In today’s world, brands are tasked with generating more content than ever before. From images to videos and audio, the high demand for fresh, new content can feel at odds with the equally important need to maintain brand governance and compliance.
Enter AI-powered DAM. An AI-powered DAM platform like Bynder supports brand governance by automating workflows, automatically flagging outdated assets, detecting non-compliant content being uploaded in the DAM, flagging and managing duplicates, and making it easier for teams across regions to stay on-brand. Read on to learn about the many DAM features to improve your workflow and how DAM helps businesses support and enforce brand governance to mitigate business risks.
Key takeaways
- Brand governance is the system through which organizations control brand appearance, including visual identity, tone of voice, and asset usage guidelines, to ensure consistent representation no matter where the brand shows up.
- Brand consistency has a range of positive business outcomes, from building customer trust and brand recognition to protecting your brand reputation.
- An AI-powered DAM strengthens brand governance by giving organizations a system of record where approved assets stay accurate, compliant, and easy to use across every team and channel.
What is brand governance?
Brand governance is a set of policies, processes, tools, and mechanisms brands can employ to control how they’re presented internally and to the public, online and offline. With strong brand governance, a brand can maintain a consistent appearance wherever it shows up.
Common elements of brand governance include:
- Visual identity: This includes all visual elements that represent an organization, like logo, brand colors, typography, and color palette.
- Tone of voice: Brand messaging refers to both the way an organization communicates to its audience and what it communicates. It includes specific language, as well as a brand’s tone of voice.
- Approval workflows: Before assets get released for use, it’s important to ensure all needed approvals are in place for regional and brand teams to ensure compliance and authorized, consistent use across campaigns and partners.
- Asset management: Strong control over versions, expirations, and asset lifecycle rules helps teams avoid using outdated or unapproved content to protect brand consistency and ensure only compliant assets make it to market.
- Access control: Setting permissions for who can view, edit, and distribute brand assets across teams, departments, and external partners helps ensure proper usage.
- Training and education: Brand governance also includes educating team members on brand guidelines and processes related to brand governance.
Why is brand governance important?
Brand governance has a significant influence on your organization’s success, as it helps avoid off-brand communication, ensures a consistent brand identity across all touchpoints, and promotes greater efficiency across teams and regions. Take a look at why organizations should follow brand governance protocols at every level of their business.
Builds brand trust and recognition
One of the most direct effects of brand governance is that it ensures the consistent brand display of logos, fonts, messaging, and tone of voice across all touchpoints. Along with brand consistency comes a range of different benefits. It can help build a sense of reliability and trustworthiness, increase brand recognition, and drive overall brand loyalty.
Protects brand reputation
Inconsistent or incorrect branding can hurt your brand reputation more than you may think. It can dilute your messaging, cause confusion, and even damage your credibility. Brand governance is a framework that protects your brand reputation from these damaging effects. By setting clear standards for visuals, messaging, and asset usage, organizations can ensure their brand is represented accurately across all channels by preventing the misuse of logos, colors, and messaging, all of which can reflect poorly on their brand.
Improves efficiency
Clear brand governance also helps improve efficiency, allowing teams to spend less time clarifying brand rules or reworking materials that don’t fit standards. Through brand governance, organizations can establish clear rules and a system of record for managing assets and optimizing approvals, access, and discoverability. This gives teams clear guidelines and approved resources that speed up time to market for campaigns, allowing marketing and creative teams to spend more time on strategy and innovation than correcting inconsistencies.
The growing complexity of brand management
It’s clear that brand content governance is of the utmost importance, as there are hundreds of touchpoints where brands must show up consistently, including web, social media, email campaigns, mobile apps, digital ads, influencer partnerships, and even emerging spaces like AR/VR. That said, its challenges are ever-growing in complexity, as each channel has its own formats, requirements, and audience expectations.
Globalization adds another layer, where brands may work with multiple teams and external partners in several different languages and cultures. In each new market, brands must navigate new compliance concerns and messaging while maintaining consistent branding. For example, with the localization of content, translations may alter tone of voice, regional imagery might stray from the brand’s visual style, and local teams may modify layouts or logos to fit cultural preferences. Without a system of record to manage and approve these localized versions, small deviations can add up, leading to a fragmented brand identity.
Unfortunately, traditional tools simply can’t keep up with these new demands. They don’t offer enough visibility or control over the content lifecycle or brand usage. This can result in content chaos, outdated brand guidelines, and compliance concerns. That’s where AI-powered DAM enters the picture, serving as a foundational system of record for all branded assets to ensure clear governance and control.
How AI-powered DAM supports brand governance
To remedy the challenges many global enterprises face in today’s digital age, many organizations are turning to AI-powered digital asset management (DAM) platforms like Bynder. These systems are revolutionizing how organizations conduct their brand governance, safeguarding brand integrity while making governance accessible across teams and markets.
System of record for brand assets
Bynder’s cloud-based DAM serves as a foundational system of record for all digital content, helping global teams store, manage, find, and deliver assets more efficiently. With clearly defined metadata, rights information, and usage guidelines that define how each asset should be used, teams can confidently rely on their DAM to keep campaigns consistent and uphold brand standards across regions, channels, and partners. This clarity helps protect the brand, reduce the risk of off-brand or outdated assets entering the market, and give organizations a foundation they can trust as they scale.
AI-powered capabilities
Bynder’s AI Search Experience capabilities enhance the discoverability of assets and reduce the accidental use of outdated or off-brand content. With the help of Bynder’s AI Search capabilities, including Face Recognition, Image Similarity Search, Natural Language Search, Speech-to-Text, Search by Image, and Text-in-Image Search, teams can get content to market faster, improve content reuse, and save costs on reworking content.
With the help of Bynder’s agentic AI, teams can also increase efficiency with customizable AI agents that automate time-consuming tasks. Regarding internal brand governance, Bynder’s AI agents can automate oversight that once required manual review, such as detecting when a non-compliant or duplicate asset is uploaded to the DAM. Plus, human oversight is ensured through the AI Control Center, which gives users visibility and control over their AI-generated outputs at scale.
Governance agents can also help identify where and how assets are used across the internet. Through an Asset Webscan, Bynder’s governance agents can detect websites that are currently displaying or embedding a selected asset. Teams can then identify assets being used past their usage rights period or without authorization, reducing exposure to brand risks. These agents can be used to detect legacy branding, old logos, or outdated styles, as well as track the distribution of time-sensitive or seasonal campaign assets to ensure they’re taken down or replaced once the campaign period ends.
Permission-based access
Bynder’s DAM features robust safeguards to enhance brand governance. With permission-based access and user roles, Bynder can help brands control who sees what and minimize the proliferation of potentially misused or non-compliant assets. With permission-based assets, brands can also apply sharing and viewing restrictions to each asset, collection, user, or group of users to avoid potential information leaks.
With Bynder’s AI Agents, organizations can also ensure enterprise-grade governance by setting permissions on who can create, modify, or delete agents using natural language prompts, which can be found on the Agent Overview page.
Automated workflows and approvals
With Bynder, DAM users can keep content on-brand thanks to built-in review and approval processes. In CX User Community, teams can create consistent brand stories with customizable hubs that reflect their brand’s unique identity. Teams can also easily share the brand vision and guidelines with internal and external stakeholders to ensure consistent brand representation.
Bynder’s DAM platform helps teams transform their content operations by automating workflows. Create content like images, videos, and GIFs in less time and maintain brand integrity with customizable templates in Studio. Or, use Asset Workflow to brief, proof, and approve digital assets in a collaborative and efficient way to manage content versions, capture vital feedback, and maintain brand compliance. Content Workflow infuses AI in content marketing by enabling teams to transform and repurpose their content using AI that can draft, edit, translate, and adapt tone to ensure brand governance at scale.
Usage insights
Monitoring how your assets are being used is a key brand governance best practice. With Bynder Analytics, teams can see how brand assets are used across regions, teams, and channels and identify where brand standards are being followed—or not. This can help you easily identify and address repeated misuse before it has a negative impact on your brand.
Build a stronger, smarter brand with AI-powered DAM
Strong brand identity and thorough brand governance are key to your business’s success. It helps build customer relationships and maintain a strong brand reputation that shows up consistently across every touchpoint. Bynder’s AI-powered DAM supports your brand governance with the help of AI, including AI-powered search, configurable AI agents, and solutions like brand guidelines, templates, and content hubs to ensure governance at scale.
