Fever Finds Epic Growth With Cloudinary

When the live-entertainment discovery platform Fever started to expand globally, storing and managing thousands of images and videos on Google Drive became a major bottleneck.

The team needed to deliver a flawless digital experience and redirect all the time spent on sharing and searching for business-critical visual assets to focus on growth.

ABOUT

Impactful Images and Videos Key to Growth

Fever is the leading global live-entertainment discovery platform, helping millions of people every week to discover the best experiences in their cities, with a mission to democratize access to culture and entertainment in real life. Through its platform, Fever inspires users to enjoy unique local experiences and events, from immersive exhibitions, interactive theatrical experiences, and festivals, to molecular cocktail popups, while empowering creators with data and technology to create and expand experiences across the world. Since its inception in 2014, Fever has grown from being in three to now more than 80 cities across Europe, America, Asia, and Oceania and more than 800 employees worldwide. Fever also recently achieved unicorn status following a $227 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs.

Fever relies on impactful images and videos to attract its users to local experiences. When the pandemic struck the entertainment industry, the company used the time wisely to plan further global expansion while helping the organizers to create and adapt to a new reality during and post-COVID by making its experiences more accessible to a new range of customers around the world. Key to this was reworking its DAM strategy with Cloudinary, which successfully met ambitious growth and the scale requirements. Since 2019, and despite the pandemic, the company has grown 10 times in revenue.

THE CHALLENGE

Finding the Right Tool for Today and Tomorrow

Fever showcases and sells exclusively through its marketplace and depends on images and videos to attract new users, keep them engaged through the customer journey, and ensure they come back. For the biggest experiences and events, Fever creates specific, visual-rich landing pages that contain short videos, images and animations.

Inés Fernández, Workflows & Automations Project Manager at Fever, explains: “We have a detailed system. We have the website and several landing pages for our biggest experiences. The landing pages are the first point of user contact and critical for engagement throughout the customer journey.” Images and short videos play a critical role in promoting events in traditional and digital channels. They are “set to level the communication,” as Fernández put it.

Using tools like Google Drive worked for a time but wasn’t scalable as the company grew. Fernández explains: “People were just organizing images and videos on their own personal drives. That made it very difficult and time intensive to share the visual assets across different teams. A lot of visual material was lost in the process.”

Fever knew it needed a DAM that could centralize and streamline its entire visual asset life cycle, while offering seamless integrations with popular creative tools like Adobe Photoshop.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Ease of Use, Intelligent Auto-Tagging, and AI Make the Difference

Fever carefully reviewed 15 DAM solutions before selecting Cloudinary, which met all its requirements. Fernández says: “Cloudinary was the only tool that supported the auto-tagging tools Amazon Recognition and Google Auto-Tagging, which would allow us to execute data analytics in the back end to find out how each visual performs. Also for the detection of duplicates, many of the tools were only able to detect duplicates by name, not by the content as Cloudinary does. The final decision for Cloudinary solutions was a mix of all these features as well as the scale it supports.”

It took Fever just two months to onboard all the departments across all geographies. According to Juan Redondo, Growth Lead Marketing Optimization at Fever, “Key to our success was getting our creative team to stop using Google Drive on day one and start uploading all their visual material to Cloudinary instead. Then the rest of our users needed to switch to Cloudinary to access these assets.”

Because Cloudinary’s AI automatically analyzes and tags visual content, it’s much easier for users to search, browse and collaborate on media assets. Thanks to advanced AI-based auto-tagging tools, the days of lost assets in the depths of Google Drive are over.

THE RESULTS

‘Epic-Scale’ Visual Asset Management

Fever’s growth is no longer held back by its visual media infrastructure and can now manage this on an “epic scale.” It currently holds and manages more than 80,000 visual assets on Cloudinary and uploads around 10,000 more per month, and counting. More than 300 users around the world share assets in Cloudinary every day, saving considerable time and resources.