Columbia Sportswear Co. partnered with Adobe Scene7 to spruce up its ecommerce site and launch a mobile commerce site to drive sales of its outerwear apparel and accessories.

When the brand decided to enhance its online presence last year, it needed a flexible and robust image production and management platform to not only meet its immediate needs, but one that would also scale as its business grows and expands into new markets such as mobile. It is also important to Columbia to present consumers with a superior shopping experience, online and offline.

“With Adobe Scene7, we are able to provide online shoppers with a full range of viewing options, including full-screen zoom and alternative views including 360-degree spin views on some products,” said Garrett Gonzales, creative manager of ecommerce at Columbia Sportswear, Washington County, OR.

“We also want to bring interactivity to our retail stores by offering access to Columbia’s entire product line and brands through Web kiosks, interactive store windows and other digital displays,” he said.

Columbia Sportswear is a United States company that manufactures and distributes outerwear and sportswear.

Columbia Sportswear also produces footwear, headgear, camping equipment, skiwear and outerwear accessories.

Adobe Scene7 is a cross-media publishing platform for delivering dynamic content to any channel—Web, email, print and mobile.

Companies using Adobe Scene7 include QVC, Harrods, Macy’s, Office Depot, Polo Ralph Lauren, La-Z-Boy, Lands’ End, Blockbuster, VF Corporation and Levi Strauss & Co.

Making the Scene7
Adobe Systems Inc. recently updated Adobe Scene7, its hosted cross-media publishing platform, providing expanded offerings for optimizing mobile experiences and data-driven dynamic banners.

In addition, the Scene7 platform now provides video publishing capabilities for mobile devices and multiple screens, enabling non-technical users to deliver video to all customer touch points.

This update also includes integration with Adobe Creative Suite 5 to streamline workflows. It also includes initial integrations with Adobe Site Catalyst and Adobe Test&Target, powered by Omniture, to automate Web site analytics and optimization.

An accelerator kit was added to simplify the development of Web-to-print applications.

“Adobe Scene7 streamlines a labor-intensive image production and management process and easily handles our requirements for 30 different image sizes used across our ecommerce properties,” Mr. Gonzales said. “Before Adobe Scene7, we relied on a labor-intensive process that involved running scripts to create different-sized images for different displays.

“Additionally, each season we shoot thousands of pictures that need to be presented consistently across our sites,” he said. “With our democratic approach to the outdoors, we build a range of products for all types of outdoor enthusiasts.

“No matter what your age, and no matter how many times a week you find yourself conquering the greater outdoors, we’re here to help you fulfill your passion.”

Rich media experiences
The Scene7 platform now supports mobile rich media viewers, enabling businesses to easily deliver rich content, including video, to enhance the user experience for mobile devices and multiple screens.

This is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of delivering rich media to desktops, interactive displays and mobile devices by leveraging a single platform to create, store and deliver assets, instead of developing a unique experience tailored for each device.

New capabilities include:

• Dynamic image sizing, which serves optimized rich experiences across digital channels—Web, social, print, email and mobile—from a single set of images that can be automatically resized to any dimension, format or resolution, significantly reducing production time and costs.

• Full-screen image zoom viewers for Flash as well as non-Flash devices, which supports multi-touch and gesture-based interfaces, a wide array of mobile viewers for images, image sets, color swatch sets and multiple view sets in many different styles.

• End-to-end video publishing for multiple screens offers the ability to upload and custom encode videos into Flash and non-Flash formats for optimal serving to mobile, desktop and interactive displays.

• Full-screen Flash-based video players, which enable the serving or streaming of video content with out-of-box viewers.

Dynamic banners for targeted promotions
Adobe also introduced Scene7 dynamic banners that provide the ability to create content once and leverage the assets to deliver different and unique banner experiences using a single template.

Marketers can now deliver variable image and Flash-based banners with and without video, reducing the time and costs for creating, modifying and publishing targeted content.

Each template variation can be created in real-time leveraging any database, such as product, promotions or CRM, removing the need to create a unique version of a banner for different visitors.

This also eliminates the resources and time required to edit source files, modify complex code or undergo time-consuming processes to update banners manually.

Adobe SiteCatalyst, Adobe Test&Target integration for optimized rich media delivery
New SiteCatalyst and Scene7 integration enables users to map rich media viewer events such as product views, product zooms, color swatch views and video views, to SiteCatalyst report variables, directly from within the Scene7 platform.

This enables marketers to determine the subsequent path visitors take through a Web site to better understand how rich media delivery affects variables such as time on site, purchases and other conversion events.

Through an integration with Test&Target, marketers can automatically personalize visitor experiences in real-time by optimizing sites and campaigns with Scene7 rich media content.

Using Scene7 image or video templates, rich content can be delivered to A/B or multivariate testing campaigns depending on a visitor’s profile parameters or prior site activity.

Relevant offers consisting of different combinations of text copy and rich visual elements, which can include video, are created directly from the Scene7 Publishing System and are immediately available within Test&Target, eliminating the need to manually create new campaigns.

“These integrations between Scene7 and the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, serve to further Adobe’s mission to provide our customers with a more complete solution for creating, managing and optimizing dynamic content, while also measuring and personalizing online and mobile campaigns,” said Sheila Dahlgren, senior director of product marketing at Adobe Scene7, San Francisco.

Final Take
Dan Butcher, associate editor, Mobile Commerce Daily