource Management”. On Wednesday, February 27, Ruth teamed up with Stephen McKillop, Global Project Lead at Diageo, a leading global brand in the drinks and spirits industry, to walk through a case study: “Diageo Smartbrand: The Evolution of a Global Brand Asset Management. Learn how Smartbrand Increases Productivity and Reduce Risks, Delivering a 6X Payback.” Both sessions were fully attended, with attendees asking many thoughtful questions related to brand management.

How to leverage digital assets to manage the creative marketing lifecycle and ensure brand consistency world-wide is gaining increasing importance. Marketers around the globe are looking for the most effective way, most of them turning to SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to achieve this efficiently.

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what the conference attendees are saying:

http://www.youtube.com/northplains