TIFF

Who is Toronto International Film Festival? 

TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) is one of the world’s most renowned film festivals, with almost 50 years of history. In addition to its annual festival, TIFF runs year-round programming and maintains an extensive digital archive of films, events, and promotional materials.

Before MediaValet, TIFF faced significant challenges in managing its vast digital archive of over 2 million assets stored across disparate cloud storage systems. Without a unified solution, the organization grappled with various inefficiencies that hindered its ability to operate smoothly: 

Duplication: Nearly 25% of TIFF’s assets were duplicates, cluttering their library and making it difficult to maintain a single source of truth. This duplication not only wasted storage space but also led to confusion about which files were up-to-date and accurate. 

Inefficiencies in Access: Internal teams and external stakeholders encountered consistent delays when trying to locate the assets they needed. The absence of robust metadata or search functionality forced users to manually comb through folders, resulting in missed deadlines and lost opportunities. 

Siloed Workflows: Without a centralized platform, collaboration among key teams like marketing, guest services, and archival staff was severely limited. Sharing and accessing assets required time-intensive manual processes, creating bottlenecks and hampering productivity. 

These challenges underscored the need for a comprehensive Digital Asset Management (DAM) system that could streamline workflows, improve asset discoverability, and eliminate redundancies. MediaValet delivered just that. 

The Toronto International Film Festival has transformed its digital workflows with MediaValet’s DAM, ensuring that its vast collection of assets is efficiently organized and accessible. With an immense volume of promotional, archival, and event-based assets, TIFF’s implementation of MediaValet has introduced precision and scalability to their operations. Here’s how TIFF leverages the platform: 

Streamlining Event Coverage: 

Managing tens of thousands of images from TIFF’s annual film festival is no small feat. MediaValet’s DAM allows TIFF to centralize and categorize these assets, making it effortless for internal teams and external partners to locate and utilize materials for marketing and media purposes. The platform ensures that critical images from red carpets, premieres, and panels are instantly available. 

Accelerating Promotional Materials: 

TIFF collaborates with distributors to upload and organize stills, trailers, and other promotional content. This streamlined process enables faster deployment of marketing campaigns and ensures that promotional efforts align with the festival’s timelines. 

Preserving History with Archival Management: 

In collaboration with TIFF’s renowned film reference library, MediaValet has become an integral part of their archival strategy. By incorporating historical collections into the DAM, TIFF has enhanced accessibility to its rich film heritage, facilitating research, storytelling, and promotional projects. 

Streamlining Rights Management with Integrated Metadata 

Prior to implementing MediaValet, TIFF’s rights data was stored separately from the assets, requiring teams to manually cross-reference documents—a time-consuming process prone to errors and missed compliance. 

With MediaValet’s integrated metadata capabilities, TIFF can now attach licensing details and usage restrictions directly to each asset. This ensures that all rights-related information is instantly accessible alongside the asset, reducing risks associated with improper use. Sensitive assets are further secured with user-specific access controls, providing an additional layer of protection. 

MediaValet’s DAM capabilities have played a critical role in transforming TIFF’s asset management, addressing long-standing challenges and enabling seamless workflows across departments. Here’s how these three key features have contributed to TIFF’s success: 

Branded Portals: MediaValet’s Branded Portals have revolutionized how TIFF shares promotional and branding materials. Instead of manually sending files via email, marketing teams can now provide internal teams and external partners with secure, polished portals containing the exact assets they need.  

This not only saves time but also ensures consistency in how TIFF’s brand is presented across various channels. During the festival season, branded portals have been instrumental in distributing event coverage, such as red-carpet photos and branding elements, to key stakeholders. 

Face Recognition: With thousands of celebrity and event images in its archive, TIFF relies on MediaValet’s Face Recognition feature to tag and retrieve photos effortlessly. By assigning names to recognized faces, the platform automatically identifies and categorizes all instances of that individual across TIFF’s entire collection.  

This capability has drastically reduced manual tagging efforts and allowed teams to quickly fulfill asset requests, such as locating images of specific celebrities attending past festivals. 

AI-Powered Metadata: MediaValet’s AI capabilities have enhanced TIFF’s metadata management by automatically generating descriptive tags for assets. This ensures that critical details about each asset—such as context, people, and keywords—are immediately captured and linked. As a result, teams can search for and locate specific assets faster than ever.  

Further, TIFF’s digital rights management is now more efficient, with licenses and restrictions directly tied to assets through metadata. This automation reduces errors, ensures compliance, and empowers teams to confidently utilize their digital assets. 

Since adopting MediaValet, TIFF has seen significant, measurable improvements in its asset management processes, allowing the organization to save time, streamline workflows, and make better use of its extensive archive. Here’s how: 

25% Reduction in Duplicates: MediaValet has enabled TIFF to identify and eliminate nearly 500,000 duplicate assets, reducing their library size by 25%. This cleanup not only saved valuable storage space but also established a single source of truth for their assets, improving accuracy and usability. 

Improved Collaboration Across Teams: Centralizing assets in MediaValet enabled teams like marketing, guest services, and donor relations to work seamlessly. With all assets easily accessible from a shared platform, collaboration has become more effective, reducing silos and ensuring that everyone has the right materials when needed. 

Faster Access with Metadata and Face Recognition: MediaValet’s metadata and Face Recognition tools have drastically cut down the time spent searching for specific assets. The Face Recognition feature alone identified over 10,000 unique faces in TIFF’s vast archive, with 3,500 successfully tagged—a task that would have been impossible without this automation. Metadata, now systematically attached to each asset, further accelerates search and retrieval times. These advancements represent a year’s worth of progress condensed into just months, allowing TIFF’s teams to focus on creative and strategic priorities instead of time-consuming searches. 

Better Rights Management: Managing rights and licensing was once a cumbersome process for TIFF, requiring teams to cross-reference separate documents. With MediaValet, rights information is integrated directly into each asset’s metadata, ensuring that restrictions and licenses are instantly visible. This automation reduces errors, mitigates compliance risks, and ensures assets are used appropriately across all initiatives.