Brand Asset Management: Two Definitions

July 9, 2008 – 11:16 am

(You say tomato…)

It seems that the term ‘brand asset management’ has been adopted by a two distinct practitioner camps in recent years, leading to some confusion of the term’s definition, or more importantly, to whom its problems should be tasked.  Companies in both the technology and creative industries release press on the subject and all have their respective brand asset management solutions. 

Essentially, the broader term appears to belong to the academics of brand strategy, most notably Scott Davis in his book “Brand Asset Management: Driving Profitable Growth Through Your Brands” (The Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series, 2002). In this realm, brand is recognised as amongst a firm’s most valuable assets, which requires careful management in order to maximise brand value and draw consumers in.

However, the term brand asset management has also found its place in the terminology of software engineering companies, to refer more specifically to a range of Digital Asset Management features for ensuring brand compliance throughout marcomms production and delivery.   In this definition, technologists respond to the very practical need identified by Davis to ensure that “all communications coming from your company deliver a consistent message to consumers…must reflect the brand value, persona and vision.”

To effect a cohesive brand strategy across a modular organisation, brand managers must maintain some control over marketing communications at the point of production and an ongoing dialogue with those responsible for brand execution, namely designers, copy writers and producers, both staff and external agencies.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Brand Asset Management | Comments (0)

Ensuring Digital Assets Are Checked Before And After Release

December 5, 2007 – 7:09 pm

The Risks To Your Brand From Digital Assets  - And How To Prevent Them

It is vital that digital assets are checked before they are released into a DAM system and periodically afterwards as well.  Apart from general considerations (e.g. copyright compliance), digital assets that may be used for external purposes needs to be checked to ensure none are not detrimental to the firm’s reputation.

There are a number of ways this can occur, from more obvious non-compliance (e.g. outdated corporate logos, colours or liveries) to more subtle and harmful, reputation-related problems, for example:

  • Photos or footage of staff in breach of health and safety policy.
  • Footage of projects where a competitor company’s logo is prominent on clothing or vehicles.
  • Products or projects that have been involved in legal disputes or safety related incidents.
  • Older collateral depicting sustainability or environmental practices that are no longer acceptable (e.g. asbestos based installations, deforestation or chemical pollution).

Evidently, any of the above could be disastrous if they are used in promotional material, especially during high profile media events where the press may be present.

In our latest report, Corporate Media Libraries: Brand Asset Management For Marketing Managers, we describe some techniques using Digital Asset Management systems for entirely avoiding these risks and the resulting damage to your brand.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Workflow | Comments (0)

Mobile DAM: The Potential For Marketers

December 5, 2007 – 6:41 pm

The growth in mobile technologies amongst both consumer and business users is revealing new methods of marketing communications for modern businesses.  The mobile is far more than merely a portable communications device. As convergence takes hold, it can be seen to be a channel along which rich, compelling and highly personalised media can be delivered, at anytime and in almost any location.  The mobile is a direct route to the individual. It is a fashion item, a statement, a most intimate and immediate means of connecting with our clients, customers and prospects, that no forward-thinking marketer can afford to ignore it for too long.

Sounds great doesn’t it, but how does all this apply to the real-world? How do marketers begin to exploit mobile channels, and what opportunities are out there?  Currently,  most adopters are in the B2C arena.  Retailers in competitive, often youth-orientated markets, such as consumer electronics, fashion and media, are busy using mobile channels to deliver push-marketing campaigns to consumers in media-rich formats such as video.  However, B2B companies are also beginning to recognise the value of the mobile channel for both marketing and operational uses.

Read the article on our site: Mobile DAM: The Possibilities Of Archived Streamed Media For Marketers to find out more.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Mobile DAM | Comments (0)

Managing Asset Licences & IPR Using DAM Systems

November 1, 2007 – 5:34 pm

Avoiding The Dangers Of Accidental Infrigement

Most corporations now insist on retaining the copyright and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to assets they have commissioned.  Despite this, copyright and IPR provides headaches for many reasons, these are just a few:

  • If the company acquires or merges with another firm, IPR may not be transferable to the parent group after the transaction is complete – this depends on the terms of the asset’s licence.
  • Assets commissioned prior an initiative to retain copyright and/or IPR will still be subject previous agreements, which may include territorial or other usage restrictions.
  • Popular, single-payment licences, such as royalty-free, may not be easily extendable over multiple subsidiaries (even if shares are owned by a single holding company).
  • There may be additional complications such as property licences where the owners of a building or structure insist on being paid royalties and/or having the right to veto usage in certain contexts.
  • Third party copyright might also require consideration.  For example if the composition of a video or image contains a highly prominent product, screenshot, or other intellectual property, there is the risk that the owner may request royalties or veto it’s usage - even though the asset was not directly originated by them.

The area of copyright compliance is usually too complex to be easily rationalised into a form based approach that can be represented on a brand asset management system.  A more pragmatic method is to determine which assets have no copyright restrictions and which that do using a flowchart based workflow as shown below:

Intellectual Property Approval Workflow

Those that claim to have a solution that will manage compliance in a fully ‘hands off’ fashion as probably lack of genuine experience of dealing with the complexities of IPR.

Vendors of brand asset management solutions with experience of working with Marcomms departments will understand the complexities of commercial copyright and IPR management across an organisation and will be able to demonstrate digital asset management features designed to accommodate them.  

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Copyright | Comments (0)

Localised Supply & Centralised Distribution Of Digital Assets

October 11, 2007 – 3:09 pm

Delegate Management AND Retain Control

The majority of corporations are divided into business units that relate to the type of service and/or sector that is being supplied.  Each may also be split into horizontal or vertical segments.

Some Digital Asset Management systems are built around a simplistic model which assumes that a centralised team will take full responsibility for supplying assets and ‘policing’ the catalogue.  However, in larger conglomerates, designating a single group to manage all materials produced across the business is often impracticable.

Removal of the opportunity for any local management of digital assets usually results in the staff who are responsible becoming over-stretched, burdened with a heavy cataloguing workload and a backlog of usage approval requests that they struggle to clear.  If assets are not quickly made available to users, individual business units may start to hoard files, or worse still commission their own catalogues, frustrated at the time taken from submission to publication of assets via the central system.

To avoid these problems, an effective DAM system needs to mirror the nature of the business itself by providing a system that enables both:

  • A centralised distribution of assets via a common core platform that all staff and external agencies can participate in.
  • Localised management of assets so that those with the most subject-specific expertise about assets can decide if they are suitable and how they should be catalogued.

This means that the department commissioning the DAM system (in liaison with the business units) can set the overall features, functionality and workflows (i.e. chain of command) but that individual business units can take ownership for the supply and management of their own assets.  This distributed workload better ensures that assets are supplied and approved within a reasonable timeframe.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Media Supply Chain | Comments Off

DAM Systems: The Ability To Handle Different Media

September 24, 2007 – 4:26 pm

Why Any And Many Don’t Mean The Same Thing
Having a DAM system that genuinely supports many different media is more complex than you would expect. There is a crucial difference between supporting a type of media and representing it.

Many systems fake their ability to offer handle multiple types of media by providing a ‘file manager’ style system that technically supports any kind of asset but fails to actually represent it. The reality is that these solutions are only fractionally more useful than a shared folder on a corporate file server.

Representing assets is a process of generating what are referred to as surrogate files so that users can view them before deciding to download the originals.

It should be possible to quickly and easily extend the range of media handled by a DAM system to meet need. It is almost inevitable that some kinds of obscure assets may require immediate support; Digital Asset Management solutions should allow generic file types to be supplied and also permit a representation (e.g. thumbnail) to be supplied to accompany the asset.

There are still some occasions where an asset might be in physical or analogue form. These could be legacy material like photographic transparencies, film or fine art. A DAM system should be adaptable to handle anything given to it and provide users with meaningful representations that are of genuine use when they are searching.

The FocusOPEN Digital Asset Management system supports fast-loading, high quality video previews, as shown here

The previewing of assets prior to download is essential for all assets, but particularly for media with large file sizes such as video. An effective DAM application will allow you to specify multiple preview sizes (if needed).

See the FocusOPEN product page if you want to find out more about a Digital Asset Management System that both supports and represents all types of asset.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in DAM Systems | Comments (0)

Searching For Assets From A Single Repository

September 24, 2007 – 8:07 am

Why You Need Everything In One Place

Many of the earlier attempts at Digital Asset Management systems were heavily oriented towards images and photographs. Most were developed by software companies who targeted the stock image library market (in some cases they also ran their own libraries).

The range of assets used and generated in most marketing campaigns is more diverse than images alone. Historically, marketing staff would just have to make do with limited asset catalogues (especially when the media were in analogue formats). Now that nearly all new material is either created digitally or rapidly converted as a matter of course, there is no reason for having digital asset catalogues that do not allow staff access to all media in common use, via a single, searchable repository. As well as images, this should encompass all the media in use in the business: video, animation, office documents, print files, CAD/3D etc.

Having separate catalogues of assets supplied by different vendors and/or in-house applications will significantly dent the productivity of staff. Some features may be offered in one system but not in another, there will be confusion about where to download assets and which systems contains what.

It is true that there are some specialised databases where there is a proven need to hold assets in unique repositories (e.g. if the repository is crucial to the operation of the business and to change it would cause substantial disruption) but where possible it is preferable to integrate these together to reduce the confusion about where assets can be sourced from.

For more information on integrating Digital Asset Management, read the reports page of our site.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Asset Management | Comments (0)

What Is Digital Asset Management?

August 7, 2007 – 10:43 am

An Introduction For Marketing Managers

This blog is about Digital Asset Management or “DAM” as it is often abbreviated to. In particular, it is concerned with how marketing managers can use DAM to gain greater control over their media and marketing collateral such as videos, images, print documents, fonts, audio, 3D models and other assets.

Digital Asset Management is both a strategy for leveraging greater value from a firm’s media assets and a description of software tools that enable the implementation of it, such as Daydream’s FocusOPEN.

DAM is also referred to via a range of other descriptions Digital Content Management (DCM) and Media Asset Management (MAM). These generally mean the same thing, however, there are a variety of sub-divisions or specialist DAM fields such as Brand Asset Management and Channel Asset Management.

Why bother managing digital assets? The main benefits can be summarised as follows:

  • Reduce costs by not re-generating material your organisation already owns.

  • Save time by helping users to find assets faster and providing assets instantly.

  • Reduce the risk of copyright breaches by making sure that staff are fully aware of restrictions before they use assets.

  • Increase collaboration across the organisation by pooling assets collectively.

  • Obtain greater control over your brand by supplying staff with assets that already adhere to your corporate style guidelines.

  • Preserve assets that may have value to the organisation (this could be both cultural as well as financial).

  • Generate revenue licencing assets to third parties.

Effective Digital Asset Management also involves adding metadata about each asset to enable them to be located later via searches. Metadata is tags or descriptive fields such as categories that help to differentiate one asset from another. Typically, a taxonomy or hierarchy needs to be considered that is relevant to each organisation’s industry sector, culture and corporate values.

There are a number of other technical considerations to be taken into account when considering DAM systems for corporate marketing departments. Normally, they will be hosted web based applications that users access via a browser. In this case, some consideration needs to be given as to whether to host the system internally or outsource everything to the vendor. This is decision that needs to be examined on a case by case basis. See our DAM hosting section for more details.

Two longer articles give more detail on what DAM is and how to implement it. 

Digital Asset Management: An Introduction For Marketing Managers

Digital Asset Management: Implementing A Strategy 

A lot of the terminology about Digital Asset Management is confusing for newcomers. To help those who may be confused by this subject, we have prepared a Digital Asset Management Glossary.

By Ralph Windsor | Posted in Digital Asset Management | Comments (0)