Luxury fashion house Chanel has highlighted how crucial a content management system is to securing and controlling the brand’s image.

Philippe Baumlin, global digital IT program director at Chanel, told the Day Software Ignite 2010 conference in Berlin: “We are an image company and our main assets are images. All that is becoming digital – how do we protect that and make it available?”

But as Baumlin explained, the assets are not simply images. A large amount of metadata, such as text, catalogue information, and marketing material, all translated into numerous different languages, is attached to each image asset, which is available on a wide range of digital platforms.

Furthermore, Chanel produces and manages thousands of assets daily. “Just the fashion show produces 5,000 assets,” Baumlin said.

The images appear on Chanel’s own platforms, such as its main site Chanel.com, its information blog site Chanel News and on its iPhone application. But they also appear on platforms that Chanel does not manage.

“[They appear] everywhere on the Web,” said Baumlin. “Everyone picks our information and tries to put it very quickly on all information sites, like [fashion publication] Vogue.”

Four years ago, Chanel embarked on a quest to protect its brand heritage. A key challenge for the company was to protect the confidentiality of its fashion collections.

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“Today, the biggest issue is to produce a huge event, and a picture [from the collection] arrives on the Web before the event. So how do we secure and control the brand image?” said Baumlin.

Another challenge for Chanel is to make sure that every channel using its assets will be updated at the right time.