Assurance of Approved & On-brand Digital Assets
Organizational Challenge: Assurance of Approved & On-brand images
Organizations are faced with the challenge of assuring that the digital materials utilized by business partners, retailers, sales force and distributors are approved and on-brand. A process for managing your digital assets provides this assurance since the most current imagery is always available to everyone that needs it. A DAM (Digital Asset Management) system achieves this result because it is centrally administered and provides the ability to make quick changes to content involving all pertinent users who collaborate in the authoring process (product managers, advertising dept, vendors, etc). This continuous updating of files happens in real time even though each promotional element is on its own design cycle.
Today most product manager communication with advertising & marketing occurs around the production cycle for new materials. If a product is added, discontinued or changed outside of this cycle, the new imagery may not be immediately supplied/updated to retailers and the sales force. Customers & sales people don’t even know new images exist. Since only a select few staff in the marketing department know where the correct images are, customer and sales requests for images are processed through a specific person that knows where the image/file is located. The availability of this person determines the speed of the image/file fulfillment. Unfortunately if images aren’t easy to locate and available 24/7, people will forgo the process of getting the most recent image. It doesn’t matter if the correct image exists when the process for getting it takes too long or requires too much effort. Some retailers and sales people will simply use an existing, outdated image.
Some questions for your company to consider:
• How much time does your organization spend trying to locate the correct imagery?
• How difficult is it for your customers to get current imagery of your products?
• How many times do your sales people and customers make do with imagery that does not adequately reflect your company quality?
• How frequently do users simply use the old version of a product image rather than go to the effort to obtain the latest one?
As you evaluate your current process, compare it to the digital asset management model utilizing a web based digital asset management system Honeycomb Archive. This process allows organizations to provide their business partners, marketing teams, and sales force with immediate, self-service fulfillment of digital assets 24/7. Since it is a web based solution, their remote sales staff, offices, agencies, newspapers, distributors and retailers all have secure access to the most up-to-date content using a standard web browser instead of special proprietary or ftp software. When new imagery is created there is a workflow process built into the system that allows them to route files/graphics to appropriate product managers and graphics personnel for approvals while tracking the work history for that item.
