Asset Management To Go… Where?

James Waite, Chairman of Adgistics, offers some opinions on the shape of brand asset management to come, and how smart brands can expect to become smarter still.

The growing realm of the asset

Brands make a significant investment in the assets they use to express their messages. But what exactly is a brand asset? Certainly identity designs, logos, photography and perhaps a typeface and colour scheme would top most lists. It’s clear though that brand assets extend much further, to include not just media files, but also written documents, processes and, perhaps most importantly, the human beings that create and direct all these things.

Even within the limited definition of what qualifies as a brand asset, the question that brand asset management systems have been trying to answer for the best part of ten years is how to achieve efficient and controlled distribution of these materials across a proliferating range of channels. How can assets be co-ordinated in relation to the projects and campaigns of which they become a part, usually with the involvement of multiple suppliers?

The systems that help to run these processes have made significant advances, but there’s much further to go. In the heat of a campaign, the use of inefficient expedients to cover gaps in asset availability or process is still commonplace, resulting in more cost, missed opportunities and brand erosion as inevitable inconsistencies creep in.

From BAM to Brand Centre

What makes up your portfolio of assets? Your house, perhaps, and some share certificates; a retirement fund and the cash in your savings account; or possibly your wine cellar or art collection. Whether run-of-the-mill or exotic in the extreme, assets present their owners with a set of common concerns: are they safe, and are they returning value to me?

Brand assets are no different, and any management system must address these issues. It must keep assets safe and safely accessible: not just with industrial strength security, but also with failsafe back-ups to ensure an uninterrupted service. And like any competent investment manager, a brand management system should hold the knowledge that enables the proper deployment of an asset to ensure its most effective utilisation. A good system keeps guidelines close at hand for users to see how it should be done; an outstanding one ensures that users cannot get to the assets without some exposure to their correct use; a great one makes this process engaging and genuinely educative. In this way, design and licensing decisions – usually the result of significant expenditure and the cause of significant additional exposure – can be upheld. But it’s not just the twin gods of compliance and audit that are served. As well as burnishing links in the chain of custody, the brand asset management system should hold a mirror to the values and culture of its client brand. This isn’t just a logo parked onto a loosely ‘skinned’ interface, but a carefully designed extension of the brand, faithful in terms of look and feel right down to navigational grids and the tone of voice adopted by the copy. A successful brand asset management system is in large part successful because it is familiar in appearance and in use; there are no new protocols for people to learn that invariably impact uptake – the measure by which systems live or die.

At the same time, as well as being widely used, a good brand management system reinforces the brand, identifying and celebrating best practice and in the process transforming its users into brand ambassadors. It’s at this point that it becomes not just a management system, but a Brand Centre.

Your assets, my system

A common lament from many purchasers of elaborate brand or marketing management systems is that the processes their assets must go through in order to make the whole thing work are not familiar. Indeed, they often require radical changes to existing procedures – or significant further investment in the customisation of various modules so that proven practice can be embraced by the system.

In a brand centre, the asset is king. The technical platform on which it rests moulds to the processes that serve the asset best because those processes are, after all, assets themselves. It avoids prescribing a rigid framework into which clients must deploy in order to see a benefit. Intelligence is embedded in the asset, not the system. This means that assets can move between processes and suppliers at the whim of their owners, because priorities – and suppliers – change over time. Being tied to outmoded workflows and supply chains just because that’s the only way to get at the assets argues strongly for returning everything to the filing cabinet. Instead, intelligent assets carry with them not only their origination and rights data, but also an entire history of the campaigns and executions in which they have featured. This makes them and their metadata entirely transportable, and, as increasingly accurate performance metrics come to be included, a self-reporting record of the returns they generate for the investment that created them.

Activation and fulfilment

Of course it’s only through exposure to the market that an asset begins to return value. By providing individual or collaborative tools that enable assets – in the form of campaign or collateral executions – to be rapidly developed and customised to meet particular market requirements is a key benefit you should expect a brand centre to bring. However, balancing flexibility (and speed) with accuracy and consistency requires the creation of rules-based templates. This is a service usually best done ‘by hand’ to ensure accurate brand expression across the widest number of possible outputs. Once a template has been made it allows an exactly appropriate degree of adaptation. Automated artwork and web-to-print exercises above and below the line then become both efficient and effective options, enabling non-graphics people to turn out localised work that is true to the original idea. From within the brand centre, output channels can be client specified or determined from within a marketplace of suppliers using standard bidding procedures. For above the line advertising, colour and size specifications for publications come as standard, and an increasing array of collaboration tools for media buying and copy scheduling are beginning to find their way into the previously hidden depths of those processes.

A world away from print, the brand centre is equally confident in handling the moving image. With bandwidth constraints finally disappearing in almost every market, and transcoding software offering ever-faster in-line processing, the automated production and delivery of TV assets is now a reality. Combine this with some staggering advances in tagging technology and we can expect a wholesale rediscovery of the value that lies locked up in the hours of video material gathering dust on tapes and disks scattered around every marketing department in the world. Significant changes are on the horizon too for the way that digital outdoor, mobile and online advertising are processed, adapted and delivered – all from within a client controlled brand centre.

Up and down the chain

Good brand centres are a catalyst and a conduit enabling brands to make better use of existing channels and to take advantage of the enormous opportunities that new communication channels provide. By minimising or removing the obstacles presented by a habituated reliance on varying degrees of redundant process, they extend the direct operating or oversight range of the brand owner much further up and down the marketing supply chain. In its full form, the brand centre closes a virtuous circle that embraces planning and creative origination, storage, adaptation and supply, and performance analysis. It provides a unique vantage point from which any brand owner can ensure that their assets generate sustained value.