Video brand asset audit: your component library still has the old logo in it
Quick answer.A video brand asset audit is a review of whether the logos, colours, type and components in your motion system still match the brand and the content you publish today. Libraries built for one content plan quietly age out of it, and a retired tagline sitting in a lower third is usually the first thing anyone notices.
How does a video component library go out of date?
Gradually, and in two directions at once.
The brand moves. A logo gets a new lockup, a tagline is retired, a colour is deprecated, and the design team updates the static asset library because that is the one people ask for. The motion components, which have the logo compiled into them, are not in the same place and nobody remembers they exist.
The content plan moves too, and this one is less obvious. A library built for product launches serves a team that now publishes customer stories and event recaps. Every component still works. Almost none of them fit the work.
One long tenured customer had both problems at once. The component set was largely irrelevant to what they were planning to publish next, and it was still carrying a logo with a tagline the organisation had retired. The question they raised was not about components at all. They asked whether they could update the brand assets themselves.
What should a video brand asset audit actually check?
Four things, in descending order of how badly they embarrass you.
Marks and lockups, since a retired logo on a published video is the error a customer will screenshot. Colour and type against the current brand definition. Component fit against the next two quarters of the content calendar. And who has access to change each of these, which is the one that determines whether the other three stay fixed.
Access is where audits usually die. On one account a team member could not use the brand approved motion graphics at all, because she was not attached to the design system her own company had built. Nothing was broken. The assets were correct, current and unreachable, which from her seat is the same as not having them.
| Asset | How it goes stale | Who notices first | Who can fix it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logo and lockup | Rebrand updates static assets, not motion components | A customer, publicly | Design system owner |
| Approved copy and terminology | Product renames something after the video shipped | Product marketing | Whoever owns the copy library |
| Colour and type | Brand refresh deprecates a value | Brand review, late | Design system owner |
| Component set | The content plan changed, the library did not | The person making videos | Design system owner plus the requesting team |
| Access | People join teams without being added | The blocked person, silently | Account admin |
Who owns updating brand assets in a video system?
Somebody has to, by name, and in most companies nobody does. The design team owns the brand. The creative team owns the videos. The motion library sits between them and gets maintained when it breaks.
Buyers raise this themselves once they think past the first rollout. A brand marketing lead at a global cloud and security company, working through what happens when approved messaging changes, asked the question that has no tidy answer:
If approved copy is added and then changes due to a product change or terminology update, how does that work?
The honest response is that it depends entirely on where the copy lives. Copy held centrally updates once. Copy typed into four hundred finished videos does not update at all, and somebody has to decide whether those videos get reissued or left alone. That decision is easier when you have already worked throughupdating video assets after a rebrand.
How often should a video brand asset audit run?
Twice a year for most libraries, plus once immediately after any brand change, however small the change looks from the design side. A colour deprecation is a five minute job in a static kit and a component by component pass in a motion system.
Attach it to something already on the calendar rather than creating a ritual. The content planning cycle works well, since checking component fit against the next two quarters is half the audit anyway. Keeping a record of what changed and when is the part that makes the next audit fast, which is the argument forversion control on video templates. Where the answer turns out to be that too few people can make changes,brand asset access for non designersis the next problem to solve, andvideo governancecovers the wider frame.
FAQ
What is a video brand asset audit?A review of whether the logos, colours, type and components inside your motion system still match your current brand and the content you are actually publishing.
How do you find an outdated logo in video templates?Check the components directly rather than the static brand kit. Motion components compile the mark into the template, so they are not updated by a change to the shared asset library.
What happens to videos already published when the brand changes?That depends on where the copy and assets live. Centrally held values can be updated once; anything typed into a finished video has to be reissued deliberately or left as is.
Who should own the video component library?One named person, usually the design system owner, with the account admin owning access. Shared ownership between design and creative reliably produces neither.