Working With OSD

Where to start — and why it matters

This is the last chapter of the Brand Bible because it addresses the people who will use everything that came before it. Vendors, social media agencies, photographers, copywriters, treatment coordinators starting their first week — all of them need to work from the same understanding of what OSD is and how it communicates. This chapter tells them how.

The Brand Bible is a living orientation document. It is not a creative brief for a single campaign. It is the standing brief — the framework inside which every brief, every piece of copy, every photograph, and every patient interaction should sit. Working inside this system does not constrain great work. It focuses it.

Which chapters to read first

Not everyone needs every chapter equally. The table below identifies the minimum reading by role. All chapters are relevant to all partners over time — but these are the ones to prioritise on day one.

What needs CMO sign-off

OSD operates with a single marketing authority: the CMO. This is a deliberate choice. Brand consistency degrades when multiple people have final say on what goes out under the OSD name. The approval structure reflects that.

The distinction is not about trust. It is about the downstream cost of errors in patient-facing communications — a misworded claim, a compliant grey area, or an off-brand design choice that sets a precedent. These things compound. The approval process exists to catch them before they ship.

The six-question test

Before any piece of work leaves a vendor's hands — a draft copy document, a social post, a photograph selection, a designed asset — it should pass this test. These six questions represent the minimum bar for anything that carries the OSD name. They are not a creative checklist. They are a filter for the most common ways OSD work goes wrong.

Run through them in order. If any answer is wrong, revise before submitting. The CMO will ask the same questions on review.

Reading and referencing this document

The Brand Bible uses a simple version control convention. Every document in the system carries a version header in the format shown below. When referencing the Brand Bible in a brief or creative document, cite the version and date — this ensures everyone is working from the same edition and makes it straightforward to identify when a document was produced relative to any brand updates.

When a new version is issued, the CMO will notify all active vendors and team members. It is the responsibility of each party to ensure they are working from the current edition. Version discrepancies — working from an older Brand Bible — are one of the most common sources of brand drift, and the most avoidable.

This document is the brief

Every campaign brief, content brief, or vendor engagement brief that comes out of OSD assumes this Brand Bible has been read. The specifics of a given campaign — objectives, deliverables, timelines, audience — will be covered in the brief itself. But the voice, the philosophy, the visual standards, the compliance framework: those are here. They do not get restated in every brief. They are assumed.

This means the Brand Bible is not a reference to consult once at the start of a relationship. It is a working document — something to return to when a piece of work feels slightly off, when a first draft is rejected without obvious reason, or when a new format is being attempted for the first time. Most creative problems, on examination, turn out to be brand problems. And most brand problems, on examination, are questions this document already answers.

If it does not — if you encounter a question this document does not address — bring it to the CMO. Unanswered questions get incorporated into future versions. This is how the document grows.