How to protect your brand while using AI

Marketing has traditionally served as the “guardian of the brand”, ensuring organizational consistency across channels. AI creates brand assets at scale, offering speed and efficiency. However, it also introduces new risks. Here’s how it changes guardrails and management and what to do about it.

Guardrails against management

Although closely related, guardrails and governance serve different but complementary functions in AI-powered marketing organizations.

Protective fences are the parameters, principles and rules that guide the daily production of marketing materials. Consider editorial style guides and brand guidelines. They help maintain consistency, giving materials developed by different groups of individuals a similar basis. Guardrails provide a “single source of truth” for arbitrating subjective decisions about creativity.

A fashion brand’s editorial guide may dictate that the tone is chic and ambitious versus casual or witty.

Management refers to the formal rules, frameworks, and control systems that apply to marketing efforts. Ensures marketing is ethical, aligned and aligned with wider organizational goals. In marketing, governance can include data privacy policy, legal compliance, risk management and ethical considerations such as truth in advertising.

How AI does and doesn’t change the game

AI offers marketers the ability to produce creative materials on an unprecedented scale. Instead of A/B testing, marketers can programmatically test from A to infinity. With that scale, there’s a risk that AI will move away from the established brand — including making things out of whole cloth.

Dig deeper: US State Data Privacy Laws: What You Need to Know

Some rules — like color palette, fonts, and spacing — can be hard-coded into AI parameters. But other rules, like tone of voice, are more subjective and open to interpretation.

For example, an AI used for a luxury car brand must learn the technical specifications and specific language of the brand. He would have to understand the difference between “strong” and “dominant” or “polite” versus “sophisticated.”

However, in some ways the game does not change. AI takes time to learn a brand, just like a new marketing writer would. He needs to be trained in voice, tone, nuances and what to say and what not to say.

Setting up AI marketing guardrails

AI is evolving, so it’s not enough to just set up the guardrails once and forget about them. The results must be monitored and improved. This means regular audits, feedback loops and fine-tuning to ensure brand alignment and correct deviations.

Instead of exclusively creating content, marketing writers can also spend some time reviewing and refining the AI’s output.

It’s not that different from a senior copywriter reviewing a junior copywriter’s work. In this case, the junior copywriter is the AI, and the fix might be editing the copy or tweaking the output parameters.

One parameter is “temperature”, which controls the randomness of the output. Lower temperatures produce more predictable, conservative content, while higher temperatures produce more creative but riskier content.

Many marketers have yet to master training AI on tone of voice. Organizations need to upskill marketers in this area if they want to get the most out of their AI investment.

Templates for creating scalable content

As AI enables more people to create content, marketers will take on the role of “keeper of master templates.” These templates, along with AI guardrails, can be used across departments or teams to create content that stays within brand guidelines.

This can prevent departments like HR or finance from having to outsource content creation because marketing is overwhelmed. AI-driven templates reduce the amount of repetitive work marketers have to do, allowing them to focus on improving quality for higher-value work.

Brand protection with bovernance

Managing artificial intelligence involves creating formal structures and policies that address issues related to the use of artificial intelligence in marketing, including:

• Data privacy and security: Ensure that artificial intelligence tools do not mishandle user data.
• Ethical considerations: Preventing artificial intelligence from perpetuating bias or promoting harmful content.
• Transparency: Ensuring customers know when AI is being used in marketing content.

Consider developing an AI Council to oversee AI marketing practices. This cross-functional group of key stakeholders will ideally include representatives from legal, data, marketing, ethics and technology teams.

Challenges in the formation of the AI ​​Council

The AI ​​Council defines AI usage policies, ensures compliance with privacy laws, and monitors copyright and other legal implications.

Because artificial intelligence is developing so quickly, decisions about its use must be made quickly. AI councils need to operate fluidly to keep up with the speed of AI change. They must understand that the guardrails or rules are “for now” and be able to update them regularly.

Practical steps for establishing an AI council

First, check if there is an AI Council in another part of the company. If so, join that council as appropriate. Since these councils are multi-functional in nature, it does not make sense to create new ones and invite many of the same people.

If the council does not exist, identify potential members. You will need a combination of expertise, including legal, marketing, data, ethics and technology skills. Look for people interested in AI who can make fast and collaborative decisions.

Next, draft a charter to define the council’s scope — including what is outside of its scope. AI is a big space. You don’t want to get stuck with something like a bunch of machine learning technology if another part of the organization can handle it.

Council activities should include:

• Conducting regular audits of AI tools and results.
• Development of rules on data use, privacy and security.
• Setting standards for transparency and ethical use of artificial intelligence in marketing.

Managing artificial intelligence is not a one-off exercise. Councils should meet at least once a month — and be able to act quickly. They should be responsible for reviewing new AI developments and ensuring that the organization’s practices remain up-to-date.

Proactive management

As artificial intelligence becomes better integrated into marketing, the role of marketing teams as “guardians of the brand” will evolve. AI can create content faster and to a greater extent. This requires strong guardrails and governance to protect brand integrity and ensure the ethical, compliant use of AI. Marketers will play a greater role in creating systems that allow AI to be used safely and effectively.

The key to success is constant training, monitoring and refinement of AI output to ensure the guardrails stay true, as well as an agile management system that keeps up with the pace of AI development.