Systems and Rules for Brand Asset Management

The global marketing operation has collapsed as a result of the inability for external agencies and internal sales teams to locate approved files within seconds due to severe delays in the ability for any one party to locate them.

In order to move beyond basic cloud storage capabilities, the brand has established a formal operating model that connects the brand’s rules and taxonomy, or classification of assets according to the levels of risk involved in the production or distribution of a given product, and the governance of brand asset control based on those factors.

In addition to identifying the complete framework by which to build a branded asset supply chain, this guide offers examples of what types of metadata, technical workflows and digital asset management systems must be in place in order to be able to effectively manage, track and distribute branded assets throughout an organization.

Measuring How Well Your Supply Chain Works

An asset supply chain operates according to a specific timeline, or the time that it takes to create an asset through to the time that it is distributed or retired.

The absence of the ability to control this timeline will result in duplicate efforts to create and distribute materials that are incorrectly branded (off-brand) and may expose the company to legal liabilities. A properly functioning brand asset management system will eliminate the designer's need to respond to requests for files and place strict limits on how an organization distributes and uses branded assets across the global enterprise.

Establishment of a single source of truth for branded assets is a core requirement of a successful brand asset management system.

A single source of truth will only be effective if the search capability is operationally perfect. If a user cannot find the asset on the first attempt, the likelihood that the user will revert to using either his or her local files or email attachments or direct messages to communicate the need for the asset is very high.

To prevent this, the setup of an effective brand asset management system relies heavily on either custom metadata schemas (that is, creating a customised metadata template that will best fit your particular needs) or on generic folder structure or filename.

Establishing governance rules will allow you to properly maintain control of branded assets by providing you with a simple mechanism for defining the parties to whom the asset belongs, who is permitted to edit the asset, and the parties with whom you have contractual rights to distribute the asset.

Five Scenarios That Require Brand Asset Management

Each business unit will have its own unique challenges associated with the inability to properly manage branded assets, and as a result, managing branded assets will create a variety of distinct and measurable failures that can be tracked and quantified and are associated with each business unit.

The failure to manage branding assets will result in a business unit costing the company thousands of hours per year.

Individual team members, without a central reference point, must evaluate whether a document is approved, current, or legally allowed to use based only on their memories of what approvals they have received. This reliance on humans and their memories creates opportunities for major errors to be made on a massive scale.

The following five scenarios create a situation where a company is no longer able to share basic drives among all members of the company and needs to utilize a professional brand asset management solution.

Sales Material Mess

Sales representatives download pitch decks and save them on their computers. Months later, the chief marketing officer updates the prices and terms of those pitch decks and changes the legal disclaimers in the master file. The sales representative ignores the change and sends out the old file to their clients.

This scenario presents an immediate financial risk.

When the chief marketing officer cannot set a date for when the downloaded pitch decks should no longer be sent to clients by the sales representatives, the company will no longer be able to control the message it sends to the public regarding its brand.

Solutions exist to address this issue by connecting the master file to a direct distribution point, allowing the sales representative to automatically pull the latest version of the pitch deck rather than relying on their own uploaded copies.

Regional Blind Spots

The global chief marketing officer creates a master campaign image for the entire world to see. Regional teams in Germany and Japan must create local versions of the same campaign image using translated text.

In a poorly designed system, the local teams download the master and edit it on their own computers and save it to their own hard drives. Now there are three disconnected files, each being treated independently.

As soon as the usage rights for the master campaign image expire, the central office will delete the master campaign image from its library. However, because the local teams are not using the master campaign image, they will continue to use the local images because they have no association with the master image.

This creates direct copyright violations. A structured system maintains connection between localized variants and the master version so that all items can have the same expiration date at a global level.

Access for Outside Partners

To make sure campaigns are quickly up and running, external agencies need immediate access to campaign assets. Granting an external agency complete access to your company servers puts internal drafts, confidential documents, and other unrelated brand-related files at risk.

Emailing a large file constitutes a security breach.

Brand asset management systems allow the creation of external portals, which restrict an agency's view to only approved assets tagged for their unique campaign. All assets downloaded from the external portal (walled garden) will be recorded and tracked in the system audit logs.

Risks of Regulated Content

Penalties for noncompliance with the use of incorrect disclosures are multiplied in heavily regulated industries such as finance, insurance, and health care. A flyer can only be created in these sectors when it is documented that the legal department has approved the text on the flyer.

Traditional storage systems don't provide a method for tracking approval paths.

In order to show compliance to auditors, companies need to demonstrate who approved a document, when the document was approved, and which version of the document was reviewed. Companies must have strict workflow rules in place so no documents are released to public channels without a documented and timestamped legal review.

High Volume Personalization

The central creative team often receives hundreds of requests to change simple things like a phone number or the name on a standard brochure. Hiring expensive creatives to do data entry wastes money and is not in line with the way to do business.

Creative automation solves this challenge.

Modern brand asset management platforms provide locked templates. The central creative team does not lock the actual layout, branding, or images, but instead has locked the layout so agencies that utilize those assets will only see the locked elements while being able to customize specific text fields.

By entering their new phone number, local users will have access to a brand-compliant file generated immediately on the platform, without requiring any input from the design team.

Understanding Different Software Types

Understanding the technical distinction between the two different types of software can help eliminate costly errors in purchasing decisions.

Enterprise file storage is handled by digital asset management as a complete solution. A central repository for all digital files owned by an organization, this includes large quantities of original videos, 3D artwork, internal training videos and past historical storage.

It has been designed for high capacity and deep storage.

Digital asset management solutions have the ability to manage large volumes of data and provide extensive and complex metadata tagging. However, they do not offer a means to create templates or guarantee compliance with brand guidelines on a localized level; they will keep files securely, but they will not assist a sales rep to prepare a personalized presentation.

Brand asset management is a distinct subdivision of the digital asset management solutions. Brand asset management manages only the customer-facing assets of an organization; in this sense it is a subset of digital asset management solutions. It is designed to ensure branding compliance, provide sales support, and facilitate the provision of materials that help to promote a business.

Brand asset management solutions offer a centralized database where brand materials can be organized and shared. Canto's brand asset management solutions represent a narrow slice of digital asset management solutions that is designed only for the purpose of supporting compliance with brand guidelines and providing templates for sales.

Canto's brand asset management solution focuses on generating fast templates for the sales team and is available through direct access to marketing and sales. The product typically lacks the support of an extensive digital archive available through a digital asset management solution.

The Phases of Software Implementation

Digital asset management solutions have numerous phases of implementation. Software only fixes broken processes. After completing a project, businesses will usually run into problems because there has been zero process improvement.

Before you make any move to migrate files onto a new system, ensure that the operational rules for file migration are documented. No data should move onto a new platform, without a full and thorough audit of that data first.

Phase 1: Making an Asset List and Setup Rules

Never move all of the folders that are in place now, to the new software. It just moves the same issues over to a different (and more costly) location. Hence the need for conducting a complete inventory/review audit.

Based on their experience, many industry-leading software companies state that performing a quarterly archiving process is the best way to stay organized while driving continued growth.

To get started on your project, create one master database that lists out all of the assets currently within each folder. Create a record of everything on your master list including (a) asset name; (b) the type of asset; (c) the current location; (d) the owner; (e) the status; (f) which business unit is associated with this asset; (g) language; (h) channels approved for usage; (i) rights to use; (j) and the date the rights expire.

Every asset in this list must have one of three methods of retention and/or disposition: (1) retain; (2) archive; (3) dispose. Ziflow identifies that the establishment of a process to remove duplicate records and old records, is one of the main priorities for organizations when implementing software.

Phase 2: Creating Your Tags and Data Rules

Keep in mind that your users are not necessarily going to search for the same terms that you have used to create your metadata schema. Users search for concepts, campaigns & products, so the organization does not allow for successful searches unless the metadata schema you create matches the user's search patterns.

Create your tags based on how users search.

To ensure that your metadata schema has sufficient fields for your users' to locate the appropriate assets, all of your uploads must require completion of mandatory metadata fields. For example, the following fields must be included: (1) brand; (2) product; (3) region; (4) language; (5) target audience; (6) campaign; (7) channel; (8) type of asset; (9) asset approval status; (10) usage rights; (11) expiration date.

A perfect example of a complete metadata string would be: Product - Enterprise API; Region - DACH; Languages - German; Channel - Sales; Status - Approved; Rights Expiration - 2027-03-31.

Phase 3: Setting Up User Rules

Not treating all users equally is a factor in destroying brand loyalty and control. Designate distinct authorization levels to various personnel throughout your organization. Each employee has access to the extent of the authority they need to perform their job.

Every platform, such as Marq, has a specific access hierarchy: viewer, user, template administrator, and team administrator.

Specify in writing who owns each category of these assets, as well as who has the authority to upload files and edit templates, who authorizes the final version, who is responsible for questions about rights and licensing, and so on.

Phase 4: Approval Steps Based on Risk

Not every content type will require the same level of security. Consequently, using the same stringent approval processes for a flyer advertising an internal company picnic as you would for a regulated financial document will create a bottleneck in production.

You will want to create approval processes based on risks.

Organize your assets into three categories: low, medium, and high risk. For example, an asset that is determined to be low risk requires only one manager's review and approval before it may be posted.

However, a high-risk asset must follow a highly structured order: upload, add metadata, back-check for compliance with your brand, back-check for copyright legal rights, approve, and finally publish. Because there are so many approvals required for high-risk content, many users will find ways around these processes. Weak controls can create off-brand disasters.

Phase 5: Sharing and Portal Creation

The approved distribution path must provide a much better user experience than the unapproved or hidden channels. If your company's primary distribution hub is cumbersome, users will quickly abandon it.

For a company's financial records, the marketing department can use the distribution system as the last step in the asset management process.

The approved distribution path should offer fast and searchable asset portals that serve different teams within the organization. External partners should have their own view of content and all local teams should have access to a collection of localized assets. Central marketing can provide a set of locked templates that contain smart fields to allow for immediate personalization.

Set up automatic expiration notifications for users so they always know when it is no longer acceptable to use an image in any capacity. Set up direct integrations between your platform and your creative tools and content management system.

Phase 6: Tracking Performance and Mistakes

You cannot make claims about the ability of any system to improve efficiency without having a defined baseline to measure performance against. Do not put together a dollar amount for projected ROI unless there is documentation to support it internally.

Maintain a tight operational dashboard.

You can monitor the active number of people using the system by team to determine where the users failed to adopt the platform. Track the percentage of successful searches to downloads and the time it takes to find a standard asset. Track the amount of times a design request is submitted every month.

A key metric to use is the cost of avoidable rework. You can calculate that by multiplying the number of avoidable rework events times the time on average to correct a rework event. Then take that number and multiply it by your blended hourly labor cost.

Evaluating Brand Asset Management Software

Currently there are many vendors in the market providing solutions that extend beyond storage and into creative automation or marketing operations, which creates confusion in your selection process. When selecting the best platform for your organization, you must match up the strengths of the vendor’s core offering with your organization’s weaknesses on an operational level.

1. Marq

Marq is primarily focused on the distribution of templated design materials to allow for quick turnaround of localized materials for large employer organizations that need a large quantity of localized design materials to service their employees in their area.

This makes it an excellent platform to use for high-volume personalization.

Data from clients of Marq show significant improvements in response times. A creative strategy team of 4 at Johns Hopkins University supports thousands of staff members across 9 colleges. Prior to the launch of Marq, the average wait time was 3-4 weeks; with the introduction of Marq, the average turnaround time was 1 day.

Fidelity National Financial has 23,000 employees, with over 800 active platform users requiring custom collateral. Marq states that one-third (33%) of companies achieve greater than 20% revenue growth through improved brand consistency (this statistic was published by a vendor).

2. Bynder

Bynder is positioned at the top of the market and provides services to large, global brands that require complex taxonomies and have strict governance requirements.

Bynder is built for the highest possible level of complexity and scale.

According to G2, approximately 40% of Bynder's user base consists of enterprise clients. The platform has a market presence of 99 out of 100, and the highest possible user satisfaction rating. Bynder's target customer base consists of enterprise clients who require detailed control of their metadata, global distribution points, and complex integrations to other enterprise software.

3. Brandfolder

Brandfolder is focused on providing a superior user experience, enables users to perform visual searches, and provides tracking of how files perform in real life.

Brandfolder provides insights into how assets are distributed and how they are used. G2 shows that Brandfolder has high ratings in specific operational areas: asset permissions have an 84% satisfaction rating, access requests at 82%, collaboration at 82%, and uses with an 84% ease of use rating.

It provides strong insights on which external agencies are actually downloading the provided materials and which assets have never been downloaded.

4. Canto

Canto provides a bridge between simple share drive products and large enterprises. It provides visual folder structures and powerful portal features.

It leads the mid-market quadrant.

Canto's reporting from G2 indicate that roughly 46% of Canto's users are in the mid-market quadrant and roughly 25% are in the enterprise quadrant. Satisfaction is rated at 79% and market presence at 64%. Many organizations that select Canto are seeking strong visual organization combined with ease of use for brand guidelines without having to deal with the issues related to deploying globally on a large scale.

5. The Wider Software Ecosystem

Digital asset management goes well beyond the four major players. Canva dominates the small business market, with G2 indicating that approximately 67% of Canva’s users are in the small business category and just 6% in the enterprise category.

Users report high satisfaction levels (93%) with their simple templated needs. Additionally, Frontify has built a reputation for strong digital brand guidelines, alongside tools like Adobe Express, Templafy, MediaValet, Aprimo, and Ziflow.

The overall digital asset management industry is expected to grow to $5.3 billion.

Software Pricing and Buying Realities

Pricing information of vendors within this space is very inconsistent. Many enterprise vendors do not provide standard pricing information and instead provide custom quotes based on the number of users and volume of storage needed.

Do not ever mix your vendor’s estimates with your actual procurement data.

There are numerous basic tools that provide predictable entry points for buyers. Marq charges $10 per month for the Pro and Team plans and offers custom Enterprise pricing. Canva has a Pro plan for $15 per month and a Business plan for $20 per user per month. Adobe Express Teams is priced at approximately $7.99 per user per month. Dash charges roughly $125 per month.

All of these tools would be expected to provide very different financial realities for true enterprise operations.

Average Costs of a Large Contract

Based on procurements conducted with Vendr's data, enterprise contracts for these deployments are very expensive. As user volumes and global reach increase, so do the costs to support those deployments.

The median annual contracts demand serious budgeting consideration.

According to the reports, the median contract for Brandfolder is approximately $24,682. Frontify’s median cost is $32,386, and Bynder’s median cost is $41,417, with the reported range from $8,428 to $72,517 for 76 different purchases.

Aprimo has a median cost of $50,000. In addition, the procurement data for both Bynder and Brandfolder show that the average negotiated discounts are 18.11% for Bynder and approximately 23% for Brandfolder.

Hidden Setup Costs

A software license is only one piece of a much larger financial commitment in the first year of implementation. Frequently overlooked by the buyer is the cost of migrating data, design of taxonomy and training of end-users.

Being prepared to implement your business information technology will avoid your budget being blown away.

An estimating guide from Aprimo indicates the initial cost of implementing a system is usually between 15% and 50% of the total annual cost of the software. System integration costs typically add an additional $2,000 to $10,000. Basic user training adds approximately $1,000 to $5,000.

If you don’t allocate a budget to cover these initial onboarding phases, you will not have any success with the deployment.

Next Steps for Buyers

Before choosing to purchase any software, the buyer should fully understand their risk profile, their metadata schema and the internal approval process that is in place.

By understanding how your current process is working, the software will improve it; however, if there are deficiencies, the platform will simply enable your employees to commit those deficiencies even quicker while executing their processes.