Brand Management

5 automotive dealer marketing lessons from The Drum’s webinar

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Beccy Furness VP Marketing
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Automotive brands were built when cars were genuinely different. Shared platforms, common suppliers, regulation, and electrification have narrowed those differences, so brand now does more of the work in persuading someone to choose one manufacturer over another.

That was the starting point for “When brand is all you’ve got: lessons from automotive leaders”, a webinar I joined with The Drum alongside Peter McLeod from Škoda and Sam Morgan from M3. Our focus was automotive dealer marketing, where brand is most exposed. Dealer networks produce more local marketing than ever, often with little oversight from headquarters.

These are the takeaways I think matter most for brand teams.

1. Off-brand automotive dealer marketing isn’t a discipline problem

Dealership teams aren’t choosing to go off-brand. They’re choosing whatever gets the job done before Saturday’s open house. If the approved route takes three days and another takes ten minutes, the ten-minute route wins.

“It’s less about policing everything… It’s more about making sure that the on-brand option is the easiest one.”

Sam Morgan, M3

What has changed is how good that alternative now looks. It used to be something slow and obviously amateur. Today it’s a free design app or a generative AI tool on a dealer’s phone, producing a polished-looking ad in a couple of minutes.

So the bar for headquarters has moved. It isn’t enough for an approved route to exist. It has to be at least as quick as the tools dealers can pick up for free, and that puts more pressure on brand teams, and the agencies and tools supporting them, than ever.

2. Strategy first, then a single home for the brand

Technology facilitates strategy; it doesn’t replace it. A brand needs to know what it wants its dealers to say in each market before any platform can help them say it.

Once that strategy exists, a single source for brand assets stops being an administrative exercise and becomes the foundation. Without one, dealers work from whatever they can find. Campaigns launch centrally but reach the network late or not at all, and headquarters can’t tell which version of the brand is in circulation.

The bigger shift is moving beyond emailing a campaign kit. A brand portal can become the system for rolling out campaigns, with headquarters brand teams and agencies feeding in campaign information, assets, and usable local templates. When a seasonal campaign launches, dealers get the pricing offers, graphics, and campaign lines in one place. They localize what they’re allowed to, then download every size and format they need to activate it across their channels.

3. Decide what’s fixed and what’s flexible, then build it in

The recurring question was how to allow local variation without ending up with competing versions of the brand. Peter explained that Škoda introduced greater flexibility into its retailer marketing templates this year, so retailers can tailor approved, on-brand assets to the models and messages that best support their local objectives.

The mechanism that makes this work is hierarchical template permissions. Brand rules are encoded into the template, and each level of the organization can change only the elements it’s authorized to change. Brand-critical elements stay fixed by design, while local variables stay open, and one template works across print, point of sale, social, and display.

“We give the retailers access to approved on-brand assets, but we allow them to tailor their advertising to the models and messages that best support their local objectives.”

Peter McLeod, Škoda

It also doesn’t have to be black and white. When templates are built by encoding your brand guidelines, you can set flexibility at a much finer level: by campaign, by channel, by individual template, or even element by element within a template.

One of our customers runs it this way. The brand team and agency at headquarters build each campaign and deliver it to local market teams. Those market teams then set the flexibility, defining which choices each region’s dealers can make. Localization happens where it makes the most sense, and dealers get real autonomy without needing design skills or being able to break the brand.

As Sam pointed out, this also frees agencies to focus on higher-value strategic and creative work, while dealerships handle routine local deliverables themselves.

4. You can’t mandate compliance, so create a pull

Dealers are independent businesses, so headquarters usually can’t simply require them to use the approved tools. Peter’s answer was to make retailers feel part of the brand journey. Škoda keeps them close to the strategy each year and has introduced an annual retail marketing conference to share it, showcase best practices, and open up a genuine two-way dialogue.

Another lever is financial. Bringing Co-Op fund management closer to brand compliance means that using approved assets becomes the quickest route to a claim, rather than a request from headquarters. The same system that produces the asset can also produce the proof, which reduces the administrative burden on the dealer, the brand, and the agency.

When one of our automotive customers brought Co-Op fund management into the platform, they saw:

  • 93% of their dealership network using the platform
  • A 50% improvement in time to market
  • A 20x increase in the volume of claims processed, which means more funded campaigns reaching the market

It isn’t the only route. Škoda has so far chosen not to tie funds directly to compliance, though it’s an approach the team has discussed. Co-Op works best where the claims process is already a friction point for dealers.

5. AI will only be as good as the brand rules you give it

AI is set to change local content production in two ways: helping dealers create on-brand material from the outset, and automatically checking what they produce against a defined design system, so central review can concentrate on the exceptions.

The responsible way to use it is risk-based. Automate low-risk checks on tightly controlled assets, and keep people involved wherever regulatory or brand exposure is higher, such as finance offers and pricing. Peter described Škoda’s approach as researching and preparing rather than rushing to switch AI on everywhere.

Both uses depend on the same thing: brand rules written down precisely enough for a machine to apply. How well a brand has set itself up for that is the best indicator of how far it can bring AI into campaign content and operations.

As marketers, we already know we need to optimize our content so that it’s cited and visible in LLMs and AI search. We need to apply the same thinking to the brand itself and optimize it to be read by AI. The more programmatic and specific our brand guidelines are, the more likely AI tools are to draw on accurate brand information, and the better we can put AI to work.

The 2026 State of AI in DAM & Content Operations report from Huddart Consulting, which Papirfly sponsored, puts organizations on a five-point operational readiness scale. Average self-reported AI success rises from 23% among organizations that aren’t ready yet to 74% among those built for AI. The report identifies readiness as the strongest predictor of AI success in its data. (Source: Huddart Consulting, 2026)

When brand is all you’ve got

The organizations that have written their brand down precisely, with clear rules, clean data, and someone accountable for it, report around three times the success with AI of those that haven’t. That work isn’t glamorous, but it protects the one thing automotive brands can’t afford to lose.

To recap, brand teams looking to keep their automotive dealer marketing on-brand should:

  • Make the approved route the fastest one for local marketing teams
  • Turn the brand portal into a system for rolling out campaigns, not just storing them
  • Encode what’s fixed and what’s flexible into templates
  • Create a pull for compliance, for example through Co-Op funding
  • Define brand rules precisely enough for AI to apply them, and build compliance in from the start

When brand is all you’ve got, the question isn’t whether AI will end up producing your dealer marketing. It’s whether it will be working from your brand or from a guess at it.

Thank you to The Drum, Peter, and Sam for a great conversation.

Watch the full webinar on demand

Hear the full discussion with Škoda and M3

Watch the full webinar on demand

Hear the full discussion with Škoda and M3

Get access to the webinar

Hear the full discussion with Škoda and M3

Get access to the webinar
Get access to the webinar

FAQs

How do automotive brands keep dealer marketing on-brand?

By making the approved route the quickest one. When dealers can find current campaign assets and adapt approved templates in minutes, they have less reason to build their own materials elsewhere.

What should a brand portal for a dealer network include?

Campaign information, approved assets, and local templates, with every size and format dealers need to activate across their channels. At its best, it works as a system for rolling out campaigns rather than a file store.

How do templates let dealers localize without breaking the brand?

Brand rules are encoded into the template, and each level of the organization can change only what it’s authorized to change. Brand-critical elements stay fixed, while local details such as offers and dealer information stay open.

Can Co-Op funding improve dealer brand compliance?

It can. When Co-Op claims run through the same platform that produces the assets, using approved templates becomes the fastest route to getting paid, and the platform can provide the proof needed for the claim.

What does a brand need before using AI for automotive dealer marketing?

Brand rules defined precisely enough for a machine to apply, clean and consistent data, and clear ownership. Human oversight should stay in place wherever regulatory or brand risk is higher.

Table of contents:

  1. 1. Off-brand automotive dealer marketing isn’t a discipline problem
  2. 2. Strategy first, then a single home for the brand
  3. 3. Decide what’s fixed and what’s flexible, then build it in
  4. 4. You can’t mandate compliance, so create a pull
  5. 5. AI will only be as good as the brand rules you give it
  6. When brand is all you’ve got
  7. FAQs
Brand Management

Your complete guide to cooperative advertising

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Rosie Sweeting Account Manager
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This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.

Cooperative advertising is when a brand and its local partners share the cost of advertising: the manufacturer pays part of the bill, and the dealer, retailer or franchisee runs the ad in their own market. It is one of the biggest pools of marketing money most people never hear about.

Done well, Co-Op advertising puts a national brand into hundreds of local markets at a fraction of the cost. Done badly, it pays partners to run ads the brand would never have approved.

This guide covers what Co-Op advertising is, how the funding works, the three main types, real examples, and how to keep every Co-Op ad on-brand when hundreds of partners are creating their own.

What is cooperative advertising?

Cooperative advertising is a cost-sharing arrangement in which a manufacturer or brand pays back part of the advertising costs of its retailers, dealers or franchisees, as long as the ads feature its products and follow its rules. The brand gains local reach. The partner gains a bigger budget than it could afford alone.

You will also see it called Co-Op advertising or Co-Op marketing. To searchers and to most marketing teams, the terms mean the same thing: shared funding for local marketing that promotes the brand.

How does Co-Op advertising work?

Most programs follow the same five steps, from budget to reimbursement.

  • Co-Op funds are the budget a brand sets aside for each partner. They often accrue as a percentage of the partner’s purchases, so selling more product earns more Co-Op, and unclaimed balances usually expire at the end of the program period.
  • Market development funds (MDF) are a close cousin. Instead of accruing from sales, MDF is usually allocated up front for a specific goal, such as entering a new market or launching a product line.
  • The cost split is set by the brand. Reimbursing 50% of eligible costs is common, and brands can raise the rate to steer partners toward priority products or channels.
  • Proof of performance is how partners get paid: a copy of the ad, invoices and details of where it ran. The brand checks the claim against its guidelines first, so an ad with an outdated logo or an unapproved channel can be rejected.

Here is how that plays out. A dealer runs a $2,000 local newspaper ad for a new model. The program reimburses 50% of eligible costs, the ad uses the approved template and runs in an eligible channel, so the dealer claims $1,000 back. Had the ad used last year’s logo, the claim could have been rejected and the dealer would have covered the full cost.

Most programs set these rules out in a written Co-Op agreement covering eligible media, required logos and disclaimers, any pre-approval step and claim deadlines. Clear terms protect both sides.

3 main types of cooperative advertising

Co-Op advertising comes in three forms, depending on who shares the cost.

Type Who shares the cost How it works Example
Vertical A manufacturer and the retailers, dealers or franchisees that sell its products The brand reimburses part of each partner’s local ad costs A car maker funding its dealers’ local ads
Horizontal Businesses at the same level of the supply chain Peers pool budgets for one campaign that benefits all of them California milk processors funding the “Got Milk?” campaign
Ingredient A component brand and the maker of the finished product The component maker funds ads that feature its brand inside the product Intel Inside on PC makers’ ads
  1. Vertical Co-Op is the most common form and what most brands mean by the term.
  2. Horizontal Co-Op brings together peers, such as franchisees in the same region or producers in one industry, who fund a campaign none could afford alone.
  3. Ingredient Co-Op is run by a component supplier that pays part of a manufacturer’s ad costs in return for featuring the component’s brand.

4 top benefits of Co-Op advertising

  • Shared cost: partners get a bigger local budget than they could fund alone, and brands get local advertising in every market without paying for all of it.
  • Extended reach: pairing a brand with a local partner reaches both sets of customers – people loyal to the store and people loyal to the product.
  • Local relevance: partners know the offers, events and language that land in their market, which a national campaign can’t match. It is the core of franchise and local marketing.
  • Stronger partner relationships: funding and ready-made assets give dealers and franchisees a reason to put your brand ahead of others they carry, and a program that is easy to use keeps them coming back.

When Co-Op advertising can erode brand consistency

Co-Op works because partners know their local markets. It also carries one built-in risk: the brand pays for the ad, but the partner makes it. Across hundreds of dealers, franchisees and retailers, small deviations can creep in – an outdated logo here, an off‑brand color there, a headline the legal team never saw.

Each ad looks close enough on its own. Left unchecked, they can start to blur the brand. These gaps are easy to miss without regular review processes, as seen in automotive Co‑Op advertising cases:

Direct digital bookings are projected to generate more than $400 billion in hotel gross bookings by 2030, overtaking online travel agencies

Source: Skift Research, 2024

One OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) found 34% of campaign assets failing compliance checks requiring reimbursement, while $4 million in eligible Co-Op funds were going unclaimed each year.

Source: Customer data (pre-Papirfly)

Execution also affects how much the extra reach is worth. A study of retailer ads featuring manufacturer brands in the US, UK and Australia found that Co-Op advertising expands the combined buyer base.

Yet the expected lift in ad memorability was cancelled out. According to Nguyen et al. in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services (2020), shoppers who bought from the retailer but not the manufacturer – or the other way around – were less likely to recall the ad. The researchers point to information overload as a likely cause. That suggests clear, focused creative matters as much as where the ad runs.

None of this is a reason to pull back from Co-Op. It’s a reason to plan for consistency from the start. When brand consistency is built into the Co-Op program itself, not left in a PDF brand book partners never open, Co-Op delivers local reach without the drift.

Cooperative advertising examples

  • Automotive dealer Co-Op: car makers fund dealers’ local ads that feature approved models, offers and branding. Many programs are under-used: more than half of available Co-Op budgets in automotive Co-Op marketing goes unspent each year.
  • Retailers featuring manufacturer brands: weekly circulars, retailer emails and in‑store promotions that feature a manufacturer’s products are often co-funded by that manufacturer.
  • Intel Inside (ingredient): from 1991, Intel reimbursed part of PC makers’ ad costs when their products and ads carried the Intel Inside logo. By the end of 1992, more than 500 manufacturers had signed on.
  • Got Milk? (horizontal): launched in 1993 by the California Milk Processor Board, which is funded by the state’s milk processors, the campaign pooled competitors’ money to grow demand for the whole category.
  • Franchise advertising Co-Ops (horizontal): many franchise marketing systems ask franchisees in the same market to pool contributions into a regional advertising Co-Op, which buys media for the whole area at rates no single location could get.

How to run Co-Op advertising and stay on-brand

The fix is not more policing after the fact. It is making the on-brand version the easiest one to create.

  1. Give partners locked, on-brand templates
    With on-brand templates, the brand locks the logo, colors, fonts and legal copy, and partners edit only what should change locally: the offer, the address, the photo. The ad reaches the claim stage already compliant.
  2. Centralize approved assets
    A brand portal backed by Digital Asset Management (DAM) gives every partner one place for current logos, product images and campaign kits.
  3. Localize without going off-brand
    Build templates for every format partners actually use, from print ads and flyers to social posts and digital banners, in every language they need.
  4. Build compliance into approval
    When ads are created from approved templates, reviewers check exceptions instead of every submission, and claims move faster.
  5. Track adoption
    See which partners use the templates, which assets get used and where Co-Op money sits unspent, then follow up with the markets that are falling behind.

Some brands go a step further and tie reimbursement to the template itself: an ad built from an approved template qualifies automatically, while anything built outside it goes through manual review. Partners quickly learn which route gets them paid faster.

Make every Co-Op dollar count

Co-Op advertising works when partners have the money, the assets and the freedom to go local, and the brand still recognizes itself in every ad. Getting there is less about stricter rules and more about better tools, which is where brand management meets day-to-day execution.

Succeed in your Co-Op marketing strategy

Give local partners one place to land compliant Co-Op campaigns, with a brand portal and on-brand multichannel templates.

Succeed in your Co-Op marketing strategy

Give local partners one place to land compliant Co-Op campaigns, with a brand portal and on-brand multichannel templates.

Discover Co-Op Marketing

Give local partners one place to land compliant Co-Op campaigns, with a brand portal and on-brand multichannel templates.

Discover Co-Op Marketing
Discover Co-Op Marketing

FAQs

What are Co-Op advertising funds?

Co-Op advertising funds are budgets that brands make available to retailers, dealers, franchisees or other partners to help pay for local advertising. Funds often accrue based on a partner’s purchases and may expire if they are not claimed within the program period.

What is the difference between Co-Op funds and MDF?

Co-Op funds often accrue as a percentage of a partner’s purchases and reimburse eligible advertising costs. Market development funds (MDF) are typically allocated upfront for a specific objective, such as launching a product or entering a new market.

What are the three types of cooperative advertising?

The three main types are vertical, horizontal and ingredient Co-Op advertising. Vertical Co-Op involves a brand and its sellers, horizontal Co-Op brings together businesses at the same supply-chain level, and ingredient Co-Op involves a component brand funding advertising by the finished-product manufacturer.

What are the benefits of cooperative advertising?

Co-Op advertising can help brands extend their reach while sharing costs with local partners. It can also give partners larger marketing budgets, make campaigns more locally relevant and strengthen relationships between brands, retailers, dealers and franchisees.

How do partners claim Co-Op advertising reimbursement?

Partners typically provide proof of performance, such as a copy of the advertisement, invoices and details of where it ran. The brand then checks the claim against its Co-Op guidelines before approving reimbursement.

Why do Co-Op advertising claims get rejected?

Claims can be rejected when advertising does not meet the brand’s program requirements. Common issues include outdated logos, unapproved channels, missing disclaimers or other deviations from the agreed brand and advertising guidelines.

How can brands keep Co-Op advertising on-brand?

Brands can provide locked templates that protect logos, colors, fonts and legal copy while allowing partners to customize approved local details. Centralizing current assets in a Brand Portal backed by Digital Asset Management can also help partners find and use the right materials.

How can brands improve Co-Op advertising adoption?

Make compliant campaigns easier for partners to create and claim. Providing approved templates, centralized brand assets and streamlined approval processes can reduce friction, while tracking template usage and unspent funds helps identify partners that may need additional support.

Table of contents:

  1. What is cooperative advertising?
  2. How does Co-Op advertising work?
  3. 3 main types of cooperative advertising
  4. 4 top benefits of Co-Op advertising
  5. When Co-Op advertising can erode brand consistency
  6. Cooperative advertising examples
  7. How to run Co-Op advertising and stay on-brand
  8. Make every Co-Op dollar count
  9. FAQs

Digital Asset Management

The DAM ROI metrics that matter for brand teams

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Beccy Furness VP Marketing
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This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.

Last month I spent a morning with the marketing team at a large automotive manufacturer. Thousands of dealerships, local market operators across most of the world, and a DAM that was never designed to be an IT system and instead what delivered their brand to local markets.

The meeting was all about how to drive adoption of the platform and their reasoning was sound. More usage meant better brand consistency, a lower cost per asset, and a slower climb in agency spend, which had been heading in one direction for a while.

Where it got interesting was measurement. Their reporting produced maybe a dozen numbers, all of them true, none of them ranked, and most of them built to answer a question about infrastructure rather than a question about brand.

So someone asked the one that mattered: which of these should we actually watch, to know whether the things we’re about to try are working?

Three metrics came out of that conversation. They’re the DAM ROI metrics I’d argue matter most to a brand team, and the order is about as important as the metrics themselves.

Why DAM ROI changes when marketing owns the platform

Most DAM ROI models were built for infrastructure. Storage consolidated, licenses retired, hours saved hunting for files, duplicate shoots avoided. All real, all worth counting, and all fundamentally questions about cost of ownership.

That model holds while IT owns the platform. It stops being sufficient the moment a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system starts doing brand management work: serving guidelines to distributed markets, feeding templates, governing what dealers and local teams are allowed to publish.

Infrastructure metrics can’t see that. A perfectly consolidated library nobody in Spain or Singapore ever opens has excellent storage economics and no brand value whatsoever.

Most organizations are further back than their dashboards suggest. Across Papirfly’s discovery conversations, 84% of organizations sit at stage one of the brand management maturity model (Source: Papirfly brand management maturity model, 2026), where the assets exist somewhere but nobody is governing or measuring how they get used.

This is the distinction I’d want any marketing team to draw before they build a business case. The infrastructure numbers are what get a DAM approved. They are not what tells you it’s working.

Why the order of your DAM ROI metrics matters

A DAM creates brand value through a chain of behaviors: people show up, they reuse what’s already there, and eventually they adapt it for their own market.

Let’s consider download volume. A genuinely useful figure, right up until you find out it came from eleven people in the central team.

When we spoke to Rabobank about their teams’ annual usage, they reported over 23,000 assets were produced in a single year through their portal. Whilst this is clearly impressive, it’s also uninterpretable until you know whether that came from a team of twenty or from thousands of people across fourteen markets, because those are two completely different companies.

The ratio is the argument, and it’s the version that survives a board meeting. Total volume proves the platform gets used. Volume set against the size of the user base proves the brand has reached the markets where the reputational risk actually sits.

“The all-in-one brand management solution is a portal for everyone – consistency is guaranteed and users can effortlessly craft polished brand collateral, to progress Rabobank’s mission and growth goals in an efficient way.”

Roel Smit
Product Owner of Brand Portal at Rabobank

DAM metric 1: Logins

Logins come first because they tell you whether the platform has entered anyone’s working habits. If people aren’t showing up, they’re getting brand materials somewhere else: an agency, a colleague’s drive, whatever design tool was already open on their laptop.

Two figures are worth pulling out separately. The first is active users as a share of total licensed users, which tells you how much of the population you paid to provision has ever engaged, and which markets the rollout never really reached. The second is average logins per user over time, which tells you whether people keep coming back to the platform or just make an annual drop in.

Rabobank’s portal is accessed by more than 22,000 people a year, around 2,500 of whom are regular users activating the brand. Both numbers are true and neither is enough on its own.

Wide reach with low frequency usually means a rollout that touched a lot of people without changing how any of them work. A small core logging in constantly while whole markets stay silent is a different problem with a different fix. You need both readings to know which one you’re holding.

DAM metric 2: Asset downloads

Once people are reliably showing up, the question becomes whether they’re using what’s already there. Downloads answer that directly, which makes them a measure of reuse rather than a measure of activity.

Reuse is where the first hard saving sits. Every download of an approved asset is a shoot not commissioned, a brief not raised, or an afternoon of internal design time spent on something more useful.

Total download volume has the same denominator problem as total output, so the number to track is average downloads per user across twelve months. It normalizes for headcount and stays comparable year on year and market by market.

The automotive manufacturer above averages 158 downloads per user per year. Another organization on the same platform averaged 34 over the same window (Source: Papirfly customer data, 2026). Both had people logging in. Only one had made the library the first place anyone looks.

This is why downloads belong above content creation in the order. Reuse is cheaper and it happens earlier, so a business creating heavily while downloading lightly is building from scratch at higher cost, further from the approved set every time.

When the download rate lags, it’s nearly always findability rather than willingness. People arrive, don’t find what they need fast enough, and go back to whatever they were doing before.

DAM metric 3: New content created

The third metric picks up what local teams do once the first two are healthy. New content created is the read on localized campaign adaptation: markets taking approved material and making it land with their own audience, in their own language.

It’s worth being precise about what gets counted here. Templates built and documents produced from those templates are two different numbers, and the second one is where the end user value sits.

Templates are infrastructure. Documents are the evidence that someone in a market picked the infrastructure up and used it.

It’s also the metric closest to commercial performance, because locally relevant content tends to outperform central material dropped into a market unchanged. And it’s the clearest evidence that a brand has scaled rather than simply been stored somewhere tidy.

XXL’s teams generate more than 4,000 assets a year across 84 stores in four Nordic countries, with campaign production down from weeks to minutes. That second figure is a time to value measure as much as a volume one, and the volume only works because access and reuse came first.

Taken together, the three read less like a report and more like a diagnostic:

  1. Logins low -> Adoption hasn’t started, and nothing further down the chain is worth interpreting yet. The work is rollout, training, and getting the platform into people’s daily routine.
  2. Logins healthy, downloads low -> People are arriving and leaving empty-handed. The work is findability: search, taxonomy, and how assets get surfaced.
  3. Logins and downloads healthy, new content low -> Local teams are consuming without adapting. The work is templates, and usually whether the right local formats exist at all. Check the document count rather than the template count here, since a healthy template library that nobody builds from looks identical to no library at all.

Building the DAM business case

The team I met had the right instinct. They were never short of data. What they lacked was a view on which number should move first, and what a healthy figure on one metric implied about the next.

Logins, downloads, and new content each measure a different behavior, and each becomes readable in light of the one before it. Take them in that order and the reporting starts answering a question rather than listing facts, which is a considerably easier thing to walk into a budget conversation with.

None of this replaces the infrastructure case. Storage consolidation and retired licenses still belong in the business case, and they’re usually what gets a DAM approved in the first place. They’re just not what keeps it funded once marketing is the team living in it.

All three sit in Prove, Papirfly’s analytics module, where they can be visualized on a single dashboard and broken down by region, team, and asset.

See what DAM ROI looks like for brand teams

The DAM built for brand execution, not just storage.

See what DAM ROI looks like for brand teams

The DAM built for brand execution, not just storage.

Explore Papirfly DAM

The DAM built for brand execution, not just storage.

Explore Papirfly DAM
Explore Papirfly DAM
Digital Asset Management interface for organizing and finding brand assets

FAQs

Q: How do you measure the ROI of a DAM platform?

It depends on who owns it. Where IT owns the platform, ROI is usually measured as storage consolidated, licenses retired, and search time saved. Where marketing and brand teams own it, those numbers say nothing about whether the brand is reaching its markets, and three adoption metrics answer that better: login data, asset downloads, and new content created.

What is the difference between DAM ROI and brand adoption?

DAM ROI in the traditional sense is a cost-of-ownership measure covering storage, licenses, and time saved. Brand adoption measures whether distributed teams are actually using the platform to find, reuse, and adapt approved material. A DAM can score well on the first and poorly on the second, which is exactly the situation most infrastructure reporting is unable to detect.

Why does the order of DAM ROI metrics matter?

Each metric means something different depending on what the one before it looks like. A high download figure reads very differently coming from a small group of power users than from a broadly adopted platform, so login data has to be read first for anything else to be interpretable.

What is a healthy download rate for a DAM or brand portal?

Track average downloads per user across twelve months rather than total volume, so the figure stays comparable across markets and years. One large distributed network averages 158 downloads per user per year, which is a healthy rate. Another organization on the same platform averaged 34, which points to a findability problem rather than a willingness problem.

Are asset downloads more important than new content created?

Downloads should be read first. Reuse of approved assets is cheaper and happens earlier, so a business creating heavily while downloading lightly is probably building from scratch at higher cost and drifting further off-brand each time.

Table of contents:

  1. Why DAM ROI changes when marketing owns the platform
  2. Why the order of your DAM ROI metrics matters
  3. DAM metric 1: Logins
  4. DAM metric 2: Asset downloads
  5. DAM metric 3: New content created
  6. Building the DAM business case
  7. FAQs
Brand Management

Why brand governance in local marketing breaks down

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Papirfly
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Every brand director knows the moment. An old logo appears on a regional site, or a partner runs an unapproved product shot, months after the guidelines were signed off and circulated. It is rarely carelessness, and it is almost never a failure of the guidelines themselves.

It is a failure of brand governance at the last mile. Somewhere between the central team publishing an approved asset and a local market putting something into the world, the connection broke. The asset was hard to find, out of date, or simply never reached the person who needed it.

That distinction matters, because it changes what you fix. Organizations that respond by rewriting guidelines or commissioning more assets are treating a distribution and enforcement problem as a creative one. Digital Asset Management, brand portals, and templated content creation all exist to close that specific gap.

Why brand governance in local marketing struggles at activation stage

The evidence points at activation rather than creation. A recent MarTech Intelligence Report on Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms – which features Papirfly among the vendors profiled – found that 67% of DAM decision-makers struggle to reuse, update, or retire existing content (Source: Forrester Consulting for Orange Logic, 2025).

Assets exist, they are stored somewhere, and someone approved them. What has failed is everything that happens after approval: surfacing the current version, retiring the expired one, and making the approved route the easiest route.

This is the gap between having brand guidelines and enforcing them. Guidelines describe the intended outcome; governance is the operational system that makes the intended outcome the path of least resistance for a local marketer working at speed.

For a brand director, the practical test is simple. If a regional team member needed the current campaign kit for their market right now, could they find it, confirm it was approved, and use it correctly without asking anyone? Where the answer is no, off-brand output is not a risk – it is a certainty.

More local markets and multichannel campaigns means more brand risk

Every additional market, region, or partner adds another point where governance can quietly erode. The same report notes that organizations managing 11 or more marketing channels need platforms built to distribute content across their entire ecosystem, not only the channels the central brand team can watch closely (Source: MarTech Intelligence Report, Digital Asset Management Platforms, 2026).

That figure is worth sitting with. Most enterprise brands passed 11 channels some time ago, and the channels the brand team monitors most carefully are usually the ones that were already the most controlled.

This is the core case for a brand portal: not a place where assets happen to live, but a single controlled front door. Every market and partner works from the same approved library – guidelines, current templates, campaign context, and sign-off status included – rather than from whatever was last emailed around.

The value is as much psychological as technical. When there is one obvious, well-maintained, genuinely fast place to get brand-approved material, people stop building private workarounds. Adoption is what converts a governance policy into governance in practice.

How templates keep local teams fast without loosening control

Regional and franchise teams cannot wait on a central design queue for every local variation, and they will not. Research consistently shows the demand outstripping central capacity: 78% of marketers say they need more personalized content than they can currently produce (Source: Salesforce, State of Marketing Report, 2026).

Speed cannot come at the cost of brand integrity, but the answer is not more approval steps. It is moving the control upstream, into the template itself, so that compliance is designed in rather than inspected afterwards.

This is where templated content creation earns its place alongside the portal:

  • Locked templates let local teams build their own campaign and channel variants without a designer, in minutes rather than weeks.
  • Every variant stays within parameters the brand team has already approved, because the non-negotiable elements simply cannot be edited.
  • No asset reaches the market without passing through the same guardrails, regardless of who created it or which market they sit in.

The outcome central teams report is not tighter control for its own sake. It is time reclaimed – hours previously spent on low-value adaptation requests and manual sign-off returned to the strategic work only the central team can do.

For Martin Pospisil, Chief Product Officer at Papirfly, this is the central challenge of governing content across distributed teams: 

“The report’s take on distribution complexity is something we see in every conversation with a brand director. The question is never whether local teams need to move fast – it’s whether they can do that without the brand having to review every single asset by hand. That’s exactly what a brand portal and templating are built to solve together.”

Martin Landsberger Pospíšil

Martin Pospíšil
Chief Product Officer at Papirfly

What AI-generated content changes about brand brand governance

As AI tools make it trivial to generate content variants at volume, governance by habit stops working. A central team that could plausibly eyeball everything last year cannot eyeball ten times the output this year, and the volume curve is not flattening.

The market has recognized this. Nine in 10 organizations say human oversight is essential to safeguard brand identity as AI-generated content becomes more common (Source: Bynder and Censuswide, State of DAM Report, 2025).

That is a governance requirement, not a creative preference. Someone still needs to know what has been approved, by whom, when it expires, and where it is permitted to run – and that knowledge has to live in a system rather than in an individual’s memory.

A governed brand portal gives that oversight a home. A clear record of what is approved, what is in review, and what has expired means speed and control stop being a trade-off, because the audit trail is a by-product of the workflow rather than a separate exercise.

The central team to local market takeaway for brand teams

The value of DAM is no longer really about storage. It is about whether a brand can hold its shape while being represented by more people, in more places, and increasingly by more automated tools than ever before.

Brand governance succeeds or fails at local activation. A governed brand portal answers the distribution half of that problem, and locked templates answer the production half – which is why the two are far stronger together than either is alone.

For brand teams reviewing their own setup, the useful question is not whether the guidelines are good. It is whether the approved route is currently the fastest route for the person in the market with a deadline.

See brand governance working in practice

One home for every market’s approved brand assets.

See brand governance working in practice

One home for every market’s approved brand assets.

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One home for every market’s approved brand assets.

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Brand hub portal

FAQs

What is the difference between a brand portal and a standard DAM?

A DAM stores, organizes, and governs assets at scale, largely for the teams who manage them. A brand portal is the controlled, branded front door on top of it, giving markets and partners self-serve access to only the approved, current version of what they need.

How does templated content creation help maintain brand governance?

Templates let local or non-design teams build their own on-brand variants within parameters the brand team has already locked. Compliance is built into the template rather than checked afterwards, so speed does not require sacrificing control.

Why is human oversight still necessary with AI-generated content?

AI can produce content variants far faster than a brand team can manually review them. A clear system of record for what is approved, pending, or expired becomes essential to stop off-brand content slipping through unnoticed.

Can local teams create their own content without breaking brand guidelines?

Yes, provided they are working from locked templates and an approved asset library rather than recreating materials independently. This combination is what allows central teams to delegate production without delegating brand control.

What did the 2026 MarTech DAM report find about brand governance?

It found that most DAM decision-makers struggle to reuse, update, or retire existing content, and that distributing content across many markets and channels is a leading cause of brand inconsistency.

Table of contents:

  1. Why brand governance in local marketing struggles at activation stage
  2. More local markets and multichannel campaigns means more brand risk
  3. How templates keep local teams fast without loosening control
  4. What AI-generated content changes about brand brand governance
  5. The central team to local market takeaway for brand teams
  6. FAQs

Brand Management

Why automotive Co-Op advertising leaves millions on the table

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Rosie Sweeting Account Manager
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This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.

Automotive Co-Op advertising is one of the most significant investments OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) make in their dealer networks. The idea is straightforward: allocate funds for dealers to spend on local marketing whilst ensuring that spend stays on-brand and in approved channels, so local campaign activity scales without central teams managing every execution.

Most programs don’t deliver on that promise. Funds expire unclaimed. Spend goes out in channels it shouldn’t. Creative that fails brand guidelines gets reimbursed anyway. And by the time central marketing has visibility into any of it, the year is already over.

This isn’t a resource problem or a budget problem. It’s a structural one. For OEMs managing hundreds or thousands of dealer relationships, the gap between what Co-Op is supposed to do and what it actually does adds up to real money.

Millions in unclaimed funds every year

Most automotive Co-Op advertising funds are allocated annually and expire at year-end. Unused balances are forfeited without the option to roll over.

For central marketing, that’s budget designed to drive local activity that never got spent. For dealers, it’s marketing support they were entitled to and didn’t access, likely because the claims process was complex enough that it wasn’t worth the effort.

At enterprise scale — OEMs managing hundreds or thousands of dealer relationships across multiple markets — the unclaimed figure can be significant. When one global automotive OEM audited their Co-Op program, they found over $4 million in eligible advertising spend going unclaimed every single year. (Source: Papirfly customer data) Not because dealers didn’t want the funds. Because the process of claiming them was too slow, too manual, and too unclear to navigate consistently.

That’s the hidden cost of undermanaged Co-Op: it doesn’t just create admin burden. It actively prevents the program from doing what it was built to do.

The compliance gap nobody’s tracking

Unclaimed funds will show up eventually in the end-of-year forfeiture figure. What’s harder to see is the spend that does happen, but shouldn’t.

When automotive Co-Op advertising programs run on spreadsheets or basic claims tools, compliance review becomes manual and inconsistent. A dealer submits a claim for an ad using an outdated logo, an unapproved channel, or messaging that violates regional guidelines. Without automated review at scale, central marketing can’t catch every instance.

Before the same OEM overhauled their Co-Op management, 34% of campaign assets running under their brand failed compliance checks. One in three ads going out to market was off-brand, in the wrong channel, or both — and all of it was reimbursed by central marketing.

Research from Demand Local (2024) puts this in context: 65% of automotive dealers describe their Co-Op relationship with their OEM as “complex,” and 43% find it “frustrating.” That frustration goes both ways: dealers struggling to claim, OEMs struggling to control what runs.

Why dealer adoption is the metric that matters

Most Co-Op programs track utilization: what percentage of the allocated budget was spent. It’s a reasonable proxy, but it doesn’t tell you whether dealers are engaged or whether the program is working as designed.

When automotive Co-Op advertising is easy to access, fast to reimburse, and compliant by default, adoption follows. The same OEM referenced above now sees 93% dealer adoption of their Co-Op platform, not because dealers were required to use it, but because the incentive is clear and the process doesn’t get in the way.

High adoption also gives central marketing something utilization figures can’t: visibility. When dealers run campaigns outside a managed platform, OEMs have no view of what’s going to market. When they run inside it, central teams can see what’s live, what’s compliant, and how spend is tracking across the network.

Speed is a cost most programs don’t measure

There’s a consequence to manual Co-Op management that rarely makes it into budget conversations: time to market.

Creative reviews that run on email take days, sometimes weeks. Claims that go into a manual queue get processed in batches. Dealers who’ve waited three weeks for reimbursement on one campaign think twice before submitting the next one.

Local activity dries up. The program built to scale local marketing ends up discouraging it. The OEM referenced above cut time to market by 50% after moving to a properly managed Co-Op system. For a dealership, that’s the difference between a campaign landing during a model launch window and landing three weeks after it.

Where AI fits in automotive Co‑Op advertising

AI-assisted compliance review is already changing how automotive Co-Op advertising programs operate, particularly for OEMs with tightly controlled templates.

When dealer flexibility is limited — swapping a phone number, updating a local address — AI can handle the full compliance check without human review. Faster approvals, lower cost per claim, no bottleneck. For programs that give dealers more creative latitude, AI handles routine checks and flags edge cases for a human reviewer.

The practical split: the more flexibility you give dealers, the more you need human judgment in the loop. The more locked down your templates, the more AI can carry independently. Most programs sit somewhere in the middle — and AI will handle more of it every year.

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Discover Co-Op advertising for automotive OEMs

See how dealers marketing stays 100% on-brand.

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See how dealers marketing stays 100% on-brand.

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What the best Co-Op programs do differently

Automotive Co-Op advertising is one of the most undermanaged investments in OEM marketing. The budget exists. The dealer relationships exist. What’s often missing is the infrastructure to make it run properly — automated compliance, fast reimbursement, and real visibility into what’s actually going to market.

The programs that work don’t rely on spreadsheets or manual claim reviews. They treat Co-Op as an operational function, not an annual admin task. And they measure success by dealer adoption and compliance rates, not just by how much budget got spent before December 31.

FAQs

What is automotive Co-Op advertising?

Automotive Co-Op advertising is a cost-sharing arrangement where an OEM allocates funds to its dealer network to reimburse approved local advertising spend. Dealers claim back a set percentage of their eligible campaign costs — typically 50% — through the OEM’s Co-Op program. The goal is to increase local marketing activity while ensuring it meets brand and channel guidelines.

Why do automotive Co-Op funds go unclaimed?

The most common reasons are administrative complexity, unclear eligibility rules, and slow reimbursement cycles. When claiming is difficult or reimbursement takes weeks, dealers deprioritize Co-Op submissions — particularly for smaller campaigns. Automating the claims process and tightening reimbursement SLAs typically has the biggest impact on utilization rates.

How does Co-Op compliance management work in automotive?

Compliance management means reviewing dealer-submitted creative before approving it for reimbursement — checking it meets brand guidelines, channel eligibility, and program terms. Depending on how much creative flexibility dealers have, this is handled by AI, human review, or a hybrid of both. Without a structured review process, non-compliant spend gets through.

What’s the difference between a Co-Op tool and a Co-Op managed service?

A Co-Op tool gives you the platform to run the program — claims submission, fund tracking, compliance workflows, and reporting. A managed service means an external team handles operations on your behalf: reviewing creatives, processing claims, and supporting dealers directly. Papirfly offers both, with a 24-hour creative review SLA and claims processing within five days as part of the managed service.

How does AI improve automotive Co-Op advertising management?

AI automates compliance checks at the point of claim submission, removing the manual review bottleneck for high-volume programs. For OEMs with locked-down templates, AI can handle the full review independently. For programs with more flexible creative, AI pre-screens submissions and flags exceptions for human review — speeding up approvals without reducing accuracy.

Table of contents:

  1. Millions in unclaimed funds every year
  2. The compliance gap nobody’s tracking
  3. Why dealer adoption is the metric that matters
  4. Speed is a cost most programs don’t measure
  5. Where AI fits in automotive Co‑Op advertising
  6. What the best Co-Op programs do differently
  7. FAQs

Brand Management

Where to start: The brand management maturity model

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Beccy Furness VP Marketing
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I expect most central marketers can name what is wrong with brand consistency in their network. Far fewer can say which part to address first. 

In my own conversations with brand and marketing leads running franchised, dealer, branch and managed networks, I kept hearing the same answers. At first I treated the answers as competing explanations, depending on sector, network size, or how independent the sites were. But it led me to dig a little deeper and what I realised is that what sounded like five separate problems is one problem at five different points.

Following my instincts, I looked to the data to accurately assess my observations. We went back over a full year of discovery conversations with distributed networks and classified each one against these five points. The result was actually more lopsided than I expected.

This is where the brand management maturity model was born, and what can help when you’re trying to decide where to start taking control of your brand consistency challenge.

What is the brand management maturity model?

The brand management maturity model describes five stages at which brand consistency breaks down across a distributed network. The stages run in sequence, and each only becomes visible once the one before it has been resolved.

A network cannot have a template flexibility problem until it has templates, or an approval bottleneck until the templates are good enough that sites want to use them. Most networks recognize all five and assume they are dealing with several at once. We’ve visualised this below:

The five stages of the brand management maturity model as an ascending arrow: 1 no home for your brand, 2 guidelines too generalized, 3 templates lack flexibility, 4 approval workflows broken, 5 brand adoption fails.

The practical consequence is that effort spent on a later stage while an earlier one is unresolved returns almost nothing. A network at stage one that invests in sophisticated approval routing has built a fast process for content nobody is producing centrally in the first place.

This happens more often than it should, and it is rarely a failure of judgment. The later stages are simply more visible to the people making decisions — an approval delay generates complaint emails that reach head office, while a site that never adopted the brand hub generates silence.

Stage one is where most networks actually are

84% of the distributed networks we spoke with over the past year were at stage one when the conversation started (Source: Papirfly new business discovery analysis, 2025–2026). Around one in ten were at stages two or three. A small minority were at stage five.

Horizontal bar chart showing 84% of distributed networks sit at stage one of the brand management maturity model, with far fewer at stages two to five.

Almost none were at stage four. Approval delay is one of the most commonly voiced brand complaints in the category, and it was virtually never the thing actually holding a network back at the point it came to us.

Stage one is also the stage networks are least likely to place themselves in. They describe themselves as working on localization or approval speed, but on examination they do not yet have a place where the brand lives.

Stage one has two forms. Either nothing central exists at all, or something was launched and never became where work begins — which produces the same outcome and is harder to admit. Site Managers and their teamsare unclear what is available to them, so they proceed without it.

Drew Croeses, Account Manager at Papirfly, speaks to these networks at the point they begin looking for a solution, and continues working with them once the platform is live. In a recent webinar, I asked him what they report happening on the ground before a central home exists.

“It’s usually not framed as a brand problem when they first come to us. It shows up as an operations complaint. Someone on the marketing team tells me they had a request for the same file from three different locations in the space of a week, or a market manager who requested the same logo four times over the last quarter.”

Drew Croeses headshost

Drew Croeses
Account Manager at Papirfly

What is needed at this stage is a single place where the brand is explained, not simply stored. The distinction that matters is between a repository location managers  are told to use and a platform or folder they choose to open. This is decided by context — what an asset is for, when to use it, and the reasoning behind the rules of where to find it.

The clearest test is what a new site manager encounters in their first week. A link to a shared folder teaches them the brand is paperwork. A place that answers their questions teaches them it is something they are part of, and that difference determines whether they return.

This is where organizations with a mature Digital Asset Management (DAM) system are most often caught out. Assets are cataloged, rights are managed, metadata is clean — and the conclusion drawn is that stage one is behind them.

It usually is not. A DAM is built for people who already know what they are looking for, which describes the central team and its agencies rather than a site manager in their first week. Access frequently stops well short of the network edge, and even where it does not, an asset library explains nothing about the brand it holds.

Organized is not the same as understood. A network can have every file in the right place, correctly tagged and version-controlled, and still have no destination where individual locations can learn what the brand stands for, which campaign applies to them, or why a rule exists.

A creative director at a consumer products brand, already running a DAM, put it more plainly than I could:

“We have a brand book, but nobody reads it. It’s in a Google Drive.”

Developing brand guidelines had been a significant piece of work. They turned it into a PDF, and then nobody opened it — which left him wondering what the point had been. His description of his own job was trying to act as a brand gatekeeper in an environment that is fluid and constantly changing.

This shows up repeatedly. Close to one in ten of the networks arriving at stage one already run an established enterprise DAM, with assets governed and brand guidelines sitting inside it as a PDF (Source: Papirfly new business discovery analysis, 2025–2026). The DAM had solved a real problem.

What do stages two to five need?

At stage two a central home exists, but the guidelines governing how campaign content gets made were written for the whole network and land in no particular market. A marketing lead at a multi-site healthcare group described what follows:

“We see clinics go rogue with their own content.”

A colleague on the same call added that anything campaign-related, the sites tend to get very creative with. What they wanted was not tighter control — it was freedom for sites within a framework HQ had set.

What is needed is campaign material assembled by market rather than distributed to everyone — the idea, the assets, the guidance and the templates on one page, already relevant to the site opening it. Region and role determine what appears, but relevance is the outcome rather than the mechanism.

At stage three templates exist and break at the first local requirement. What is needed is templates that absorb local reality without failing: copy that runs long, a language that expands, a requirement nobody anticipated. That is decided element by element when the template is built, which is why some hold and others do not.

Ben Ruffel, Project Manager at Papirfly, builds and launches these systems for large decentralized networks. I asked him how he decides what stays locked and what stays open.

“There are two failure modes. Under-locking is where a central team gives away too much control, and a dealership manager can recolor the primary logo or swap a high-res photo for a grainy camera shot. The result is material no central brand team would ever approve. 

Over-locking is the more common mistake. The team gets nervous about brand integrity, locks everything down, and the local operator abandons the system within five minutes and builds something off-brand in another tool instead.”

Ben Ruffel headshot

Ben Ruffel
Project Manager at Papirfly

At stage four the templates work but sign-off still routes through head office and returns days later. What is needed is review that happens where the content is made, and an explicit decision about what requires review at all. Most networks have never written that down; it lives in habit and in a few individuals, and separating what genuinely needs sign-off from what does not is where the delay disappears.

Around 81% of companies report dealing with content that does not follow their brand guidelines, and only 30% of organizations with guidelines say they are consistently enforced (Source: Lucidpress, now Marq, State of Brand Consistency Report, 2019; Marq, 2026). Those figures have barely moved in the years since.

Stage five arrives after everything appears to be working and the launch of the system is touted as a success by HQ. Here is where the central team can be blind sided by the same issue they tried solving from the get go – consistent usage. Usage does not collapse, it erodes — the people who knew the system move on, the library stops reflecting what sites now need, and activity quietly declines.

Drew’s first observation when a network raises a decline is that the decline is a visibility problem before it is an activity problem:

“Just because people stop using the system doesn’t mean they stop producing content. It hasn’t changed. We just can’t see it anymore.”

Drew Croeses headshost

Drew Croeses
Account Manager at Papirfly

What stage five needs is a named owner and visibility of who is actually using the system. A decline noticed  early indicates a need for action rather than a failure in the system itself, and it usually describes something the network now needs that nobody has built yet. Only once someone has been assigned to own the system, can those continued changes be made and local teams encouraged to stay on brand.

How do you find your starting point?

The fastest diagnostic is not a survey of your sites. It is a question about your own central team: what did the majority of their week actually consist of?

  • Fielding requests for files that already exist somewhere points to stage one.
  • Hearing nothing from the sites at all, while off-brand local material appears anyway, also points to stage one.
  • Rewriting or adapting central material for particular markets points to stage two.
  • Fixing broken layouts and handling exceptions to templates points to stage three.
  • Clearing a review queue points to stage four.
  • None of the above, but usage falling, points to stage five.

This works because a central team’s workload is the most reliable record of where the system is failing. Whatever the network cannot do for itself arrives at head office as a request, and the shape of those requests describes the stage precisely.

Marketers already spend substantial time on asset management, with 37% spending five to ten hours a month on it and 27% spending more than ten (Source: Storyblok, global survey of 500 marketers, 2023). Those hours are the most honest brand consistency data most organizations hold.

A second check is worth running alongside it. Ask what proportion of your sites produced anything at all through the central system last quarter — networks that assume they are at stage three or four routinely discover that a substantial share never reached stage one.

Conclusion

The five stages are not a maturity score to be reported upward. They are a way of converting a problem everyone discusses in general terms into one specific enough to act on.

Most networks are further back than they believe, and that is not a criticism of the teams running them. The stages are genuinely difficult to see from the center, because each is hidden behind the one before it.

If you take one thing from this, take the diagnostic rather than the model. Look at what your central team spent last week doing, and your starting point will identify itself.

Discover the reasons networks go off‑brand in our webinar

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Discover the reasons networks go off‑brand in our webinar

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FAQs

What is the brand management maturity model?

It is a five-stage model describing where brand consistency breaks down across a distributed network. The stages run from having no central home for the brand through to having a system that runs but nobody owns, and each stage only becomes visible once the previous one has been resolved.

How do I know which stage my network is at?

Look at what your central marketing team spends most of its time doing. Requests for files that already exist point to stage one, adapting central material for local markets points to stage two, fixing broken templates points to stage three, and clearing review queues points to stage four.

We already have a DAM. Does that mean we are past stage one?

Not necessarily. A Digital Asset Management system organizes and governs files for people who already know what they are looking for, which is usually the central team rather than the sites. Stage one is only cleared when the network has a destination that explains the brand, not simply a library that stores it.

Why does the order of the stages matter?

Because effort spent on a later stage while an earlier one is unresolved produces very little return. Building fast approval routing for a network whose sites cannot find anything centrally solves a problem that network does not yet have.

Does this apply to networks that are not franchises?

Yes. The model applies to any structure where a central team holds authority over the brand but not over the people executing it — dealer networks, branch networks, managed sites, country offices and tied agents all encounter the same five stages.

Local marketing icons representing brand governance, campaign performance, location targeting, digital assets, and franchise campaigns.

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Table of contents:

  1. What is the brand management maturity model?
  2. Stage one is where most networks actually are
  3. What do stages two to five need?
  4. How do you find your starting point?
  5. Conclusion
  6. FAQs
  7. Resources

Brand Management

Franchise marketing agency vs template software: how to scale your business

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Papirfly
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A small central marketing team supporting a large franchise network knows the feeling well: requests pile up faster than the team can handle, and franchisees start making their own materials just to keep local marketing moving.

The usual next step is to call a franchise marketing agency. But that is no longer the only option available to a lean team trying to protect the brand.

This guide compares hiring a franchise marketing agency against bringing franchise marketing in-house with software, and looks honestly at where a hybrid of the two makes sense. Along the way, we’ll cover what franchise marketing software should include if you go that route, and how a small central team decides between the three paths.

What is a franchise marketing agency?

A franchise marketing agency is a specialist firm that manages some or all of a franchise network’s marketing on the franchisor’s behalf. Services typically span brand strategy, paid media, local SEO, content production, and franchisee support and training.

Agencies exist because franchise marketing has a structural problem: one brand identity has to work across dozens or hundreds of locations, each with its own local audience and competitive context. That’s a lot of ground for a small in-house team to cover alone.

Why franchise marketing teams look for outside help

The tension at the heart of this decision is simple. A central team wants to protect brand standards, but a handful of people cannot realistically service an entire network on demand.

When requests outpace capacity, franchisees start creating their own flyers, posts, and local ads just to keep business moving. Consistency breaks down at the exact point where the customer meets the brand.

This is precisely the problem 47% of franchisors cite as their biggest challenge: managing brand reputation consistently across multiple markets (Source: Constant Contact, State of Franchise Marketing, 2025). It’s also why 59% of franchisors say consistency, not local performance, is the main reason they set the level of marketing control they do (Source: Constant Contact, State of Franchise Marketing, 2025). Faced with that pressure, hiring an agency is the instinctive first move — but it isn’t the only one.

Option 1: Hiring a franchise marketing agency

Bringing in a franchise marketing agency gives a stretched central team immediate access to specialist skills and hands-off delivery. It’s a well-worn path for a reason, but it comes with real trade-offs for a brand that wants to keep tight control.

Pros of a franchise marketing agency

An agency arrives with strategists, designers, and media buyers already in place, so campaigns can launch in weeks rather than months. There’s no recruitment, onboarding, or tooling to sort out first.

That breadth of expertise also means access to specialisms a small team is unlikely to have in-house, from paid media optimization to franchise-specific local SEO. For a network without the budget or the appetite to build a full team, this is often the fastest route to professional-grade output.

Cons of a franchise marketing agency

The trade-off is control. Decisions, timelines, and day-to-day priorities sit with a partner outside the business, and few agencies understand the brand as intimately as the people living it every day.

Cost is the other factor. A full-service agency retainer can run comprehensive marketing support for $50,000 to $150,000 a year, and that spend continues indefinitely rather than converting into an owned asset (Source: Chariot Creative, 2025). Over time, dependency on an external partner can also limit how quickly the central team can flex or bring work back in-house.

Option 2: Bringing franchise marketing in-house with software

The alternative is for a lean central team to run franchise marketing themselves, using software built for the job rather than handing the work to an agency.

This isn’t about doing more manually — it’s about giving a small team the tools to produce, control, and distribute local marketing at a scale that would otherwise need a much bigger headcount.

Pros of the in-house software model

The right platform lets non-designers in every location create on-brand materials in minutes, without waiting on the central team or an outside partner. Control stays entirely with the brand, and every asset produced is a reusable part of the business rather than a one-off agency deliverable.

It’s also considerably cheaper at scale. Building a comparable in-house agency-style team costs $450,000 to $550,000 a year for just four people once salaries, benefits, and tools are counted, against a fraction of that for a software platform (Source: Chariot Creative, 2025).

Cons of the in-house software model

Software doesn’t replace strategic thinking. A central team still needs to set direction, build the initial template library, and manage rollout, which takes time upfront even if it saves time later.

There’s also a learning curve for franchisees who are used to making their own materials from scratch. Getting them to adopt locked templates rather than choosing quick shadow tools (that often take you off-brand) instead requires some change management, not just a login.

The hybrid approach

Many franchise brands don’t choose one route exclusively. A common pattern is to use an agency for strategy, brand campaigns, and big creative swings, while software handles the day-to-day local execution and keeps every market on-brand between those campaigns.

This division of labour plays to each model’s strengths: the agency’s outside perspective and campaign firepower, and the platform’s speed and control for everything franchisees need day to day. It also explains why hybrid setups are becoming the norm rather than the exception — the share of B2B companies combining in-house and external marketing resources is projected to climb from 36% to 46% between 2025 and 2026 (Source: Sagefrog B2B Marketing Outlook, 2026).

Franchise marketing software: what to look for

If you’re leaning towards the in-house or hybrid route, the software you choose does most of the heavy lifting. A handful of capabilities matter more than the rest when you’re supporting a large, dispersed network.

  • A portal for franchisee access: a single, intuitive brand portal for every location to find what they’re approved to use.
  • Templated content creation for localization: ready-made design templates that let franchisees swap in local details without touching locked brand elements.
  • Centralized asset library: the backend Digital Asset Management platform as a home for logos, imagery, and approved materials – so franchisees are never working from outdated files.
  • Role-based access and permissions: the right level of control for head office, regional teams, and individual franchisees.
  • Approval workflows: a clear, auditable path for anything that needs sign-off before it goes live.
  • Analytics and reporting: visibility into what’s actually being produced and used across the network.

For a fuller comparison of platforms against this checklist, see our guide to the best franchise marketing software on the market today.

How Papirfly helps a small central team scale

Papirfly’s suite maps directly onto the pains a stretched central team faces, without turning day-to-day marketing into a design bottleneck.

One source of truth for every brand asset

Papirfly’s DAM gives the central team a single, governed library for every logo, image, and approved asset. Franchisees always pull from the current version, so outdated or off-brand files stop circulating.

Templated content franchisees can localize

Templated Content Creation lets franchisees build their own local materials from pre-approved templates, without needing design skills or the central team’s time. Output stays on-brand because the templates are built that way from the start.

A brand portal every franchisee can access

The brand portal gives every location one intuitive place to find guidelines, campaigns, and approved templates. It replaces the scattered folders and PDF brand books that push franchisees toward off-brand shortcuts in the first place.

Lock what can’t change so off-brand work isn’t possible

Locking functionality protects the elements that matter — logos, colors, fonts — while leaving room for franchisees to customize local details. It’s how a small team enforces brand consistency across locations without reviewing every single asset by hand.

How to decide: marketing agency, templating software, or both?

Reach for an agency when the network needs strategic firepower or major campaign work that the central team genuinely doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise to produce itself.

Lean toward software when the bulk of the workload is repeatable local execution — local versions of existing campaigns, everyday social content, in-store materials — that a locked template can handle safely. And consider a hybrid when both are true: strategy needs an outside partner, but volume demands a platform.

Franchisors who pair the right technology with clear guardrails are 2.5 times more likely to run an adaptive, best-in-class marketing operation than those who don’t (83% versus 44%) (Source: Constant Contact, State of Franchise Marketing, 2025). That gap is the clearest signal of which lever actually moves the needle for a lean team.

Scale your franchise marketing with Papirfly

A small central team can protect the brand and keep pace with a growing network, but not by absorbing every request manually or by handing the whole problem to an agency indefinitely. The right mix of strategic support and the right platform is what makes that possible.

For most lean teams, that means software that lets every franchisee produce on-brand content independently, with the central team setting the guardrails rather than doing the work by hand. Papirfly’s DAM, Templated Content Creation, and brand portal are built for exactly that job.

See how Papirfly keeps every franchise on‑brand

Scale with best‑in‑class portals and templates.

See how Papirfly keeps every franchise on‑brand

Scale with best‑in‑class portals and templates.

Discover Papirfly

Scale with best‑in‑class portals and templates.

Discover Papirfly
Discover Papirfly

Frequently asked questions about franchise marketing agencies

Can software replace a franchise marketing agency?

For day-to-day local execution, yes — templated software lets franchisees produce on-brand content without an agency’s involvement. For strategy, major campaigns, or specialist skills like paid media, many brands still value an agency’s outside expertise.

What should franchise marketing software include?

Look for a centralized asset library, templated content creation for localization, a brand portal for franchisee access, role-based permissions, approval workflows, and analytics. Together, these let a small team govern a large network without reviewing every asset manually.

Is franchise marketing software cheaper than an agency?

Usually, yes, especially at scale. A comprehensive agency retainer typically costs $50,000–$150,000 a year on an ongoing basis, while software is a one-time investment in a reusable system rather than continuous spend on external production.

Table of contents:

  1. What is a franchise marketing agency?
  2. Why franchise marketing teams look for outside help
  3. Option 1: Hiring a franchise marketing agency
  4. Option 2: Bringing franchise marketing in-house with software
  5. The hybrid approach
  6. Franchise marketing software: what to look for
  7. How Papirfly helps a small central team scale
  8. How to decide: marketing agency, templating software, or both?
  9. Scale your franchise marketing with Papirfly
  10. Frequently asked questions about franchise marketing agencies

Brand Management

Franchise social media marketing: Your guide to localized brand consistency

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Papirfly
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This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.

Every franchise brand has a presence in hundreds of local markets, and each account is run by a different franchisee or location manager. Social media is where local customers actually engage with the brand, but a small central marketing team can’t post for every location.

So franchisees post their own content, and the brand starts to look different everywhere: different fonts, tone, photos, sometimes different logos altogether.

This guide covers why franchise social media matters, how to structure accounts and guidelines that hold up across a network, and how templated content keeps every location on-brand without creating a bottleneck at head office. If you’re weighing up franchise marketing software, the sections below cover what to look for.

Why social media matters for franchises

Social is where local discovery happens. A customer choosing between nearby options is more likely to check a location’s Instagram or Facebook page than a national homepage, which is exactly where a well-run local account earns trust a national campaign cannot.

Approximately 806,270 franchise establishments operate in the US alone,
employing 8.7 million people and generating more than $800 billion a year.

Source: International Franchise Association, 2024

A network that gets this right can outperform independent competitors. Pairing a recognized national brand with a real, locally-run presence gives customers both the reassurance of a known name and the authenticity of a business that feels part of their community, which is why social sits at the center of most franchise marketing plans today.

The core tension: brand consistency vs local relevance

Central marketing wants the brand protected on every account: consistent colors, tone and messaging, wherever a customer encounters it. Local teams want to post quickly and speak to their own community, without waiting on approval from head office.

Both goals are legitimate, and the tension is structural rather than a sign either side is doing something wrong. The question is not which side wins, but how much freedom locations get and within what boundaries.

When the balance tips too far toward local freedom, off-brand posts creep in: mismatched logos, inconsistent photography, a different voice from one location to the next. Left unchecked, this is what rogue posting looks like at scale, and it affects how much a customer trusts the brand overall. 

How to structure franchise social media accounts

Most franchise networks run a hybrid structure: a national or brand-level account that carries flagship campaigns, alongside individual location pages that handle local offers, events and community engagement.

Facebook and Google Business Profile are generally the easiest platforms to structure this way, since both offer native tools for managing multiple linked location pages under one parent brand. Instagram and TikTok need more judgment about whether a standalone local account is worth the investment.

A useful test: does this location have enough distinct local interest, operator capacity and content to sustain its own page?

If not, it’s often better served by a shared regional account than a page that goes quiet after a few weeks. The pay-off for getting this right is real:

Choosing the right social platforms

Not every platform deserves equal investment. Facebook and Instagram tend to carry the most weight for local discovery and community engagement, while LinkedIn matters more for franchisee recruitment than local customer engagement.

Prioritize based on where your audience spends time and what content locations can realistically produce.

A network of gyms or restaurants may lean harder into Instagram and TikTok, while a professional services franchise may get more from LinkedIn and Google Business Profile updates.

Social media brand guidelines for franchises

Social-specific brand guidelines are the governance layer that keeps every account recognizable, even when hundreds of different people are posting. They need to go further than a general brand book, because social moves faster and involves far more contributors.

At minimum, guidelines should cover visual consistency, such as logo use, color palette and photography style, plus tone of voice for captions and comment replies. They should also state which elements a location can and cannot change, what hashtags to use, and how to handle complaints in public replies.

Framed this way, guidelines aren’t a restriction; they’re the reason a customer can walk into any location and recognize the brand immediately, whether they found it through a national ad or a local post. See how brand consistency across locations affects customer trust.

Social media marketing templates for locations

Templates turn brand guidelines into something a busy franchisee can actually use. Instead of interpreting a brand book, a location manager opens a pre-built template, edits only the fields they’re allowed to change, and publishes something on-brand in minutes.

This is where speed and consistency stop competing. Locked elements, such as the logo, color palette and layout, stay untouched, while editable fields, like the local offer or event date, give each location room to speak to its own audience.

Well-designed templated content creation removes the need for local teams to have design skill, and removes the need for central marketing to manually review every post before it goes live.

Building a franchise social media content strategy

A workable content strategy blends national and local content on a shared calendar, so head office campaigns and local activity never clash. National content typically covers flagship promotions and brand-wide announcements, while local content covers community events and location-specific offers.

Coordinating this doesn’t mean controlling every post. Build the calendar around fixed national moments, then leave defined space around them for local customization, whether that’s a seasonal offer, a partnership or a community shout-out.

Common franchise social media mistakes

Most of the problems franchise networks run into on social media come down to a handful of recurring issues.

  • Inconsistent posting across locations, where some accounts post daily and others haven’t updated in months, damages the network’s credibility as a whole, not just the quiet location’s reputation.
  • Ignoring local relevance by pushing only national content leaves locations feeling like an afterthought, and gives customers no reason to follow a local page over the national one.
  • Off-brand or rogue posts, from mismatched logos to an inconsistent tone, chip away at the recognizability that makes a franchise brand valuable in the first place.
  • No approval process for what gets published means problems are caught after they’ve already reached customers, rather than before.
  • Missing user-generated content (UGC) rights, where a location reposts a customer photo or video without permission, creates real legal exposure for the whole organization, not just the local branch.

If you’re comparing platforms to fix these issues, our roundup of the best franchise marketing software is a good next stop.

How Papirfly helps franchises stay on-brand on social

Every pain above comes down to the same root problem: a small central team cannot manually govern what hundreds of locations post. Papirfly’s Digital Asset Management (DAM), Templated Content Creation and brand portal work together to solve that without slowing local teams down.

One source of truth for social and brand assets (DAM)

A Digital Asset Management system gives every location access to the same approved logos, photography and campaign assets, instead of sourcing their own images or reusing outdated files. When the source of truth is centralized, off-brand assets stop entering the network at all.

Templated social posts locations can localize

Locations use ready-made templates for offers, events and seasonal campaigns, editing only the fields they’re permitted to touch. This is the practical version of the earlier balance: national marketing keeps brand elements locked, while local teams still speak to their own community.

A brand portal every location can access

A brand portal gives every franchisee, regardless of location or team size, one place to find approved templates, guidelines and assets, rather than chasing head office for the right file. That single point of access often determines whether guidelines actually get followed.

Lock brand elements so off-brand posts aren’t possible

Locking functionality means a franchisee simply cannot edit the logo, brand colors or core layout, even if they wanted to. It replaces manual review with a structural safeguard, so off-brand output stops being a risk that has to be caught.

Run franchise social media on‑brand with Papirfly

Getting franchise social media right means resolving the tension between central control and local relevance, not picking a side. That means clear account structure, usable guidelines, and templates that let local teams move fast without going off-brand.

Brands that manage this well protect what makes their name recognizable while letting every location feel genuinely local. The ones that don’t end up with a network that looks like dozens of different businesses loosely wearing the same logo.

Papirfly brings DAM, Templated Content Creation and a brand portal together so franchisors don’t have to choose between speed and consistency. See it in action with a personalized demo.

See franchise social media done on‑brand

Let everyone create in an instant.

See franchise social media done on‑brand

Let everyone create in an instant.

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Let everyone create in an instant.

Discover franchise marketing software
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Frequently asked questions about franchise social media

Should each franchise location have its own social media account?

It depends on the platform and the location’s capacity. Facebook and Google Business Profile support linked location pages well, but a standalone account only makes sense with enough local interest and someone to run it consistently. Smaller or newer locations are often better served by a shared regional page.

How do you keep franchise social media on-brand?

Combine clear social media guidelines with templates that lock core brand elements, such as logos and colors, while leaving room for local editable fields. A shared DAM system and brand portal ensure every location works from the same approved assets.

What should social media brand guidelines include?

They should cover visual consistency, tone of voice, which elements locations can and cannot change, hashtag use and how to respond to comments and complaints. Together, these form the governance layer that keeps a network recognizable across hundreds of accounts.

How do social media templates help franchise locations?

Papirfly templates let non-designers produce on-brand posts in minutes, without waiting on head office. Locked brand elements stay protected, while editable fields let each location speak to its own community and local offers.

Table of contents:

  1. Why social media matters for franchises
  2. The core tension: brand consistency vs local relevance
  3. How to structure franchise social media accounts
  4. Choosing the right social platforms
  5. Social media brand guidelines for franchises
  6. Building a franchise social media content strategy
  7. Common franchise social media mistakes
  8. How Papirfly helps franchises stay on-brand on social
  9. Run franchise social media on‑brand with Papirfly
  10. Frequently asked questions about franchise social media

Digital Asset Management

5 insights from Forrester’s latest DAM trends report

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Melanie Duffy Product Director, DAM
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This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.

Marketing and content teams are under growing pressure to produce, govern, and distribute content across more channels and regions than ever. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is expected to keep pace, but new research suggests most organizations are still working out what “keeping pace” actually requires.

Forrester’s June 2026 trends report, Digital Asset Management Anchors Modern Content Operations, draws on its Q3 2025 DAM Survey of 313 global decision-makers and interviews tied to The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management Systems, Q1 2026. Here are five Digital Asset Management trends from that research – plus one regulatory deadline our team is flagging alongside it.

1. Integration, not features, is now the top DAM priority

For years, DAM selection centered on storage capacity, search features, and file format support. That calculus has shifted.

According to Forrester’s Q3 2025 DAM Survey, nearly half of DAM decision-makers (47%) name ensuring their solution is well integrated with adjacent systems as a top priority for the next 12 months (Source: Forrester, 2026). That figure outranks every other stated priority, including evolving DAM for go-to-market strategy (41%) and extending DAM into creative operations (39%).

Forrester’s interviews with mature DAM programs describe the same pattern: leaders position DAM as the hub for intake, approvals, rights enforcement, and distribution into CMS, product information management, commerce, and campaign tools. Teams still relying on email and shared drives report the lowest adoption – DAM that sits apart from daily workflows gets bypassed, regardless of how strong its feature set looks on paper.

Separately, Forrester’s Enterprise Applications Software Survey, 2025 found that 29% of enterprise application decision-makers are expanding existing DAM implementations rather than replacing them (Source: Forrester, 2026). About one-third of decision-makers (31%) go further, expecting DAM to orchestrate workflows across multiple other systems – routing approvals, managing localization and reuse, and controlling distribution rather than acting as a passive endpoint.

2. Findability failures are eroding trust in DAM

A DAM system can hold every asset an organization owns and still fail at its core job if people can’t trust what they find in it.

Roughly two-thirds of DAM decision-makers (67%) report difficulty reusing, updating, or retiring existing content, which Forrester links directly to discovery and metadata gaps (Source: Forrester, 2026). The report frames this plainly: search failures become trust failures. When people can’t reliably locate the right asset, they recreate it from scratch or pull from unofficial sources – the exact behavior a DAM system exists to prevent.

Forrester’s interviews point to the fix: better findability depends less on search technology and more on upstream discipline – consistent taxonomy, naming conventions, and required metadata captured at the point of upload.

3. Governance pressure is rising fast

Nearly two-thirds of DAM decision-makers (64%) cite legal or regulatory compliance as a significant challenge, and about a third (36%) plan to prioritize expanding digital rights management in the next year (Source: Forrester, 2026). Interviews add an important nuance: even where automation exists, most organizations still rely on human oversight for brand and rights governance.

Forrester’s conclusion is that successful governance works as an operating model – with clear roles and workflows – rather than a technical checkbox. Adoption follows the same pattern: teams that invest in training, documentation, and simplified portal experiences see governance rules actually followed, not worked around.

4. AI adoption in DAM is being paced, not avoided

AI is reshaping DAM product roadmaps faster than most organizations can absorb it, and Forrester’s data shows this gap is by design rather than reluctance.

Well over half of DAM decision-makers (58%) cite challenges with AI integration strategy, and 41% point to organizational restrictions as a hindrance to AI adoption (Source: Forrester, 2026). Interviewees told Forrester they’re impatient for AI features, but they’re prioritizing a deliberate sequence: fixing metadata quality, taxonomy, and integration patterns before scaling automation on top of them.

That caution isn’t the same as disinterest. Roughly two-thirds of decision-makers (67%) expect AI use in DAM to increase over the next two years, particularly for discovery, content operations, and content generation.

Teams are testing AI tagging, visual search, and transformation in narrow contexts first, then pausing when accuracy, brand risk, or regulatory exposure becomes unclear. This is a readiness problem, not an ambition problem – organizations that treat metadata quality and taxonomy as prerequisites are best positioned to move past pilots once the guardrails are in place.

5. DAM investment is rising, but only operational impact will justify it

Eighty percent of businesses plan to increase DAM investment over the next two years, and some expect increases of more than 20% (Source: Forrester, 2026). That spending is arriving alongside real pressure to prove impact – not just capability on paper.

A clear majority of DAM decision-makers (63%) expect DAM optimization to meaningfully improve customer experience, and interviews link that outcome to end-to-end integration: time savings, higher reuse rates, faster launches, and lower compliance risk (Source: Forrester, 2026). Forrester’s recommendation to DAM leaders is to clarify the system’s role as the system of record, invest in stewardship and change management, and stabilize metadata and workflow foundations before scaling AI ambitions on top of them.

Forrester also flags architectural ambiguity as a recurring blocker: when DAM overlaps with other systems on discovery or asset adaptation, ownership gets murky and teams end up duplicating uploads across CMS, creative, and collaboration tools. Positioning DAM clearly as the system of record – rather than one repository among several – is what removes that friction.

Beyond Forrester’s data: the EU AI Act is an arriving compliance deadline

Forrester’s survey captures where DAM organizations stand today. It doesn’t cover a regulatory shift landing within weeks, so we’re adding it here alongside the five trends above – not as one of Forrester’s findings, but as our own perspective on what else 2026 planning needs to account for.

From August 2, 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act introduces transparency obligations for AI-generated or AI-manipulated content: end users must be able to tell when the content they’re viewing was substantially produced by AI (Source: EU Artificial Intelligence Act, Article 50).

The obligation applies regardless of where the agency or vendor producing the content is based, as long as that content reaches an EU audience. Penalties for non-compliance reach €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher, and they apply to both the providers of AI tools and the organizations deploying AI-generated content in market – brands and their agencies, not only the software vendors.

For DAM and content teams, this turns AI labelling from a brand-safety preference into a governance requirement with a hard date attached. Systems that can already track what was AI-generated, AI-assisted, or fully human – and surface that at the point of publishing – have the shortest path to compliance.

Forrester’s 2026 trends report makes one thing clear: DAM’s biggest opportunities and failure points both sit outside the feature list. Integration depth, findability discipline, governance operating models, and provable operational impact determine whether a DAM investment pays off.

Alongside those five trends, the EU AI Act’s transparency deadline adds a new, non-negotiable line item for any brand producing AI-assisted content: knowing what’s AI-generated, and being able to prove it.

For teams weighing where to focus next, the report’s own guidance is a useful filter: prioritize connection over collection, and readiness over novelty. This is the same principle behind how Papirfly’s Enterprise DAM approach is built – embedding DAM into the systems and workflows content teams already rely on, rather than asking teams to work around another repository.

If you’re assessing where your own DAM setup stands against these trends, our related guide on building a system of action for content operations is a good next step.

FAQs

What did Forrester’s 2026 Digital Asset Management report find?

Forrester’s June 2026 trends report found that DAM value depends on integration, findability, and governance rather than feature breadth alone, and that AI adoption in DAM is being deliberately paced behind foundational readiness.

Why is integration the top priority for DAM decision-makers in 2026?

Nearly half of DAM decision-makers (47%) told Forrester that integrating their DAM with adjacent systems is their top priority, because disconnected DAM systems get bypassed even when their features are strong.

Why do organizations struggle to find and reuse assets in their DAM?

Forrester found that two-thirds of DAM decision-makers struggle to reuse, update, or retire content, tracing the problem to weak upstream taxonomy, naming conventions, and metadata discipline rather than search technology itself.

Is AI adoption in Digital Asset Management actually slowing down?

Not exactly – interest is high, with two-thirds of decision-makers expecting AI use in DAM to grow over the next two years, but organizations are deliberately sequencing AI behind metadata, taxonomy, and integration fixes to manage risk.

What does the EU AI Act mean for AI-generated marketing content?

From August 2, 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires that AI-generated or AI-manipulated content be clearly disclosed to anyone viewing it in the EU, with penalties of up to €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover for non-compliance – rules that apply to brands and agencies deploying the content, not only the AI vendors. This point is not part of Forrester’s report; it is added here as Papirfly’s own perspective.

Table of contents:

  1. 1. Integration, not features, is now the top DAM priority
  2. 2. Findability failures are eroding trust in DAM
  3. 3. Governance pressure is rising fast
  4. 4. AI adoption in DAM is being paced, not avoided
  5. 5. DAM investment is rising, but only operational impact will justify it
  6. Beyond Forrester’s data: the EU AI Act is an arriving compliance deadline
  7. What these Digital Asset Management trends mean going forward
  8. FAQs
Brand Management

What the EU AI Act means for marketing

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Melanie Duffy Product Director, DAM
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This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.

Somewhere in the last few years, “is this real?” became a fair question to ask about almost anything you come across online — a photo, a voice, a product shot, a conversation. That shift happened fast, and mostly without anyone deciding it should.

Article 50 of the EU AI Act is a response to that shift, and the intention behind it is a good one: if knowing something was AI-made would change how a person reads it, they’re entitled to know. Not that AI shouldn’t be used to generate or shape content — it says nothing about that. It says the audience gets to have accurate footing when they look at the result.

That’s a reasonable thing to ask for, and it’s one most brands would probably want to meet even without a regulator asking. Where the frustration lives is in the doing — tracing which assets involved AI and how much, deciding what counts as disclosure-worthy, and getting that answer to actually travel with the asset all the way to publication. That’s real operational weight, and it’s fair to feel that weight even while agreeing with the reason for it.

The EU AI Act’s transparency obligations became applicable on August 2, 2026. They are the broadest section of the entire regulation, because they reach any organization that uses a generative AI system – not only the companies that build one.

For anyone responsible for brand governance across markets, a narrower question is more useful: which of these duties falls on a brand, which falls on the AI vendors it uses, and what has to change in the workflow producing campaign content. Those are the questions customers have put to me for months.

What the EU AI Act actually requires?

Article 50 is not a single labeling rule. It sets out 4 distinct duties, aimed at different actors and carrying different exceptions, and collapsing them into one is the most common source of both over-compliance and under-compliance.

The duties are:

  • People interacting with an AI system must be told they are, unless it is obvious from the context.
  • Providers of systems generating synthetic audio, image, video, or text must mark those outputs in a machine-readable format, detectable as artificially generated or manipulated, to the extent technically feasible.
  • People exposed to emotion recognition or biometric categorization systems must be notified.
  • Deployers publishing deep fakes must disclose them visibly, as must those publishing AI-generated text to inform the public on matters of public interest.

Enforcement arrived on the same date as the obligations themselves. Breaches of Article 50 sit in the tier carrying administrative fines of up to €15 million or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher (Source: EU AI Act Article 99, 2024). Enforcement sits with national market surveillance authorities rather than with Brussels.

That ceiling is not the highest tier – prohibited practices carry up to €35 million or 7% – but it is high enough that “we assumed it had been delayed” is an expensive position to hold.

Why the disclosure duty lands differently on brands than on AI vendors

The distinction that matters most here is between a provider and a deployer. A provider builds or places an AI system on the market; a deployer uses one. A marketing organization generating campaign copy or imagery with a commercial AI tool is, in the ordinary case, a deployer.

That matters because the machine-readable marking duty falls on providers. The obligation to embed detectable markers in generated output sits with the vendors of the generative tools, not with the brand that used them.

What reaches a deployer is considerably narrower. Visible disclosure is required for deep fakes – content resembling real people, places, or events – and for AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest.

There is a further carve-out worth knowing about. The marking duty does not apply where AI performs only an assistive function for standard editing, or where it does not substantially alter the input data or its semantics. The European Commission adopted guidelines on the scope of these duties on July 20, 2026, ahead of the application date (Source: European Commission, 2026).

For most brand campaign work, the deciding questions are whether an asset resembles a real person, place, or event closely enough to count as a deep fake, whether text is being published to inform the public on a matter of public interest, and whether AI substantially altered the content or merely assisted with standard editing.

Answering those is a legal judgment, and it belongs with counsel rather than with a marketing team. The operational problem is a different thing entirely – and that one does belong to marketing.

What the Digital Omnibus delayed, and what it did not

The confusion is understandable, because something genuinely was postponed. It just was not this.

The amending regulation was published in the Official Journal on July 24, 2026 and entered into force three days later, days before the transparency duties became applicable (Source: Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, 2026). Obligations for stand-alone high-risk systems moved from August 2, 2026 to December 2, 2027, and high-risk AI embedded in regulated products moved to August 2, 2028.

Neither of those touches the transparency layer, because Article 50 applies regardless of risk classification. A marketing team generating social copy is not running a high-risk system, and never was – which is precisely why the high-risk delay does not reach it.

One transition does reach Article 50, and it is narrow enough to misread easily. Providers of generative systems already placed on the market before August 2, 2026 have until December 2, 2026 to implement machine-readable marking, while systems launched from August 2 onward must comply immediately.

Read that as a short engineering grace period for a specific set of AI vendors, not as a general reprieve. Every other duty in Article 50 has been live since August 2.

Even where no disclosure is legally required, the question arrives anyway. Retailers, platforms, agencies, and enterprise customers are already asking brands to state whether AI was involved in a given asset, on timelines no regulation sets.

Most organizations cannot answer that question about their own libraries. Provenance information, where it exists at all, is scattered across file metadata that survives some tools and not others – and a large share of AI editing writes no provenance record whatsoever.

The regulation does at least draw a line under the back catalogue. Content generated before August 2, 2026 does not need to be labeled retroactively, though the Commission encourages it where possible (Source: European Commission, 2026).

The harder structural point is where disclosure falls due. The obligation attaches at publication, to the artifact an audience sees – not to the file sitting in a storage system. An asset can carry flawless provenance metadata all the way through a library and still be published in an advertisement that discloses nothing at all.

That is the gap most brand governance setups have not closed. Knowing which assets involved AI is a metadata problem; making sure the resulting advertisement, menu, or social post carries the right label is a production problem, and it usually sits with whoever built the template.

Graphic showing the missing AI label required by the AI EU Act

What we are doing about this at Papirfly

The questions reaching me from customers are rarely legal ones. They are operational: which of our assets involved AI, who recorded that, and whether the disclosure reaches the finished advertisement.

None of what follows is legal advice, and none of it decides anything on a customer’s behalf. Whether a specific asset needs a label is their own call, based on their own reading of the Act. What Papirfly provides is the mechanism.

Preservation comes first in how we have sequenced this. Where assets arrive carrying industry-standard content credentials, we keep that information intact as they move through the platform – because a system that discards provenance breaks the chain its customers depend on further downstream.

On top of that, teams can:

  • Flag AI involvement on any asset – AI generated, AI modified, or neither – with a clear visual indicator in the platform.
  • Filter the library to locate AI-involved assets for review or audit.
  • Map existing metadata across so assets are flagged automatically rather than by hand.
  • Add an AI label or disclaimer to documents produced in the platform, either using the EU icon, or in their own wording, design, and placement.
  • Identify every Papirfly feature that uses AI through an AI icon, so people always know when they are working with an AI tool.

Every organization interprets the Act slightly differently, so none of this is fixed. There are several ways to configure it depending on the workflow and how prominent labeling needs to be, and more of it becomes automatic over time.

Two commitments on our own content, neither of them required of us under Article 50. Any article on this blog produced with AI assistance carries a note saying so, and any image published here that has been materially altered with generative AI is identified as such.

Waiting for a legal floor to force that question is not a brand governance strategy.

Conclusion

Less landed on brand teams on August 2 than the headlines implied, and more will be asked of them than the law strictly requires. Both things are true at once, and planning for only one of them is the mistake.

The legal question – which specific assets trigger a disclosure duty – belongs with counsel. The operational question is whether the systems storing and producing brand content can reliably answer “was AI involved here,” and carry that answer through to whatever gets published.

The principle worth holding onto is that provenance is only useful if it survives into the output. Teams able to trace AI involvement from asset to published artifact will find every version of this question easier – the regulatory one and the commercial one alike.

See how compliance works inside your asset library

Consent status, automatic flagging, and audit trails.

See how compliance works inside your asset library

Consent status, automatic flagging, and audit trails.

Explore compliance tools

Consent status, automatic flagging, and audit trails.

Explore compliance tools
Explore compliance tools
graphic showing ai feature for gdpr compliance

FAQs

What exactly changed on August 2, 2026 under the EU AI Act?

The transparency obligations in Article 50 became applicable, covering AI system disclosure, machine-readable marking of AI-generated content, notification for emotion recognition and biometric categorization, and visible disclosure of deep fakes. The penalty provisions became operative on the same date, with fines for Article 50 breaches reaching up to €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover.

Does the EU AI Act require all AI-generated marketing content to be labeled?

The visible disclosure duty on deployers applies to deep fakes and to AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest, not to all AI-assisted marketing content. Machine-readable marking is a separate duty that falls on providers of generative AI systems rather than on the brands using them.

Was the AI Act’s transparency deadline delayed by the Digital Omnibus?

Almost entirely no. The Digital Omnibus moved high-risk obligations to December 2027 and August 2028, but left the Article 50 transparency duties applicable from August 2, 2026. The single exception is a short transition allowing providers of generative systems already on the market to implement machine-readable marking by December 2, 2026.

Who is responsible for labeling AI content, the brand or the AI vendor?

It depends on which duty is in question. Machine-readable marking of generated output is a provider obligation, so it sits with the AI tool vendor, while visible disclosure of deep fakes and certain public-interest text sits with the deployer publishing the content.

Does content created before August 2, 2026 need an AI label?

Content generated before that date does not need to be labeled retroactively. The European Commission encourages organizations to do so where possible, but it is not a requirement.

Table of contents:

  1. What the EU AI Act actually requires?
  2. Why the disclosure duty lands differently on brands than on AI vendors
  3. What the Digital Omnibus delayed, and what it did not
  4. The gap between a legal minimum and an operational answer
  5. What we are doing about this at Papirfly
  6. Conclusion
  7. FAQs