Say your company has numerous and far-flung sales offices, franchisees, resellers, whatever. How do you make sure your sales materials—e-mails, newsletters, ads, whatever—have a consistent look? How do you stop the office in Kansas City from using its own palette of “prettier” colors to doll up your logo? If you’re a med-tech firm, how can make sure sellers are putting in the proper legal disclaimers in their promos?
Tuesday, I stopped by the Minneapolis Warehouse District space of ASI Communications to learn about a system it’s marketing that’s designed to handle those kinds of things.
ASI’s a different animal, at least in my experience. Like a growing number of marketing communications agencies, it brings together a number of practices—PR, advertising, Web site content and design, product naming. It also does public affairs work—not unusual for a PR firm, but not standard at an ad shop. (ASI clients are looking for face time with politicos—clients in the health care field, notably.)
A few years ago, ASI clients Hormel, Aveda, Miracle-Ear, and Qwest were looking for ways to store and manage their electronic branding assets—e-newsletters, photos, logos, ads. ASI designed a data warehouse system that put these items on handy electronic “shelves” on their servers.
But how do you keep employees from taking any of these items and altering them? How do you keep salespeople from sending multiple copies of, say, an e-newsletter to the same client? Not the mention the kind of problems listed in the opening paragraph of this post?
What ASI did was build in a system of business rules—a kind of digital touchpad system that limits access to these materials, and making it easier for marketing and sales managers to oversee their comings and goings.
This year, ASI took these customized programs and turned them into a more standardized product called Fision. Very simply, it allows a company to manage any of its electronic marketing items to ensure that the brand is consistent across multiple channels and users.
(Fision is a software-as-a-service model, which allows to ASI to keep tabs on how it’s used—helpful for creating updated versions.)
Electronic asset warehousing and brand management software certainly aren’t ASI inventions. What makes Fision distinctive, according to ASI head guy Mike Brown, is that it’s been designed to be easy for marketers to use. Similar products, he argues, generally aren’t intuitive unless you’re the techie type who designed them.
Brown, a former Navy guy who was stationed on a nuclear sub, came up with the name. “Think of an atom splitting and releasing energy in a controlled manner,” he says. Using Fision “is your brand splitting and replicating itself.”
As far as I know, communications shops don’t typically develop their own products, digital or otherwise. ASI hopes this one could help smooth off the feast-and-famine cycles agencies typically experience.
BTW: I tweet from time to time on (mostly) business-related topics on Twitter at @generebeck.
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