SBS uses Brightspot, Adobe to drive audience experience

Australian broadcaster SBS has detailed the benefits of a two-and-a-half-year content management system (CMS) transformation, combined with its use of an Adobe stack, to enhance and customise audience experiences.

Speaking to the iTnews Podcast, chief technology officer Darren Farnham outlined SBS’ technology strategy and operational remit, alongside the specific CMS replacement effort.

“Here at SBS, the team is just not a typical ICT-type technology team that thinks about servers and infrastructure and networks,” Farnham said.

“We also have a large operational part of the portfolio as well, so we have studio productions thinking about making TV and radio production; we also have the physical assets of the building and how we make sure that we run the facility.”

Farnham said that technology at SBS needed to serve internal customers - “the people that are making the content in our TV, online, radio, or news divisions” - as well as the increasingly digital consumption requirements of audiences.

These different needs are served by initiatives that align to pillars of the organisation’s technology strategy.

Farnham said that SBS underwent a major change to its CMS technology, due to the age of its former platforms, and the number of different CMSs it had ended up operating and maintaining.

Patches, updates and feature enhancement required considerable duplicated effort.

In addition, SBS needed to be able to more easily present content in 63 languages, meeting its broadcast remit.

Farnham said that “one of the biggest concerns” with the project was how to consolidate so many CMSs - and the different workflows they codified - in a non-disruptive way.

The technology team worked hard to create buy-in, to collaboratively define “what good looked like” and to work towards achieving that.

“We really needed the editorial teams, those people that are the digital teams that work [with CMSs] every day, to be excited and see the opportunity that came out of the new tech, rather than be something that sort of enforced upon them,” Farnham said.

One thing that assisted was the creation of a proof-of-concept environment for each team that contained some of their own content.

It meant that once they’d been trained in the new system, they could immediately go into a test environment and put into practice what they’d just learned - before any change was made to the production system.

“Once we got that on, the biggest problem we then had was that all of the rest of the business saw a shiny new user experience, a great new frontend … and they wanted it straight away,” Farnham said.

“It was good to have the rest of the editorial teams excited about wanting to come onto a new platform rather than being nervous about the fact that they were going to have to move and the usual change fatigue that can come along [with that].”

Farnham said that SBS had also utilised Adobe technology to underpin a new A-B testing feature of the CMS, and to enable personalisation of content experiences.

“We’ve done a bunch of work around A-B testing, where we can look at placement of articles and related content on websites and see what one cohort thinks when we place something within the website design versus another, and be able to compare and contrast,” Farnham said.

“We're using some of the Adobe products there just to help us with driving out some of the insights that we can get from that.”

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