Collab and Comply: An Interview with James Hirchak, Founder of Astute Review, Brand Compliance Software

The Collab is thrilled to welcome James Hirchak, president and founder of Astute Review, as our L Street LABS interview guest. L Street LABS is a specialized division of L Street Collaborative, dedicated to hands-on experimentation and continuous learning in tandem with emerging innovations.

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With expertise in delivering brand compliance and productivity tools to companies, James brings invaluable insights to a discussion on how L Street can further improve our clients brand experiences. Leading the discussion is our moderator, Amber Manna, president and general manager of L Street Collaborative. 

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Amber Manna: 

Let's dive right in. James, can you tell us a little about Astute Review and what you do?

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James Hirchak:

Of course, our brand identity and voice monitoring tool addresses a very common problem faced by marketing teams—total brand compliance. Despite their efforts to create guidelines and templates for brand consistency, once these resources are deployed, there's often no way to track their usage or how branded materials leave the organization. To put it simply, at Astute, we eliminate the disconnect between marketing and the rest of the organization to help marketing teams quantify, understand, and improve brand consistency.

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This issue is especially prevalent in industries like consulting, accounting, and investment banking, where a wider range of employees create client-facing materials.

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Amber Manna: 

We see this too with our clients, they often struggle with maintaining consistent graphics across teams, especially when individuals may not have a deep understanding of their brand. 

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Our team of designers, writers, and project managers work to seamlessly integrate with our clients' existing teams to form a partnership, alleviating the burden of document management. But that is where we can see a tool like this coming into play, safeguarding our clients' investments in their brand and maximizing the value they derive from them.

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James Hirchak:

The part where it gets tricky is when people edit materials after they have been approved by marketing. 

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Around 60% of marketing materials are edited by others before reaching their destination, and roughly 70% of business files are created not using the latest templates, leading to significant issues with brand misuse.

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Amber Manna: 

Wow that’s a higher percentage than most would expect. So what you’re doing is eliminating that disconnect by finding and monitoring the off brand materials? 

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James Hirchak:

Exactly, we securely connect to where files are stored, enabling marketing teams to pinpoint and address rogue content organization-wide. Our monitoring covers a wide range of file types across platforms like Microsoft Office, Adobe, and Google.

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Amber Manna: 

In turn, L Street can then swiftly and effectively rectify any off-brand content that your software identified, saving our clients from expanding internal resources on asset retrieval.

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I mean, to me it sounds like an excellent and efficient solution for over-capacity teams.

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James Hirchak:

We like to think so! Our software offers automated brand governance and compliance resources at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time employee, making it ideal for companies without a dedicated brand compliance team. And that’s where the collaboration between Astute, L Street, and your clients truly falls into place. 

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Amber Manna: 

Who doesn’t love to save money! I would bet that your brand monitoring also saves companies who have their own marketing team lots of time.

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James Hirchak:

That’s right. Marketing teams can spend about a third of their time monitoring and enforcing brands. We're going to be able to do that more accurately in an automated fashion.

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Amber Manna: 

So I wanted to shift to the branding side of things for a minute here. In our previous conversations you have shared a statistic that I think our audience would be interested in. McKinsey actually did a study recently that showed how companies that display a consistent brand identity out in the marketplace, outperform their competition by 20%, and that's a top line revenue number. So they're selling 20% more stuff than their peers. 

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Can you explain how exactly you achieve this level of compliance? 

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James Hirchak:

Our software pinpoints the main brand violators across the organization, like employees using old images, incorrect logos and trademarks, outdated templates, incorrect fonts, and such. This enables targeted cleanup and quantification. We consolidate everything into a dynamic dashboard, facilitating easy investigation of incorrect brand use. 

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You can analyze failed files, understand misuse extent and specifics, and identify file types and owners. For example, we can display brand logo usage across an organization and scan incorrect files for cleanup. 

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Amber Manna: 

That's incredible James. You're providing companies with a valuable asset that we believe can make a difference in their day-to-day operations and add even more value to the new brand they received after working with us. Exploring the implementation of this tool within our client base gets our team very excited. 

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As part of L Street LABS, our team remains dedicated to exploring cutting-edge technologies that elevate marketing endeavors. Our focus always centers on sharing our discoveries and strategies with both our audience and clients.

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That’s all the time we have for today, but before we wrap up, any advice for companies looking to take the next step in brand compliance?

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James Hirchak:

Work with L Street Collab to revitalize their brand, and Astute Review to maintain it… ha! All jokes aside, I would stress that consistency matters, we’re all judged consciously or subconsciously by that and the stats show it. It’s difficult to get people to work the way you want them to from a branding perspective. Marketing teams need to not only provide their colleagues with the guidelines, templates, and tools to maintain a brand, but also consistently educate people on why it matters. 

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Amber Manna:

Well said, and I can’t say I disagree with your first comment! Nonetheless we are so thankful for everyone who joined us today and James, we look forward to future collaborations.