Outstanding innovation: How the Emmys® Brand Center gave its new brand a new home

A rebranding dilemma

The iconic Emmy® Awards balance aspiration and tradition. During a recent rebrand, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) realized it needed to modernize the way it managed the Emmys® brand, which celebrates achievement in the television industry.

With brand assets spanning its 75-year history, including images from dozens of past shows, NATAS needed a platform that would scale with the brand and make it easy to organize, access, and repurpose those assets in future campaigns and regional activities.

NATAS also needed a way to educate stakeholders on how to engage with the brand and the assets. In the past, NATAS relied on static PDF guidelines. These were difficult to adapt and evolve to new use cases. As a result, the team wasn't able to incorporate feedback from the field, which led to brand inconsistencies and misused logos; teams adapting the logo or other assets outside of brand guidelines.

An award-worthy answer

NATAS used our comprehensive platform to create the Emmys Brand Center — a one-stop shop for all its assets, including images from past award shows. We worked together with Windrose Management, who supported NATAS with the implementation and roll-out of the Brand Center and set-up and migration of their DAM.

The Frontify DAM helped NATAS organize more than 60,000 brand assets into libraries that simplified finding and re-using decades of award show assets in new campaigns and brand activities. These assets included tens of thousands of images from past shows that were now organized by year, event, or category. The Frontify platform made it easy to create a sound structure for all the Emmys assets thanks to advanced metadata, easy tagging capability, and intuitive library structure set-up and maintenance.

Frontify’s flexible user permissions offer a customizable user experience for the various stakeholders, including the 19 regional NATAS chapters. Now, NATAS can instantly communicate new brand elements or assets to regional stakeholders — something that would have been impossible with their old, rigid PDF guidelines. This enables their regional chapters to take increased ownership and propel the brand forward.

In addition to its DAM, the Brand Center includes guidelines to educate these stakeholders on how to engage with the brand and its assets. They got a style guide that was flexible, scalable, and adaptable to their evolving needs. Frontify’s Brand Guidelines have helped NATAS maintain brand integrity and communicate the Emmys style guides across all their business units and key stakeholders.