Overview

Diageo plc is the world's leading premium drinks business, with an outstanding collection of brands across spirits, wine and beer. With approaching 200 brands in its portfolio, and production, management and distribution across 180 countries, it's imperative for the company to keep a tight rein on its brand assets.

In 2002, Diageo launched a specific Brand Asset Management programme - one of the biggest and most complex ever undertaken. The BAM programme took a holistic approach to changing both the way that Diageo worked internally, and how the business interacted with third party suppliers who all contribute to the creation, evolution and maintenance of our assets. The programme was managed from within Global Marketing Procurement, but from the outset drew together a cross functional team including Marketing, Legal and Information Services as well as Procurement.

Core Activity: Creating an Asset Library

While the programme was focused on delivering a change in the way Diageo and its partners worked, and strove to find ways to embed those changes, it also required an enabling tool to focus the changes around. The first iteration of this enabler was the Diageo SmartLibrary - in essence, an asset library. From the beginning, its objectives were clear. Diageo needed an online library of great brand materials that marketers and agencies around the world could access when they needed them. The great value for Diageo was that it would ensure timeliness and brand consistency - and significantly reduce the cost of asset distribution.

Diageo is a large and complex business. Consequently IP is a central issue. The business recognised that one of the great strengths that SmartLibrary would bring was a far greater ability to track and control intellectual property and usage rights for the assets created for Diageo by its third party partners.

Challenges Faced

The team faced four core challenges in bringing the Brand Asset Management programme to fruition:

• Finding the right technology solution and provider to work in partnership with Diageo
• Internal change management to align geographically dispersed brand teams and functions with distinct ways of working .
• Agencies providing brand assets for upload
• Ensuring the content in the Library had clear usage rights

The Brand Asset Management programme took quite a while, significant financial investment, a massive internal team effort and a significant change in culture in the way that both Diageo and our third party partners worked. Once these challenges were overcome the team delivered an enviable and innovative solution.

The initial version of Diageo SmartLibrary enabled Diageo establish the fundamentals of Brand Asset Management. However, the real step-change in usage and content occurred when, in partnership with VYRE, the project team developed and implemented the enabler that brought the programme to life: the Diageo SmartBrand portal.

Anatomy of the SmartBrand Portal

The portal includes a number of core modules. These are:

• SmartLibrary: this is a central store of brand identity, advertising and all other marketing communications used within Diageo. The library has an advanced permissions matrix and usage rights management capability that enables effective control of materials to users across the world
• SmartApprove: an online marketing approval tool, enabling compliancewith the Diageo Marketing Code and creative standards
• SmartVisibility: a tool to enable the design and production process for Point of Sale and value-added packaging solutions, with a focus on adapting centrally created standard items
  
• SmartSpace: a brand information and knowledge sharing area, aimed at improving the sharing of best practice executions across Diageo . SmartTransfer: an easy-to-use uploading tool for agencies, with online confirmation of usage rights

Partnership: The Key Success Factor

The key to the Diageo SmartBrand Portal success has been the way that VYRE understood Diageo's needs and created a technological solution that fitted Diageo's culture and made it far easier for third party partners to comply with Diageo's requirements.

Return on Investment

The Diageo Brand Asset Management programme is one of the largest
and most complex asset management programmes undertaken, bearing in mind the high number of brands it includes, the continual variation on brand assets and the wide span of territories in which the company operates. It was neither a cheap nor quick process to get right.

There were three areas of initial investment:

• Internal resource - the cross functional project team created to manage the first phase of the project
• External legal resource, engaged to ensure that terms and conditions, contracts and ways of working were in line with best practice

The technology selected to create SmartLibrary

The relatively high start up costs in legal and internal resource during the initial ‘discovery phase' meant the investment has taken almost four years to pay back. However, this is regarded as worthwhile since the process has delivered an extremely robust approach to intellectual property and usage rights management, from which Diageo will benefit for a long time to come.

Ongoing investment now covers:

• Internal resource: a central team in global marketing procurement, with a wider virtual team across brands, functions and geographies
• Third party asset management companies, aligned by brand and geographies, to support the management of our assets, metadata taxonomy, file formats etc; and
• Technology: in September 2007, SmartBrand got a significant upgrade providing a new look and feel that makes the most of the new technology available from VYRE
  

The SmartBrand tool is dynamic, and Diageo will continue to incorporate new functionalities where they're appropriate and aligned to business requirements.

Benefits

Diageo is deriving a wide range of benefits. In terms of costs, these are derived from elements taken out of the business. Primarily these are from two areas:

• The cost of potential duplication of creative materials in markets
• The cost of CD distribution for materials

By tracking the volume, type and onward usage of downloads from the tool, Diageo can accurately estimate the actual costs avoided in the usiness. By benchmarking with agencies and local markets to verify the assumptions made in estimating the benefits, it is possible to verify the cost saving.

Additional Benefits

Additional benefits where the cost saving has yet to be evaluated include:

• Intellectual property and usage rights management:
  • Making users aware of where and how an asset can be used
  • Making best use of system functionality to prevent downloading when not appropriate to the user's profile
    

•  Brand consistency and quality:
  • Ensuring executions have consistent brand identity across markets Ensuring the use of high quality brand assets in executions
    

• Process efficiency:
  • Improving speed to market
  • Approval workflow requirements
    

• Process compliance:
  • Ensuring compliance with the marketing approval process
  • Archiving requirement for tracking of approvals
  • Purchase and negotiation of usage right

• Search and Spin (internal/agency sharing of best practice):
  • All of the tools drive the search and spin agenda - from creative ideas, execution methods, best practice and, of course, brand assets
    

To date, Diageo has seen significant growth in asset volume, market overage, site activity and downloads with the estimated cost benefits unning annually at a 1:5 payback on the ongoing investment. That growth is set to continue, with the expectation of driving the payback ratio towards 1:10 over the next 12 months.