Mighty Morphin' Brand Management: How Saban supercharged an international web context expansion

Months of work was completed in just three weeks thanks to what the firm learned during the tendering process

If the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers find their regular, everyday giant Tyrannosaurus Rex or Pterodactyl robots aren't enough to defeat the giant lipstick monster or minotaur that stands in their way, they can easily call on each other to combine resources and take down the giant rubber aggressor by transforming into Megazord.

The reality for Saban Brands, which formed in 2010 when Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban regained control of the beloved IP he'd sold to Disney in 2001, has resembled that of its characters' on-screen adventures, as it sought a way to quickly and efficiently draw together its fleet of brand websites into the native languages of an exploding global fanbase.

Joe Camacho is the IT director at Saban Brands.

"Disney's performance with Power Rangers was probably not what they expected, and Haim Saban had a soft spot for it and reacquired it," he says.

"After that, we formed Saban Brands, which is a new company.

"We established it to be progressive around IT innovation, but it means we have to support our brands through some sophisticated and tech-driven marketing initiatives."

At the time of Power Rangers' reintroduction to the Saban family - which as well as its entertainment properties also handles several fashion brands - brand marketing was still "driven mostly by the US market", Camacho says.

Adding localised and regionalised content was necessary, with over 900 web pages needing to be localised as quickly as possible to start leveraging a global brand. It was Tendering Time!

"Originally we'd looked at our existing vendors and providers, which was mostly driven by web development and content development," says Camacho.

"But without putting a slight on our current vendors, they couldn't help us put the content out into the world."

Incremental cost versus work effort versus release times were the key issues, and redeveloping every site from scratch would be too costly, and simply take too long.

Saban Brands had heard of marketing implementation agency Hogarth's development subsidiary Cortex and its Integrated Agile Marketing (I/AM) product, but initially approached the firm just for translation purposes, with a mind to plugging its work into another vendor's web development - even the translation part was to be a huge undertaking.

"Translating all 960 pages and making the process efficient was a huge challenge. The number of unique or distinct experiences becomes cumbersome, and logistics becomes heavy," says Camacho.

But it turned out translation wasn't the only solution Cortex had up its sleeve.

As a proof of concept, Camacho describes how Cortex "ingested a part of the Power Rangers website" and "within three days gave us an idea of how the whole web page would look in French".

"We asked, ‘Wait, how did you do that?' We wanted only to use them for translation!" exclaims Camacho.

"We were going to scrub the [translated] content and rebuild the site with new developments."

When Cortex developed the proof of concept within just these three days, Saban didn't hesitate to pursue the opportunity further.

"We said ‘Let's stop everything and see what's happened here'," says Camacho.

Peter Proud, MD for I/AM at Cortex, picks up the technology story:

"We separate the code and the imagery from the text, we have a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) file, and a CSS file, and another one for the text. We take the text file that's separate from the code, so we just have a text code. So when we do the translation, we give the JSON file to the translation team and they translate the text, then add a few lines of code to tell the platform it's in English, French or Portuguese..."

After this, all of Saban's sites are run from a single container, hosted on Azure.

"We cracked the code to deliver localised translations using Azure," explains Proud.

"Because it's not bound to CMS, and is within an Azure container, once it's published we have a slot for each language, and can publish the web pages as a self-contained slot and then cut the connection with the CMS so it's bolted down and scalable."

Saban was encouraged by this package, especially as it was already happily using Azure to host content.

"When you look at cloud hosting, Amazon has been doing it a long time, but there is a certain process there. Azure gives us flexibility to scale immediately and a model to be reactive to the market needs.

"We knew it was a technology-driven play [from Cortex], and we were already using various hosting solutions with over vendors... so we realised we should come up with just one hosting platform to work out where the content would live and how it would be sent out to the world," says Camacho.

"We thought France would take a month and a half [with other vendor development input], but it took just three weeks to do three languages."

Camacho now describes Power Rangers as "the first of many to come" at Saban Brands, seeing a lot of potential for Cortex's speedy yet controlled approach to content repackaging. He's also impressed with how well the method serves up content for different hardware platforms, such as mobile.

"We're very protective of our content, and we're very aware of all these platforms. The kid space experience is different to all our experiences, so we probably gave Cortex a fair amount of headaches because we were very aware of the responsiveness required."

Camacho describes a palpable difference between now and "if you looked at the [French Power Rangers] website six months ago, being a Wordpress website hosted ‘somewhere'..."

The bottom line, he says, is that Cortex and Azure is about the content first and foremost, "not about the platform delivering it".

"I want ubiquitous and flexible, and I don't want restrictions on the creative process."