Power Software's Yoshki solution improves brand control for imagery

The growth of digital media has opened up immense possibilities for brands to communicate with consumers, but it also means they now quickly lose control of their own message. A Google Images search for any well known brand logo, for example, will reveal sometimes millions of instances of infringement, distortion and even fraud sullying what brand owners might think is their good name.

As it becomes ever easier to gain access to intellectual property like logos and images, and to adapt and reuse them without approval, that infringement becomes ever harder to police. “Assets and media collateral do tend to be a major problem,” says Damon Oorloff, CEO of Power Software Solutions, which has developed a web-hosted tool to address the issue. “What everybody tends to do is essentially steal an image off the web, use that image, the image gets messed around with and abused, and eventually it gets degraded.”

Some brands attempt to fight this problem through sheer force of will-power and man-power – Oorloff gives the example of one household name that employs 24 people full-time to monitor where and how its imagery is used online. But he argues that this brand and others like them are on a hiding to nothing with this kind of enforcement: “Not only can you not police it, but how do you start finding them?”

Power Software’s alternative is to offer brands the opportunity to wrest back some control through Yoshki, an enterprise product based on its Imagi technology developed by CTO Tim Walton. Twice a British Computing Society award winner, Walton “built a dynamic website the year before last outputting flat HTML which Google was referencing on two and a half million pages, just to see if it could be done”, Oorloff says.

Yoshki acts as a repository for digital assets through which brand owners can not only distribute images throughout their own marketing networks, but also control any appearance of their imagery anywhere on the internet. This is not achieved by doggedly and fruitlessly pursuing offenders, but by encouraging web communities to share digital assets on the owner’s terms.

“We want the sharing,” says Oorloff. “You can’t stop anybody from taking images off a website: what we can do is make it more difficult for them or give them a soft route. With Yoshki, you have the ability to set up a ‘right-click disable’ with a single keyword. If you set up ‘right-click disable’, it will give you the option of going to Yoshki to draw off an image.”

In this way, those wishing to use an asset owned by a particular brand are likely to take it from the brand’s own image store within Yoshki. In so doing, they are in fact taking a live URL link to the central image source held on Power Software’s servers.

“Where it starts to get a little bit clever is, because it is a dynamic URL and dynamic link, you change the core photograph or the core logo and it will change throughout the internet – throughout every PowerPoint, throughout everything that is out there,” says Oorloff. “Once you have a single core image, everything is resized from that automatically.”

The powerful implication is that the sharers themselves become agents of maintaining brand integrity. This will be effected both across the brand’s own online media and marketing, and anywhere its assets have been used by third parties.

Not only does Yoshki change any linked image throughout the web when the source image is changed, it also provides analytics that are able to demonstrate exactly where and how often particular parties are using a digital asset. A brand owner can therefore distinguish between a website taking an image a few times for editorial use on a blog and a website taking thousands of images to advertise counterfeit goods on fraudulent auction sites.

“People are going to use your collateral: there is nothing you can do about it,” concedes Oorloff. “But it’s nice if you can control how they do it, it’s very useful if you can find out how often they’re doing it, and it’s even nicer if you can stop them when they’re using it illegally.”

The customer has various options for managing its images through Yoshki. Standard image file types such as JPGs and PNGs can be used as source images, although Oorloff suggests the greatest benefit to many companies would come from using a Photoshop document (PSD). This could fundamentally alter one of the more wasteful stages in a brand’s creative and production processes.

“We all use Photoshop, we create our images, we output the image as a JPG and the JPG is what becomes the master. The Photoshop document gets thrown away: we don’t save it, we don’t reuse it, we don’t do anything with it. There is no real asset storage of Photoshop documents and, in all honesty, why should there be? We don’t want them: we want the pictures it generates.”

However, by using a PSD as a master, any creative changes to a brand’s digital assets can be made directly to that file without the need to create a new design from scratch. Other file outputs can then be generated from the PSD automatically by Yoshki. This hugely simplifies the process of ensuring that a brand’s creative assets are transmitted throughout all of its marketing channels, and that they continue to be used accurately.

At the client-facing end of Yoshki, the live links that are generated for images conform to a RESTful (representative state transfer) architecture. In other words, elements of the URL correspond to aspects of the image itself such as its height, width and file type. By editing the URL of a source image, a customer can return a new version of the image in a different size, resolution and file type to add to its gallery. Each time a URL is edited, Power Software’s server checks its cache for a version that meets the chosen criteria; or, if it has not been used before, generates it instantly from the source file.

Conversely, when an internet user is directed to Yoshki via a right-click on a browser image, the link attached to the graphic it returns is a read-only URL that is unique and identifiable. Thus the user can share the brand’s asset online, but with a few conditions: it cannot be altered, each use is tracked and the image will change when the master changes.

Oorloff summarises: “We can generate the link, we can see the images, we can have the image in whatever size we want; but we can’t delete, we can’t update, we can’t mess with it.”

As a complementary service to the software package, Power Software also offers Yoshki Radar, which surveys the current online presence of a brand’s imagery and encourages those using it to take a picture from the Yoshki library instead. About 60% of this work is done by bots, with manual search covering the rest.

Oorloff explains: “Yoshki will find where your image is used, even if it is a portion of your logo. We search the internet backwards essentially, finding everybody who is using an image – a portion of the image even – then reference that backwards to us. We then make contact with them all, asking them to go onto the Yoshki link of the companies involved. Once we have got that, we have then got a reporting system that shows who is using what.”

With different packages and service level agreements available for different companies’ needs, Oorloff says that work so far with early prospects (including multinational brands) indicates that they would see a return on their investment within six to eight months on average. He also says that productivity in image workflows has been improved by three to four times amongst beta testers.

With no competitor currently covering all of these services, Yoshki could become a potent weapon in defending the integrity of brands online.


www.yoshki.com