How REWE Group centralized its content buying process with Smint.io

Managing a multitude of Content providers and a huge number of buyers

In Germany and 21 other countries, REWE Group offers great products and innovative services that make people’s lives more pleasant and convenient. The enterprise is probably best known for its supermarkets (major brands like REWE, BILLA, BIPA, MERKUR, PENNY, ADEG), and its TOOM Hardware store chain, but its activities also include a large tourism division (DER Reisebüro, Kuoni) and several online platforms.

The huge scale and diversity of REWE’s operations makes processes like content buying highly complex. Each advertising agency, marketing unit, corporate communications or PR department likes to use their own favorite content providers and tools to purchase images, illustrations, videos, music or other assets. This is why in the past, people spent way too much time on searching for content and handling approval processes as well as accounting. Negotiations of agreements with content providers were not centralized and asset prices were too high.

Redundant purchases caused increasingly high costs. It was very hard to figure out who had purchased which asset and where content came from. Effective cost reporting and billing were impossible. And last but not least, reliable license and usage rights information was not ensured, exposing REWE Group to a significant risk of license infringements.

Taking the first steps

Steffen Kujus, Head of Print- and Asset Management at REWE Group, identified this flaw in REWE’s processes and took first steps to optimize asset pricing by negotiating central Agreements with the existing content providers. Bundled user accounts enabled the users to benefit from better purchasing conditions. This initiative already led to an important advantage and to transparency About purchased content.

But most of the problems persisted. Managing a myriad of accounts for agency users, internal and external stakeholders as well as using multiple purchasing platforms still caused significant problems in terms of secondary use and billing. Employees and agency users still could not easily search, find and purchase content in a license-safe way through one central point of access. Most of the interactions throughout the content buying process still were not digitized and done in a manual and cumbersome way.

Steffen Kujus did not want to give up. He decided to continue to work on fixing the ongoing waste of time and money and started to look for Software solutions that would solve the problem. However, this was not easy. As the content buying part of the enterprise content supply chain was a blind spot for most organizations at that time and managers were just handing over the problems associated with content buying to their agencies, there were no suppliers of standard software to solve the issue

Introducing the Smint.io Content Buying Portal

At the same time, Smint.io Portals, the Content Experience Platform, was being released. Next to other solutions, Smint.io Portals also offers capabilities to fully digitize the content buying part of the enterprise content supply chain. It is the first viable solution that fully covers the content buying process end-to-end, from content searches to approval processes, from license management to billing.

After many talks and an assessment of the solution, REWE Group chose to introduce the Smint.io Content Buying Portal for its capabilities to finally completely digitize and professionalize the content buying process at REWE Group.

Smint.io Content Buying Portal allows all stakeholders involved in the content buying process to easily search, find and purchase content from all major content sources, on a single platform, and to stay legally compliant and cost transparent at the same time. Smint.io is available as a cloud service, it is fully secure, 100% transparent and made for enterprise usage.

Getting started

Prior to launch, the enterprise contracts of REWE Group with its content providers were imported into the Smint.io contract and license management system. Over 60,000 assets that had been purchased by REWE Group before launching Smint.io were seamlessly migrated from their respective content providers to Smint.io for reuse by the content buyers. In addition, all 300 user accounts that REWE had to maintain separately with each of the different Content providers were centralized into the Smint.io user directory.

The system was ready for launch.