Marketing asset distribution

Marketing assets tend to escape into e-mail threads, shared drives and personal folders. A dealer asks which logo is current; an agency downloads files one by one; a campaign owner sends another large attachment because the original link is lost; and the central team cannot tell which outlets received or used the material. When a campaign ends, obsolete artwork remains beside the new release and people keep picking the wrong version.

The recognisable symptoms are repeated requests for the same files, hand-built download bundles, multiple copies with uncertain dates, spreadsheets maintained separately from the files, and people chasing an administrator for access or for permission to retrieve an older campaign.

For a central marketing or brand team that distributes approved material to a known external network: dealers, franchisees, agencies, local offices or campaign partners. It fits when material is organised by campaign, model, channel, format or other controlled labels; when releases have a start and end date; and when the owner needs to distinguish current material from retained history.

It also fits organisations with recurring partner onboarding, because access can be requested, granted in bulk, limited to permitted actions and withdrawn when a temporary account or password policy expires.

It is not for:

• a creative-production team looking for proofing, annotation and design approval inside the same workspace;
• public, anonymous file publishing where every visitor should receive the originals;
• automatic publishing into advertising, social or dealer-site channels;
• a records repository whose primary requirement is legal retention and disposal rather than campaign distribution;
• an organisation that cannot nominate people to curate metadata, release kits and administer partner access.

Library and discovery

Campaigns and release

Distribution

Access and history

The upstream-library and secure-drop capabilities are alternative intake paths and can coexist with manual curation. Self-service access requests still require an administrator to decide who is approved and which access profile they receive. Archive access should be granted narrowly because it deliberately bypasses the normal end-of-campaign restriction.

What is included in a given delivery, and how it is delivered: configuration vs. custom · delivery approach.

• Creative production and proofing. There is no annotation, artwork review or design approval workflow; approved files arrive from elsewhere.
• A four-eyes release workflow. Draft and publish states exist, but a separate reviewer approving a release is configuration to agree per delivery, not a behaviour the pattern provides.
• Automatic account approval. The access-request form notifies administrators; it does not verify the requester, approve them or create the account.
• Single sign-on or federation. Partners sign in to the platform’s own accounts; there is no connection to a corporate identity provider.
• Rights and licence management. Campaign end dates control availability. Territory, talent, music and usage-right expiry rules are not modelled.
• On-demand asset transformation. The platform distributes uploaded originals and prepared previews; users cannot resize, crop or convert formats themselves.
• Automatic downstream publishing. Nothing is delivered onwards into dealer websites, advertising systems, social networks or print-production systems.
• Deletion at campaign close. Expired kits and assets are retained as archived records. Disposal requires a separate retention decision.
• Automatic reconciliation of upstream deletions. When an asset disappears from the source library while it is still part of a campaign kit, the reconciliation rule is agreed per delivery rather than assumed.

Technology-neutral first — this is the blueprint:

The reusable boundaries are the curated asset catalogue, the campaign-kit layer, the authenticated partner workspace, the access-administration path and the lifecycle/activity record. A source library supplies material; it does not decide what the distribution audience can see.

Implementation stack of the delivered instances: Drupal 10 on PHP with a relational database and managed file storage; a search index with faceted discovery; scheduled and queued background work for ingestion, packaging and archiving; spreadsheet reports generated from recorded activity.

Assets are not published onwards to dealer websites, advertising platforms or social channels; the partner retrieves them and uses them in their own channels.

Baseline: security-baseline. Specific to this blueprint:

• Original downloads require an authenticated account and a dedicated download permission. Browsing access alone is not the same as permission to retrieve originals.
• Archived downloads are a separate restricted capability. Ordinary users are denied archived assets and kits, including when a mixed bulk selection is prepared.
• Account administration is delegated deliberately. Bulk importers can only assign roles their own account is allowed to assign; imported accounts can be active or blocked and can receive a welcome message.
• Temporary access ends by blocking the account. A temporary-account end date is checked during sign-in. Password policies can also block the account and optionally notify the user when the governed password has expired.
• E-mailed asset links are time-limited. They can be opened without a signed-in session until their embedded validity expires, so mail-recipient choice and link forwarding are part of the access model.
• Activity records identify the actor. Sign-ins, views and downloads record the user and network address; transmissions record the sender, recipient and asset; kit downloads are recorded separately.
• Roles are granular and agreed per delivery. The pattern separates curating, publishing, reporting and administering users, and distinguishes a partner organisation from its parent. Which role holds which permission is fixed in the access matrix agreed at implementation.
• Campaign material is archived, not deleted. Archiving ends ordinary download access and keeps the record. Retention periods and the data-subject erasure procedure are agreed at implementation and documented for it.
• Ownership is set in the delivery agreement. Who owns the code, the stored assets, the activity data and the infrastructure is established in the delivery agreement.