If you’re a brand leader managing complex communications, one of Australia’s largest banks believes its time for you to centralise, approve, standardise and manage your brand assets.

Paul Siedle is ANZ’s head of brand experience, who leads a team that has taken brand education and governance to the next level with IntelligenceBank’s online BrandHub.

Recently, Siedle revealed to B&T why he believes having an online brand portal that centralises brand assets is absolutely critical to his department’s operations.

Paul, why is an online brand portal important for ANZ?

Our brand is the sum of all our parts – people, experiences, products, values, and the way we look and sound. Having our brand guidelines and assets online ensures our brand elements are being shared consistently and effectively while helping us deliver on our brand values and promises.

As a brand team, we work with over 130,000 brand approved digital assets such as brand guidelines, photos, audio files, video, templates, documents, logos, colour palette, typography, icons, and the list goes on.

Given the high consumption of digital media files across our 50,000 internal and external users, it’s critical that we have a robust BrandHub to digitally showcase brand guidelines, create instant access to approved brand assets such as logos, fonts and brand campaigns. campaign management and campaign templates.

Since we work in a highly regulated environment, managing brand compliance from a design, legal and regulatory compliance perspective is critical for us as an enterprise brand to maintain brand equity.

IntelligenceBank’s online brand portal and digital asset solution help us do just that by making it easy to centralise and share our brand assets with our entire team—including external partners and third party agencies.

By having our guidelines and assets centrally located with the correct access, it provides us with the reassurance that our brand will not be compromised.

What problem did adopting an online brand platform solve for ANZ?

ANZ provides banking and financial products and services to around eight million individual and business customers and operates in and across 33 markets. Given our international geographic footprint and diverse audience reach, our digital brand guidelines and asset solution enable our 90-plus agencies, 50,000 users and stakeholders to be able to find up-to-date brand assets remotely, quickly, and securely.

Our brand portal is integral in solving three key needs: international access, improving efficiencies, and remote brand control. As a brand owner, I want to make sure that our organisation is not only consistently living and breathing our brand guidelines but is also getting maximum mileage and return from all of our existing assets and content.

Access and permissions are an integral component to our software solution and ensure that each individual user is granted the correct level of access. Take for example our sponsorship commitments where we sponsor a diverse range of activities both at a national and local level—there are times when we need to collaborate with third-party channels and share approved co-branded logos, guidelines, campaign assets, or even product shots.

Our access and permissions’ feature allows us to easily and securely distribute approved creative assets to external parties and internal users with efficiency and without compromising our brand.

In addition, while working in a highly regulated industry we cannot afford to allow stakeholders to use wrong file versions or even waste time and money on content duplication.  Therefore, having a digital solution that can host, manage, share, repurpose, automate and track our brand assets is critical in making sure that we’re publishing our offerings in a manner that is up-to-date, relevant and meaningful.

How does the platform help you keep control of your brand identity and improve your overall marketing performance?

Our brand is the sum of all our parts—people, experiences, products, values and the way we look and sound. Having our brand guidelines online ensures our brand elements are being shared consistently and effectively while helping us deliver on our brand values and promises.

Our brand portal not only shares our branded assets, but it also governs the usage and application of our brand across thousands of creative outputs.

Therefore, using an online brand guideline to share our brands across our footprint has never been easier to communicate, educate and direct our users to the relevant branded assets.  Without it, we’d be at risk of our guidelines not being properly followed or even broadcasting noncompliant creative across our ecosystem.

Our bespoke hub ensures that all of our branded communications are approved, meet industry standards, reduces the risk of negative impressions and improves our overall marketing performance.  Not only does it provide us with peace of mind that we have complete control of our brand, but it also enables us to focus less on administrative tasks and apply more strategic thinking around our customer segments and value propositions.

Do you have any tips for brands that are yet to adopt a digital strategy for their brand assets?

As a marketing leader, my job is to balance the tension between the speed and quality of our branded communications.  By digitising our brand guidelines certainly transforms the way that our stakeholders navigate and interact across our multiple brands.

If you’re a brand leader who manages multiple stakeholders and complex communications, where both sign-off and access needs to occur through multiple departments, I would most certainly suggest considering a single system to centralise, approve, standardise and manage your brand assets.

Having such a powerful system has helped us enable strong inter-functional collaboration and gives me the bandwidth to spend less time on managing requests and more time delivering high-quality brand experiences.

To learn more about how an online brand portal can transform your brand governance experience, download the ANZ Case Study or register for a complimentary online demo.

Featured image source: iStock/Veni