Does your organisation have a one hundred per cent grip on the exact status of each and every marketing asset, such as images, video, web and social media content? I’m not just talking about the location (though that’s important too), but other factors such as the Intellectual Property associated with each asset (not just your own, but whether you might be infringing someone else’s), whether the licence on an image or piece of third party content (such as an industry report that’s on your website) has expired? If you can hand on heart say yes, absolutely, then that’s a great achievement. But, if your organisation is anything like the majority, the answer was probably not a full-bodied, unequivocal 100 per cent sure ‘yes’.

Should you care? Some of the stories in the media of late – particularly around brand infringement and genericide – suggest you should. For example, Taylor Swift is being sued by American Apparel for the use of ‘Lucky 7’. While we cannot comment on that case, it does highlight the whole issue of brand or copyright infringement: what assets a company owns or has rights to use. 

Brand infringement and genericide

And it is easy to see how mistakes can be made, especially in organisations where team members may not be working in the same office and anecdotally, we hear about these mistakes all the time. Imagine the marketing manager in the Hong Kong office not being aware that the image the UK team used for its spring advertising campaign was actually only licensed for a short duration of time, or that the great creative concept that the Norwegian office came up with is inadvertently a very close copy of a competitor’s campaign logo in the USA.

There is also the risk of ‘genericide’, namely when a brand becomes so ubiquitous that everyone uses it generically. Tiffany and CostCo have been going through a battle regarding the term ‘Tiffany rings’. Other brand genericide victims have included Hoover, Xerox, Frisbee, Thermos, Escalator and Bubble Wrap. Using a brand name to describe any competitive product is potentially devaluing the brand. While genericide is probably more of an issue for a big brand, since today’s start-ups could be the giants of tomorrow, it pays to heed attention now

Climbing the brand asset mountain

A medium-sized brand can easily have in excess of 100,000 digital assets and for a large brand, it could be many more. But let’s face it, even if the assets number a few hundred, it’s going to be hard to keep track of what is what and where. These challenges are likely to increase on our connected, digital world: the Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose observed at a recent seminar in London, the amount owned media – content that companies generate themselves and distribute on their own platforms, such as websites and social media pages – is getting bigger and bigger. That then impacts on the volume and control over the marketing assets involved.

So, what can companies do to protect themselves from issues such as brand or copyright infringement (whether of their own or someone else’s) or genericide? Legal action should be viewed as the last resort, after all, who needs that pain and cost. Instead, there are some practical steps that companies can (and many do) adopt on a daily basis to protect these valuable assets. While it will always be hard to control external misuse of a brand, it is possible to control internal management of a brand, its IP and related assets, so that the company can be confident that what it puts out to the world is consistent, compliant and ultimately 100 per cent ‘on brand’.

Six tips for great digital marketing assets

Digital asset management is an answer that many brands are turning their attention to, whether building their own in-house systems or investing in one of the plethora of commercial solutions now available. In essence, digital asset management is a software-based approach to creating a single repository of all assets across an organisation, to help brands (and their agencies) to find exactly what they need and use within the right guidelines. Like any methodology or technology tool, there are some best practices that will improve the success of a digital asset management strategy.

Here are five examples:

Control access wisely – not everyone needs to see everything (in fact, it will just confuse them), so implement different levels of user access. Also consider having only certain people allowed to upload assets into the system, people who are trained to know where to put what.

But don’t make the system too rigid for users – they should be able to crop and manipulate content, of course without affecting the original asset’s integrity. And the system must be simple for non-technical people to use.

Don’t forget about traditional assets – the system should not just focus on new digital assets, it should be able to encompass offline content too. It definitely needs to be designed with visual marketing assets – such as images and video – in mind, so the ability to apply tagging to these files is important, otherwise they will be hard to find.

Be comprehensive – clearly, the strategy and chosen system should cover every function: brand managers, PR, product marketing, channel managers, web, social and creative teams. Just as importantly, assets need to be exist as standalone (in case you want to just use the image of the cereal packet, not the packet on a breakfast table) but it is important to indicate linked assets (for instance, the breakfast table image).

Clear compliance and tracking – the system should clearly indicate the rights around an asset, timescales and a track record of previous usage.

Archival and removal – ensuring the latest and approved versions of your marketing assets are being used and old versions are removed or archived is critical in any system. It’s essential that users of the system have absolute confidence that they are working with the correct and most up to date content.

However, having a clear asset management strategy in place not only protects a company’s own brand management or inadvertent infringement of someone else’s IP, it can have other benefits too, such as reducing the amount of time wasted spending looking for the right file and preventing unnecessary duplication of work. Achieving that single, comprehensive view of all assets is these days becoming less of an option and more of a ‘must have’ for today’s digital marketers.

 

By Liz McClellan, North Plains. 

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