An experience of a lifetime
Time to pack your bags and grab your passports - you’re about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. ✨
No, really. Since founding Cookson Adventures back in 2009, Henry Cookson has brought together a team of specialists dedicated to building the best possible experience for their clients. At Cookson, trips are all about ‘world firsts.’ Whether you want to explore Roman shipwrecks in the Mediterranean or travel around Antarctica by superyacht, you’re pretty much guaranteed to go somewhere and do things that nobody has done before.
Standing out from the crowd
Cookson Adventures isn’t your typical travel agency and visual content is essential in showcasing their experiences to the world. In a competitive market, Cookson’s marketing team uses breath-taking visual content to stand apart from the competition.
As Simon Langley, Cookson’s Head of Marketing, told us:
“You can go on Instagram and see beautiful shots from everywhere put out by various travel brands. What we have to do is cut through that noise.”
And that means telling a story.
“We don't just want to show a beautiful landscape. We want to show the actual trip we organised there. So that might be photos of a bear-tracking expedition with leading conservationists in British Columbia, or a world-first submersible expedition among remote Pacific islands. It’s about telling our authentic story.”
One photographer isn’t enough to capture a large-scale adventure, so they’ll often send off a whole team of freelancers and in-house professionals to document one of these world-first experiences.
Sounds amazing, right?
But once everyone is back in the office, organising the hundreds of videos and photos is challenging - to say the least.
“Everyone had to become an expert in knowing where things were and what images they could and couldn’t use. And what happens when a new starter comes in or when someone leaves? You lose that knowledge.”
When it came to telling that authentic story that we mentioned, things got complicated. It was time to move to Dash.
Making photos and videos easy to find
The main reason Simon bought Dash was to help the marketing team search Cookson Adventures’ content for their campaigns. Having easy access was important - it meant they could get to the visuals they needed faster.
“Accessibility was key and I wanted to have all of our media at our fingertips. So right now, if I want to search for all photos of a ‘helicopter’, I can do that. Or if I want to search for all photos in a certain place, I can. Whereas before, we only had a finite way of accessing them. And a lot of that only existed in our heads.“
The team uses attributes and tags to make it even easier to find their content.
In Dash, there are several ways to use custom fields. Whether you set up your own custom ones, or use auto-tagging, the end goal is the same; to make searching as fast and as easy as possible. Simon worked with everybody who’d be using Dash to figure out the best way to set their custom fields up.
“We reached out to all stakeholders who’d be using Dash and worked out what attributes would be most relevant. So for example, we have a nested list of locations. In Dash, we can set up parent and child tags to sort by country and continent.”
So if the team is doing a campaign promoting a particular continent, they can filter by photos or videos of countries in that particular region.
Cookson Adventures have teams of people working around the globe - as you’d expect from a travel company. Having remote accessibility means everyone can access the content they need, whenever they need it.
Sharing content with the press
Cookson Adventures also uses Dash to share images and videos externally with their network of journalists.
“We didn't actually set out to use Dash for sending media to journalists as well. However, the collections function was perfect for external sharing .”
In Dash, you can create collections to share with external partners, agencies (and in Cookson Adventures’ case) journalists. All you need to do is select some images and videos, add them to a collection and create a unique URL that can be shared with your recipient.
Now, Cookson Adventures use Dash's collections to share all-important imagery for stories in the world’s leading publications, like Financial Times and BOAT International.
Keeping everything safe and secure 🔒
Having their content kept safe in Dash is important to Cookson Adventures. This means storing them securely but in a way that only they or their clients can access. After all, discretion is one of Cookson’s key selling points.
Our security helped Simon feel comfortable when picking Dash. Here’s just a few of the security measures we have in place to keep your content safe:
- ISO 27001 - We’re a certified ISO certified supplier. ISO 27001 is the international standard that describes best practice for an information security management system (ISMS).
- Hosting - Your Dash and all of your assets are hosted on the cloud with Amazon Web Services. This is a lead hosting provider and adheres to all compliance programmes.
- Encryption - Because you access Dash from your web browser, this is the only method of communication allowed between Dash and the internet. Any time you use Dash, you’ll see the URL begins with https. This means all information is encrypted, so data like your login details are kept safe.
Read our help article on security measures if you want to find out more.
For Cookson Adventures, they found that one of the great benefits of Dash is the ability to manage usage rights and set permissions. That means that only people with certain permissions can access certain assets.
To wrap this up, we'll pass the mic back to Simon. "Dash is a slick product, backed by some of the best customer service in tech", he says. Aww shucks!
Header photo credit: Cookson Adventures in Malta
