Many companies manage their brand assets in an ad hoc manner, making it difficult for teams to access the latest and greatest branded content quickly. This content is crucial for brands to engage with their target audience. In a recent survey, 64% of respondents stated that images and videos are crucial for building trust, while another 62% stated that visual content is critical for improving product credibility.
However, there’s a significant gap when it comes to managing this valuable branded content. The survey also found that 51% of brands reported that management resources hinder the deployment of visual content, while another 48% struggled with managing the time and effort required for asset variations.
Compounding the problem is the time and effort required to rediscover content that has been created in the past. Think about how many emails you have sent or received from people asking where brand assets are located? The average worker spends 28% of their workweek managing email and another 20% tracking down information or seeking help from a colleague.
On top of all the other emails you get pinged with regularly, these emails only add to the clutter and are entirely avoidable.
Consolidating this content through a more holistic approach, utilizing brand asset management (BAM), would make a significant difference in both efficiency and productivity. In this blog, we will discuss the following areas to help you obtain a complete understanding of BAM:
- An Introduction to Branding Assets
- What is brand asset management?
- Who uses BAM?
- The role of AI in BAM
An Introduction to Branding Assets
Brand assets help bring a company’s identity to life through a variety of content. These assets are how people interact with a brand and are critical to ensure that you not only stand out from your competitors but that people come to know and recognize the brand.
The following list includes the most common types of brand assets:
- Brand logo, including all the variations in size and color
- Designs for advertising that may be used on websites, social media, or other platforms
- Branded photos, graphics, illustrations, and other visual content
- Description of the company used everywhere
- A style guide that outlines typography and fonts used for designing
- A list of approved company slogans or taglines
- Templates used for business communications, such as press releases or email signatures
- Overall brand guidelines to align all teams with how they implement a consistent brand for the company
What is brand asset management?
Brand asset management (BAM), also a segment of digital asset management, is the process and systems used to manage all branded digital files and content in a central location. This branded content is managed and accessed by internal teams who can repurpose, modify, and update content as needed.
As we mentioned in our blog in media asset management (MAM), brand asset management is a term that’s grouped under digital asset management (DAM) which more broadly refers to the storage, management, and distribution of content.
However, BAM stands apart from MAM and video asset management (VAM). It focuses solely on managing branded content for the company. In contrast, media asset management encompasses a broader range of audio and video content, including various use cases and types of content that are not necessarily used for brand management. As for VAM, it focuses solely on video content.
Who uses BAM and what’s it used for?
Brand asset management is used by any company, organization, or business entity that has a brand identity. BAM is used to ensure that a brand is always represented correctly with the most up-to-date and approved collateral.
BAM helps companies in these three areas:
Organization of Brand Assets
Bringing all a company’s branded assets into one location ensures that teams can find what they need more quickly, without having to work through lengthy email chains or wait for others to reply to a message in Slack or Microsoft Teams. This enhances operational efficiency, enabling employees to concentrate on tasks that have a greater impact on the business.
Ensure Brand Consistency
Teams must work fast these days. That means they typically fall back on what’s readily available to them if they aren’t getting responses. The last thing a company wants is for people to use outdated brand assets. This leads to an inconsistent representation of the brand, which can be confusing to consumers and negatively impact the business.
Easily Control and Update Branded Content
Companies often refresh their branded content frequently, while major overhauls typically occur at least once every decade. It’s imperative to have a centralized repository of your brand assets that everyone can access, so that when the content is updated, you can ensure everyone is using the latest and most up-to-date information. It also makes it far easier to update this content if you have it in one place rather than having to track down things from different teams or groups.
How is BAM right for me or my company?
An easy way to determine if you need to invest in brand asset management software is by answering these four questions. If you answer yes to any of them, then you should look at how you can improve your brand asset management with a modern solution:
- Do you struggle to find the latest brand logos, company descriptions, and guidelines?
- Is it challenging to collaborate due to communication breakdowns related to finding and utilizing brand assets?
- Do you find it challenging to update your brand assets?
- Are people using outdated materials more often than not?
The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in brand asset management
AI has revolutionized asset management, regardless of whether you are working with DAM, MAM, VAM, or BAM. It helps reduce labor-intensive tasks, accelerating the speed at which projects can be completed.
One of the areas that it can help with is logo detection. Say you have an archive of content that’s not well organized and is intermixed with other types of content. Maybe it even includes assets that have partners or customer logos on them. With logo detection, you can quickly identify which assets have certain logos so that you can either:
- Update outdated logos
- Determine what approvals need to happen with third-party branding
This not only helps a company from an organizational standpoint but also accelerates its ability to find, create, and share content. Especially if there are multiple teams, both internally and externally, working together.
Another use case is identifying all instances of a brand name in the content you may have, including photos, graphics, and illustrations. This can help you locate all the places you need to update much faster, particularly with certain types of media that you would normally have to open in different software solutions and review manually.
Looking at AI-powered Veritone Digital Media Hub
Veritone Digital Media Hub is an AI-powered media hub that makes every piece of media, such as brand assets, searchable, accessible, and ready to drive revenue. With Digital Media Hub, your team can find and surface content faster through metadata enrichment, auto-indexing, and natural language search.
With greater visibility into what branded assets you have in your library, you can more easily curate, clip, and organize this media with capabilities such as bulk selection, persistent filters, automated workflows, and more. You can even push this media and metadata directly to your cloud storage, social platforms, and production tools. Take back control of your branded assets today with AI and start maximizing the total lifetime value of your media for your organization.
Learn more about Veritone Digital Media Hub
Sources:
https://crocommander.com/articles/e-commerce-cro/survey-reveals-challenges-in-digital-asset-management-growth/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy
