Love a good brand. When you think of Coca-Cola, Disney, Apple, Nike (the list goes on, as Interbrand’s recent best brands of 2022 report attests) you can probably picture their logos, colors and usage across media. When a major rebrand goes well, like Target, Burberry and Old Spice, people talk about how they brought a legacy brand forward. Some are so iconic, like Milton Glaser’s “I love New York” design, that only a terrorist attack warranted a (thankfully) one-time temporary update. Then there are brief disasters (2010 Gap, New Coke etc.) and utter failures you can’t just blame on the logo like MySpace to My_ and Radio Shack to The Shack. Many brands do evolve successfully over time, like NBC, which just updated their logo.
When you have broadcast since 1926, this is actually a pretty conservative brand history that reflects (or influenced) the prevailing design trends of those decades.
Sure, you can lose hours down brand rabbit holes on Logopedia, but what does this have to do with DAM? Digital asset management can be a strong tool in your brand strategy. By controlling the assets available, updating users, empowering design teams and delivering the message, the DAM can use its status as the single source of truth very effectively when a client, company or product is either launching or revising their brand.
Back to TV, in a previous role, it was vital that we supplied everyone from the creative team, outside agencies and our internal broadcast/satellite systems with the newest logos and other brand assets from networks. The DAM was a brand ambassador in the old-fashioned, diplomatic sense of the word. It smoothed over the friction that change brings by making it easy to make the right choice. We removed the old options, included key dates and rules along with print, web and broadcast versions of the new assets, named and ready to use.
Beyond the assets themselves - which could range from the logo, style guide, branded images and video and color palettes and more depending on the extent of the project - keeping the DAM current can help manage the relationships involved. Never is this more important than when your own company or client is rebranding. People fear change in part because of the work involved in user adoption. Make your DAM an implement to fight overwhelm and support your brand & creative teams’ hard work rolling out the look and feel they have spent months refining.
Brand awareness can impact the way the world views your company so do what you can to improve the view with DAM.