Working alongside thousands of top brands, we’ve seen firsthand how unleashing the power of visual media saves time, money, even CO2 while taking the customer experience to new heights. However, our experience with Mecum Auctions, the world’s largest collector car auction house, stands out as a truly stellar example of transformation.
Mecum urgently needed to tune its visual media engine to get the most from the roughly 2 million high-quality images used to promote and sell dream cars. Given the nature of Mecum’s business, where every vehicle is unique and imagery must communicate detailed information, its legacy systems and processes could no longer handle the complexity or scale. Mecum had come to rely on certain team members with photographic memories to identify specific images – an unsustainable and impractical situation. And a staggering amount of resources were being spent on manual tasks like optimizing images for different devices, sizing them optimally, and maintaining smooth, efficient processes.
This is where Cloudinary’s API-based digital asset management (DAM) system came to the rescue. Our API-first approach enabled Mecum to create a custom solution that perfectly met its unique needs and integrated seamlessly with its headless IT stack that included WordPress VIP and Vercel, a frontend development platform.
The transformation has turbo-charged Mecum’s web presence. The company saved more than 2,000 working hours in image uploading time alone. The equivalent to more than 300 full-time employee days, effectively an entire year! Image optimization, which once took an arduous 10 seconds per image, is now completely automated with Cloudinary and instantaneous. As a result, Mecum’s website pages now load twice as fast, significantly boosting the customer experience and engagement levels.
Cloudinary’s built-in transformations have also expedited Mecum’s Google Ads campaigns, enabling it to kick-start campaigns in 1/100th of the time it would have taken manually. Mecum is now also able to effortlessly share attractive content with its partners, and its on-premise image storage workflow has been thoroughly modernized.
But our relationship with Mecum doesn’t run out of road there. We’re working with Mecum to automate its user-generated content (UGC) processes using Cloudinary’s APIs. This will further streamline how the company receives and manages customer photos, allowing valuable team members to focus on creative tasks that add real value.
As Mecum’s IT Director, Cade Cannon, so beautifully put it, “On a scale of one to a 10, it’s a no-brainer — I’d give Cloudinary a 10. If you compare the old website with what we have now it’s the difference between night and day, the value add is just tremendous. There’s no question at all that for us, this is an incredibly valuable solution.”
If your brand similarly needs to harness the full power of high-quality visual media at scale to engage and sell, get some inspiration from Mecum Auctions’s full case study here.
