This article was co-written by Steven Miller, CEO & Co-Founder of ViryAI
Brand guides have long been the cornerstone of brand identity, ensuring consistency in look, feel, voice, and tone across all touchpoints. From traditional print materials to modern digital applications, these guides have evolved to reflect the changing landscape. However, we are now on the cusp of the most significant update to brand guides since the advent of the internet: the integration of Generative AI.
The Tidal Wave of GenAI in Creative
Generative AI is rapidly transforming the creative industry, promising unprecedented productivity gains in both asset and copy generation. Imagine instantly creating countless variations of images, videos, and written content, all tailored to specific campaigns or audiences. This potential is immense, but it also presents a significant challenge: ensuring that this vast output remains true to the brand. Getting AI-generated content to consistently align with brand guidelines has proven to be a tricky endeavor.
Sam Altman's quote, "95 percent of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost be handled by the AI—and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups," underscores the disruptive potential of AI in marketing and creative fields. This vision of near-instant, low-cost creative generation is compelling, but it also highlights the need for a robust system to maintain brand integrity.
The Historical Role of Brand Guides
Historically, brand guides have served as a comprehensive repository of a brand's identity. They capture the visual elements, such as logos, colors, and typography, as well as the intangible aspects, like voice, tone, and core messaging. Modern brand guides extend this to digital domains, motion graphics, and app interfaces. The fundamental purpose remains the same: to ensure that everyone working on the brand, whether employees or external partners, understands and adheres to the brand’s core traits. This consistency is crucial for building brand recognition and trust.
Bridging the Gap with ‘Brand Ontology’
At Ready State, in partnership with ViryAI, we are addressing the challenge of aligning AI-generated content with brand guidelines. We are introducing a revolutionary concept: the Brand Ontology. This new component translates your existing brand guide into a language that Generative AI tools can understand, follow, and replicate. It acts as a bridge between the traditional brand guide and the capabilities of AI, enabling the tools to interpret and apply brand principles at a granular level.
The Brand Ontology essentially tells GenAI tools how to understand and interpret your brand guide. It helps them reference the appropriate sections of the guidelines when creating new assets, ensuring high-fidelity, on-brand images and videos. This means that AI can not only generate a large volume of content but also ensure that it feels like your brand, maintaining consistency and reinforcing your brand identity.
The Magic of Brand Ontology
ViryAI leverages its semantic ontology technology to transform a brand guide and its corresponding assets into a structured data format that GenAI tools can process. This data structure allows the AI to understand the nuances of your brand, from visual styles to messaging tones. We then use reinforcement training to refine the ontology further. Our creative team provides feedback to the AI, indicating which interpretations are on-brand and which are not. This iterative process teaches the AI to make more accurate and brand-aligned decisions, gradually enhancing the quality and consistency of its output.
While we are careful to protect the "black box" magic of our offering, the core idea is to provide enough detail to demonstrate the power and potential of Brand Ontology. By translating your brand guide into a machine-readable format and training the AI to understand and apply it, we unlock the ability to generate high-quality, on-brand content at scale.
The Future of On-Brand Creative
The holy grail of high-fidelity, real-time, on-brand creative at scale is no longer a distant dream. It is within reach. With the integration of Brand Ontology, businesses can harness the power of Generative AI without sacrificing brand consistency. This means faster content creation, increased efficiency, and a stronger, more cohesive brand presence.
By enabling AI tools to understand and adhere to brand guidelines, we are empowering businesses to leverage the full potential of this transformative technology. The future of creative is here, and it is on-brand. The evolution of brand guides into dynamic, AI-driven systems marks a significant milestone in the marketing and creative industries. With Brand Ontology, we are paving the way for a future where creative generation is both rapid and reliably on-brand.
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Steven Miller, CEO & Co-Founder of ViryAI
Steven has spent his career in the world's of performance marketing & product. In his early twenties he led Instacart's shopper performance marketing team during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently he moved to Uber into a global product role to lead consumer & growth initiatives for their emerging grocery delivery business. He is now the Founder & CEO of ViryAI, an AI startup that provides brands with data driven capabilities to generate creative via GenAI tools
