A distributed hub model with centralized content

It’s a standard scenario for a content production firm: A creative brief comes in from a client. The team then works on design comps and presentations across Adobe and other software tools. The resulting files — images, video, and other types of media — are sent back to the client for feedback and approval. There might be multiple rounds of collaboration, with a lot of back and forth of large-sized files in various states of design and production.

For Tag, an omnichannel content production partner and global marketing execution agency with teams in 29 countries, this paradigm is magnified times a lot. As various regional teams work with leading brands and agencies around the world, they pride themselves on delivering content at speed and to scale across marketing channels, cultures, and countries.

In the 50 years Tag has been in business, this “distributed hub model,” as they call it, has grown tremendously. Today, the company has 2,700 employees at its disposal and handles many, many terabytes of invaluable creative content.

Simplifying content sharing, collaboration, and security is a critical effort for Tag, which is why Philip Yau, APAC Head of Technology, is grateful that “Box has helped simplify everything and speed up the processes.”

The vast simplification of distributed content sharing

Tag long relied on traditional physical servers and multiple tools and platforms for handling content. This model was already getting old when pandemic shutdowns sent teams around the world home to work remotely. Thus began the headache of dealing with VPNs to connect employees to the files they needed every day. Collaboration between coworkers and clients got even clunkier.

“It wasn’t easy,” says Yau. “We tried a few file-sharing tools, but they were extremely hard to use. They have limitations, and we had performance issues.” In addition to remote work woes, the team had other content issues:

• On-prem servers were hard to scale, and the company was consistently growing — as was the amount of content it produced
• Siloed content hampered the ability to send very large files in traditional ways; it often involved logging into various places to get files
• Clients send files in all sorts of ways, adding to the confusion and fragmentation

“It was disjointed,” says Yau, “Multiple systems and pain points slowed down our way of working. With Box, we now have a better way of working.”

Collaboration is vastly easier because content is now all in one place: the Content Cloud. The ability to use shared links to folders allows clients to share files without a lot of thought or effort, and those same files can be transferred back easily as well.

As a result, says Yau, “We can work from in the office or out of the office. We can collaborate with the client with Box and do it seamlessly. The whole collaborative aspect is simplified with Box.”

Stack simplification that leads to cost reduction

The IT team at Tag is methodical when they institute a new technology. They first rolled out Box in the APAC region, starting with Australia, then Japan, and gradually to the other countries including China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, etc. With Tag Americas already using Box to an extent, a wider deployment is being considered currently.

Using Box Shuttle to migrate files has made the process much easier, as Yau reports: “The speed that we can transfer files, and the user interface, have made it much easier as we decommission more and more on-prem servers.”

In the regions where the physical servers have been decommissioned, every team is now on Box, which helps simplify the tech stack tremendously. Where Box has not yet been deployed, there are still pockets of creative production creating content fragmentation. But Yau reports that those other markets within Tag are keen to start using Box thanks to word of mouth around the company. Having now migrated 100TB of SharePoint & physical server content to Box, he says, “It's brilliant. It supports the savings we want to achieve.”

Enterprise-grade security across the global organization

In addition to scalable, cloud-based space that accommodates a lot of large files for global teams, Box offers the enterprise-grade security and unlimited storage TAG needs. “The server never goes down,” says Yau, “so the reliability, the simplicity, the security around it all are the main benefits.”

The security aspect of content management was very important to Tag, as it is to every company today. Tag’s process for adopting a new technology included having the security team conduct a thorough assessment of Box before taking the leap. “It passed the tests with our security team with flying colors,” Yau confirms.

Security is not just important to Tag; it’s also critical to clients, so being able to assure clients that file sharing is happening in a highly secure cloud environment is key. Yau says, “The fact that Box has all the top accreditations and approvals — ISO and other protections — gives us peace of mind.”

The top three things TAG loves about Box, according to Yau:

1. Simplicity: “It’s the number one thing. It’s just there, and it’s easy.”
2. Security: “It gives us the peace of mind of a secure platform. We are very, very strict when it comes to security.”
3. Ease of collaboration “Box just makes it so easy to collaborate with our clients, agencies, and suppliers.”

The reliability, the simplicity, the security are the main benefits. Our way of working became much more productive with Box.