Bauer Media Outdoor

The Client

Bauer Media Outdoor is an out-of-home (OOH) advertising company operating across eight markets, providing brands with high-impact outdoor advertising solutions, including billboards, digital displays, and transit advertising. Part of the global Bauer Media Group, the company connects advertisers with audiences at scale, offering a portfolio of outdoor inventory supported by creative, data, and production capabilities across its markets.

The Situation

In early 2025, Bauer Media Outdoor was required to separate from the Digital Asset Management environment it had previously shared with its former US parent company, following a merger with Bauer Media Group. This triggered a business-critical project: the complete migration, restructure, and relaunch of its DAM platform within six months, under a hard deadline driven by the organizational change.

The scope was significant. All assets needed to be migrated to a new DAM platform, AssetHub; legacy-branded materials had to be rebranded or restricted, and a scalable, multi-market content workflow had to be established to serve the newly formed organization. AssetHub would need to support eight markets and serve internal teams across marketing, sales, and operations, as well as external clients and specialists accessing Bauer Media Outdoor's out-of-home advertising photography.

The project had to deliver across six areas simultaneously:

• Migration and rebrand: Migrate all assets from the old DAM into AssetHub within six months, prevent the use of legacy-branded assets by separating historical content into restricted asset groups, and enable a clean, controlled market launch protected from old branding during the corporate transition.
   
• Governance and permission control: Resolve historical issues caused by uncontrolled metadata editing and permissions by introducing clearly defined DAM roles with global and regional market admins, limiting metadata creation and editing to trained users only, and reducing the risk of data corruption, eliminating accidental structural changes, and ensuring long-term DAM scalability.
   
• Metadata simplification and standardization: Create a metadata structure that works for all markets rather than being optimized for a single one, reducing complexity while maintaining coverage and flexibility, resulting in faster tagging, improved search accuracy, and a significant reduction in time spent searching for or correcting assets across marketing and sales teams.
   
• Data quality: Validate that all assets were correctly tagged by market, metadata type, and asset group before import, avoiding legacy inconsistencies in the new DAM and eliminating the need for large-scale post-migration clean-up.
   
• Market-specific user experiences: Implement consistent, well-branded homepage designs across all markets, with customized navigation that shows users only assets and content relevant to their market, increasing engagement with the DAM, reducing confusion, and improving self-service access to content.
   
• Controlled external sharing: Move markets away from SharePoint and ad-hoc file sharing to DAM-driven portals, enabling sales and marketing teams to share live, dynamically updated asset collections with clients, resulting in faster reach to clients, reduced manual handling and duplication of assets, and improved brand consistency across external touchpoints.

The Challenge

The project involved several significant business and technical challenges:

• Complex multi-market migration: Assets in the legacy DAM were stored in groups that spanned multiple markets, making it impossible to cleanly migrate content by market. Without intervention, assets risked being mixed across countries when being imported into the new DAM.
• Legacy metadata complexity: The previous DAM contained inconsistent metadata usage between markets, excessive and overlapping fields, and unrestricted permissions. Reconciling these legacy structures with a new, simplified metadata framework across all markets, without data loss, significantly increased the migration's complexity.
• Fixed timeline during live business activity: The migration had to be completed within six months, while sales and marketing teams continued operating, photography production continued, and a live company rebrand was underway. Failure would have resulted in duplicated effort or business disruption.

The Solution

Bauer Media Outdoor worked directly with Acquia throughout the project, holding weekly sessions to work through how to export and import assets and metadata without losing any information. These sessions also covered homepage design for each market, how to use permissions to restrict access to metadata changes, and how to utilize portals to their full potential.

Step 1: Preparing Assets for Migration

The first challenge was preserving market ownership during migration. Acquia helped Bauer Media Outdoor migrate assets without losing market ownership by creating temporary categories in the legacy DAM. Every asset was tagged with a category combining the asset group and market name, ensuring assets could be exported by Acquia and re-imported into the correct market and asset group in the new system.

Step 2: Metadata Redesign and Reduction

The teams redesigned metadata to be simpler, consistent, and scalable across all markets. Acquia set up all fields and asset groups in the new DAM while Bauer Media Outdoor's team manually audited all metadata exports, removing old fields and updating values in Excel to ensure clean alignment with the new structure before import. Acquia then ran test imports to identify any asset duplication, which could be removed before the final import.

Step 3: Governance and Permissions

With the metadata structure in place, the teams turned to governance. Global admins and regional market admins were introduced, metadata changes were restricted to trained users only, and marketing roles were split to ensure only qualified users could upload, export, or create portals. This prevented future structural drift and protected data quality across all eight markets.

Step 4: Brand Control and Rebrand Governance

Managing the rebrand required careful separation of old and new assets. Only rebranded and new assets were made available for external use, while legacy-branded assets were isolated into restricted groups. Acquia helped identify a solution to hide old assets using asset groups and permissions, ensuring nothing with old branding could be accidentally shared during the corporate transition. All DAM UI elements, portals, and buttons were fully rebranded to reflect the new Bauer Media Outdoor identity.

Step 5: Driving Adoption with Tailored Experiences

The final step focused on ensuring teams across all eight markets would actually use the new system. Consistent, Bauer Media Outdoor-branded homepages were created across all markets, with navigation customized to show users only content relevant to their market. Markets were also empowered to optimize metadata and portals locally within a governed framework, balancing global consistency with local flexibility. Acquia DAM's flexible configuration, dynamic portals, and secure external sharing capabilities enabled simultaneous alignment with global governance and local market needs.

The Results

Working together, Bauer Media Outdoor and Acquia migrated more than 200,000 assets from the legacy DAM to AssetHub within six months, correctly placed into asset groups and tagged with accurate metadata. With the migration complete, users and markets could immediately begin creating portals to share assets internally and externally.

By completing a full migration and rebrand in six months, simplifying metadata by up to 84%, and enabling dynamic client-facing portals, AssetHub is now a governed, scalable, multi-market DAM that delivers real business value. The platform drives increased productivity across marketing and sales, faster internal and external access to key assets, and improved client engagement and retention. The project highlights the role of Acquia DAM as a central content platform that supports governed workflows, multi-market scalability, and measurable business outcomes.

Specific metrics include:

Metadata Simplification

The metadata structure’s redesign delivered significant complexity reductions:

• Metadata types reduced from 19 to 9 (53%)
• Asset types reduced from 45 to 14 (69%)
• Metadata fields reduced from 156 to 52 (67%)
• Asset groups reduced from 93 to 15 (84%)

Portal Adoption and Commercial Impact

Adoption was strong, particularly in the UK market, where client-facing portals drove measurable commercial engagement. Photography portals shared with major agency partners generated significant traffic:

• WPP: 367 views
• Talon: 264 views
• Dentsu: 165 views
• Publicis: 106 views
• Posterscope: 93 views
• Rapport: 19 views

Internal sales and marketing portals saw similarly strong engagement:

• Motion Content Guidelines: 964 views
• Product Decks: 259 views
• Pitch Portal: 204 views
• BMO Europe Content Hub: 203 views

A newly launched Portfolio Portal generated 198 views in just three months, demonstrating rapid uptake.

Asset Usage Growth

Although AssetHub launched in August, the internal photography workflow didn’t launch until November, so photography assets weren't consistently updated in the DAM until then. Once the photography workflow launched, uploads were scheduled every two weeks, ensuring users received a regular flow of assets to share externally and use internally. The impact on usage was immediate and measurable.

Assets shared and downloaded grew dramatically through Q4 2025 and into January:

Monthly downloads rose from 1,783 in October to 7,279 in December, a 308% increase across Q4. Asset sharing followed a similar pattern, growing from zero activity in October to 154 shares by December, including a 130% month-on-month increase from November to December. Growth continued into January, with 10,224 downloads and 271 shares, demonstrating strong user adoption once structured workflows and regularly refreshed content were embedded within AssetHub.