Simpleview Embeds Cloudinary to Make High-Scale Image Management Easy

ABOUT

Making the Destination Marketing Organization’s Job Easier

Simpleview, now part of Granicus, is a worldwide leading provider of CRM, CMS, website design, digital marketing services, and data insights for convention bureaus, venues, tourism boards, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), and attractions. The company employs staff across the globe, serving clients of all sizes, including small towns, world capitals, top meeting destinations, and countries across multiple continents.

THE CHALLENGE

Billions of Images, Millions of Visits, No Web Builder Stress

A leading provider of CRM, CMS, website design, and digital marketing solutions, Simpleview has built up an enviable customer list of DMO specialists working hard to promote their destinations. If you’ve ever clicked on a city website that started with “Visit,” such as “Visit Las Vegas,” chances are the city team used Simpleview to build it.

Simpleview’s customer database of more than 1,000 premier destinations is the fruit of 20 years developing a highly functional and modular promotion tool. And as its Group Product Manager, Andrés Bastidas, confirms, cities eager to showcase their attractions want lots of appealing imagery to show their locations in the best possible light: “We primarily focus on servicing the needs of marketers using their website as one of the primary channels for driving attention.”

In the early days, Simpleview had been using its own in-house solution for visual media management. However, as customer asset volumes grew and it became harder to keep up with visual media innovations, this approach soon reached its limit.

At that critical stage, Simpleview decided to partner with a third-party solution to handle its growing visual media needs much more efficiently and selected Cloudinary for its industry.

Simpleview became the first ISV to leverage Cloudinary’s unique Embedded Media Experiences (EMX) offering, enabling them to integrate Cloudinary’s image automation and optimizing capabilities into its CMS for a hassle-free experience, as Bastidas explains: “We wanted DMOs to be able to just focus on their key goals. Because DMOs live in the highly inspirational phase of the customer journey, it is critical to ensure not just the right image format, the right quality, the right transformations but that pages can be as light as they can be while still delivering impactful experiences and giving good SEO value.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Making Complex, High-Scale Image Serving Easy

Cloudinary was so seamlessly embedded in the Simpleview CMS workflow that customers weren’t aware they were using third-party capabilities. This gave DMO teams the freedom to concentrate 100% on web design without having to learn a new tool or do any manual image work.

Bastidas elaborates: “We configured Cloudinary so that images our customers upload are automatically formatted and optimized to work specifically with the templates we created for them. Our customers just experience speed and simplicity, without having to know what’s happening behind the scenes or gain any new technical skills.”

More recently, Bastidas’ team launched the Simpleview DAM powered by Cloudinary, tailored for DMOs, and integrated with the Simpleview CMS. By leveraging Cloudinary’s intelligent DAM, Simpleview provides creative teams with a single source of truth for all visual assets, plus AI-powered resizing, cropping, and formatting; auto generation of limitless asset variations; and scalable generative AI features like recoloring, background replace, generative fill, and more. DMOs can now adapt, transform, customize, and repurpose assets to personalize experiences across channels.

Cloudinary also helps with the heavy lifting of tourism website performance, as its CDN allows Simpleview to handle spikes in traffic and deliver images reliably. “If a campaign goes viral, you need infrastructure the moment that you need it, as all of a sudden you’re getting doubling, tripling, quadrupling, or 10-xing of visitors to your site who you don’t want to lose.”

THE RESULTS

Simpleview ‘Powered by Cloudinary’

Today, Cloudinary is used by 450 of Simpleview’s DAM customers and 900 of its CMS customers. Across these two products, Simpleview and its customers are benefitting in several ways.

Crucially, Simpleview’s customers benefit from the greater Cloudinary-enabled flexibility so they can quickly and easily edit imagery on their websites without requiring any technical expertise. No other competitors in this industry offer this type of solution, which contributes to Simpleview’s 98% retention rate.

With Cloudinary, Simpleview’s customers can handle the scale the tourism industry requires. About 2.5 billion images and videos are served across all Simpleview-built and hosted websites every day with an average of 2.5 million daily sessions per month. Simpleview’s customers can be assured that when they launch a major “Visit” campaign, traffic spikes won’t slow down page load speeds.

Simpleview recently became a part of a larger, combined digital experience company, Granicus. That, explains Bastidas, means a whole new level of embedded Cloudinary-powered media experiences.

“Together, we now can reach and engage more than 400 million current and future residents, visitors, and businesses. We’ll be using a swathe of channels to create connected communities that support places where individuals want to visit, meet, live, work, play, and invest.” 

Full integration with Simpleview’s tech stack means Cloudinary no longer lives behind the scenes, with DAM customers now seeing “powered by Cloudinary.”