1.4 TB of marketing assets.
Found in seconds-not minutes.
How Canada's largest out-of-home advertiser replaced a decades-old folder archive with Digital Hive-and finally got every sales rep searching, surfacing, and selling from the same source of truth.
Faces 240,000
Decks & research 8,400
Recommended for automotive 12
A pure sales organization, finally selling from one shelf.
PATTISON's 25 sales offices run on visual collateral-240,000 ad faces, a century of billboard photography, decks, research and client journey histories totalling 1.4 terabytes. The legacy folder server was buckling. Two previous platform attempts had failed. Digital Hive shipped a working system in five months, kept the folder muscle memory intact, and gave marketing the broadcast tools it never had.
PATTISON Outdoor is the acknowledged Canadian leader in out-of-home advertising-billboards, transit, street-level, large-format hoardings, digital. The company runs campaigns across more than 200 markets from St. John's to Victoria, and as part of Canada's second-largest privately held company, the Jim Pattison Group, it sits alongside brands as varied as Guinness World Records and TNG, North America's largest magazine distributor.
A stubbornly sticky legacy system
PATTISON didn't have an asset problem. It had a findability problem- wrapped in two failed migrations and a workforce that kept gravitating back to what worked.
Manual search service
Marketing was acting as a human Google-tracking down decades-old billboards from the treasure trove on demand. Not sustainable
Two prior platforms-rejected
Each modern web CMS the team tried, salespeople drifted back to the old folder server. The new interfaces just didn't surface things fast enough
1.4 TB, growing weekly
240,000 ad faces, video, research, client histories-all accumulating on a single legacy server that was reaching its physical and cognitive limits
Adapt the tool to the people. Not the other way around
Digital Hive sat above the existing archive-indexing, governing, and surfacing assets without touching the source. The folder structure salespeople trusted stayed put. Everything underneath got rebuilt.
Google-like search across 1.4 TB
Custom-tuned load-time work for PATTISON's high-volume image and video files-so a face from 1998 surfaces as fast as a deck from last week
One asset. Many ways to find it
Digital Hive shipped new product functionality so reps in automotive, financial services, retail-each tag the same content their own way
Netflix navigation. Zero training
Familiar horizontal lanes-Faces, Decks, Recommended, Compliance-mean a 30-year sales vet and a new hire find what they need the same way
Marketing finally has a megaphone
Weekly company news, fresh creative, compliance updates-pushed to every sales office regardless of location or timezone
Five months. Three rollouts. One platform that finally stuck
PATTISON had been burned twice. Digital Hive's deployment was phased, stress-tested by actual sales execs, and custom-tuned to the way the business already worked.
Stand up the catalog
Connect the legacy archive, SharePoint, research DB and video store. Metadata only-nothing migrated, nothing rebuilt
Test with real sellers
Phased rollout to a representative sales pod. Feedback shaped the search ranking, lane structure, and tagging UX
Speed up the heavy stuff
Custom engineering work for PATTISON's outsized image and video payloads. Load-time targets met before general rollout
All 25 offices, in stride
Familiar folder structure preserved. New broadcast, personalization and recommendation layers turned on for everyone
The sales floor, before and after
Same assets. Same people. Different day
Before Digital Hive
- Reps phoned or emailed Marketing to track down assets, mid-pitch
- Two prior platforms abandoned-teams gravitated back to the legacy folder
- Decades of billboard photography effectively unsearchable
- No way to push fresh creative or compliance updates to the field
- One tag scheme for everyone-auto, finance, retail forced into the same vocabulary
- Retraining cost killed every prior migration attempt
With Digital Hive
- Self-service search across 1.4 TB-results in seconds, not minutes
- Familiar folder structure preserved. Adoption from day one
- Every face, deck and research file indexed-back to the 1908 archive
- Marketing broadcasts new creative weekly. Coast to coast, on schedule
- Per-vertical tagging. Auto teams tag in auto. Finance in finance
- Netflix-style swim-lane UI. Next to no training to operate
Where the work shows up
Measurable on the floor. Audible in the comments coming back to marketing. Visible in the queue of departments now asking for their own Hive.
People want to tag content their own way, depending on their focus area, so it's fast and easy to surface. Digital Hive adapted the tagging system to make this possible-a true value add for us as a business.
The capabilities behind the outcome
Six Digital Hive capabilities did the heavy lifting at PATTISON. Every one of them is in production today across the customer base.
Google-fast, on enterprise data
One search box across every connected source. Tuned per customer for asset weight and result ranking
Tag once. Find many ways
Per-team, per-vertical tag schemes layered over the same source content. Built for PATTISON, shipped to all
Netflix navigation for analytics
Horizontal lanes by category and audience. Familiar enough to need no training
The right content. The right rep
Markets with no subway transit don't see subway creative. Region, vertical, role-all in the personalization model
Marketing has a megaphone
Push new creative, news, compliance updates to every sales office on a schedule. No more email blast and pray
One door to the whole stack
Same identity, same governance, same audit trail across every connected source. IT keeps control. Reps just sign in