How Landor Associates Delivers Branding
Services in the Digital Age
The Cumulus Solution for Building Brand
Relationships through the Internet
by Geoffrey E. Bock, Principal
Bock & Company 2006
A
Pioneer in the Global Branding Industry
A holistic approach to brand management When it comes to branding, Landor
Associates does it all. From branding services, including brand
research and valuation, to brand positioning and architecture.
From naming and nomenclature systems to corporate identity and
consumer packaging design. From branded environments and brand
equity management to brand engagement and, yes, even digital
branding.
It's little wonder that this branding giant's portfolio includes
names such as Microsoft, FedEx, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi,
BP, GE, Delta, Frito-Lay, Hyatt Hotels, Levi's, Japan Airlines,
British Airways, Cathay Pacific and LG Group.
Nor is it any surprise that Landor—which turned to Canto's
Cumulus software nine years ago to help manage the valuable
digital assets that represent its bread and butter—is
counting even more heavily on Cumulus today.
Founded in 1941, Landor pioneered many of the research, design,
and brand consulting methodologies that are now standard in
the global branding industry. To say Landor takes a holistic
approach to brand creation and management is an understatement.
Landor has a global network of 22 offices in 17 countries. It
is part of the WPP Group plc, one of the world's leading marketing
and communications concerns.
Producing brand assets As part of its brand management
services, Landor develops and manages a wide range of brand
assets for its clients. Landor produces the logos, photographs,
packaging art work, advertising, and a host of other graphical
elements that encapsulate the client's brand identity.
These brand assets also form the basis for generating new business,
entering competitions, and documenting Landor's 60 plus year
history.
Getting started with Cumulus Landor adopted Cumulus as its digital
asset management system in 1997. Reinforcing its reputation
as a leader in its industry, Landor has steadily extended the
capabilities of Cumulus to manage branded assets across the
organization. Landor relies on Cumulus to provide the essential
capabilities for delivering branding services over the Web,
and for building long term relationships with clients.
The
Need for Digital Asset Management
The challenge of analog media assets For more than fifty years, Landor
relied on analog media assets—film negatives and prints,
hard copy art work, and 35 mm slides—for visualizing a
company's brand identity. Organizing and managing the analog
media archives was an ongoing challenge. The issues only got
worse with the advent of digital media.
Finding even recently archived assets was a time-consuming problem.
"When a client or an employee in one of our offices wanted
to see the work we had done, a request was sent to San Francisco.
Yet it was impossible for the person making the request to know
exactly what was available," continues Orr. "As a result, our
fulfillment process was often a matter of guesswork. It took
a considerable amount of time and money to create, duplicate,
and ship the slides back and forth. We knew there had to be
a more efficient way for all of Landor's worldwide offices to
access the brand assets we had created."
Beyond scanning and filing: Finding digital
assets In the early 1990s, Landor started
scanning the slides it had already created, making it easier
as well as more timely and cost effective to transmit brand
assets electronically. As digital photography emerged, shooting
high-resolution digitized photographs replaced the process of
scanning film-based images. Landor could begin to anticipate
the business benefits of digital asset management.
However, these files were stored on a multitude of CD-ROMs,
organized by client and project names. The ad hoc filing system
essentially replicated the physical filing environment Landor
had historically used, only this time in electronic form. Landor
still lacked an overall online environment that would allow
for someone to quickly and easily search through the growing
number of digitized brand assets and retrieve the desired items.
Efficiently
Managing Multiple Global Brand Asset Collections
Two distinct requirements By the mid-1990s, Landor knew it
had to make the switch to a digital asset management solution.
Landor assessed its needs and determined that it had two distinct
business requirements.
Landor needed to organize, archive, and catalog all of
the brand assets (then being stored as files on CD-ROMs)
that it developed for key clients and projects.
In addition, Landor needed to create a portfolio of its
best work that anyone in the company—regardless of
location—could easily access over company-wide intranet
connections, and show to prospects and clients.
At this point, Landor decided that it needed to store assets
in a shared online repository, and turned to Cumulus for help.
A Platform for managing digital assets Landor initially adopted Cumulus
as a client/server application. Over the years, the company
has steadily enhanced its corporate intranet—Landornet—around
Cumulus's capabilities for managing digital assets. Landor now
uses Cumulus as a scalable, customizable platform for maintaining
diverse collections of brand assets.
Landor can rapidly catalogue all of its digital media assets
within a central repository. Cumulus can easily ingest and index
any type of file. Thumbnails are created automatically and stored
as part of the catalogue. Metadata fields are completely customizable
to meet the unique requirements of each asset type, project
or client. Cumulus replicates the categories of Landor's existing
filing system, ensuring that employees can continue to organize
brand assets by familiar words and phrases.
Visual access for brand assets Landor uses Cumulus to store brand
assets for its key clients and projects in a series of online
catalogs. These catalogs, such as one for a leading international
beverage company that contains records for over 30,000 assets,
are managed by Landor's in-house teams of brand asset managers
and indexers.
Indexers use a Cumulus desktop application (running on a Macintosh
or a Windows system) to catalog and store digital assets. Brand
asset managers and other company employees then retrieve and
download assets using a Cumulus desktop application.
Landor develops the information architecture for categorizing
assets based on the brand architecture and nomenclature systems
that it creates for each client. Landor can thus tag brand assets
by the familiar terms used by the in-house project team to describe
images. (See Illustration 1). Then, when project or account
managers request photos or other images to send a client, Landor's
brand asset managers simply access the shared repository, enter
the search criteria, and find all relevant results in a matter
of seconds.
Illustration 1: Project teams
at Landor use Cumulus to organize assets by sources beginning
with project numbers, then brands, and finally asset categories
within brands.
Virtual Slide City Landor also uses Cumulus to develop
Virtual Slide City, a globally accessible portfolio of its best
work. This portfolio encompasses a collection of over 10,000
images, vetted and approved for non-proprietary distribution,
that company employees can show to prospects when generating
new business proposals, and to the public at large for public
presentations. Landor adds about 1,000 images per year to this
collection.
Landor manages the assets within the native Cumulus client application,
while company employees access this collection through the customized
Web browser. (See Illustration 2.)
Illustration 2: Landor uses Cumulus
to categorize and store assets for Virtual Slide City by predefined
categories. The assets are then made available to company employees
through Landornet, the company intranet.
Deploying an extensible network-centric
architecture In fact, Landor relies on Cumulus
as a key server within Landornet. "Cumulus provides the powerful
capabilities of a shared metadata store, enabling us to connect
the client/server database into our corporate intranet," says
Matt Sherman, Director of Knowledge Sharing and manager of the
company's solutions development efforts. "We've been able to
take advantage of the SQL connector to Cumulus (an embedded
feature of the Cumulus Server) to replicate and store metadata
about digital assets within our SQL database."
Here is what Sherman and his technical team have deployed.
As shown in Illustration 3, Cumulus features a SQL database
integration capability. Asset metadata, stored and managed within
Cumulus, can be exported to a Microsoft SQL Server database
using an ODBC connection. Asset metadata, created and managed
in the Cumulus client, is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database
using Cumulus' ODBC connection. The asset metadata is then distributed
through Landornet, Landor's intranet environment which is based
on Microsoft's Active Server Pages.
Illustration 3. Landor relies
on Cumulus to manage the metadata about the assets while also
storing the assets themselves in a separate file server. Asset
metadata is then incorporated into Landornet, through Microsoft
SQL Server and the ODBC connector within Cumulus.
As a result, brand asset managers
and other company employees can search and access photographs
and other brand assets through the Web browser, using metadata
that is maintained by Cumulus. End users can easily access,
retrieve, and download brand assets over the Web, on their own.
Cumulus fuels a self-service environment.
Building
Business Value
Rapid implementation Landor initially implemented Cumulus
and began cataloging its brand assets in a matter of days. The
SQL database integration was also completed on schedule and
within budget, as part of the company's overall intranet development
initiative.
Presentation in hours, not days Using Cumulus, Landor has been able
to significantly improve its operational efficiency in a number
of areas.
The time to create presentations (searching for brand
assets, verifying their usefulness and appropriateness,
copying, etc.) for new business development activities has
gone from several days to a few hours.
Costs associated with shipping a portfolio of images to
up to twenty offices worldwide were completely eliminated
in favor of the Cumulus-powered Virtual Slide City.
Production costs and time associated with new projects
in the San Francisco office have been reduced by using Cumulus
to manage its in-house collection of stock photography.
Cumulus has helped Landor dramatically improve response time
and efficiency. Thus, Landor has been able to improve customer
service and increase client satisfaction and loyalty. "As Landor
produces more brand assets and expands how we use them, Cumulus
grows with us," says Orr.
Cumulus key to new opportunity
Now that Landor is managing digital assets on the Web, it can
extend and reinforce relationships with its clients by offering
companies access to all of their brand assets over the Internet.
In the not too distant future, Landor will no longer have to
send assets to its clients on request. Landor is beginning to
develop a self-service extranet for its client companies. Once
deployed, employees at Landor's client companies will be able
to connect to a Landor-maintained Web site, and retrieve the
brand assets that Landor has developed for their clients.
This is a natural evolution of Landor's overall branding services.
"We can become the brand stewards for our client companies. We
will take responsibility for managing their brand assets over
the Web," say Mains in his role as Landor's technology strategist.
"We already manage the keywords, the nomenclature, and the
brand architecture for our clients' brands. Providing our clients
with direct access to their brand assets will be a great service."
Behind the scenes and fueling this innovative business strategy
is Cumulus. Once again, it is going to play a key role in a
new business opportunity.
Landor already relies on Cumulus to manage the metadata for
cataloging and accessing its clients' brand assets. Landor already
defines the brand architecture for its clients, and then uses
Cumulus to categorize assets by company-specific keywords and
nomenclature. In the future and with only modest additional
investments, Landor will be able to extend Cumulus's capabilities
and to deploy a self-service extranet for clients to access
and retrieve brand assets over the Web. In so doing, Landor
will continue to enhance its reputation as one of the world's
leading branding and design consultancies.
Lessons Learned
Build an information architecture. Develop
the business processes to define the subject-level, operational,
and administrative metadata for categorizing digital assets.
In the case of brand management, focus on the brand architecture,
naming and nomenclature systems, categories, and keywords.
Integrate with a SQL database to deploy
digital assets across the Web. Using the SQL connector to Cumulus,
rely on Web-based applications (developed using a Web application
server) to manage, distribute, and download digital assets over
corporate intranets, extranets, and the public Internet.
Expect to develop a business strategy based
on your ability to distribute digital assets directly to your
customers over the Web. The key to success is defining up front
the content categories that your customers use to categorize
and search for photographs and other digital assets.
“With its ease of use and price point, Cumulus continues
to be the digital asset management solution that works for us,"
says Spencer Mains, Landor's Chief Technology Officer. "Cumulus
has just the essential features we need to get traction with
our clients and to succeed in the marketplace."
Spencer
Mains,
Chief Technology Officer
"Before Cumulus, we really didn't have an efficient method
for documenting, organizing, and accessing the numerous brand
assets we developed for our clients," says Chris Orr, Visual
Asset Archivist. "We had thousands of assets that we documented
in the form of conventional slides and then put into binders
grouped by client and project—all of which were centrally
stored in our San Francisco headquarters. Yet we weren't leveraging
them as effectively as we felt we could, in order to better
serve our existing clients or to help win new business."
Chris
Orr,
Visual Asset Archivist
“Brand
assets require visual access," says Orr in her capacity as the
company's professional librarian and information architect.
"Cumulus manages thumbnails of our assets regardless of their
original file format. We can centrally manage the metadata for
each client's brand asset collection. We can maintain the quality
of our clients' assets by using Cumulus as a reliable and extensible
brand asset management system."
Chris
Orr,
Visual Asset Archivist
"Cumulus provides the powerful capabilities of a shared metadata store, enabling us to connect the client/server database into our corporate intranet. We've been
able to take advantage of the SQL connector to Cumulus to replicate
and store metadata
about digital assets within our
SQL database."
Matt
Sherman,
Director of Knowledge
Sharing
About Canto
About Canto
Founded in 1990, Canto remains the leading supplier of Digital Asset Management
products and services, with more than 13,000 server systems sold worldwide,
and more than 1,000,000 user licenses. Canto products are built
upon the multi-platform Cumulus Core metadata management engine and software
framework, which enables customers to archive and manage the digital
assets used in workflows of any size, from office work groups, to multinational
enterprises.
About Bock & Company
About Bock & Company
Geoffrey Bock, Principal of Bock & Company, focuses on business strategies for content
management and collaboration. An analyst and author with over
twenty-five years industry experience, he tracks how organizations
create, organize, and manage business information to sustain
profitable relationships.
As a consultant and thought-leader, he advises software companies,
end-user organizations, and government agencies in areas of
business planning, technology innovation, and operational excellence.
Contact us:
Phone: US +1.415.495.6545 | EU +49 (0) 30 390 485-0 | Email: info@canto.com
