When clients see a PowerPoint presentation with cartoon fonts, garish colours, a badly dithered logo and kitschy clipart of a panting dog, do they really notice how great the content is?

Even though a marketing department likely created a well-designed, properly branded PowerPoint template for everyone to use, many departments - from sales to technical support - won't necessarily know where to find this template, or that it even exists. Instead, a sales presentation for a client meeting may have been derived from content provided by the technical department, who in turn had created it for an internal presentation.

Unfortunately, this content "disconnect" is a common situation. As a result, brand management and digital asset management are two very real and important issues facing many industries today.

Looking beyond the logo

Organizations have to always keep in mind that each time an existing or potential customer sees a presentation, business card, advertisement or any other physical or digital piece of collateral with your logo on it, your brand is being represented. When this occurs in a void, your brand can easily be misrepresented many times over and clients will walk away from your presentations with very little knowledge of the value of your own brand.

Good brand management is about more than just making sure the white space around a logo is consistent across all pieces of collateral and communication. Controlling the creation and ultimate use of all assets on which your brand appears is critical to leveraging its strength to achieve your broader corporate objectives.

Your brand is a significant, valuable asset to your organization. Managing that intellectual property should be as important as managing tangible capital assets. However, brand integrity is habitually compromised as different parts of an organization modify images for their own uses. This inevitably weakens the value of your brand.

Setting standards

The best way to preserve the value of your brand is to create standards for its use - both internal and external - and communicate them to your organization. Education should include a gallery of do's and don'ts that illustrate how the standards impact the look and feel of corporate communications. Creating these examples as Adobe Acrobat PDFs will ensure they do not get used improperly.

An extensive sample library of logos, templates and other digital assets should be created to accompany the gallery of examples. These will be for multiple uses by many users in different languages across all the departments of your organization. Authoring once and customizing many times will result in numerous process improvements and obvious cost reductions. The implicit benefits of a consistent voice across all your brand messaging will be more difficult to quantify, but it will definitely exist.

Typically, the sample digital assets to be created and shared will include: PowerPoint templates; Word templates; business card templates; high-resolution logos for print; low-resolution logos for web use; Quark documents for newsletters and advertisements; multi-layered EPS and PhotoShop files for various uses; and any other high-quality digital assets which were created explicitly to have the highest possible level of reuse and reexpression.

Once all the assets have been produced, when standards, examples and samples are all approved and the final files are ready for use, the challenge that inevitably arises concerns where it all goes and how it gets maintained. How can you make sure each of your corporate representatives uses the approved PowerPoint template and not the one with cartoon fonts and kitschy panting dog clipart?

The role of a Digital Asset Management system

Corporations that want their employees to share common resources need to create a central repository where the resources can be stored, managed and distributed electronically. A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is typically used as that central repository. At its core, it will be the technological embodiment of a process for maintaining the currency, relevancy and integrity of your brand and brand messaging both inside and outside your organization.

The level of sophistication required by a corporate DAM can vary greatly, depending on requirements. As well, security, user management, bandwidth availability, technological capability and resource limitations will also be issues to consider.

A low-level solution would be the creation of a shared directory on a LAN or WAN. All authenticated network users would have read privileges to the digital assets in the directory, but only an administrator would have write privileges. This would allow for controlled versioning as updates are rolled out, and prevent accidental overwriting of existing files. In this situation, if Workgroup Templates were configured within an entire enterprise's Microsoft Office deployment, the use of standardized, approved templates would be seamless to all users of the relevant applications (the templates would appear as options whenever a user tried to create a new document). As well, updates to the documents by an administrator would be a transparent process to the users.

On a higher level, solutions are typically geared towards integration into an existing Intranet or Extranet. There are a wide variety of commercial solutions available, ranging in price from $5,000 for a simple software solution you install yourself to $500,000 for a sophisticated solution that comes complete with hardware, IT consultants and annual software licensing fees. The other options are to let your own IT department build it themselves or hire a branding agency to build (or customize) some proprietary software for you. Note, however, homegrown solutions that are unintentionally difficult to use often result in perpetuating the cartoon font and "panting dog" problem that created the need for the solution in the first place. The sting of a higher price is forgotten sooner than the sting of poor quality.

A working example

An interesting example of a higher-end solution is a project I worked on in the spring of 2002 for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. Although not an industrial operation, the same branding content management rules apply.

In the early 1990s, we (Spencer Francey Peters) created a print manual for Four Seasons' brand standards. It was called the Logo Usage and Design Manual (LUDM), and it became a formidable document as further iterations were created. In late 2001, we created a strategy to move the manual online and to integrate it into their current enterprise-wide network.

Four Seasons' requirements were quite clear, and illustrated a significant challenge. They have 55 hotels in 25 countries and conduct business in 14 languages, but they have one voice and one vision that must remain consistent across all their collateral. The first thing we worked on with them was defining a process for managing and maintaining their digital assets and textual content. Roles and responsibilities were assigned and a detailed plan was created for aggregating content, developing the system, rolling it out globally, and educating users on its use.

Then, when the hard part was done, we articulated all the desired functionality, created mock-ups of the database structure and GUI, and began addressing the issue of content. This consisted largely of repurposing the existing LUDM, but also involved the daunting task of gathering templates, forms and process documents from across the organization. Once all this was done, we worked with their IT team to develop and launch their new Online Brand Manager.

Today, a Four Seasons Resort employee working at the Bali at Jimbaran Bay hotel in Indonesia will log on to the secure corporate network to learn how the brand should be used across multiple media. While they're there, they will also access templates for business cards and stationery, and download whatever templates they require. As well, an advertising agency's offices in Toronto and New York can both log in and access high-resolution logos for various pieces of advertising collateral.

Because Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts understand Brand Management and Digital Asset Management, they will never have a situation where one of their employees gives a presentation with kitschy clipart and cartoon fonts in it.

The makings of the right solution

Obviously, most of the functionality outlined in the Four Seasons example is on the higher-end of the solutions scale. If you're doing research of your own, you should be aware of the wide variations between higher- and lower-end solutions. They can be quite dramatic. Some of the more desirable functionality in your own system should include:

• Proper indexing of digital assets through the use of metadata (low-resolution thumbnail images, and textual information pertaining to the assets' creation, author, designer, copyright, date of origin, classification, categorization, media-type and subject matter). Some systems will store this information as XML.
• Fully searchable index (matching user-entered keywords with indexed metadata, and displaying the results with accompanying thumbnail).
• Placement of meta-data in a relational database that will also have unique references of file locations on a network server, so they can be downloaded (large digital assets will normally not be placed directly into a database due to their prohibitive sizes, but will instead be uploaded through a web interface to a network directory).
• Tracking each instance of reuse or reexpression to collect asset-activity data. The data can include who actually uses the system for what purpose and how they use which assets. Analysis (and cross-referencing against sales data) might allow clear indication of ROI for certain asset types.
• Management of assets and users through a web-based Graphic User Interface (GUI), where administrators can add/edit assets and create new user profiles, user groups and access restrictions (if some assets are to be made available to outside vendors or representatives like advertising agencies).
• A "guidelines" content section with the complete standards, illustrated with the examples and linking to the samples for download.

There are many DAM solutions available in the marketplace. Clear definition of requirements (and budget) can help narrow the list significantly. What needs to remain paramount in the mind of decision makers is that a DAM needs to implement or reinforce brand management process in a corporate environment. If roles and responsibilities aren't clearly defined in terms of creating standards and assets, and maintaining the system, then a large risk exists that your employees will be misrepresenting your brand and weakening its value.