Editorial Articles

With so much of the value of today’s companies lying within their brands, it’s amazing that so few are efficiently managing their brand assets.

With many multinationals having ad creative and marcomms assets spread all over the world, and with procurement breathing down everyone’s backs to create cost savings, integrating efficient workflow and archiving technology can be a win-win scenario, giving them 100% control over their global assets while at the same time producing efficiencies and cost savings across the board.

The recent £12bn sale of Cadbury to Kraft shows the value placed in brands today, it also raises questions as to why so many of those brands are still not effectively managing their digital creative assets around the globe.

Huge changes in the marketing landscape over the past few years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of TV channels, the arrival of digital broadcasting, the convergence of the internet and TV through catch-up services delivered straight to your living room and on the PC, the rise of rich-media web advertising and social media-based viral marketing. And that’s without touching on the increasing number of devices across which all these technologies are delivered, from TVs to iPhones and from PSPs to PCs.

This proliferation of digital has fundamentally changed the marketing industry. With so many more channels, platforms and devices than in the past, marketers now have to control huge volumes of inventory. As such, asset management and delivering campaigns has become vastly more complex and time-consuming. This is especially true for global brands.

Having embraced the growing tide of customer-facing technologies, marketers and agencies must now understand and embrace the enabling technologies that will help them organise and implement their strategies and creative ideas and deliver them to the wide range of media channels available to today’s consumer.

However, these new production technologies should not be seen as a challenge or a threat but as a competitive advantage. The brand with the best process for getting campaigns out there will reap the benefits in reduced cost, increased control and accelerated speed to market.

The implementation of smart backend systems and archiving suites can give brands and agencies the power to control the whole process from brief to fulfillment, allowing them to effectively and efficiently track their assets across an array of media. Once marketers can keep tabs on everything in the pipeline they can start to count, report and evaluate what’s happening with their brand – instantly and across the world, delivering cost savings and efficiencies as yet untapped.

This usage and measurement data that these end-to-end systems are able to provide is fast becoming invaluable for the marketing and advertising communities, allowing, for example, brands to spot wastage in areas of creation, multiple variations and distribution. With marketers expected to be as certain about how well money is being spent as the engineering function, or the logistics partners, intelligent application of the available technologies means all stakeholders in the creative process can meet the rigorous demands of procurement – at the same time gaining competitive edge over other brands in this new competitive arena.

But this is not just about effective procurement, it is also about providing greater control of brand assets and evolving better production processes. Being able to see where too many markets are creating work that is only used across one, two or three markets while almost identical executions have been created and used elsewhere, or where photoshoots are being done for material that already exists but was previously stuffed in a brown envelope inside a drawer, means money can be freed up and reinvested in brand development, R&D and building on creative partnerships.

Furthermore, by tracking who is using what, how, where and when marketers can make sure their assets are not abused thus retaining their brand integrity. In short, in today’s world a company that is not effectively monitoring and controlling the use of its global assets is about as irresponsible as a company that doesn’t take out insurance on its buildings.

Angus Fear
UK General Manager, Adstream