A Multifaceted Digital Transformation

Since its founding in 1965, Dolby has become synonymous with high-quality sound. The company’s products are ubiquitous. Dolby is a technology and entertainment brand primarily focused on B2B, but with consumer and creative audiences. They are renowned for innovative research and engineering; creating audio, video and voice technologies for cinemas, home theatres, PCs, mobile devices and games.

Over the years, the company has grown to include more than 2,200 employees in more than 20 countries. They’ve pioneered more advancements than we could list here, and they’ve been a shining example of how a tech company can perfectly nurture the creativity of their science-minded employees and foster an atmosphere of creation and experimentation.

For our part, Valtech’s relationship with Dolby extends back to 2018. Dolby was in the midst of evolving itself from a pure business-to-business focused “ingredient” brand to a consumer-facing “experience” brand. This transformation is rooted in conveying the essence of Dolby as a company, educating consumers to better understand its technology and how Dolby enhances media experiences.

Dolby is an iconic brand with an amazing history, offering incredible state of the art technology and enabling drastically better media and entertainment experiences. The evolution of Dolby’s web presence was born of a need to bring their functionality into the 21st century digital landscape and a desire to increase brand awareness and value. The challenge was then not just to build a new website, but to enable a digital-first ideology, a branding shift and a multifaceted digital transformation.

To meet these needs, Valtech transferred Dolby’s content over to Optimizely, built a rich front-end experience, allowing consumers to explore Dolby technology through their existing passions and on their own terms. We also helped guide Dolby through discovery and technical design, unified marketing efforts in regard to metrics, analytics and several campaign launches leading up to the new Dolby.com launch and embedded a “connected digital ecosystem” mentality in Dolby’s DXI/Social group.

Transformation Results

This transformation of Dolby’s web presence led directly to more synergy and projects between us. It also hit the initial goals surrounding rebranding and bringing the business firmly into the contemporary digital landscape. However, one of the biggest results from this work was the creation of a comprehensive “website factory” with an Epi core, where Dolby could leverage features and functionality that have been built for the new Dolby.com in order to launch additional sites, microsites and campaign sites. This made all future digital projects just a bit easier.

Dolby Soho was an experimental space in Soho, New York which showcased immersive installations powered by Dolby technology. In the push to bring increased brand awareness to Dolby, Dolby Soho was a brilliant idea, giving visitors a chance to witness the differences of a Dolby experience first-hand, and getting the products the company has created into the hands of potential consumers as opposed to simply continuing to rely on their established partners for the bulk of their business.

Previous marketing efforts by Dolby had largely been transient, with little consideration for using the user data to improve user experience and marketing in the future. The challenge was therefore to devise a consistent user journey for Soho attendees, allowing for them to sign-up in-store and later having this data influence their digital Dolby experience.

To go along with the digital migration to Optimizely, we unified data collection into the Optimizely platform (Optimizely Marketing Automation) in order to streamline all future marketing efforts. We also assisted with the configuration and setup of soho.dolby.com, oversaw the integration between SplashThat (Event Management & Check-in) and Optimizely, and developed an email template used for RSVPs and event notifications.

While the Dolby projects mentioned thus far have all had B2C implications and uses, the Dolby Professional website is a B2B site designed to speak directly to developers, engineers, mixing/mastering studios, film production studios, hardware vendors and other partners and potential partners. There was a clear need for a significant overhaul of the Dolby Professional information architecture and numerous hard-coded, complex multi-step forms built on a Salesforce integration that needed to be migrated onto the new Optimizely site.

As a lead-up to the launch of the new Dolby.com, multiple micro-sites were successfully launched, and part of the beauty of the migration to Epi is that Dolby stakeholders now have the ability to launch properly branded sites on their own without a need for further assistance from us. This autonomy hasn’t lessened the amount of work we’ve been able to do together, on the contrary it has led to an ongoing relationship that not only spawned the Dolby Soho and Professional projects mentioned here, but which continues to reveal opportunities for the partnership to explore new and exciting digital frontiers.