BRAND CONTENT MANAGEMENT

EXECUTIVE WHITE PAPER

Solutions for Business

Consulting. Technology. Results.
Marketing challenges II. Increasing complexity
…at the same time, the process of getting brand content to
In search of ROI market is becoming more and more complex.

• Campaign complexity: The number of potential market

According to the Marketing Executives Networking Group’s
Marketing Trends Report 2010—“Marketing ROI” is the most
important concept being contemplated by marketing executives,
even beating out “Customer Satisfaction” and “Customer
Retention.”
Marketers are being pushed to deliver clear and targeted brand
communication to market faster than ever, while at the same
time being forced to slash budgets due to macro-economic
realities. Pressure to improve marketing ROI is coming from
the highest levels of the organization; budgets are receiving a
level of scrutiny from the Board and C-Suite that has not been
seen in the past.
Marketers are aware of the need to improve marketing
operations, yet few feel they have been able to significantly
move the bar.
segments in a typical campaign is growing exponentially
due to globalization, channel proliferation and an explosion
in consumer data availability and level of granularity.
• Collaboration: Successful creation and distribution of brand
content requires broad collaboration within the enterprise and
across a growing number of external partners.
• Digital asset management: Enterprises must store and
manage a vast amount of brand content—copy, video, images,
packaging artwork and many others—and be able to convert
and distribute that content through multiple channels
• Digital marketing: There is a lot of buzz around new and
emerging digital marketing techniques and technologies such
as social media, without a clear understanding of where and
when to use them, or the return on investment they deliver.

The opportunity to improve marketing operations is ripe.

According to a study by Interwoven, 22% of marketing dollars
are allocated for production, management and distribution
of marketing content. Considering that marketing budgets
generally range from 5-30% of revenue, spend on Brand
Content Management represents a considerable piece of
Only 11.5 % of marketers report
most operating budgets. This represents a significant handling the global coordination of
opportunity for cost savings and increased effectiveness marketing services with a robust
for those willing to take on the challenge of transforming
marketing operations platform that
Brand Content Management capabilities.
optimizes resources and processes.1
A two-fold dilemma:
I. The need for speed
Creative professionals spend an
Marketers are expected to get accurate and effective brand
content (messages, campaigns, packaging and product content, average of 1 out of every 10 hours of
etc.) to end-consumers at blazing speed... their time on file management. Their
• Campaigns: Fast moving markets create the need to execute prime activity: searching. The average
marketing campaigns with fresh product imagery and creative person looks for a media file
marketing collateral in ever-shortening timeframes. 83 times a week and fails to find it
• Packaging and product content: Shorter product lifecycles 35% of the time.2
mean getting products, and associated brand content, to market
quickly to avoid potential lost revenue and market share.

• Consumer dialogue: Consumers continue to demand access to

brand-related information immediately, and in any channel, and
also expect two-way dialogue with brands in near- or real-time.

1
Marketing Supply Chain Institute’s
“Define Where to Streamline” report
2 2
Gistics Research
The result: chaos
The complexity involved in aligning all of the moving parts
required to get brand content to the end-consumer often results
in marketing operations that are neither efficient nor effective.
Marketing operating models have not kept pace with the
rapidly evolving ways in which consumers consume content
and engage with brands. Most organizations are still organized
around more traditional marketing campaign and product
development lifecycles, constantly lagging behind the demands
of their consumers. Gone are the days where campaigns are
built, executed and left alone in a one-way communication to
consumers. Today’s campaigns must be executed, monitored
and adjusted based on knowing the targeted consumers and
the way in which consumers are reacting and interacting, in a
constant, iterative cycle.
Because marketers are forced to keep up with the consumers
and technology of today using the tools and operating models
of the past, they quickly get bogged down with non-value
added activities and lose focus on what should be their primary
concern—driving marketing return on investment. One of
the largest challenges is the difficulty in managing marketing
efforts across organizational silos and among external partners
(agencies, suppliers, distributors, etc.), which significantly
increases time to market. These silos also result in a lack of
visibility into existing brand content, creating duplicated costs
and effort. On top of it all, most marketing organizations
struggle to maintain proper governance over brand content
such as usage rights, product claims, legal statements, brand
standards and other requirements. This leads to errors that
negatively impact the customer experience and increase the
risk of potential fees and penalties.
Nearly two-thirds of senior marketers
have never undertaken a comprehensive
audit of the costs and processes that
contribute to their marketing supply
chain and most admit their resources
and suppliers are poorly integrated
across global networks, reports the
Chief Marketing Office (CMO) Council.
3 “Define Where to Streamline” report
The opportunity
Reduce the noise
The number of creative handoffs, reviews and approvals
required to get a single piece of brand content to market can
be enormous. The problem is exacerbated by the number of
versions required to meet the needs of numerous consumer
segments. As the volume of interactions grows exponentially,
so do the corresponding opportunities for error. All of this
“noise” makes it difficult to expose and eliminate the non
value- added activities in the marketing supply chain.
Marketing transformation efforts can be daunting given the
number of teams, processes, technologies, partners and
channels involved. The key is taking action now and building
big improvements off of smaller successes. Some of the largest
challenges marketers face are also some of the most easily
addressed with the proper transformation agenda. Too often
the focus is on chasing an elusive ROI measure or getting caught
up in the latest buzz around new technologies and distribution
channels, rather than building the infrastructure required to
efficiently develop and deliver effective brand content. The
channel and method in which brand content is delivered to
consumers is irrelevant if the content creation process is too
slow and resulting assets are sub-standard.
Marketers are realizing that, in order to maximize the
effectiveness of brand communications, it is essential to first
master some foundational capabilities. Some good places to
look for opportunities include addressing organizational silos,
improving the creative development process and enabling
better collaboration with partners.
Organizational silos
40.7% of marketers blamed functional silos and resistance
to operational marketing process as the greatest obstacle to
marketing supply chain effectiveness.3
Creative management
A significant number of marketers— 40.5%—identified creative
design and development as an area in the marketing supply
chain with the greatest potential for process, productivity and
performance improvements.4
Agency inter-dependencies
with suppliers
32.5 % (of marketers) believed established vendor and supplier
relationships and loyalties were a significant contributor to
supply chain cost and ineffectiveness.5
Marketing Supply Chain Institute’s
3, 4, 5
Making the case for Brand
Content Management
Organizations that have embarked on the effort of identifying all
of the constituents of their marketing supply chain are usually
A 2008 study by The Aberdeen
surprised at the levels of complexity and redundant effort that Group found that Marketing Asset
unfold. Typically, many different marketing “islands” exist in Management “Best-in-Class”
near or total isolation. Brand managers, corporate marketing,
organizations have seen significant
global packaging and product development teams, corporate
communications/public relations and a number of other benefits from enhanced management
functional teams follow different sets of processes, maintain of brand content:
their own repository of brand content and work with their
own network of external partners. • 22% performance increase in
Tackling the challenges of creating and managing brand
year over year Return on Marketing
content across all of these “islands” can yield substantial Investment
return on investment, yet remains one of the last bastions of
inefficiency within the corporate ecosystem. The value drivers
• 58% improved brand effectiveness
for better content creation and management processes can be versus the past year
categorized into four major streams:
• 62% reduced time to market
• creation of brand content
year over year
• consolidation of brand content

• automation of creative workflows

• collaboration between internal teams and

across external partners

Creation
The adage “Content is King” is still true and being able to
effectively create and manage it is more important than ever.
Key to the identification and creation of content are optimized
search capabilities. Quick and easy access to assets through
dynamic search functionality such as matchup of keyword
search phrases, content attributes, and content linkage, is
an important factor in the ‘time equals money’ equation and
getting fresh content to market rapidly. Equally important,
once content exists, is security (i.e., privileged control on
distribution of assets) and digital rights management.
Assigning and enforcing business policies (i.e., tracking
usage, expiration dates) throughout the life-cycle of digital
assets ensures accountability and consistency in maintaining
corporate brand identity.
Consolidation
Maintaining brand content in multiple repositories results in
considerable creation and storage costs, as well as missed
opportunities to reuse or repurpose existing assets. Additionally,
allowing agencies to store and manage brand related content
creates an inherent switching cost that sub-optimizes agency
spend. The result is excessive agency fees for locating and
distributing assets and reduced leverage across the agency
supply chain.
According to GISTICS Research, a Digital Asset Management
system can reduce the amount of time spent on file
management by more than 85%. Instead of finding a file
only 65% of the time, a DAM system will enable users to
find something 95% of the time.

4
Automation
Creative workflow automation is a powerful tool for decreasing
time to market and increasing the quality and accuracy of brand
content. Automation allows marketers to communicate changes
instantly across geographies and over a myriad of teams
involved in the brand content creation process. This serves to
break down the brand and marketing silos, delivering a unified,
streamlined process. Some major benefits achieved through
automation include reduced marketing and legal review cycles,
improved cross-channel messaging, greater accountability
through a reliable and accurate audit trail and reduced penalties
and fines resulting from the use of incorrect or expired content.

Collaboration
Highly collaborative processes enabled by the use of
technology can deliver significant value by reducing the
number of interactions and rework typically required to
get brand content to market within/across companies and
When asked how technology investments
geographies. For example, a study performed by AMR Research impacted performance, “Best-in-Class”
found that “It takes 22 days on average for a consumer products were the only organizations to consistently
company to review and approve packaging artwork. But using
understand the link between technology
collaborative artwork management technology, this time can
be reduced by 30% and packaging scrap by 1.2% (as a investment and performance:
percentage of revenue).” 6
How did the digital asset management
Collaboration also means providing field marketers and investment impact performance?
selling organizations with access to self-service portals
where they can view, customize and distribute the content • 69% indicated decreased asset creation
they need to be successful. And with powerful version control
cycle time
capabilities they can be confident that the material being
distributed is the most recent version and has been approved for • 63% indicated agency fees decreased
the markets they serve.
• 40% indicated time spent transferring
files decreased
• 63% indicated time spent locating files
decreased 7

6
“Want to Reduce Artwork Approval Time by 30%? Try Collaborative
Artwork Management,” by Lora Cecere and Fenella Sirkisoon,
AMR Research, July 2009.

7
“The Marketers Guide to Justifying Investments in Digital Asset
Management,” Aberdeen Group, May 2009. 5
The solution
A successful Brand Content Management solution optimizes brand content creation, management and delivery­­—
by connecting people, standardizing processes and simplifying distribution to channels.

Brand Content Management (BCM) Model

FUNCTIONAL TEAMS
Single source of in-progress Brand
and approved brand content. Marketing Brand content available to
Managers
anyone, anytime, anywhere
Corporate Interactive (governed by flexible,
Brand content management
Comm. Managers role-based access rights).
related data integrated with
Marketing and ERP systems.
BRAND CONTENT
INTEGRATION PARTNER COLLABORATION
Audio Sales Materials
MRM and CRM Systems Images Packaging Agencies Suppliers
ERP Systems Documents Labeling
Proprietary Systems Translations Artwork
Copy Print Media
Data Warehouse (e.g. BI) Web Content
Video Partners Partners
Third party adaptors
CHANNELS
Pro
ce

Standardized, repeatable
se Mobile Email
s

workflows and management of s Packaging and

projects, tasks, resources and KPIs.
delivery of brand
Web Print content to any channel.

Connecting people Simplifying distribution to channels

Seamless and collaborative access to brand content: Efficient distribution of digital brand content:

• Understand and optimize the complex interactions between • Enable corporate marketing to manage the brand regardless of
enterprise teams and external partners to eliminate bottlenecks channel. Marketing content can be prepared for distribution through
multiple channels, including newspapers, magazines, SMS, circulars,
• Track vendors and costs direct mail, ad collateral, e-channels, point of purchase, packaging, etc.
• Real-time or offline collaboration and annotation • Maintaining control of global brand content while providing field-
• Content certification and governance based personnel with access to approved assets and the ability to
customize them, is the best of both worlds—corporate marketing
• Version control and auditing controls brand and messaging, while franchisees, dealers or field-
based sales personnel introduce the type of personalized content
Standardizing processes that boosts response rates

Streamline brand content creation and reuse:

Integrating technology, data, etc.
• Content certification processes tightly manage copy elements,
Low cost of ownership and ease of use:
helping ensure that accurate copy is available to all stakeholders
on a global basis • Enterprise SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) that employs
XML web services for scalability and flexibility, and integration
• Process automation with existing systems
• Rules-based workflows • Seamless integration with enterprise systems through a plug-in
• Integrated review and approval mechanisms framework that enables easy and secluded updates to the system

• Employs Web 2.0 technology to improve application usability

and performance

• Ability to adapt to business process changes by using a Rules Engine

6
Successful Brand Content Management
requires a collection of critical capabilities
Automate creative workflow processes
BCM platforms bring a new level of efficiency and control to
the content creation and production process, by leveraging the
Internet to connect marketers with other internal teams within
the enterprise, and with their external suppliers. A suite of
tightly integrated, web-based software modules enables rapid
transfers, sharing, annotation, collaboration and approval of files
in real time. Sophisticated tools provide annotation capabilities
for a range of multi-channel assets during development,
including video and web content. Every feature and function
offered within an integrated suite is designed to compress time
to market, minimize errors and reduce cost.
Manage your business with a dashboard view
Not only do BCM Solutions optimize the asset creation
process, they also create a dashboard view of all projects in
real time, from creative through execution. Advanced reporting
capabilities can be integrated with existing ERP systems. BCM
Solutions also provide a documented audit trail that facilitates
regulatory compliance. This breadth of visibility provides the
data needed to optimize efficiency from concept creation
through marketing fulfillment.
Marketing fulfillment
A BCM Platform offers the capability to easily create
customized content, with variable data authoring software
that generates full-color personalized communications. A
feature-rich storefront makes it easy to order static, print-ready,
personalized or customized items. Moreover, printing and
fulfillment are automated for maximum efficiency.
Streamline execution
BCM workflow solutions provide the control to create new
projects online and upload files for automatic processing at
the printer, and through digital channels. Job tickets, color
information and brand metadata automatically flow into
the content ordering process, compressing lead times and
extracting cost. Projects in production can be proofed and
managed online, with status available any time.
7
Eliminate the chaos
A successful Brand Content Management initiative simplifies
the alignment of people, metrics, processes and technology to
make marketing operations more efficient and effective.
A comprehensive Brand Content Management program should
include the following high-level initiatives:
Organizational alignment
Organizational alignment defines how various teams within the
marketing and brand ecosystem interact and share knowledge
and information. The critical output defines appropriate
governance structures and balances control over brand content
while eliminating bottlenecks.
Performance management
Another important building block for successful Brand Content
Management is the establishment of performance metrics and
incentives, creating the right behaviors to optimize marketing
operations, reduce costs and increase effectiveness. This
capability enables consistent monitoring of supplier and partner
performance and ensures that relationships are being leveraged
across the organization.
Process transformation
Key workflows must be re-engineered to reduce cycle times
and eliminate non value-add activities. This effort allows the
organization to gain visibility into programs, campaigns and
project tasks —specifically identifying who is doing what,
where, when and why.
Brand Content Management platform
implementation
Before implementing a Brand Content Management platform,
it is important to understand and evaluate the existing and
prospective types of brand-related content and the way in
which it is utilized, transformed, shared and distributed. Once
the strategy has been defined, brand content is centralized in
a repository that is accessible across the organization. Next,
processes for routing, reviewing and approving brand content
are automated. A governance structure is defined to ensure
that the correct brand content is being used for the correct
application and that content has been certified and is compliant
with brand standards and regulatory requirements.
Kodak Solutions for Business—
management consulting
A reliable and dedicated partner you can trust
The Kodak most people know touches 40% of all commercially
printed materials, manages 5 billion photos for more than 75
million Kodak Gallery members and has been an integral part
of every Academy Award Best Picture ever selected. Kodak
brings that heritage to the management of images and
information in life and work.
Today, 70% of Kodak’s worldwide revenues are from business-
to-business solutions. With more than 20 years of experience
in offering business-to-business products and services, Kodak
is no stranger to the world of managing complex business
processes for customers.
Combining intellectual property with an experienced team
of industry professionals worldwide, Kodak offers clients
a strategic advantage in enterprise marketing and brand
execution. Core capabilities provide business solutions and
technology that enable measureable return on investment,
accelerate time to market, protect brand equity and optimize
marketing operations.

For more information about solutions

from Kodak :
Visit www.kodak.com/go/ksb

Eastman Kodak Company

343 State Street
Rochester, NY 14650 USA

©Kodak, 2010. Kodak is a trademark of Eastman Kodak Company.

U.USR.164.0610.en.01 (K-164)