Leo Burnett Case Study

Business Initiative

Leo Burnett Worldwide faced a growing challenge managing its global brand presence across more than 50 markets. Each regional office maintained its own creative assets, templates, and brand guidelines, resulting in inconsistency, duplication, and diluted impact for flagship clients. The lack of a unified system made it difficult for creative and account teams to find approved assets, maintain compliance, and ensure cohesive storytelling across borders.

The business goal was to design a centralized digital portal that housed brand standards, creative assets, and templates for global teams—enabling faster collaboration, improved version control, and consistent brand execution at scale. The platform needed to support hundreds of concurrent users, localized content, and real-time updates without compromising performance or usability.

My Role and Team

As the Lead UX Designer on a multi-disciplinary global initiative, I collaborated with brand strategists, developers, project managers, and regional representatives over a two-year period. My role spanned the full lifecycle—research, information architecture, interaction design, testing, and ongoing iteration.

I partnered closely with Leo Burnett’s internal IT and global brand leadership to define business requirements, while ensuring the interface reflected the agency’s design philosophy: clarity, creativity, and accessibility. Because the portal served teams from North America to Asia-Pacific, the UX had to support multilingual functionality and regional brand variations within a single, consistent system.

Design Process

The process began with user research and workflow mapping across global markets. I conducted interviews and contextual inquiries with creative directors, designers, and account leads to understand how each region managed and shared brand assets. Common pain points included duplicated work, outdated logo files, and misaligned campaign templates—all leading to delays and brand drift.

Based on these insights, I defined core user personas: brand managers, creative teams, and regional marketing leads. Each had distinct needs around access, approval, and customization. I created journey maps and task flows to visualize how each role interacted with brand content, identifying opportunities to automate repetitive steps and surface the right materials at the right time.

I designed an intuitive portal that centralized all brand assets and guidelines while embedding automated checks for compliance. Users could preview campaign templates, download approved assets, and access localization tools within a consistent, modular interface. The system incorporated metadata tagging, search filters, and version tracking—making it simple for teams to find and use the correct assets instantly.

I built prototypes in Figma and InVision and tested them with users across multiple regions, ensuring the design felt intuitive regardless of language or familiarity with the brand. Feedback from early pilots informed refinements in navigation, taxonomy, and notification settings. Post-launch, I partnered with analytics and IT teams to monitor adoption rates, identify underused features, and roll out phased improvements based on live usage data.

Implementation and Evolution

Once the design was finalized, I worked closely with the development team to define component behaviors and ensure scalability. We built the portal on a cloud-based CMS architecture with role-based permissions and responsive layouts that adapted seamlessly across devices.

After launch, the platform continued to evolve through quarterly design sprints. We introduced new features like asset usage analytics, content approval workflows, and dynamic brand guideline updates that helped regional teams operate independently while staying aligned to global standards.

Outcome and Impact

The Global Brand Management Portal became a single source of truth for Leo Burnett’s brand identity and creative assets, dramatically improving efficiency and alignment across offices.

• Reduced brand inconsistencies by 40% within the first year of rollout
• Streamlined asset retrieval time by 60% through metadata-driven search and filters
• Improved cross-market collaboration and content reuse across 50+ global offices
• Increased platform adoption to 85% of active creative teams within 12 months

The portal strengthened global brand cohesion and provided a lasting digital foundation for managing creative assets at scale. It enabled Leo Burnett to maintain a unified brand identity across continents while giving local teams the flexibility to adapt content for their audiences—balancing consistency with creativity.