Hi Gary,
Agree with the previous answer that unpublish is better, but since you're only using the Brand Portal rather than AEM Sites, the impacts of straight deletion are less serious. (The TTL situation I believe only applies to AEM Sites with a dispatcher and/or CDN caching layer in front of it).
Basically, the only impact of a straight delete on the Brand Portal is that the author instance (i.e the DAM) will still show those assets as published to the Brand Portal. The deletion on the Brand Portal just removes the assets--it doesn't send any message back to the DAM to adjust status / metadata there.
Hope this helps evaluate the tradeoffs,
Beau