Safeguards and governance: how to protect your brand while using AI

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

Safeguards or governance

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

Guardrail are the parameters, principles and rules that guide the daily creation 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. The guardrails provide a “single source of truth” to adjudicate subjective decisions regarding creativity.

A fashion brand’s editorial guide might indicate that the tone is chic and aspirational rather than casual or humorous.

Governance refers to the formal rules, frameworks, and monitoring systems applied to marketing efforts. It ensures that marketing is ethical, compliant and aligned with broader organizational goals. In marketing, governance can include data privacy policies, legal compliance, risk management, and ethical considerations such as truth in advertising.

How AI changes or 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. Added to this scale is the risk that AI will stray from the established brand, including inventing things from scratch.

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Some rules, like color palette, fonts, and spacing, can be hardcoded into the AI ​​settings. But other rules, like tone of voice, are more subjective and open to interpretation.

For example, the AI ​​used for a luxury car brand must learn the technical specifications and specific language of the brand. He would need to understand the difference between “powerful” and “dominant” or between “elegant” and “sophisticated.”

However, in some respects the situation does not change. The AI ​​needs time to learn a brand, just like a new marketing copywriter would. He must be trained on voice, tone, nuances and what to say and not say.

Putting Safeguards in Place for AI Marketing

AI is evolving, so it’s not enough to install guardrails once and forget about them. Results must be monitored and refined. This means regular audits, feedback loops, and adjustments to ensure brand alignment and correct gaps.

Instead of exclusively creating content, marketing writers can also spend time reviewing and refining AI results.

It’s not that different from a senior editor reviewing the work of a junior editor. In this case, the junior editor is AI, and the fix may be to edit the copy or adjust the output settings.

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

Many marketers have not yet mastered AI training 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 allows more people to create content, marketers will take on the role of “master model gatekeepers.” These models, along with AI guardrails, can be used across various departments or teams to create content that adheres to brand guidelines.

This can prevent departments like human resources or finance from needing to bring in outside help to create materials because marketing is overloaded. AI-driven models reduce the amount of repetitive work marketers need to do, allowing them to focus on improving quality for higher-value work.

Protecting the brand with good governance

AI governance involves creating formal structures and policies that address issues related to the use of AI in marketing, including:

Privacy and data security: Ensure that AI tools do not mismanage customer data.

Ethical considerations: Prevent AI from perpetuating bias or promoting harmful content.

Transparency: Ensuring customers know when AI is used in marketing content.

Consider creating 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.

The challenges of forming an AI board

The AI ​​Council sets policies for the use of AI, ensures compliance with privacy laws, and tracks copyright and other legal implications.

Because AI is evolving so quickly, decisions about its use must be made quickly. AI boards need to operate fluidly to keep pace with AI change. They need to understand that the guardrails or policies are “for now” and be able to update them regularly.

Practical steps for creating an AI council

First, check if there is an AI Council in another part of the company. If so, join this board as appropriate. Since these boards are cross-functional in nature, there is no point in creating a new one and inviting many of the same people.

If a council does not exist, identify potential members. You’ll need a mix of expertise, including legal, marketing, data, ethics and technology. Look for people interested in AI and able to make rapid, collaborative decisions.

Next, draft a charter to determine the scope of the board, including what is beyond its purview. AI is a big space. You don’t want to get bogged down in something like a machine learning technology stack if another part of the organization can manage it.

Council activities should include:

Carry out regular audits of AI tools and results. Develop policies on data use, privacy and security. Establish standards for transparency and ethical use of AI in marketing.

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

Proactive governance

As AI becomes more integrated into marketing, the role of marketing teams as “brand stewards” will evolve. AI can create content faster and at a larger scale. This requires strong safeguards and governance to protect brand integrity and ensure ethical and compliant use of AI. Marketers will play a greater role in creating systems to use AI safely and effectively.

The key to success is continuous training, monitoring, and refinement of AI outcomes to ensure guardrails remain met, as well as an agile governance system that keeps pace with AI development.

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