Brand activation management

Three words that mean a great deal for the quality, consistency and performance of your brand in an increasingly crowded environment.

Your brand is what sets you apart. It’s your unique calling card to your audiences, be they your customers, employees or the wider public, showing them what you are all about and why they should care about you. In a landscape that is only becoming more and more competitive, having this identity is more critical than ever.

• 81% of global consumers need to be able to trust the brands they buy from
• It takes 5-7 interactions for someone to recall your brand
• Presenting a consistent brand across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%

With the status and protection of your brand a critical foundation for success, becoming acquainted with activation management should be a matter of when, not if. Discover how this software empowers your company, and why our all-in-one brand management platform is the standout choice for marketing teams worldwide.

What is brand activation management?

Brand activation management is about gaining control of everything that depicts your brand, not to be confused with brand activation in experiential marketing.

It’s a way to centralise everything that represents your company (including your online videos, printed materials, brochures, social media and employer brand assets) and fitting them seamlessly into your overall brand machine.

Essentially, it’s having the power to transform how the world engages with your brand.

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Why is brand activation important?

For global brands producing hundreds of thousands of assets, it can be easy for guidelines to be misinterpreted, messaging to veer off purpose, colours to be used incorrectly and content to become skewed. 

All these inconsistencies will be hurting the brand perception you have worked so hard to build.

Brand consistently presented to consumers are 4 times more likely to experience brand visibility (Lucidpress)

Brand activation management software keeps your assets in order and creates a safe, controlled environment where you can be totally confident that all content stays on-brand.

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The power Papirfly’s all-in-one platform

Papirfly’s platform is your single online destination for everything that contributes to the strength and quality of your global brand, helping your teams:

Manage:

Through the platform’s digital timeline tool, you can stay informed when content is being published, where it is being shared and how often it is being used

• Set permissions and lock down specific parts of your templates
• Introduce approval workflows for an extra layer of quality control
• Calculate the ROI of your platform by analysing how often assets are created and used

Store & Share:

Use a dedicated DAM to house and organise all your approved content, marketing materials, files and more

• Adjust permission levels to establish who can access each area of your DAM
• Easily filter through logos, fonts, imagery, videos and more
• Consistently build your asset collection, and be alerted if any errors occur

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How does Papirfly stack-up against other software?

Over the last two decades, Papirfly has gained more than 600,000 users across enteprises. But during that time, other companies have emerged offering similar solutions. 

Trying to differentiate one from another by reading through feature lists can get confusing. So, to help you make a more informed decision on the best solution for your company, we’ve carried out some competitor analysis to share what Papirfly has that other software doesn’t.

At its core a DAM solutions provider, Bynder has extended their offering over the years to incorporate creative templates, brand guidelines and analytics.

What we like about it
Like Papirfly, our platform provides a central cloud-based portal for all branded company materials and messaging. The software also allows teams real-time collaborative edits, on-brand approvals and includes auto-formatting for channels and file types – two features our customers find incredibly useful in our solution.

Why we’d choose Papirfly instead
While Bynder’s Template feature has some similarities to Papirfly’s, its capabilities are limited – you get the same basic functionality, but it doesn’t give you the same flexibility and reassurance. 

In this respect, Papirfly is far more dynamic in that it allows you to set strict templates and approve content to be associated with them. This leaves no room for the kind of errors that can still happen using Bynder, especially when localising assets for distinct markets.

Final say 
For smaller organisations who are less impacted by lack of consistency, Bynder has pretty much everything you need to store and share your marketing materials. But if you’re dreaming of global brand consistency, Papirfly’s Template and Localisation features can’t be outdone.

Canva is an online design and publishing tool that helps people around the world design for a wide range of materials and publish them anywhere.

What we like about it
Canva’s online design and publishing tools are simple and easy to pick up with limited design experience – even with its long list of editing features. They also do a good job of encouraging teams to create more with them by including helpful video tutorials on their website.

Why we’d choose Papirfly instead
This is another instance where Papirfly’s Templates feature really stands out. Canva showcases a huge variety of its own templates for different print and digital formats, but relies on the teams using them to ensure that they are bespoke to your brand.

With BAM, all templates can be predefined before anything is created to guarantee absolute alignment with your guidelines.

Final say 
Again, this is a question of consistency – if you want full control over your templates while empowering your teams to produce assets quickly and on-brand, BAM is still your best bet.

Frontify is a brand management solution that leads with brand guideline creation. However it also incorporates DAM, creative collaboration spaces and templates for both digital and print. 

What we like about it
Similar to Papirfly’s Point feature, Frontify makes relevant brand guidelines easy to store, find and share with specific teams. And for faster campaign asset approvals, it also features a real-time collaboration feature and the ability to allocate relevant materials to specific teams.

Why we’d choose Papirfly instead
Although Frontify has lots of helpful integrations, such as Sketch and InDesign, it relies on teams having a good knowledge of these complex tools in order to create and set templates in the first place. 

With Papirfly, you have this capability built into an intuitive interface that doesn’t rely on prior knowledge of design software.

Final say
If you’re looking to free-up design resources and reduce your dependency on external agencies, then Papirfly’s easy-to-use creation suite can help you bring more in-house and create bespoke templates in minutes.

Built primarily with retail brands in mind, Colateral promises to help users plan, implement and analyse their campaigns.

What we like about it
Colateral has been available for about the same time as Papirfly. And like BAM, its software focuses on the pain points of its customers and incorporates genuinely useful tools for solving their most pressing challenges.

Why we’d choose Papirfly instead
It’s clear that Colateral has some great features to make the lives of retail marketers easier, but it leaves other areas of the business unaccounted for. With Papirfly you have tools to enhance your employer branding, external marketing and comms all in the same solution. 

Final say
While we can’t deny Colateral’s scope for the fast, wide-scale rollout of retail assets, Papirfly’s focus lies in empowering your teams to produce work of a higher quality. However, scale of production is something that we’re developing in a new feature that will be able to convert huge qualities of content into specific formats, sizes and languages.

Altru is an employee advocacy platform that makes it easy for staff to create, store and share videos.

What we like about it 
Altru is great for producing professional-looking videos fast. It’s incredibly simple to use and even incorporates an app to promote employee advocacy to get staff engaged with your brand.

Why we’d choose Papirfly instead
Employer advocacy is an excellent way to make your brand resonate with both potential candidates and consumers. But it’s only one part that makes up the overall success of your employer brand. 

With Papirfly, you have easy-to-use tools to help your employees create authentic employee advocacy videos, social media posts, print assets and more. Plus you get a built-in DAM to store and share them, as well as a single location to store brand guidelines for total consistency.

Final say
As well as having the extra features and capabilities mentioned above, Papirfly origins are in employer branding. It’s this expertise that made us stand out from the very beginning and has made us a top choice for leading brands across the globe ever since.

Lumen5 is a video creation and editing tool that makes it easier for teams to produce impactful, engaging videos from existing content. It claims to cut video creation time to an average of six minutes.

What we like about it
As well as providing templates for specific types of video, Lumen5’s AI-powered technology helps you storyboard your ideas, fit your content to a layout, and find music and visuals that enhance your message.

Why we’d choose Papirfly instead
It’s brilliant to have simple software for bringing video creation in house. But the difference with Papirfly is that you can guarantee they’ll be consistent, keep track of how they are being used and make them easily accessible, company-wide.

Final say 
Contrary to the old saying, many tools don’t make light work. If all you need is the ability to create social media videos quickly, Altru can do it, but if you want to make them feel part of your overall brand, you’ll need to invest in more tools, or have them all-in-one with Papirfly.

Perhaps the most notable difference that Papirfly delivers over the solutions above is over 20 years’ experience dedicated to developing our platform. We’ve spent time making it as comprehensive and robust as possible in meeting the needs of brands in any industry across the globe.

Our commitment is to simplify the everyday for marketing teams worldwide. We are proud to have made that possible for over 200 brands globally, and would be happy to discuss how we can achieve the same for your company.

Get in touch with our team today to learn more about the benefits of our all-in-one brand management platform, or experience the platform for yourself by arranging your free demo.

When it comes to building a strong, memorable brand, consistency is crucial.

Presenting your audiences with a dependable, distinguishable identity on all channels is the origin of them building trust with your brand. Without trust, there can be no brand loyalty, and you lose your opportunity at securing that sought-after return customer.

To preserve consistency at a time where the demands on content production are greater than ever, organisations are encouraged to create clear brand guidelines that underpin everything that is published. Much of these concern the visual aspects of the brand, ensuring these don’t deviate from their identity.

Why tone of voice is so important

Just as important is keeping tone of voice and language on-brand and markets specific. Yet, this is often overlooked when it comes to these guidelines, as it is viewed as difficult to enforce and manage in the way visual assets can be.

The end result? Copywriters that are unsure of how to evoke their brand’s personality across content. With incessant pressure to produce this content, they instead write in their own style to compensate.

These inconsistencies impact how audiences view your brands. If there is no binding thread between your various touchpoints, this will prevent potential customers from gaining a solid sense of what your brand represents, making you appear less trustworthy.

What is tone of voice?

Although tone of voice is a commonly held expression, it is important to recognise that tone and voice are two separate entities.

Your brand’s voice is the base of your verbal personality. It represents the core values, characteristics and features that make up your brand’s unique identity, and will be unwavering across every piece of marketing collateral.

Tone by contrast is much more malleable and flexible. Tone is the application of your brand’s voice to fit the context of where it is used. For instance, a social post on Twitter hopping on the back of a trending meme will probably have a notably different tone than a press release about your latest development.

The tone and style it is written can be markedly different, but they can still carry that overarching voice behind your brand. That is the secret to a tone of voice that maintains complete consistency, but perfectly adapts to the channel it’s placed on.

This is a difficult balancing act, and certainly one that some brands perform better than others. But at the heart of the most successful examples are tone of voice guidelines, that remove any room for interpretation and make it clear to everyone in your company how you should be projected verbally in all circumstances.

Building your brand’s tone of voice guidelines

Your tone of voice guidelines set the rules for every aspect of your written communications. It is the document that all writers, both internal and freelance, should refer to in order to ensure they are producing content in line with your personality.

This will also streamline the process of onboarding new copywriters in how they get to grips with communicating your brand, and used as a reference guide for when it comes to editing and proofing.

Below, we’ve outlined our 9 tips to making these guidelines as robust and useful as they need to be to guarantee consistency throughout your content.

9 steps to great tone of voice guidelines

1. Perform a language audit

First, it’s important to assess the content that your brand currently produces across its various channels to identify anything that you feel is inconsistent with how you wish your brand to be perceived.

What words stand out most frequently in your content? How long are your sentences? How often do you use colloquialisms or abbreviations? Do you employ emojis?

Ask these questions and more across a wide body of your existing content. This will give your team a base to determine the elements you like within your current copy, and what needs to be tightened up or addressed in order to consistently present your brand’s personality. Understanding these will be important to what you include within your final guidelines.

2. Identify your brand’s personality

When determining the right tone of voice for your brand, think of it as a person. Imagine meeting them at a dinner party:

• Would they be loud and confident?
• Would they be thoughtful and reserved?
• Would they be assertive and forthright?

What would they be wearing? What subjects would they talk about? Who would they be inspired by? When you start to think of your brand in this context, you can develop a more vivid understanding of what its voice is and how it would be used in a variety of contexts.

By developing this persona, one that incorporates all of the top values and aspects of your brand, it becomes clearer how it would interact with your audiences.

3. Assess your target audiences

Speaking of your audiences, it’s important to perform some critical analysis on who they are and what they would want to hear from your brand.

Is your primary audience niche or is it more mainstream? Do they prioritise particular social issues over others? Is there particular jargon that they use day-to-day?

Building this understanding will cement what your brand’s voice should be to best engage your customers and, importantly, help you recognise how its tone needs to shift to capture the imagination of different audiences across your various channels.

4. Construct a glossary

An essential component of your tone of voice guidelines should be a glossary, which outlines specific terminology and jargon that is unique to your brand or industry, and that needs to be incorporated into your copy.

This will include product names, brand language, warranty terms and department names, and will span across both content you produce for customers, and phrases you use internally. It will also be valuable in outlining how terms will differ when used in different contexts or in a variety of languages (more on that later). It should also address any words that should be avoided at all costs.

Also, it’s important that this glossary is not left static. As your brand evolves and expands into different locations and onto different platforms, it’s crucial that this list is kept up-to-date.

5. List clear grammatical dos and don’ts

Alongside the glossary, your tone of voice guide should also have a distinct list of grammatical rules for your writers to follow. This should be as comprehensive as possible, but listed in a digestible way so it is easier for writers to understand and apply to your brand.

• Do you want hyphens to be used in words like double-click?
• What perspective do you speak with? (i.e. first-person, second-person, third-person)
• What slang words or abbreviations are allowed and which are forbidden?
• Are writers encouraged to use idioms, cliches, metaphors and other literary devices?
• What are your rules relating to punctuation and formatting?
• How long should sentences and paragraphs be in general?

This sounds like nit-picking, but if you want to achieve complete consistency, it is best that nothing about your voice is left to chance.

6. Put copy into context

Remember what we said about voice and tone being separate? That’s because the overarching language and grammatical rules you outline in your tone of voice guidelines might shift slightly depending on the context of the writing.

For instance, on a press release or product description, your copy might be more formal and to-the-point, with little margin for humour or creative expression. At the same time, your social posts could be more colloquial and quirky. The nature of these different types of content necessitates a change in tone to not appear jarring to the audiences reading it.

So, make sure your guidelines address any difference in approach on specific content channels. This will allow for the writing to be rightly adjusted for these various audiences, but not stray too far away from your brand’s core identity.

7. Provide plenty of examples

To give your writers complete clarity over how they should produce content for your brand, it is vital that you give them clear examples of copy that ticks all the right boxes, and copy that is completely off-brand.

Providing several examples, across all of your brand channels, will make it apparent to new and existing writers what is expected of them in a way that simply explaining doesn’t always cover. When you’re learning grammar in school, you will be presented with good and bad examples to make that process easier – this works in exactly the same way here.

Consider the “Goldilocks” technique here: If you want your brand to be perceived as “approachable yet professional”, you might title your emails with “hello” rather than “dear” (too formal and familiar) or “hey” (too colloquial).

8. Don’t forget the details

While it is important not to overwhelm writers with detail to make it as straightforward as possible for them to absorb and apply your tone of voice requirements, not covering all your bases widens the risk of inconsistencies creeping in over time.

With this in mind, make sure you also incorporate sections dedicated to:

• The degree of formality of your content in various contexts
• Your stance on swearing and other potential sticking points
• How and when to reference news and pop culture

Continue to review and assess your copy over time to see if any off-brand tendencies start to emerge, and if they do, update your guidelines where necessary to reflect this.

9. Make it easily accessible

Finally, you can have the most complete, comprehensible tone of voice guide imaginable – but if nobody can access it or knows where it is, it will have no effect. So, it is vital that the location of the guide is known company-wide, and that your teams globally can access it at all times to inform their writing.

This is where a platform like Papirfly’s all-in-one brand management solution can be a powerful complement to your tone of voice guidelines. By providing a single, central destination for all your brand guidelines, this keeps your teams worldwide aware of your brand’s unique identity and how they should maintain this both verbally and visually.

A single source of truth for your brand voice that your entire team can engage with.

4 brands that know their tone of voice

Coca-Cola

A brand that is already benefiting from the Papirfly Platform, Coca-Cola’s tone of voice has been clear and consistent across its 130-year history – it is all about bringing happiness to people.

Coca-Cola maintains a positive, friendly and down-to-earth tone across all its primary communications, built around their core personality trait of helping people live happy lives. Through the language they use, no one is left in any doubt what their brand stands for, and that’s helped it become one of the world’s most celebrated brands.

Examples

“Open happiness”

“Together tastes better”

“Refresh on the Coca-Cola side of life”

Starbucks

Starbucks’ voice guidelines plainly outline their tone of voice in a way anyone can understand, including several examples.

By employing a blend of functional and expressive language, Starbucks sets out their brand identity as one that wants to be clear, helpful and digestible for their customers, but to unlock their passion for what they drink and to indulge in what they love.

Examples

“That first sip feeling”

“It’s not just coffee. It’s Starbucks”

“Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time”

Dove

As a company built around beauty and self-care, it is important that Dove’s messages of empowerment and body positivity are projected throughout its communications.

Dove keeps this consistent in their various marketing and social media campaigns, through to their website, where their vision aligns them as an organisation that wants to make beauty a source of confidence, rather than anxiety.

Examples

“Making a genuine difference”

“Welcome to Dove…the home of real beauty”

“We believe that real beauty comes from confidence, and confidence comes from embracing who you are”

Old Spice

Following their rebrand in 2010, Old Spice unshackled themselves from their former tone of voice, which was associating them with a mature audience, and revitalised it to attract a broader, younger demographic.

By focusing on wit, humour and a new perspective on masculinity, Old Spice used its new voice to regain its foothold as a global leader in men’s deodorant.

Examples

“The man your man could smell like”

“How to keep excessive sweat from stopping your swagger”

“Get more awesomeness, good smellingness, and Old Spice exclusiveness than ever before”

Lock down your tone of voice

We hope this has helped you recognise the absolute importance of being clear and consistent with your brand’s tone of voice and language, and how you can guarantee this in your own marketing.

Consistency is the cornerstone of customers trusting your brand – and this needs to be maintained every time you engage with them. Your tone of voice and the language you use is just one component of this, but it is one that demands your attention to prevent your voice from becoming confused or inaccurate.

Our all-in-one brand management platform is designed to help your brand lockdown consistency across all areas of your marketing, both verbally and visually. 

• Harness bespoke, intelligent templates to produce assets faster and more cost-effectively, with no chance of going off-brand
• Make all guidelines, training videos and assets available company-wide
• Set permissions for different team members to ensure they can only access features and assets relevant to them and their market

Start empowering your brand with a brand management platform – get in touch with our team today.

You’re ready to put your big idea forward and start making a real change for your brand and marketing team. But you need to get through senior management first.

• How do you prove the effectiveness of software they haven’t seen yet?
• How do you demonstrate return on investment?
• How do you prove this isn’t another fad, but a significantly better way of working?
• How do you justify the cost to people outside of the marketing team that may not be able to visualise the bigger picture? People that may be in the process of making cuts?

We understand your time is already stretched, and putting together a business case is the very last thing you need. That’s why we’ve put together a download containing everything you need to get the ball rolling. 

We’ve also put together a dedicated slide that will help retail marketers and employer brand teams make their presentations more industry relevant.

The ‘why’?

The fact you’ve made it to this point demonstrates you understand the value of BAM by Papirfly™. You see that it’s a long-term, valuable investment into the future of your brand. You are pioneering for positive company-wide change. But why should any of your bosses sit up and take notice?

When talking through the pitch, ensure you remain confident and professional, but not sales-y. This isn’t a typical piece of software – this is positively changing the way you approach marketing production forever. It’s a big deal, and your opening statement needs to demand attention.

At the very beginning of your pitch deck, we’ve given you a powerful positioning piece that addresses the problem you’re trying to solve, without being too negative. It’s a call for change, and to embrace innovation for the greater good of the brand and company.

The solution

You may be tempted to go into lots of detail about BAM by Papirfly™. But try not to do this unless prompted. The reality is that the people you are pitching to only need to understand the topline information surrounding what it is; the main focuses should be on how it will benefit the organisation, the problems it will solve, and that it won’t cost them any more than they are already spending. 

That’s why we’ve given you some top-line benefits and name-dropped some of our world-renowned customers so that your senior management team can see just why they should take your pitch seriously.

The financials

If you can prove that BAM by Papirfly™ will not only save money, but make teams more productive, without having to invest heavily, you’ll immediately break down the biggest barrier in the minds of key stakeholders such as CMOs, CFOs and CEOs. 

While BAM by Papirfly™ will be able to help you deliver more output than you’ve been able to afford in the past, it’s important to back up any claims with evidence. We’ve included real-world examples within the PDF, but feel free to create your own versions using your existing rates.

The time-saving

We’ve included a dedicated section on how BAM by Papirfly™ helps teams go to market quicker. Though this is a huge benefit for the marketing department, from an SMT perspective, it helps to reduce dead time and lengthy turnaround times – a major source of bottlenecking on projects and a costly expense. 

We’ve included the below infographic to illustrate just how much time can be saved. This is a great tool to help senior management understand just how many moving parts there are to a single campaign. 

The bigger picture

Ensure the recipient of your presentation understands that this solution isn’t just going to benefit the marketing department, but also the wider organisation. Branded documents of any kind can be easily created, edited and shared. 

So while this solution is primarily a marketing and brand solution, it is also a comprehensive business tool in that it can support multiple departments with content creation. These departments can have access to their own templates and use them as they see fit.

The independence

Management teams will have more time for strategic thinking and guidance as other members of the marketing team will be able to easily create and get campaigns to a much more progressed stage than they usually would. 

There will be less hand-holding and micromanagement, meaning senior employees would be able to concentrate more on higher-level tasks. Having a lot of the menial tasks taken from them will also help to create a more positive working environment and contribute to employee retention.

The future-proofing

The details covered in the pitch will all help to build confidence in what you are proposing, but you will need to work on how you make it fit into your company’s long-term strategic vision. 

Making reference to terms and goals you’ve been told about will help stakeholders resonate more with the language you’re using, and help them visualise how this proposal fits in with and supports their plans. 

Dealing with objections 

You should expect to meet some level of resistance, and provide all responses in a calm and considered manner. Be confident in your convictions and reasoning, but by preparing for questions and a level of criticism you can prepare for all eventualities. 

Try to be objective when preparing your presentation, and put yourself in the shoes of the people hearing your pitch. We’ve ordered the pitch to break down any barriers they throw at you.

Good luck and get ready to embrace BAM by Papirfly™!

You should now have all the tools and information you need to put up an indisputable pitch. 

The power of BAM speaks for itself, but sometimes those at board-level need a bit of extra convincing. If you have anything in mind you think will help you with your pitch, get in touch with our team and we’ll do our best to help.

A brand portal’s power can’t be understated. It’s a game-changer for not only your brand, but for you and your teams – but that’s only when you fully understand what you’re signing up for.

It won’t transport you to another galaxy, but this kind of portal will take your brand to places it has never been before. 

There are hundreds, possibly thousands of brand portals available. It’s a saturated market and the term ‘brand portal’ alone is interpreted in many different ways, delivering many contrasting solutions.

The problem is that they’ve been developed by teams from all different backgrounds, solving different pain points and problems – which leaves you with an overwhelming amount of choice but not a lot of context or clarity. 

In this article, we aim to help you understand the core features of every solid brand portal, what it should help you achieve day-to-day and how it can propel your brand long term. Lastly, we’ll help you navigate and narrow down your choices.

What is a brand portal and what does it do?

At its most basic level, a brand portal is a digital home for your brand. Many give you access to brand assets, videos, guidelines and campaign materials. It allows employees, agencies, suppliers and whoever else needs access to log in and get what they need, when they need it, without having to interrupt anyone else.

This is still an accurate description of many brand portals that exist. But there are many vendors taking this to a new level, and redefining what a brand portal is and should be.

The trouble with the traditional definition is that it only solves one of many brand problems. A comprehensive brand portal should give teams the ability to create and edit assets, as well as access them.

Otherwise, there’s still a great disconnect between what’s being produced and what’s available. There’s no true oversight or assurance of brand consistency, and mistakes can only be noticed once the files are uploaded. 

What features should a brand portal have?

A brand portal solution like Papirflys are being continually updated and invested in, so it can be hard to know what you should be looking for in terms of features. We’re proud to say our core product allows for the vast majority of features to be accessed, with very few module upgrades available. 

Here’s the list of features you should be looking for in your next brand portal: 

An easy-to-use, customisable dashboard or ‘homepage’

Tailored login credentials, so that certain individuals or companies only have access to what they need

A built-in, intuitive Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to organise and locate files and assets easily – with tagging functionality, as well as the ability to download in different file formats

Dedicated education section for brand assets, guidelines, usage and more to educate teams on the wider brand consistency mission and reduce internal requests

Intelligent design studio integrated into the portal, with guaranteed on-brand digital, print, social, video and email templates that can be created from scratch, edited or translated and adapted for other sub-brands, languages and regions

Campaign planning tools and timelines where campaign materials can also be easily accessed – with the option to discontinue asset availability once campaigns have finished

How will a brand portal make your life easier?

Aside from giving you a centralised place for your content production and brand management, it will also give teams a direct way to get the assets they need. They can create and edit anything themselves, while you are assured your brand guidelines are always adhered to.

This means no waiting around for agencies or third-party suppliers; teams can go to market quickly and you’re not bombarded with requests.

Wider than this, everything your brand produces will be on-brand and consistent, helping to create a more unified approach to marketing and communications. A brand that’s presented consistently tends to generate 23% more revenue.

Budget will be saved by reducing agency spending. Time will be saved by having a single place to go to for files and creation of assets. Teams will be more productive and deliver more in less time. 

There are very few (if any) downsides to implementing a brand portal. The benefits extend far beyond just being able to deliver more day-to-day – it has an incredible positive impact on the wider brand and business. 

Making an informed choice

We’ve compiled a list of key questions to help you select the brand portal that’s right for you. 

• Are big, reputable brands using the portal?
• How many active users do they have globally?
• Can the company demonstrate reviews and detailed case studies (preferably video)?
• How many years has the company been established?
• How many employees does the company have? (this will help you to establish the level of customer service you can expect)
• Are the pricing and package levels transparent?
• Was the demo useful and informative?
• Are the sales and customer service representatives knowledgeable? 
• Is there a set roadmap for updates over the next year?

Could a brand management platform by Papirfly be your next brand portal?

We’re proud of the brand portal we created back in 2000. We’ve had a vision for over 21 years to become the best brand portal available and help global companies reach their full potential. And we’re doing it.

If you would like to learn more about Papirfly book your demo today. 

The demands of content production get tougher with each passing year. Today’s brands are expected to maintain a consistent flow of on-brand content, across a growing number of channels, to diverse, global audiences.

The pressure is on for modern marketing teams. But, budgets are limited. Hours are finite. Workforces are already stretched. Trying to meet the need for continuous content in a purely manual way is now utterly impractical.

Creators will be overworked. Errors will be made. Costs will run high. To keep audiences with ever-decreasing attention spans engaged with your brand, marketers need solutions that will enable them to ramp up production without compromising on quality.

That’s why the term “creative automation” has rapidly risen in popularity in recent years. It embodies the aim of many marketers to produce the substantial amount of content today’s audiences demand, without needing to massively expand their teams or work around the clock.

What is creative automation? 

Creative automation is harnessing technology to allow marketers to scale their production significantly while maintaining a quality output. This is achieved by removing many of the simple, yet time-costly, administrative processes that go into creating assets for a wide range of campaigns and formats.

For instance, say you want to launch a digital campaign promoting a new product. This will involve:

• Multiple different asset formats – social media posts, videos, infographics, banner ads, digital signage, etc.
• Content dedicated to specific channels, from social media platforms to email campaigns
• Numerous audiences across the globe

All of your assets will have consistent branding and a unified theme. But, because of the different requirements for each channel – sizing, formats, languages, imagery – these small changes will take a lot of time and effort to produce.

Creative automation seeks to make these minor yet vital changes much faster to implement. Rather than designers and editors needing to hand-craft these across all formats, painstakingly making every subtle alteration for what is essentially the same asset, they would be able to do this in a matter of clicks.

Using intelligent, pre-approved templates, marketers could seamlessly adjust one base into multiple formats, sizes and localisations, all in one place. In a matter of minutes, one asset can become dozens, even hundreds, all perfectly on-brand and error-free.

This reduces the administrative overhead that these once manual, time-consuming tasks required. 

It sounds too good to be true, right? Creative automation promises to be everything that marketing teams need to streamline their operations and free-up their creatives’ time for more suitable matters.

But, there are reasons why BAM by Papirfly™, in spite of delivering the same speed, cost-saving and consistency advantages outlined above, is not referred to as a creative automation tool…

Why BAM is not a creative automation solution

At Papirfly, we are averse to the term “creative automation” for several reasons. First, the phrasing of creative automation itself is problematic, as it indicates that the creative process behind the design and development of assets is automated.

This is far from helpful when one of the biggest barriers to this helpful technology being adopted is the fear among designers that these solutions are brought in to replace them, rather than support them. 

With increasing doubts across all industries over the effects of automation and “the robots taking over”, referring to a tool as creative automation is unlikely to alleviate any concerns your design team may have about their status.

We firmly believe that the creative process behind any assets or campaign must remain manual and person-driven, and not confined by any kind of automation. BAM as a solution is there to accelerate the rate of content production once the creative behind an asset is confirmed, and that is why we avoid the confusion that “creative automation” can inspire.

Furthermore, the scope of creative automation solutions can vary significantly depending on the tool used. It has become something of a catch-all term for any technology that can aid the speed of content production, even if that is simply the ability to resize imagery for different social media channels.

With BAM, the scope of our intelligent templates is as comprehensive as possible. From social assets, videos and emails, to brochures, posters and presentations – all marketing materials can be adapted to these formats in-house with this all-in-one solution.

Plus, rather than simply take an existing asset and adjust it, BAM’s templates allow all users – even those with no design expertise – to create new, on-brand assets in a short span of time. These can then be adjusted to all relevant formats, increasing the reach of that asset across all of a brand’s audiences.

Take social media assets as an example. This is one of the most demanding areas of content production that marketers must contend with, competing with other brands for their customers’ attention. Through BAM, users can:

• Customise organic and paid assets in just a click, ensuring they’re perfectly sized for all channels
• Produce static, carousel, video assets and more from pre-programmed templates
• Maintain identity across your social channels with subtly different, yet significant, designs
• Create multi-image layouts, promotions and more
• Quickly adapt language and cultural imagery that appeals to your audiences worldwide

How BAM goes further than creative automation

In addition, BAM does not label itself a creative automation tool because its offering to users is so much more than just a means to create and adapt assets. While that is a major feature, BAM goes even further to be everything marketers need to activate their brand globally.

Digitised approval workflows

To further streamline the content production and ensure everyone who needs it has eyes on assets before they’re published, BAM’s approval workflows guarantees that the right people are notified when an asset is ready to be checked. This means that sign-off is fast-tracked and there is no risk of errors entering the public eye.

• Digital trail of sign-offs
• Make comments directly onto assets
• Complete edits inside BAM

Clear campaign planning

CMOs, marketing managers and more can have complete oversight of what assets are required at each stage of a campaign through BAM’s helpful campaign planner. This visual overview keeps everything neat and tidy, and everyone on schedule, with the ability to make certain briefs, templates and imagery only available to the relevant users and teams.

• A central, visual campaign planner
• Reduces wasted time locating files
• Pull stats to see how often assets are being used

Dedicated educate section 

Give your entire team, from experienced veterans to new recruits, direct access to the guidelines that inform the identities of your brand and sub-brands. Users will be able to find colour palettes, typefaces, icons and more in one central location, with a clear idea of how each should be applied.

• A central place for all guidelines, documents and brand materials
• Specialised views for different teams
• Help teams understand why your brand is executed in a certain way 

Fully configurable DAM

Maintain a unified database of all assets created by your teams globally with a comprehensive Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool. Through this, BAM users can easily save, search, edit and send assets to anyone with the right permissions. It’s a single source of truth for your entire marketing team, making sure there is no risk of duplicating efforts ever again.

• Store and categorise assets by team, sub-brand, campaign or country
• Download, save, share and edit from within the portal
• Keep on top of what’s being used and how frequently

Discover the full reach of BAM

By going beyond the boundaries of creative automation, BAM by Papirfly™ equips marketing teams to enhance the speed, quality and cost-effectiveness of their content output. Over 500,000 users across the globe, including names like Coca-Cola HB, IBM, Unilever and Vodafone, are transforming their approach to marketing through this powerful solution.

If you would like to learn more about the far-reaching capabilities of BAM, arrange a free, personalised demo, or get in touch with our team.

The four-day working week is something that has been earmarked by organisations for several years. But now, numerous companies have taken the stride to adopt this new approach.

Earlier in 2022, tech giant Panasonic announced that they were looking to offer their employees an extra day off to relax. Despite Japan being a culture infamous for its steadfast devotion to work, the scales have begun to tip in favour of long weekends in one of the most career-focused countries in the world.

It’s not just corporations across the pond that have started to embrace shorter working weeks – European countries, such as Spain and Ireland, have already begun piloting similar schemes with great success. 

In the UK, dozens of companies, including several marketing agencies like Crystallised, FLOCC and Punch Creative, have taken the leap as part of the 4 Day Week Campaign, reaping the benefits that this model of work brings.

But, how did we get here? The world of work has been changing with the evolution of technology for some time. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it allowed employees and employers time to reflect on the future of work and their approach to it. Since then, the calls for the 4-day working week have only grown louder.

The benefits of a shorter working week

At first glance, it may seem counterproductive to condense our busy work schedules down to 4 days. However, adopting this new working model has several very real advantages for businesses and the marketing teams within.

Enhanced productivity

Although you may think that having less time to do the same amount of work would cause deadlines to pile up, in many cases, working fewer hours actually has the opposite effect. When time is at a premium, staff are more aware of how they spend their hours, often resulting in them working much more efficiently. 

While 4-day weeks mean reducing you and your team’s hours by 20%, embracing this new model of work has been seen to boost productivity by up to 40% – typically outweighing the time lost. 

The end result? Your marketing department can increase its output in a shorter space of time. This could mean campaign assets are completed quicker, leaving you or your team more time to plan ahead.

Improved employee engagement

Giving your staff more time away from work by condensing the week can serve to improve staff happiness and engagement, in turn reducing employee absenteeism by up to 41%.

Enhancing engagement also has a notable impact on how invested your marketeers are in the company. Simply put, if people are engaged, they are more likely to go above and beyond for the business.  

By limiting the number of working hours within your organisation, you not only help bolster staff attendance – the people working at your company are going to be more invested in the business and more willing to help your brand go further. 

Higher staff retention

Over time, it’s natural for employees to eventually move on to pastures new. However, to keep your top talent for as long as possible you ideally want to increase staff retention as much as you can.

By embracing a 3-day weekend throughout your organisation, you work to keep existing workers happy and satisfied, reducing the likelihood that people consider leaving.

As the time and costs associated with recruitment are considerable, keeping talent inside your offices means you can spend more time and money delivering outstanding content, and less on finding and training new recruits. 

Challenges of a 4-day working week

While preliminary trials suggest that a shorter working week does indeed have some very real benefits to businesses and their subsequent marketing departments, this new model isn’t without its challenges.

To combat these potential obstacles, tools such as BAM by Papirfly™ can help organisations overcome the challenges ahead, allowing them to leverage the benefits of this new way of working. With this all-in-one software, 4-day weeks can become a reality for your organisation.

Fewer hours to deliver

The most notable challenge enterprises face when switching to a shorter week is the fact that there are fewer hours for employees to carry out their workload. Without the right tools in place, you risk diminishing the volume of content your marketing team produces. 

If you’re unable to deliver at the pace your audience expects, leads could go cold and customer engagement may dip.
How BAM overcomes this challenge

To help you upscale your content production, even during smaller 4-day working weeks, BAM allows your department to:

• Create bespoke assets that embrace your brand’s guidelines quickly and easily using smart templates – no design experience is needed
• Approve individual elements of your campaign faster to deliver a greater volume of accurate content
• Reduce the time spent looking for crucial files by filtering through existing assets in our robust digital asset manager
• Simplify your webpage management, and easily publish or update content online using an integrated CMS

Maintaining consistency

Another challenge that workers will face when moving to a shorter working week is maintaining the same level of consistency across their output. Often, when there is less time to complete tasks, it can be easy for errors and inconsistencies to creep in. 

In such a highly competitive marketing environment, a brand without a clear message, tone or look may risk muddying its brand and alienating its existing customer base.

How BAM overcomes this challenege

To ensure your brand is fronting a strong image, BAM’s intelligent creative templates allow the streamlined creation of on-style visuals. 

Covering everything from social media assets and email templates to posters, brochures and billboards, ensures that brand identities are locked down across all assets. Even those with no prior design experience can utilise these templates to craft perfectly branded content.

This means consistency is effortlessly maintained across your output, relieving your team of pressure when producing assets at pace.

Overseeing all elements 

For managers who oversee the delivery of marketing campaigns, a shorter working week can seem a daunting prospect. 

Not only will you have less time to fit in your weekly duties – as a manager people rely on your input all of the time. If you can’t cast your eyes over everything you need to, it’s likely to cause delays in the pipeline, hampering efficiency.

How BAM overcomes this challenge

BAM’s powerful campaign planner gives you a bird’s-eye view of your campaigns across brand divisions, letting you create briefs, assign marketing materials and outline timeframes from one single place. 

This doesn’t just save you and your fellow marketing managers valuable time – the robust campaign planner aims to give you the information you need to make informed decisions that benefit your brand.  

Leverage the benefits of the 4-day working week with BAM

With the likes of Panasonic and Canon recently taking the leap to a 4-day working week, this new approach is here to stay. And rightly so – trials indicate that there are very real benefits to this new working model.  

Despite there being a number of challenges associated with adopting shorter weeks – BAM our revolutionary all-in-one solution – is perfectly positioned to help your organisation adopt this new model of working, overcoming challenges and harnessing the unmissable advantages. 

Over 500,000 users in some of the world’s most well-known organisations – such as Coca Cola and HSBC – recognise BAM as the future of marketing. This is because our all-in-one platform doesn’t just deliver quality, on-brand content at speed – our cutting-edge software can also:

• Edit and brand videos for websites, social media channels and digital campaigns
• Simplify the process of localising and adapting content to new regions
• Centralise assets and important documents into an accessible online folder structure
• Allow content to be updated and published across sites using one central CMS
• Integrate seamlessly with existing PIM and ERP systems

If you want to learn more about BAM, and the ways in which it can help you ramp up content production in a condensed timeframe, get in touch today, or book your demo online.