Case Study: UTMB Group Improves Content Discovery and Collaboration With Moments Lab AI-Powered Cloud Media Hub

Based in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France, UTMB Group is the organization behind the UTMB World Series, a premier global trail running circuit with 40+ events taking place across Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It is also the only place where runners can begin their quest to the HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc, where the prestigious UTMB World Series Finals are held in the OCC, CCC, and UTMB races. Inaugurated in 2003, the UTMB race stands as a beacon of trail running excellence with an awe-inspiring course around the iconic Mont-Blanc — traversing Italy, Switzerland, and France — covering a distance of 171 kilometers with a staggering 10,000 meters of positive elevation gain.

“The HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc is the most incredible and competitive trail running event,” explains Coralie Batté, head of brand and communication at UTMB Group. “Each year, the best athletes meet in Chamonix, and more than 10,000 runners participate in one of our eight races, including the UTMB World Series Finals.”

Through the UTMB Live streaming service, and content shared on social media channels, people can follow their favorite athletes and share in the breathtaking beauty of the landscapes as runners cross the finish line in Chamonix.

The UTMB charts a stunning course around the iconic Mont-Blanc, traversing Italy, Switzerland, and France.

Simplifying the Allocation of Media Content

UTMB Group accumulates a large collection of media as it documents each race — as many as 2,000 photos from a single event. Many of the images and videos did not have adequate metadata, and the UTMB Group team spent significant time properly tagging new media files to ensure that content could be found by partners and stakeholders. Finding the correct image or video clip for a sponsor or partner was often a time-consuming process. Moreover, UTMB Group had to manually review the footage to ensure the presence of sponsor logos. This workflow was not sustainable nor scalable given the large volume of media across all 40+ events and its small content team.

UTMB Group needed an easy and efficient way to access, store, manage, and share its media content with sponsors and athletes.

“Our goal was to modernize our media management and create a media marketplace where partners, athletes and our content team could easily — and independently —  find the content they were searching for,” says Batté.

Aside from being user-friendly, the solution needed to be deployed quickly. With several upcoming races, UTMB Group wanted to move forward and bring its new media asset management solution online as soon as possible to enable simpler sharing of content for improved brand awareness and athlete and partner relations.

Swiftly Deploying a Media Asset Management Solution

Moments Lab’s Cloud Media Hub with Multimodal AI indexing, and Media Marketplace met UTMB Group’s requirements for an efficient and centralized space to store and work with their media assets.

The deployment was quick. During the implementation process, Moments Lab’s team set up five sponsor media collections per event.

“We had a lot to do in a short amount of time,” says Philippe Petitpont, co-founder and CEO of Moments Lab. “Within three days, we established about 15 events and 85 media collections with visuals for UTMB Group, which is an unprecedented speed, especially considering that none of the media content was properly tagged.”

Each media collection was created with specific AI detection parameters, including the year, event, race, and logo to ensure content is easy to find.

The Cloud Media Hub and Media Marketplace contain all original files and proxies. UTMB Group can use Moments Lab’s live photo media upload capability to provide partners and athletes with faster access to content.

Winning the Race for Faster Content Search Experiences

The Cloud Media Hub is powered by revolutionary multimodal AI indexing technology. Photographers and Videographers can automatically or manually upload shots of the trail runs to the Cloud Media Hub from anywhere. AI indexing then scans the media and detects athletes and sponsor logos. Utilizing AI, UTMB Group can instantly tag media with the names of athletes leveraging automatic facial recognition technology, optical character recognition (OCR) for sponsor logos, and speech-to-text transcription for video interviews. The result is infinitely more powerful search experiences.

AI indexing scans UTMB Group’s media and detects individual athletes and sponsor logos.

“Moments Lab’s Cloud Media Hub transforms our workflow, reducing our production times and improving collaboration,” adds Batté. “We can now find media assets in just a few seconds.”

Boosting Content Engagement With the Media Marketplace

The UTMB Group team manages the partner and sponsor collections folders in the Media Hub and the validation of content access via the Media Marketplace. Through the Media Marketplace, UTMB Group can efficiently manage access to photos and know when a particular partner has hit their quota. Sponsors and partners have the autonomy to log in to the Media Hub and access their designated collection.

UTMB Group sponsors and partners have autonomous access to designated media collections.

In addition, UTMB Group’s social media team uses the Media Hub to search for, select, and download images and video clips for use on its channels, including Instagram where it currently engages with more than 400,000 followers.

Batté explains, “The Media Marketplace enables us to easily publish relevant videos or photos on our channels and share content with partners and sponsors. They love how simple it is to view and download approved content.”

Increasing Workflow Efficiency, Sponsor Satisfaction, and ROI

Since deploying Moments Lab’s cloud and AI-based platform, UTMB Group has successfully stored, managed, and shared media content for its 2022 and 2023 races. The team uploaded close to 2,000 photos to the Cloud Media Hub from the 2023 UTMB Mont-Blanc event alone.

Adopting Moments Lab’s solution saves UTMB Group significant time while increasing their engagement with sponsors and partners. Prior to using Moments Lab, UTMB Group manually scanned about 1,000 photos per event to identify and tag sponsors. This process took the UTMB Group team eight hours at a minimum. Now, the same work is completed in about 15 minutes.

“A time saving of 97% on manual photo tagging is just incredible. We’re already seeing a huge return on investment from being able to store, manage, and share our race images much more efficiently. Enabling our partners and sponsors to independently download footage and shots from anywhere and rapidly activate their marketing and social media campaigns is a game-changer. Moments Lab’s solutions propel our business on a path toward future growth and collaboration,” says Batté.

In 2024, UTMB will oversee 42 incredible trail running events in Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Leveraging the Moments Lab solution, UTMB Group can share every captivating race moment with the world.