What is Branding Automation?
(Branding Automation in plain English)

"Branding Automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for brand managers and marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks and more effectively distribute brand messaging."

Back at HQ

At the headquarters of many brands and modern marketing teams today, sits a Brand Management System, Digital Asset Management, or Brand Management software. These systems are often core platforms for branding and marketing activity.

Driven by the modernization of marketing tools and the 'rise of digital', these systems enable Brand Managers and Marketing Teams to manage their brand messaging and marketing campaigns more efficiently and help deal with burgeoning collections of, and demand for, digital content.

As communication channels proliferate (e.g. Websites, Blogs. Media sites, Facebook, Instagram. Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Digital Dashboards, Physical Digital Displays, Proliferation of Screens, IoT, etc), the opportunities to communicate are increasing exponentially. Consequently, the risk for brands grows.

At the heart of any good brand, is a consistent telling of the Brand Story and the consistent execution of messaging, identity and collateral.

"Any reasonably sized brand is going to have to juggle a lot of stuff."

Communicating the Brand Story and Brand DNA to staff, partners and suppliers, coordinating the creation of new brand content with agencies and creatives, curating user-generated content, managing owned brand identity, collateral and content, and distributing it all to the brand's marketing channels.

It's a big job.

A new breed of Branding Automation solutions is setting out to make life easier for brand managers and marketing teams.

Branding Automation brings new functionality to the table for Brand Management Systems.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help organize and co-ordinate volumes of content
Self-service platforms to aid distribution
Automated notifications to keep everyone on the same page
Collaboration systems to enable quicker turnaround of new messaging and content
Automated ingestion systems to help Brands leverage User Generated Content
Automated deployment systems to help Brands share messaging and content
Coordination of external creative and content suppliers

Branding Automation solutions continue to develop and vendors while all generally moving in the same direction are at different stages of development.

How are you adapting to the new norms in digital? Are you keeping up?

Branding Automation is a
Marketing Agility Enabler

Branding automation can enable brand and marketing teams to operate in an agile manner.

Inspired by the now famous/infamous Oreo ‘You Can Still Dunk In The Dark’ campaign, brands are looking to be more agile.

See the actual Tweet here.

Branding Automation can clearly help brands in the quest for agility and responsiveness to real-world events, and the take advantage of opportunities to stand out.

For example - ingesting and automatically tagging content from across a brand's network - quickly and near real-time from sports events, conferences, exhibition, market visits, and user-generated content, marketing teams can quickly coordinate and collaborate on new initiatives.

Brands ever-since are looking to
echo Oreo's success.

Give individuals and local marketing teams the freedom to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, instead of having to wait for the marketing team at HQ (often in a different time zone and with a different cultural reference) to get their A into G.

Teams can use and repurpose existing brand master assets, wrapped in the context of the brand and the required brand standards, collaborate with colleagues (both inside and outside the organization) and get approvals from appropriate team members, all orchestrated by the Branding Automation system.

Branding has never been better or more enjoyable.

Branding Automation is a
Co-ordination champ

It's really hard to keep up with all the content, on all the channels.

Branding Automation can help by centralizing all the content and enabling collaboration across teams before embarrassing mistakes are made.

While traditional DAM software helps, a DAM is primarily a file management system, and doesn't really help that much in streamlining brand management and brand messaging processes.