One of the reasons that may have influenced your decision to choose Contentful as your content management platform is that you understand the potential of content. A striking image or engaging video can instantly bring a brand and its customers closer together, taking them from a transactional arrangement to something deeper.

The issue for many brands is managing the constant stream of content that is required to populate social media channels, retail sites, blogs, and much more can be cumbersome and time-consuming. This is where the Contentful® Composable Content Platform excels in delivering those impactful experiences at scale in a seamless way. You can read more about Contentful and how it works in the Controlling Content Chaos report.

Yet, how do you ensure the content you create maintains the impeccably ambitious standards that you have set for your brand? Further, how do you make it compliant with existing and upcoming regulations while ensuring it matches your inclusivity strategy? 

These are questions that my team at VML wrestled with before producing what we believe is the ideal solution.

WPP Open Brand Guardian is a web service-based cognitive AI tool, available as a plug and play solution on the Contentful Platform, that interrogates digital content to ensure it is creative, compliant, quality assured, and inclusive. 

We describe the process as “Curative AI” in that it is using the technology to get feedback on the content, to understand its efficacy and to enable the creator to fine tune it. 

Streamlining the content review process

Content often fails legal or brand compliance in its final review, even after months of work, a common and frustrating issue for all businesses. Creators may have delivered content that isn’t completely coordinated with brand values or uses images or video that might not be appropriate for all the markets it is targeting. It’s not surprising given the huge amount of content that brands create and the substantial number of channels and platforms that require a constant stream of content.

Our tool, which our clients have been working with for over three years, ensures brand compliance defects are determined at the time of asset creation, instead of the time of launch. 

Brand Guardian works in a simple and efficient way. When you upload an image, a little button is available to click, and it tells you at once if the content has failed any of the custom rules that have been set by the user for the digital asset. 

It streamlines the content review process, reducing time and effort for teams while maintaining exacting standards. It’s scalable and designed to support both small teams and large enterprises, providing flexibility as content needs grow.

When VML developed Brand Guardian, we had three specific problems in mind.

1. Brand consistency

Brands invest significant amounts of money and time in ensuring that their values are clearly defined. They often have large documents that address everything from the use of graphics to how content reflects their stance on sustainability. Yet, despite the best intentions, if content is checked for brand values manually, mistakes will be made. 

On one level, this might mean that the wrong logo is used on an image, or an old strapline is added to a video, which undermines the brand’s strategic consistent approach.  

It can also be much worse when content is created and shared that alienates key audiences or fails to align with the brand's values and commitments. Even well-intentioned campaigns can sometimes miss the mark, potentially leading to reputational damage and loss of consumer trust. Brand Guardian helps mitigate these risks by analyzing content early in the creative process, flagging potential issues before they become public-facing problems. By automatically checking assets against predefined criteria for diversity, inclusion, and cultural sensitivity, it helps ensure that content resonates positively with intended audiences and upholds the brand's ethical standards.

Through this proactive approach, Brand Guardian effectively consigns content errors to history. It ensures that all content aligns with the brand's voice, style, and messaging guidelines, reducing the risk of brand dilution. Its algorithms note if something is not adhering 100% to the brand's value and informs the content creator who can then amend it.

2. Brand compliance 

Another of the challenges multinational brands face is ensuring their content meets the regulations of the various markets and countries they operate in. Images and video content that might work for one market might fall foul of the more stringent requirements of another. 

Checking for compliance relies not only on vigilance from the individual involved but also a great deal of specialist knowledge of the intricacies of national and international legislation.

Brand Guardian makes compliance fast, straightforward, and scalable. It assesses each element of the content and then informs the creator if it’s likely to fall foul of any compliance regulations in a particular region.

A testament to the tool’s effectiveness is that many of Brand Guardian's early adopters and most passionate users come from highly regulated industries such as pharma, financial services, and tobacco. In fact, we have clients in those sectors who tell us that using Brand Guardian has saved them significant sums of money as they are no longer fined for issuing content that is not compliant. 

Consumer-facing brands, especially those in retail, have also adopted Brand Guardian to ensure compliance with other initiatives, most notably the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

Many countries in Asia have their own bespoke regulations governing online content. These are often determined by cultural values and are different to those in place in the EU and North America. More regulations are incoming too, such as the European Accessibility Act, which, when it becomes enshrined in law in 2025, will require key products and services, such as websites, mobile apps, and ATMs, to meet common accessibility standards across the EU. 

I expect more brands in less regulated industries will adopt Brand Guardian as a frontline tool to ensure that any content created does not fall foul of the new legislation.

3. Brand inclusivity

We are also increasingly finding that companies are using Brand Guardian to help them to ensure that their content reflects their inclusivity values. It acts as a bulwark to prevent common mistakes such stereotyping, superficial representation, and cultural appropriation.

Here is how it works. The tool can communicate with the end user whether a digital asset has passed or failed a predefined rule set in the rules engine. It can also return facts about a digital asset, noting whether something is present or absent from an image, text, or video. This could be a word, a type of landscape, animals, or the race of people included in the asset.

Brands are then able to easily calculate if their content reflects the breadth of different communities they are trying to reflect and connect with and address any issues.

Brand Guardian and Contentful

As Contentful is API-based, it was easy for us to add our tool into  its marketplace. There are already many companies across the globe whose content teams have become significantly more efficient since they started using Brand Guardian via the Contentful platform. It has helped to ensure that the content they produce reflects their brand values and stays within the parameters of existing and upcoming regulations.

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