When We Brand was founded, we started with a simple observation; despite billions invested in brand development, most organizations struggle with consistent brand implementation.
I've seen first hand how marketing teams would spend hours and hours on perfecting their brand guidelines, and investing in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform, yet 71% of organizations report significant brand inconsistency issues across their channels.
This is despite the fact that the Harvard Business Review recently reported that brand consistency can increase revenue by up to 23%. It’s clear that the traditional DAM approach continues to fall short. Why?
Because DAMs are fundamentally just passive repositories, static warehouses of finished assets that require specialized skills to modify.
Beyond the digital asset warehouse
Traditional DAM platforms have reached their evolutionary endpoint.
According to Forrester, 68% of marketing professionals express frustration with their existing DAM solutions' inability to adapt to modern content demands.
Research from the CMO Council shows that up to 70% of the content produced by marketing organizations goes unused, representing billions in wasted creative spend. This waste stems largely from the disconnect between centralized content creation and distributed content needs.
The fundamental flaw in the DAM approach is treating brand assets as static artifacts rather than living, adaptable building blocks.
This is precisely why we developed the Active Asset framework.
Active Assets represent a paradigm shift in how we approach branded content creation.
Instead of storing finished, locked files, the Active Asset framework deconstructs brand elements into intelligent, adaptable building blocks that can be reconfigured while maintaining brand integrity.
Consider this analogy. Traditional DAMs are like photo albums, collections of finished snapshots.
We Brand's Active Asset framework is more like a set of LEGO blocks with intelligent rules about how they can be assembled. The possibilities are virtually endless, but the result always looks like it belongs to the same brand family.
The science behind active assets
Our approach is backed by what we know about how humans process visual information.
As researchers at the Nielsen Norman Group have documented in their work on visual perception, humans recognize patterns before details, and we process visual information holistically before focusing on individual elements.4
The implication for branding is significant: maintaining visual systems and relationship patterns between brand elements may be more important than pixel-perfect replication across all touchpoints.
This insight forms the foundation of the Active Asset framework.
Democratization without dilution
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Active Asset framework is how it democratizes brand creation without diluting brand integrity.
According to McKinsey's 2024 report on organizational agility, companies where content creation capabilities extend beyond marketing departments are 2.7 times more likely to report above-industry-average growth rates.
Yet historically, expanding content creation capabilities meant risking brand inconsistency.
With We Brand's platform, we've solved this paradox. By embedding brand intelligence into the assets themselves, we enable anyone in an organization to create or adapt branded content while maintaining complete brand control.
One of our enterprise customers, a Fortune 500 technology company, reported a 78% reduction in marketing request tickets and a 34% increase in content production after implementing our Active Asset framework. Their creative team transformed from production bottlenecks to strategic partners, while regional teams gained autonomy without sacrificing consistency.
The true cost of passive assets
The financial implications of the traditional DAM approach extend beyond operational inefficiencies. According to the 2024 Gartner Content Operations Report, organizations with traditional DAM systems spend 31% of their creative budget on asset adaptation and reformatting. In other words they are essentially paying repeatedly for slight modifications to existing content.
But the costs go deeper. Consistent branding drives business value. A 2019 Demand Metric study found that brand consistency contributes to an average revenue increase of 33%.
In today's fragmented media landscape, where the average B2B buyer encounters a brand across 12 different touchpoints before making a purchase decision, consistency isn't just a visual nicety, it's a revenue driver.
Why we brand makes DAMs obsolete
I believe We Brand's Active Asset framework will make traditional DAMs obsolete for three fundamental reasons:
- Speed to Market: Traditional DAM workflows create bottlenecks that slow down creative teams and frustrate stakeholders across the organization. With We Brand, content adaptation happens in minutes, not days. In my experience working with enterprise marketing teams, I've seen creative approval processes that stretch for weeks, with endless revision cycles that drain both creativity and productivity. Our Active Asset framework eliminates these bottlenecks by empowering teams to create on-brand content instantly without waiting for specialized resources.
- Scalability Across Channels: The explosion of digital channels has rendered the "create once, store forever" DAM model completely obsolete. Today's marketing teams are expected to deliver consistent experiences across websites, social media, email, digital ads, apps, video platforms, and emerging channels like UGC. Each requires different formats, dimensions, and content approaches. Active Assets automatically adapt to these requirements, eliminating the manual reformatting that consumes so much of marketers' time and energy.
- Data-Driven Adaptation: Unlike static DAM files, Active Assets can evolve based on performance data. When marketing teams can see which visual approaches drive better engagement, they should be able to immediately implement those learnings. Our platform's integration with analytics tools allows assets to be optimized based on engagement metrics, creating a continuous improvement loop that static assets can't match.
The future is active, not passive
As we look to the future, the trend is clear: marketing organizations are shifting from centralized production models to distributed creation networks. The days of all content flowing through a small creative team are over. Subject matter experts, field marketers, sales teams, and partners all need to create content that represents the brand effectively.
This isn't just a technology shift—it's a fundamental reimagining of how organizations approach branded content creation. The legacy DAM systems built for an era of centralized control and limited channels simply cannot adapt to this new reality.
At We Brand, we're not just building a better DAM. We're replacing the DAM concept entirely with something more powerful: a dynamic system where brand assets are active participants in the creative process, not passive files awaiting manipulation.
The future of branded content isn't about better asset storage—it's about smarter asset creation. And that future starts with Active Assets.
For organizations ready to evolve beyond the limitations of traditional DAMs, talk to our team about how you can get started.
5. Gartner. "Marketing Organization Survey." 2023.
6. Demand Metric. "The Impact of Brand Consistency." 2019.
7. Gartner. "Predicts 2023: Marketing Seeks a Path Through Economic Uncertainty." 2022.
8. IDC. "FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Transformation 2022 Predictions." 2021.
Chris ConnellApril 9, 2025
