Many companies manage their brand assets in an ad hoc fashion, making it difficult for teams to get their hands on the latest and greatest branded content quickly.
Think about how many emails you have sent or received from people asking where brand assets are located? The average interaction worker spends 28% of their workweek managing e-mail and another 20 percent tracking down information or seeking help from a colleague.
On top of all the other emails you get pinged with on a regular basis, these emails only add to the clutter and are entirely avoidable.
Consolidating this content, taking a more holistic approach, through brand asset management (BAM) would make a big 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
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 the management of branded content for the company whereas media asset management focuses on audio and video content that can have a variety of use cases and different types of content that isn’t 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 faster without having to work through long email chains or wait for others to reply to a message in Slack or Microsoft Teams. This improves operational efficiency and opens employees to focus on tasks that are more impactful for 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 people using 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 will often refresh their branded content frequently while major overhauls happen usually at least once in a 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 greatest. 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 do I know if BAM is 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 description, and guidelines?
- Is it hard to collaborate because of communication breakdowns related to finding brand assets?
- Do you find it difficult to make updates to 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, no matter if you are doing 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 finding all the text appearances of a brand name in the content you may have including photos, graphics, and illustrations. This can help you locate much faster all the places that you may need to update, 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
As we covered in our blog on MAM, Veritone Digital Media Hub is a versatile, modern asset management solution that leverages the power of artificial intelligence to streamline how we create, find, share, and distribute content.
While Digital Media Hub offers many benefits just as a MAM, it can also help companies manage their brand assets more efficiently. Using aiWARE, the first OS for AI, companies have access to a constantly improving and advancing suite of cognitive engines so that they have access to the latest and greatest AI technology.
Much like other technologies, AI is constantly advancing each year as adoption has grown, helping drive innovation forward. Veritone is contributing to that charge by continually providing our customers and partners with new enhancements and capabilities to our solutions. We recently announced three new enhancements to Digital Media Hub, which highlights our commitment to improving our solutions so companies can obtain the most value out of their content.