Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪ Music ♪]
Sold, for $2,600,000.
Sotheby's is one of the largest and most preeminent
auction houses in the world selling fine arts and antiques.
[Amy Todd Middleton] [SVP, Global Strategic Marketing, Sotheby's]
We have 4 major sales rooms around the world,
principally in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Paris.
Our clients are probably the most sophisticated, savvy
art collectors in the world.
[Michael Redding] [Creative Director, Digital Media Services, Sotheby's]
The catalog is probably the most important factor to buying and selling
within this company.
We publish 300-400 catalogs per year.
We've also had these amazing sales over time
where the catalog becomes a collector's item
because of the rarity and the nature of the sale.
The books are difficult for us, because the world has changed a lot.
There had been comments from certain clients
that our catalogs are heavy.
They're not portable.
For us to publish in a digital format really helps resolve
a lot of those issues and gives us the versatility
and the ability to reach people more quickly
in many more regions around the world.
[♪ Music ♪]
[Josh Pullan] [VP, Worldwide Dir. of Digital Media Services, Sotheby's]
The opportunity when the iPad came along presented something that we had to take.
It was an opportunity to find a sweet spot, really,
between the print and the digital so that we bring the visual richness
and aesthetic layout of a print catalog and combine it
with some of the digital functionality.
For us to launch this program for the iPad app,
it's something that's important to us to look in aggregate at
how people are using the application.
We searched high and low for lots of different solutions,
from building a custom publishing suite in-house,
finally settling with Adobe, which was the best possible decision we could have made.
The partnership with Adobe has been great.
We're moving forward to capture what the client may need next,
and a lot of times Adobe has foreseen a lot of things that we haven't seen.
Partnering with them to understand the individual nuanced needs
of this business versus other businesses has led to
a very positive result that our clients have commented widely on,
and we've gone to tens of thousands of users
in a matter of 4 months, and for a business like ours,
that's a really unbelievable transition.
When I first started at Sotheby's,
they were using another print software.
It wasn't InDesign.
Converting to Adobe DPS and InDesign allowed us to basically
use 1 tool to publish in multiple mediums like print,
digital, and mobile.
The more a user engages with a product,
the more they become emotionally attached to it,
so if I'm doing a 360 sculpture,
I'm allowing that client to play with the sculpture
as if they were there in the gallery walking around it.
Clients are completely ecstatic over the fact
that they can now see all the detail.
We work very closely with the Adobe team,
and we use the Digital Marketing Suite integration
into the Digital Publishing Suites to assess and see
how people are using the application, and therefore,
make improvements based upon that usage.
For example, we know that the engagement is typically
3-4 times higher using the app
versus what it is on our website today.
Going forward, we want to be where our clients are,
and if that means every device, then we'll be on every device,
and we're confident that we can work with Adobe to get there.
[Adobe]
