Case Study
Managing Media for a Chicago-style Digital Transformation
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When the Lou Malnati Organization needed a way to manage its media assets and facilitate a digital transformation, it used iconik. With iconik, the in-house creative team can collaborate with external creative and marketing agencies to review and approve ad assets, find content, and track the performance of each asset in campaigns.
Digital transformation has reached into more industries as the conditions of the last two years have brought a flood of new challenges. To stay profitable, companies have had to pivot and change the way they serve customers, build community, and sell their products.
This is a story about one of those companies.
The Lou Malnati Organization has a rich 50-year history that includes 65+ Lou Malnati’s Pizzerias spread out across four states. Their brand is built on their specialty, iconic, Chicago-style, deep-dish pizza, a beloved tradition of their region’s food culture.
To reach beyond the four-state region, Lou Malnati’s created Tastes of Chicago, an online direct-to-consumer specialty food retailer. Frozen Lou Malnati's pizzas aren’t the only items being delivered to doorsteps, the site also offers other famous Chicago food like hotdogs and popcorn.
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Until 2020, the restaurants were the main revenue driver, but when the pandemic sent communities into lockdown, that changed. People were home, still hungry, and craving comfort food during a stressful time. Over the next 12 months, Tastes of Chicago had incredible growth.
Almost overnight, the Lou Malnati Organization had to shift from talking to customers at their tables to talking to them online. This meant more professional advertising, which created the demand for a lot of new, engaging content—and it had to be delivered fast.
The 4 main challenges Facing the Lou Malnati Organization were:
When Ahin Thomas, the Chief Revenue Officer at Tastes of Chicago, saw these challenges, he believed iconik could help bring his organization together during this exciting time of growth.
To introduce a media management product for the first time to his organization, Ahin wanted to show more than slides. He wanted to demonstrate that his solution was easy to implement and offered a lot more value than the existing solution.
There hadn’t been a clear case for media management before, so to present a powerful case to the key stakeholders, he arrived at their meeting with a fully functional proof of concept. Ahin was able to set up a new iconik account for less than $100 with all of the organization’s existing media in less than two hours!
“The barriers for a company adopting iconik are profoundly low. It was extremely easy to get started, and the pricing was predictable and affordable.”
- Ahin Thomas, Chief Revenue Officer, Tastes of Chicago
Soon enough, the value became clear. Iconik would open the door for their growing team to produce content without barriers.
Within the same two hours that Ahin set up his iconik account, he also synced his entire library of media assets from their Backblaze B2 storage and auto-tagged every asset with visual AI analysis that comes with iconik. According to the iconik 2022 Media Stats, AI visual analysis usage is up 300%. It’s an indicator that more people are understanding the value of this technology.
Ahin explains the impact of this simple task, “The value became clear to all the stakeholders once we searched for words like “cheese” and instantly saw our cheese pizza images. It didn’t even matter if the assets were named correctly, iconik found them. I explained that this detailed tagging was done automatically in less than an hour, so imagine what else we could do in iconik with more time.”
The team at Tastes of Chicago worked 100% remotely in collaboration with outside agencies. They needed a way to unite themselves through their creative processes and track all the new incoming assets. Navigating and reviewing content via file-sharing links was difficult. The teams needed a creative drive that was organized and easy to access from anywhere.
Based on past experiences, Ahin believed that locking a creative drive behind a firewall was a business impediment. In iconik assets are always available for the creative and marketing teams from any online device. On top of iconik’s extensive IT security measures, admins also can use detailed permissions and roles, asset blocking, and warnings to keep media safe.
When new advertising assets required feedback, iconik offered the review and approval workflows needed out of the box. With features ranging from approval requests to time-based comments and drawings, teams would have everything they need to avoid long email threads and centralize their conversations around media.
On top of all this, iconik will help Tastes of Chicago optimize their marketing campaigns with added custom metadata that shows what campaigns have historically done well and what assets were running for each campaign.
Iconik has now been introduced to Tastes of Chicago’s community agency, performance marketing agency, branding agency, and PR agency. The response from all four of these independent, professional entities has been the same, they've never heard of iconik, but as Ahin reports, “They are thrilled! Everyone knows where everything is and it has a network effect for our ecosystem.”
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Moving complex folder structures for an organization all at once is a huge project, and this was a real concern for the leadership at Lou Malnati’s. However, with iconik, it isn’t necessary to have all of the folder structures in place to start receiving value.
Ahin explained how the ability to start without the entire data hierarchy in place worked for his team, “I think Iconik is very user-centric and empathetic for both business runners and creatives. There are very few points of no return, so you can just dive in and start to discover how you want to work. For us, this meant we could add our unorganized assets to iconik and it was still easier to find things than before.”
Iconik can preserve existing folder structures as collections to maintain familiar navigation, but it can also search across many more data points other than folder and file names when users don’t know where to look.
To keep up the momentum of these early wins, Tastes of Chicago will focus more effort on tagging media for their unique business purposes. Continuing to enrich media with marketing data will make future ad campaigns more effective.
The team is still growing and remote work is a permanent fixture of work-life, so the review and approval processes will become even more important as Tastes of Chicago establishes requirements and standardization for agencies and consultants who work with their brand.
“Iconik not only makes us more efficient and collaborative, but it's helping us usher in a new mindset on how we do our work even beyond our creative workflows.”
Ahin Thomas, Chief Revenue Officer, Tastes of Chicago