Staying true to your Brand: How Azzuu ensures consistency across your team

Never underestimate the power of consistent branding

When you dedicate years to and invest considerable finances into creating a globally recognisable brand, everyone in your organization needs to not only live and breathe it, but also project and protect it. For sports clubs, maintaining brand consistency across multiple channels, platforms, territories and languages is not only professional, it’s crucial. This is especially true for progressive clubs with multiple men’s, women’s and academy teams, each with their own sub-brand style under one umbrella club brand. Add multiple sponsors into the mix, with their own brand identities and guidelines, and keeping faithful to the internal and external brands involved is increasingly difficult.

Satisfying all stakeholders of a club, from a brand communications point of view, has many challenges. You’re not only trying to feed your numerous fanbases’ insatiable appetites for content on social media, news media also want a piece of the action and club owners want to leverage sponsorships and monetize marketing opportunities.
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One tool that tackles multiple challenges

Azzuu is the ultimate tool for sports teams. It singlehandedly enables anyone in your digital communications team, anywhere in the world, to maintain consistent branding across all your published social content.

It ensures that every outbound digital communication, from social posts and CRM to perimeter boards and stadia screens, uses professionally designed pre-approved templates with photo and video media pulled directly from your official media library. Matchday social reporting lets your team draw upon real-time match and performance data to give dynamic, lightning fast, accurate and authoritative updates that are 100% faithful to your brand.

Azzuu uses your brand’s specific fonts, colours and logos to eradicate rogue off-brand posts. It streamlines checks and accelerates the approval process. It removes all the barriers to creating exciting and engaging content in minutes, even seconds.
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Setting your brand elements in stone

To maintain a consistent band image when you are giving access to multiple teams and users is easy with Azzuu. Don’t worry. Sign up to Azzuu and we won’t throw you in at the deep end – our team will set everything up for you.

We have built a dynamic and experienced team of professionals from global advertising and design agencies. All are sports enthusiasts who totally understand the passion, immediacy and business of sport. You will be assigned a team headed up by your own Relationship Manager with a team of talented designers. They will provide a choice of service levels that cover design and management and also offer 24-hour support if required. We are experienced in offering this, not just for your sport, but for 16 different sports, internationally, in all languages.

Your brand will no doubt have a suite of very carefully thought out colours and fonts which are to be used. Azzuu allows you to lock specific colour themes and fonts to ensure brand consistency in all visual communications.

Next, logos and brand assets can be quickly and easily uploaded to, and managed within, Azzuu. You may have different logos and assets for main and sub brands. Azzuu handles all variations and enables your team to access and use them instantly.

Finally, you can capture and use differing themes to differentiate between various teams, events and disciplines within your brand and across different media.

Team scorer, game day stats, editorial, video, fixtures, results, player of the match, transfers, global match times – these are just some of the themes our clients currently employ. Plus, templates are not just limited to traditional social media. YouTube, CRM, in-stadia perimeter boards, digital displays and giant screens.

Azzuu eradicates any chance of mistakes by enabling you to flick between themes and select the correct theme, across any visual communication, at the click of a button. Our clients find this incredibly efficient.
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Pre-approved templates avoid own goals

Azzuu has enabled you to lock in brand logos, fonts, assets, colours and themes. But how do you then use them correctly and consistently across different media?

Creating pre-approved templates, designed either by the Azzuu Design Team or your teams, will ensure everything that goes out into public domain aligns perfectly with your brand guidelines. You can even make fresh creative templates for each forthcoming season to shake things up and increase engagement with fans.

Azzuu also gives you opportunity to have up to 70 templates at your disposal, each one designed for a specific team, purpose or sponsor – all completely on brand and pre-approved.

Templates created with Azzuu can have multiple fixed lockable layers. The advantage of doing this is that it ensures that your core brand elements remain unchanged. You can even give different members of your team different permission levels.

Photography and is incredibly important in highly visual sports media. Your brand is likely to have a particular style of photography to convey a consistent image. Azzuu incorporates image filters and frames which are baked into the system to apply a specific treatment to any image you select. So, you know wherever your images originate from, they will go out on brand.
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Seamless image, video and data integration

Talking of accessing imagery, Azzuu integrates directly with your own media library and all the world’s leading image galleries via the Azzuu desktop and app. This enables your users to search for and immediately access appropriate, approved and impactful images and videos. APIs create a seamless connection with your own media databases and with image and video galleries including Getty, (client to add list of leading image galleries compatible with Azzuu).

Azzuu’s integrations also give you easy access to correctly named and labelled images and videos of players. Being instantly searchable saves valuable seconds when live reporting or posting on social media. Also, all shots clips are cropped perfectly to make their inclusion even quicker and easier. Azzuu can even ensure specific sponsor logos come with particular players. 

Another vital integration enables you to draw on raw performance data from key sports data providers, such as Opta Sports, (client to provide a balanced list). By integrating your sports data provider with the Azzuu platform, you can instantly create statistical driven content that adds an extra dimension to your team’s output.

So flexible is Azzuu, it offers agnostic integrations that work with multiple cloud servers. Plus, you can also use Azzuu to actively push out on brand content to other integrations and even create content hubs for images and media.

If you are a data provider or asset manager, get in touch and discover how we can integrate your services and products with Azzuu to satisfy your clients and our subscribers.
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Streamlined draft and approval

With the very nature of live sport, being able to quickly create rich content for an engaged audience is essential. Azzuu accelerates the process of content creation by not only enabling teams to quickly draft content, the platform also facilitates automated and live drafts, too. 

Live drafts are pre-designed templates that auto-generate and self-populate using live data and information. So, for example, as a team line-up, fixture or goal scorer is announced, Azzuu can be set up to instantly pull in relevant images and the correct details and stats to create ready designed, fully branded content. These appear as drafts ready for your content team to tweak (if necessary), approve and make live.

Watertight approval workflows which follow strict approval processes are at the heart of Azzuu quality control. Being totally flexible, you get to assign specific responsibilities and grant different levels permissions to individual team members. These can be set based on their skills, position, language, job role and responsibilities within your organisation. All this is designed to keep your team happy, make the entire workflow run smoothly and prevent the publication of off-brand content.

Engaging 100% on brand content, made instant.
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Monetizing and automating player and sponsor branding

Satisfying your club sponsors and monetizing sponsored content and activity is second nature with Azzuu. By creating sponsor-approved branding elements and delivering them on the fly means you can offer new and more frequent commercial opportunities to your sponsors. But that’s only the start.

Azzuu also handles individual player and kit branding with effortless ease. With multiple teams and kits, each with various sponsors, then player-specific sponsorships also thrown into the mix, would normally be a minefield. Azzuu can automatically pull together player-specific branding elements such as shots, away kits and individual player sponsors to create high quality club and sponsor on-brand content

Use Greenfly, Socialie or ScorePlay? (I need Azzuu to explain what this section is about as I can’t work it out).
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Azzuu in action

Realworld applications of the Azzuu platform are numerous, global and game-changing with subscribers across the entire sporting spectrum. Football to cycling, hockey to basketball, rugby to American football – Azzuu is used by organisations, competitions and clubs including UEFA, NFL, NHL, NBA, UCI, England Rugby, Guinness 6 Nations, Rangers, Wolves, Everton, Aston Villa – the list goes on.

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UEFA Euros

UEFA are exploiting the full potential of Azzuu using it to create content and visibility for 25 different individual competitions. Over 10,000 graphics were generated during the Euros with 150-200 of their social team using Azzuu to create and duplicate branded content across the world in multiple languages with ease. The workflow involved multiple approval protocols requiring multi-national sign-off ensuring every piece of multi-channel content was consistently on-brand and out there to engage fans as quickly as possible. To bring them closer to each other, UEFA and the Euros sponsors.
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‍RFU

The RFU cover many brands from Mens, Red Roses, Age Grade and the Championship. The challenge of managing these across all Digital channels from Social to CRM and Web is huge, but this is where Azzuu really comes into its own. It allows each brand to have its own dedicated hub, meaning the RFU can seamless jump between each, without having the delay of getting back up to speed. Many of their teams run content side by side, with matches happening at the same time - Azzuu ensures there is no delay, back log or bottleneck, allowing a continuous stream of content to be created and posted simultaneously.
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What next?

You’ve heard how Azzuu can help your teams stay on-brand when creating, editing and sharing content at lightning speed. You’ve learned how this game-changing platform can engage fans and monetize multiple sponsors on a global scale. You know how flexible permissions and approval workflows make sure brand standards are maintained across multiple territories. We’ve highlighted successful real-world applications for major international sports organisations and competitions. Now think how Azzuu could benefit you as a leading commercial sports team operationally, financially and in terms of raising your game and profile.

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See for yourself

Nothing beats seeing Azzuu doing what it does best. If you’d like to book a demo to see how Azzuu performs and explore its impressive capabilities first-hand, please click here. We’ll arrange a convenient time for a live demonstration and discuss how we can help your organisation. Don’t worry, there is absolutely no obligation or commitment, but there is a lot to gain.