You’ve spent months finalizing the artwork for your biggest global advertising campaign, and it’s finally live. One of your friends spots an ad out in the wild and sends you a photo, and only then do you spot it. How did the designs get through so many rounds of creative, revisions, and approvals with the old tagline on it?
Creative mistakes like that can really undermine your branding efforts, and show the importance of effective governance. Digital asset governance is the process of managing brand files throughout their lifecycle, ensuring they are used consistently, effectively, and legally. It’s the framework applied to ensure brand compliance for all digital and creative assets, from website copy to global ad campaigns.
Governance frameworks increase brand consistency and improve operational efficiency on a global scale. Understanding digital asset governance will help you build the frameworks you need to bring these benefits to your brand.
Why digital asset governance matters
Poor digital asset governance can cause significant challenges for businesses:
- Inconsistent branded content: Teams create content using incorrect brand elements or messaging, contributing to inconsistent branding which hinders brand recognition and the creation of a cohesive brand identity in the market.
- Inefficient workflows: A governance framework should lay out the review and approvals process for creating brand content. Without one, team members go in circles seeking feedback, and creative projects suffer as a result.
- Unregulated content production: Without clear frameworks and processes, team members can accidentally create duplicate, unneeded, or conflicting brand materials. This brings inefficiencies and wastes team resources.
- Unclear version control: A lack of asset governance makes it more likely teams will unintentionally use outdated or inaccurate brand assets, as they can’t tell which is the correct version.
- Legal and compliance challenges: Without effective governance, companies risk compliance issues, copyright violations, unauthorized asset usage, and other regulatory concerns. Non-compliance with legal standards and industry regulations damages the brand’s reputation and exposes the business to legal repercussions.
But effective digital asset governance can prevent these challenges, helping companies achieve consistent branding, streamlined workflows, and better content visibility and oversight for its stakeholders.
A robust asset governance framework helps companies ensure all their brand content is consistent and compliant — not just with their brand guidelines, but also copyright and other usage regulations. For example, your U.S. design team creates marketing materials for your next global ad campaign. They share it with your EMEA marketing team, who follow your governance framework to ensure the ads comply with regional regulations in all the markets it will go live in. This framework makes it easier for companies to manage the production, approval, and distribution of new brand content, especially in global or multi-region businesses.
The right tools make it easier to adhere to your governance framework. For example, embedding your governance framework into your digital asset management (DAM) system streamlines tasks like tagging, searching, and approvals, helping teams increase efficiency and streamline their creative workflows.
The 4 pillars of DAM governance
Effective digital asset governance isn’t a one-size-fits all solution. However, these four pillars should be the foundation of your governance framework, as they cover the most critical elements of your business. You can adapt this framework to fit your organization’s needs, and develop your own framework to help you control asset creation, ensure brand compliance, foster collaboration, and create scalable workflows.
1. Centralized control empowers teams and reduces inefficiencies
Centralizing brand assets in a single platform gives your brand team more control over the assets being used across the business. By granting access to one central tool you can ensure team members are accessing approved brand content quickly and easily, reducing the risk of employees using outdated or incorrect files.
You can also keep brand files up-to-date more easily, as you can replace assets in your DAM software, and that change will automatically sync for all users. This lets you update brand files quickly and efficiently, maintaining control over when the new version of brand assets go live.
2. Governance and compliance ensure brand consistency
It’s essential to establish clear processes for content creation, approvals, and usage. These processes ensure all the assets you’re creating meet brand standards — and adhere to the legal requirements for global and regional campaigns.
Develop processes around asset creation, including who has authority to review, provide feedback, and sign-off on finished designs. Then create guidelines around circulating new assets, to control how new materials are used across the business. This will help ensure new brand files are adopted consistently, keeping teams on-brand and on-message.
3. Seamless collaboration aligns cross-functional teams
A DAM platform helps teams work together on shared projects. Everyone can reference and use the same brand files and creative templates, giving them a shared starting point for collaborative work.
Additionally, a DAM integrates with other tools, like content management systems, marketing automation platforms, and creative tools. These native integrations streamline access to brand assets and eliminate communication gaps, ensuring all teams can work together towards their shared goals.
4. Scalable workflows support growth and adaptation
Your brand governance workflows should scale with your business as its needs change and grow. For example, the workflows and processes you develop now should also work if your company expands into new markets and regions — with a few adaptations to support different languages or region-specific preferences.
Asset governance frameworks should allow your business to grow without compromising your brand integrity or workflow efficiency. They should support your growth, not hamper it.
The building blocks of your digital asset governance framework
Effective governance won’t happen by itself. Help everyone in your organization to understand their role in governing the creation and use of your brand assets by developing a digital asset governance framework. The framework should cover the people, processes, and resources your organization is working with to support your brand governance initiatives.
Users & User Groups
Your governance framework should explain your different user groups, what they can (and can’t) do in your DAM, and who to contact if they need different permissions. When defining your user groups, consider:
- What are the different types of users in our DAM?
- What are the differences between different user permissions?
- Who is responsible for creating, deleting, or updating user accounts?
- Will we provide DAM access to external partners?
This step lays the foundation for effective asset governance, as you control who can do what within your DAM system.
Asset Creation & Approval Processes
Clear processes for creating new brand assets will support your asset governance efforts. Define who can create new assets — some team members may create assets from scratch, while other user groups may be restricted to using creative templates to create files, giving your design team more control over these new assets.
Then, map out the process users need to go through to get their assets approved and ready for use. Consider who needs to provide feedback, and how users should seek that feedback. Agree who has the authority to approve new assets for publication.
You may also want to provide guidelines for adding files to your DAM. These should cover naming conventions, file taxonomy, adding metadata, creating tags or keywords, and any rights management information as required.
Asset Updating & Retiring Processes
Effective digital asset governance needs to cover the full asset lifecycle of your brand files. So you need a clearly documented process for updating digital assets (for example, if you rebrand), and a separate one for retiring assets at the end of their life. This should cover archiving or removing them from your DAM.
Training & Resources
The training and resources section of your digital asset governance framework should include:
- Information about training: Your framework should explain when employees will receive formal training on your DAM and asset management process — for example, as part of new employee onboarding, or when you adopt new DAM software.
- Links to additional resources: People who only use brand materials occasionally may need a bit more support alongside their initial training. Share additional resources such as tutorials from your design department, creative templates for frequently used brand assets, and FAQs about following your brand guidelines for global markets.
Key DAM features that support digital asset governance
There are several features in your DAM platform that support your asset governance efforts. Here are some of the features and functionality to look for when comparing DAM solutions if digital asset governance is a priority.
Role-based access to centralize control
Everyone in your company will need to use some of your brand assets, but very few will need access to everything within your DAM. Define the different user groups and user permission levels that different people need for your DAM. Ask questions such as:
- What level of access and permissions does each user need?
- How many different user groups will our DAM have?
- What level of DAM access do external partners, vendors, or agencies need?
Your DAM should enable you to control users’ access to make sure people can only access libraries and files you want them to. For example, if you have specific brand guidelines and elements for the Spanish market, you should be able to grant access only to your team in Spain, to ensure other regional teams don’t accidentally use the wrong brand elements.
AI assistance to automate governance
Some DAM platforms (like Frontify) have AI functionality that supports brand governance. Frontify’s AI Brand Assistant helps team members achieve brand consistency: Users can share written content with Brand Assistant, then the AI reviews it against your brand guidelines and provides suggestions to improve brand alignment.
Users can also ask Brand Assistant questions related to visual elements of the brand, such as how to use the logo correctly, or what the brand colors are. Frontify’s Brand Assistant automatically shares the relevant information from your brand guidelines, helping team members self-support and follow your brand rules without additional input from your brand team.
Multilingual and multi-region capabilities
If your company operates in multiple regions, you need a DAM to support that. If your DAM has multilingual and multi-region capabilities, it becomes much easier to manage your global branding efforts because you can organize your brand assets by language or region. This supports your brand governance initiatives, as you can localize digital content and files seamlessly within your DAM.
Real-time updates and notifications
Communication is essential to ensuring brand compliance across the business. Your DAM system should let you share updates with employees about brand changes, such as asset updates or guideline edits. These updates and notifications will help you keep team members informed, reducing the risk of employees using old assets or brand elements.
Building your governance framework with Frontify
Frontify’s brand platform helps global enterprise businesses establish a strong governance structure and improve their asset management. These practical steps will help you embed your digital asset governance into your Frontify DAM.
Step 1: Streamline governance through integrations
Frontify integrates with different types of tools, including CMS platforms, marketing automation tools, communication tools, and creating design software. It offers a range of native integrations, or third-party connections via APIs or low-code connectors.
These integrations streamline workflows for creating, finding, and using brand assets. Team members can access the brand assets stored in your DAM directly from within any of the other tools they are using. This means they can find the correct, on-brand files more easily, reducing the likelihood of outdated or off-brand materials being used.
Step 2: Scale governance for global teams
Global teams need a platform that helps them manage their brand at scale, including more complex governance issues like managing global compliance and regional branding.
Frontify is built with scalability in mind: companies can manage multiple brands within one central portal, meaning it becomes the single source of truth for everything brand-related. You can also set up portals for different regions or languages, and set access controls so global teams can only access the relevant materials for their market.
Evolving your brand with future-forward DAM governance
Strong asset governance frameworks boost efficiency, improve brand consistency, and position your business for long-term, sustainable growth. The right tools support your governance efforts, and a digital asset management system should be the foundational tool for your brand operations. A platform like Frontify will streamline your brand management initiatives today, and scale with your business to future proof your governance and branding efforts of tomorrow.
Book a demo to see how Frontify can transform your digital asset management processes and streamline your asset governance efforts.
