A REVOLUTION IN
CONTENT-PRODUCTION

The triumph of social media and the trends towards personalised customer communication are increasing the demand for image and film content almost immeasurably.

Currently, the communication channels in automotive sales are still considered separately from each other. The required content is produced and played out in separate production pipelines. On the one hand, this causes marketing and communication managers to spend a lot of time and effort on procuring and providing the necessary source materials such as CAD data, production information, configuration logics, and material allocation information. On the other hand time is spent on communication and acceptance loops with the service providers involved. Ultimately, these efforts are reflected in the considerable costs for this type of production.

Uniform Data Model across all Channels

The use of digitally produced content is now state of the art in automotive marketing and sales. Many images and video contents on websites, point-of-sales systems and in traditional print products are no longer photographed or filmed "for real" but digitally generated on the computer based on CAD data.

In order to optimise processes and costs, marketing and communication departments are always on the lookout for new and innovative approaches. For the customer Opel, Reply has developed an innovative solution that makes it possible to create content from a uniform data model for various communication channels. This means that previously separate production processes are now possible via one production pipeline, which dramatically reduces the time and effort required to provide the source material, for coordination and production, thus helping to save costs.

Process and Cost Optimisation

The approach developed by Reply is based on modern game engine technology. In the specific case for Opel, the Unreal game engine from the manufacturer Epic Games was used, a technology that is also standard for video games.

In addition to the use of gaming technology, a cloud-based rendering approach was implemented to produce the image content, which further increases the possibilities of use and, above all, drastically simplifies the maintenance of the content and accelerates the time to market.