Guides

Guide

Give the analysis what a crawl cannot reach

The material archive is where you add the brand's own material, so the next analysis becomes sharper.

Why

From online analysis to full brand analysis

A brand does not live on a website alone. It lives on the shop front, the signage, the delivery van, the uniform, the packaging and the exhibition stand. None of that can be reached by a crawl, however good it is. With the material archive, the brand analysis is no longer an online analysis. It is a full brand analysis.

Social media and news can rarely be crawled

Crawling LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, along with many news outlets, is blocked, because the platforms systematically protect everything that is not logged in, and because articles often sit behind paywalls. Web search falls back on the search engine's indexed copy, which can be years old: in July 2026 a user was given a wrong follower count and a wording that had not been on the profile since 2024. For ordinary websites this is a minor problem. For social media it is the challenge. The material archive solves it.

How it works

Choose a brand and add images

Drag them into the field, or click to choose. The material belongs to the brand you have selected.

Set material type and date

The type decides how the material is read. The date decides whether it still counts as current. Both apply to every file in the upload.

Write a note and a link as context

Both are optional and set per file. The note is a short line of up to 100 characters about where or why the material was made. The link documents where it came from. Both can be edited later.

The material is read

Each image is read for both text and visual expression, and the result is stored.

The next analysis uses it

The material feeds seven of the fifteen sections: source coverage, brand assets, semiotics, distinctive assets, positioning, employer brand and channel execution. It is deliberately kept out of the sections that establish the brand's identity, so a piece of material is never measured against an identity it helped define.

Four material types

The type decides how the material is read

A post, an ad, a shop front and an article are four different kinds of evidence. They are therefore not judged the same way.

Social media

Organic posts in the brand's own voice. Not ads, but what you write and share yourselves. Here text and image count equally, because both are your choice.

Ad or campaign

Paid material, online and offline: print, poster, outdoor and banners. Judged as advertising, where a sharp, single-minded message is a strength and not a lack of nuance.

Physical material

Shop front, signage, packaging, vehicle wrap, uniform and exhibition stand. Judged mainly on visual and sensory expression. Sparse text is entirely normal here.

Article or coverage

Written by others about you, including behind paywalls. Read as the outside world's picture of the brand, never as your own voice. A journalist's wording does not count as your tone of voice.

Social posts

Both what the post says and what it shows

An organic social-media post carries brand signal in two places at once: in the text and in the visual — photo, colours, style, mood. Both are stored. Take only one, and you throw away half, because you chose both yourselves. The platform's own buttons are deliberately left out, because "Like" and "Share" say nothing about the brand. But the engagement figures are kept: impressions, comments, shares and follower counts are the market's response to the brand.

Advice

Getting the most out of an upload

Add material as you go

The archive improves the more of the brand it covers. Add new material as it appears, rather than saving it up for one big session. That way the analysis always has the freshest picture to work from.

Choose representatively, not just the best

The analysis judges the quality of the material, not merely that it exists. If it is generic or incoherent, that counts against the brand, exactly as it would in reality. And because people naturally upload their best-looking work, the archive is read as the brand's strongest material: if even that is average, it weighs more heavily than a random selection would. So add what shows the brand day to day.

Write a note on what you add

The archive grows month by month, and a year from now it will no longer be obvious what a single image was, or why it is there. A short note keeps the material understandable for you later and for colleagues who were not around when it was made. It also travels into the analysis as context from you.

Keep material from the same period together

The date is set for the whole upload. If something is from the spring and something from last week, run two rounds, so both get the right date.

Expect about 20 seconds per image

Ten images take around three minutes. Files are read one at a time on purpose, because the server does not have the memory to read them in parallel. Keep the tab open.

Be aware of

Sharing

The archive is shared across the organisation

Material belongs to the brand, not the person. If a colleague adds posts, they feed your analyses too. That is why every card shows who added it and when. Shared material that changes everyone's results must not be invisible.

Timing

Material works forward, not backward

It feeds the next analysis. Analyses already completed do not change, because a finished analysis is a snapshot of what was known at the time.

The date

More important than it looks

The date decides whether the material still counts as current. Social posts never show a real date, only "4d" or "2 weeks ago", and that kind of stamp becomes wrong the moment it is stored. That is why we ask. Give it honestly: old material presented as new is precisely the mistake this feature exists to prevent.

Evidence

Evidence of something, never of absence

The analysis uses the archive to confirm what the brand does and expresses. It never concludes that something is missing because it is not in the archive. An archive is always a selection.

The note

Brief context, not a description

For each item you can write a note of up to 100 characters about where or why it was made. We read the content ourselves, so the note should not repeat what the material says or shows. It travels into the analysis as context stated by you, not as the brand's own words.

The link

Stored, but not fetched

You can note a link for each item. It is stored as documentation of where the material came from. We do not try to fetch the page, since that is exactly what cannot be done on social media.

Corrections

The note and the link can be edited later

The pencil icon on the card reopens both fields, so you can fix a typo, add a link you only track down later, or remove what you wrote. The correction feeds the next analysis, not the ones already completed. Type and date cannot be changed, because they decide whether the material still counts as current. If they are wrong, delete the entry and add the material again.

Tidying

Archive rather than delete

Archiving puts material away without removing it, and can be undone. Deleting is permanent and removes the raw file from storage too.

Not covered

What is deliberately left out

Brand books, visual identity guidelines and strategy documents are not included. That is entirely deliberate: a brand book describes what the brand wants to be, and that must not become the answer key for the very sections of the analysis it ought to be measured against.