Edward Boatman • Feb 23rd, 2024
The Texas A&M creative team was being bombarded with asset requests from internal and external partners and they were seeing incorrect usage of their iconic brand. They solved this by using Lingo to create a public brand portal that contained digital brand guidelines and asset libraries. This reduced asset requests and increased overall brand usage and engagement. The brand portal can be accessed here.
Texas A&M Athletics has one of the strongest and most passionate fan bases in all of sports, known as the "12th Man," which symbolizes the unwavering support and commitment of Aggies. The brand embraces the rich history and traditions of the university, such as Midnight Yell, the Aggie War Hymn and the Gig 'Em hand sign.
Texas A&M like many athletics departments across the country had a robust set of digital brand guidelines in pdf format that contained a trove of valuable information around messaging, logo usage and colors. This guideline was created to help ensure consistency and provide a framework for others to use when creating content for the Aggie brand. However even though this guideline existed, the creative team at Texas A&M was still being bombarded with basic questions around their brand and was also seeing incorrect usage of branded material. The problem was no one was using their existing brand guideline because they were in PDF format - they were hard to use and even harder to update.
The 12th Man Creative team at Texas A&M, led by Tyler Pigg, knew there must be a way to digitize their brand guidelines and make them easy to access and use, so he started to look for digital brand guideline solutions and quickly discovered Lingo - an easy to use brand management platform.
Tyler scheduled a demo with the Lingo team and quickly determined Lingo would be a great fit. It was an affordable option compared to other expensive solutions and allowed his team to do the following:
Once Lingo was identified as a potential solution Tyler and his team took advantage of Lingo’s completely free 30 day trial. This was a great way for his team to truly test the platform and confirm it would meet their needs before making a purchase.
During the trial Tyler and his team started to organize all their brand information inside Lingo. They decided to create different Lingo kits to help separate their content and make it easy to understand and navigate. For example they created a kit to house their brand guidelines and another kit named Athletics Logo Database to house all of their various athletics logos.
Inside each kit, Tyler and his team were able to use Lingo’s intuitive no code kit builder to quickly organize their assets and documentation. For example, in the Athletics Logo Database kit all of the Aggie logos are organized using separate headings making the database easy to navigate and visually browse through.
Downloading the logo files from Lingo is valuable not just because the files can be placed next to contextual information like usage guidelines, but also because Lingo provides automatic file conversion and resizing capabilities. This means the end user can find the file they’re looking for, in the right format and size all without needing to contact the creative team - this is a massive time saver.
Once the Aggie brand system was fully documented in Lingo it was time to start thinking about how to distribute the content to all the necessary groups. One of the first steps the Texas A&M team took was to make sure their brand hub looked on-brand and official for anyone that was accessing it. To do this, Tyler used Lingo’s custom theming to apply a custom accent color and font, and also setup a custom sub-domain for the brand portal - 12thman.lingoapp.com
With the theming applied it was now ready for the rollout - certain kits that were placed in the brand portal were made public so people without Lingo accounts could access them. The kit that contained the Texas A&M logos had a special access setting called “download requests” turned on. This forces visitors to the kit to provide their email address when they attempt to download an asset. The Texas A&M team can then review each request and approve or deny it. This ensures only the correct people are using the logos which helps protect their brand.
With the Texas A&M brand portal now accessible to all faculty, students, outside partners and the general public, the Aggie creative team are fielding less asset requests, seeing an increase in usage of their brand and their brand is being applied consistently and correctly.