THE COMPANY

The BAYARD-PRESSE group has its origins in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2023. Today, it is a reference in its market segments, publishing no less than 120 print titles, 4,800 books and 200 websites.

Currently present in some thirty countries, the BAYARD Group bases its creative network on more than 1,400 employees in France, 550 abroad, 700 freelancers and more than 5,000 authors.

Present in almost all segments of publishing, from the daily press to magazines, the group is the fifth largest French publisher through the large circulation of the daily newspaper La Croix. In total, BAYARD serves 36 million readers worldwide, including 5 million subscribers.

THE CHALLENGE

The BAYARD-PRESSE has a large number of subsidiaries and publishes a large number of print titles. Generally speaking, the transmission between them of all the assets (documentary objects, texts, media, compositions, etc.) produced by each creative entity represents a major challenge at group level: searching for and reusing content. The development of the group’s presence on digital media tended to increase this need until the implementation of a first DAM in 2009. Although the solution makes it possible to manage part of the print content via a web portal allowing selection, ordering and moderation of content for foreign subsidiaries, the latter remains limited to the print channel only, and presents several imperfections in terms of the cross-functionality of searches and the typing of assets.

The challenge was therefore to propose a solution that would enable all types of cross-media content to be grouped and stored, and not just print, by proposing a database model based on MarkLogic technology and an interface that would facilitate internal and external exchanges of assets. All of this would be moderated by a dedicated interface. In short, the platform had to enable all users to find content created by another subsidiary, order it virtually, and receive it after validation by a moderator. In addition, both French and foreign entities had to be capable of populating the content database It was therefore an optimization tool that BAYARD-PRESSE was looking for, the idea also being to generate savings on content creation costs by sharing them.

The issue of copyright in the reuse of content could not be neglected either; hence the importance of moderation and workflow based on internal commands. The latter is a legal issue directly related to reducing the risk of intellectual property infringement.

THE SOLUTION

The first objective to which 4D CONCEPT responded was to be open to the type and quantity of assets managed by the solution. As a result, thanks to CONTENT FACTORY and the MarkLogic database technology that 4D CONCEPT had been integrating for more than 10 years, BAYARD-PRESSE users could integrate and use all types of print and digital content.

CONTENT FACTORY‘s extensive indexing and search capabilities made it the ideal tool to meet the global need for an internal, multi-support, and above all multi-entity search engine service.

For the purposes of setting up a workflow that managed the exchange of content in the form of internal commands and with the aim of moderating requests and guaranteeing the proper use of assets while respecting copyright, 4D CONCEPT developed a specific module directly in the product interface. This module also made it possible to generate statistics, and to open the solution to external partners who were most often authors, freelancers or agencies, while supervising their activities.

4D CONCEPT also paid a lot of attention to the global ergonomics of the solution. The great multiplicity of user types required the solution to be easy-to-use and the users to be quickly satisfied. This was as much because of the requirement for general adhesion as of the requirement for the absence of training, which is generally a prerequisite when you need to put a tool quickly and easily into the hands of external partners.

Totally based on the software published by 4D CONCEPT, which acted both as an editor of the ECM (Enterprise Content Manager or Content Management System) CONTENT FACTORY and as an integrator and consultant for the BAYARD Group, the solution implemented now makes it possible to meet a very large part of the initial expectations while continuously evolving thanks to a high rate of adhesion from users. This project is a demonstration of total cooperation between 4D CONCEPT and BAYARD-PRESSE in the continuous development of a specific solution built on a solid technological base.

 

THE ADVANTAGES

The deployment of CONTENT FACTORY is a real change for the BAYARD-PRESSE. The number of users has increased by 50% with an average of simultaneous connections multiplied by four. Naturally, the number of internal commands has also risen sharply.

Now open to all types of content, the fluidity of the interactions is there, together with an agreed and accepted workflow, guaranteeing the quality of the assets exchanged, and the conformity of their use with respect to copyright.

Finally, and this is ultimately the primary objective of implementing a single asset management solution: the rate of content reuse is rising sharply, undoubtedly providing major savings on creative costs. The same element can now be used several times, on several media, for several subsidiaries, in several countries, all easily, thus multiplying its value many times.