TEAM LEWIS thrives on LucidLink cloud connectivity

About the company

TEAM LEWIS is a global marketing agency built to help and inspire brands to grow. It provides a full spectrum of marketing, communications and digital services to deliver tangible business impact for clients. The company has over 650 staff across 24 offices throughout Asia, Europe and North America, working for blue chip clients, including McAfee, Adobe, Hisense, Skechers, Deliveroo, and Siemens.

The challenge

TEAM LEWIS has evolved with technology and changing client expectations to stay at the forefront of campaign communications over two decades. It has shifted away from traditional text-based PR to become a full-service marketing agency working with a wide variety of rich media on a daily and international basis, including video and 3D animation.

Even before COVID hit, the sheer amount of media needing to be routed and worked on by creatives across the agency was hitting a bottleneck.

“It’s fine if you’re all in one large building where you can put in storage and computer systems adjacent to staff,” says Kelly Redding, IT Director for TEAM LEWIS, managing Europe and APAC. “But you can’t do that across more than twenty offices globally when you are all trying to work on the same project and trying to process media to a final ultra-high quality state.”

“Within the first couple months of COVID hitting us, I knew we needed something to change, but I didn’t know what. Our workflow was slow and fragmented. We had a desperate need for this to be fixed.”

Redding turned to Jigsaw24, an industry-leading IT reseller, systems integrator, and consultant. They suggested LucidLink. Redding plugged it in and gave it a test.

Erasing bottlenecks

Before LucidLink, the internal media transfer at TEAM LEWIS was slow. Explains Redding, “People would be in the office five days a week as normal, and we had an internal NAS which would stream data to that singular person. Clients would also ship physical drives of 40 GB – 60 GB of raw files and video. There was no real way of enabling collaboration. One person would have to quit what they were working on for someone else to go into the same asset.

“There was no real flow of data. If someone needed to connect from home, they’d have to connect by VPN and get data that way. It was very slow, especially when dealing with video. In fact, with the amount of video data we were working with, it was not manageable. 

Before COVID, this was just the standard way to do things. There was no environment to enable our staff to work remotely as a team.”

Boosting productivity

LucidLink is deployed across the agency and used extensively by its creative services team, whether they are working at one of its offices or at home, and on applications including Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, and Maxon 3D animation tools.

“People often have set ways they want things to work, but LucidLink has been accepted straight away through the group,” Redding says. “A good example is that if someone were working on a video, they would have to take the drive home, do the work, compress it and push to the internet, whereas now with LucidLink, there are none of these workflow hold-ups.”

“It is hard to quantify its benefits except to say that it has made us a lot more efficient. When the team in London finishes at 17:30, our team on the East coast of the US can pick it up and carry on. We follow the sun.”

He continues, “We are very impressed with the speed at which we are turning things around. Quick access to media by groups of creatives working on a project ensures we can get back to the client in record time all because of LucidLink.”

LucidLink is the new standard

LucidLink has been part of the background infrastructure at TEAM LEWIS globally since early 2021. The agency no longer uses NAS, relying instead on the Wasabi cloud via LucidLink for its creative interactions.

“LucidLink is solely used for creatives, and that bubble is getting bigger and bigger. We are hiring more people and looking for more creatives who increasingly value the ability to work from home. Having LucidLink as an enabler means we’re not constrained by people needing to have super high bandwidth at home; plus, we give them the flexibility to work just the way they want,” said Redding. 

“Being in IT, you are responsible for finding the right product and doing due diligence, but there really wasn’t anything out there we could find that could do the job as well as LucidLink. From my point of view, I don’t think I’ve ever implemented a product that has been so well received within our company.

Redding concluded, “Within weeks of its introduction, we were getting comments like ‘It’s magic’ and ‘It really revolutionizes the way we are going to do stuff.’ It’s been a win since day one.”