One prompt won’t kill your brand. A thousand just might.
Governance is one of those words that does no favors for itself. It sounds like a thing that might slow you down, might require a lot of approvals, might be a bottleneck in the process. And honestly, most of the time, it doesn't help the creative process. But when it comes to managing brand integrity, governance may actually be in your corner. The problem is that for most companies it does not actually exist. Yet.
Your AI policy is being written right now, and brand isn’t in the room.
Your AI policy is getting written or rewritten as you’re reading this. And seated at the table for this conversation are likely the legal, compliance, security, procurement, and IT teams. They’re talking through considerations for data privacy, security risks, and cost. But they’re not talking about the considerations for brand. Tools get chosen for safety, security, and cost. Nobody's asking whether they actually work for the brand. And more often than not, they don't.
AI doesn’t know your brand. It knows the average of every brand.
A brand is a specific set of traits, most notably how it sounds, what it looks like, and what it never is or does. AI isn’t fed the right context, so it doesn’t know any of it. It knows the average of what every brand looks like (like, my least favorite blurple-gradient-Inter-centered-hero look; can we please retire that already?) These models were trained on the internet; the models learned what most common design patterns are and now use them. But these models aren’t trained on your brand. They don’t have the context and nuance for camera angles, for language that compels action with your target audience, and for an experience that delivers delight.
Anyone can prompt now.
It used to be that the only people producing brand work were trained in the brand work, and may have created it themselves. Now the org chart is no longer a guardrail; anyone with a prompt box (sales, operations, interns, etc.) can create brand touchpoints. It’s not malicious; they’ve been asked to work faster and smarter, as you likely have, too. But they’re not prompting with all of the right context and content to produce materials that work in service of your brand. Instead, their prompting is eroding the brand with each request. Not bad assets, but thousands of slightly off-brand assets.
It’s time to ask for the seat at the table.
Tool selection and AI policy decisions are being made without you. Because brand isn’t invited into the conversation, it has to ask loudly to revise the policy before it hardens (and to get a seat at the table in future conversations). Yet brand is the only one in the building who can define what on-brand even means for AI to follow. When you ask for that seat at the table, bring three specific asks with you:
- Brand context loaded into the tools when they’re deployed,
- Brand voice + visual traits built into how people prompt, and (most importantly)
- A real say in which tools get bought before contracts get signed
What to do when the tools are already in the wild.
Chances are likely the tools are already in use and your colleagues are happily prompting away. Pretending you can claw that back is a waste of time and energy. Shape it instead. Teach others to feed the brand in; guidelines, visual and voice traits, examples of the brand in action. Create guidelines for prompting (a whole other blog post to write on that!) Make sure the conditions and context for creating brand touch points works in service of your brand rather than against it.
Same thousand prompts, two completely different endings.
Without governance: a thousand small cuts. The brand erodes. Nobody notices until it's gone. With it: a thousand on-brand assets, moving at AI speed. The prompts were never the problem. Prompting in the dark is.
If you're staring down this problem and your brand doesn't have a seat at the table yet, that's what we do at Cella by Randstad Digital. Let's talk!
