For organisations in the financial services arena, governed by strict compliance regulations, the pressure to manage images and brands is even greater. It’s one thing to fall foul of a photographer when the copyright terms of the use of their image have been breached through simple carelessness, but quite another to discover that an error, or an out-of-date graphic in a product guide, or a form, puts the company at odds with the Financial Services Authority (FSA) itself. At Standard Life, the largest mutual life assurance company in Europe, the implementation of a digital asset management system aims to use the latest technology to safeguard corporate images and brands, and act as an important tool in the organisation’s compliance strategy.

With its headquarters in Edinburgh, Standard Life provides a wide range of life, savings, protection, pension, annuity banking and permanent health insurance products. It is a truly international business, having spent the last decade diversifying into new markets around the globe, from Spain and Germany to India and Hong Kong. In the UK alone, where it has one of the strongest brands in the insurance market, the company has around 3,000 items of literature to support its products, all produced with a range of text and visual materials. In 2001, marketing communications manager Fiona Davidson decided the time was ripe to overhaul its Digital Asset Management strategy.

The main event

“We have thousands of visuals in our library,” says Davidson. “Historically, they’ve been managed by many different manual processes that didn’t necessarily communicate with each other very well.

“Every time we needed to retrieve an item, it could be difficult to find out where it was stored, who actually owned it and whether we still had the copyright to use it. One of the biggest problems was that we sometimes had photographers call us to notify us that we were using something to which our rights had expired. The other crucial aspect is that, as we’re governed by the FSA, we need to demonstrate that we’re doing everything possible to comply with regulations. If there is a legislative change that impacts on our corporate or customer literature, whether it’s an application form or a product guide, we have previously had to make a manual search through the material to locate it. We needed to hone in on that.”

One option, of course, would have been to outsource the management of digital assets to an agency, but after investigating the market, Davidson and her team felt the autonomy of a corporate system was the next logical step. Not only would it avoid the overheads of an agency relationship, but it could also be the foundation for a strategy that will lead, in time, to the development of a tool that will have far reaching business benefits across the company. Consultation and research were paramount. Rather than rushing into a decision, the team at Standard Life took a year to assess the needs of the marketing customer communications department.

“We contacted our key stakeholders to discuss the difficulties that our old processes presented,” says Davidson. “Then we looked at the DAM system market in detail. It soon became clear that a customisable platform was essential: most vendors offered aspects that we could use, but our requirements dictated choosing a system that required the least work to customise. So we spoke to suppliers, attended many demonstrations and symposia and eventually settled on Picdar’s Media Mogul software.”

That was in 2002. Since then, the customer and the supplier have been working closely on the development of a secure hosted version of the software. The marketing customer communications department’s digital assets are stored in ‘zones’ according to the type of media, making location and retrieval a straightforward process.

The system acts as a centralised asset store, radically reducing the chance of duplication, and saving Standard Life commissioning, reproduction and copyright costs. It also brands the asset so that the owner – for example, Standard Life Bank, Standard Life Investments or The Standard Life Assurance Company – is always identified.

“It’s been very important to streamline the project so that departments feel confident in the ownership of their material, and are automatically alerted when an asset is coming up for compliance review, dead dates (when material falls out of common view) or copyright reversion,” says Ged Walls, project manager at Picdar.

Details are attached to the file of each asset, defining copyright status, accreditation, currency, compliance, date limitations and embargoes. The system is highly secure, allowing Standard Life to create user types for different levels of access.

Cultural shift

The basic premise of a digital asset management system – to impose order on a library of disparate material – is its main selling point for anyone tasked with managing a complex portfolio of digitally stored assets.

According to Davidson, the automation of the simplest tasks – such as running a search, in itself a relatively small element of the management process – makes a strong theoretical case for investment. This project didn’t entail a great deal of cost benefit analysis to get off the ground, but in the long term, it is likely to have positive ramifications for a wider community than the initial group of users in Standard Life’s Marketing Customer Communications department.

“When you show people how – when new legislation, a rate change or some external event effects a corporate – publication, they can identify all the affected material with a quick search, it tends to remove the need to justify a new system,” says Davidson.

“We’ve been fortunate in that respect. People can see how it will improve their jobs and the processes they follow. For example, to be automatically notified a month before material is due for compliance sign-off, or to receive an e-mail notifying the expiry of a copyright license, saves a considerable amount of time.”

The future

Standard Life’s digital asset management strategy is initially intended to enable the company’s marketing customer communications department to reduce turnaround times and improve efficiency for its internal customers. But in the long term, Davidson says it will become an increasingly important marketing tool for the whole company, integrated with the business structure. External customers will be provided with the benefit of access to the system in due course.

“First, we need to build a picture of tangible benefits,” says Davidson. “Just rolling out a system doesn’t mean much to people unless they can see how it will help them to share and view information – possibly even across borders – and give them a different way of working. But just by giving people the chance to see what’s available, and who to contact about using it, digital asset management really has the potential to open out to the whole company.”