Building distinctive brand assets is one of the smartest things we can do in marketing. AI makes this something we can exploit even more.
We get about 2-3 seconds before people scroll past or stop watching our ad. Some ads might get six seconds in the right channel with the right creative, but we have this tiny window of seconds where we must get our brand into people's memories. They must notice our brand if we want them to retrieve it later. Not just notice the ad, but the brand.
Plastering your brand name from the opening frame is an option, but it can feel bolted on and makes it harder to land your idea. That's why distinctive brand assets are so useful. They do the heavy lifting.
The waterslides
In 2021, when I was running marketing at The National Lottery in Ireland, we would show this waterslide image in our research. No name. No logo. No tagline. Yet 72% of the country could still spontaneously name the brand.
The waterslides were a distinctive asset we had built through consistent and rigorous advertising. People recognised the brand without us having to cram our name into opening frames. That gave us freedom to push creativity, safe in the knowledge that every ad impression wasn't falling at the first hurdle: getting the brand noticed. People knew who was advertising, so we could focus on making the ads enjoyable, another useful goal in ads.
We can credit the brilliant Jenni Romaniuk with the phrase, and the science behind distinctive brand assets. I wrote about them in my first book six years ago. And when I joined The National Lottery, we built a bunch of them and were extremely rigorous and disciplined in using them.
Our logo, our tagline, our waterslides, our green background and our music track: we used them consistently, as a toolbox. And we measured them often. You cannot manage what you don't measure.
This first campaign, internally known as William, was our introduction of the asset, and our re-introduction of the tagline "It could be you", which had been dropped some years earlier. Few brands have taglines that are liked, famous and still relevant, so it was an easy enough decision to bring it back.
The following year we launched Village, which played into a different insight but let us tell new, entertaining and joyful stories linked to our waterslides. Joy is a big thing for this brand.
We resisted the temptation to move away from this, and instead always looked at how we could build onto it, to have fresh consistency. For example, we focused on the yellow inflatable ring and developed that into a distinctive asset itself. Which we measured.
Character brand assets
Character assets are some of the strongest distinctive brand assets a company can have. One advantage is flexibility: you can use characters as heroes in your ads, not just aesthetics within them. Over time, if consistently used, people recognise your brand at a glance. This is far more important than folks realise.
We created a Dream Inspector character for this reason, and built him into a recognisable asset. Within a year or so, over 60% of adults could attribute our brand to this character.
Voice can be the asset too
Distinctiveness doesn't have to be visual. A voice, held consistently, does the same job: people know who's talking before they see a name. Oatly is the obvious example. Cover the logo and you'd still know who wrote it.
Isa is ours. She answers visitors on runwithfoxes.com in our voice: same tone, every conversation, any hour. She's live now, ask her something.
Use AI to sweat your assets
The challenge in the past was production. I could do a two-day shoot and plan in as much footage and photography as possible, to get all sorts of ads for all our channels. I was lucky we had the resources for that. Small teams and small brands do not. And even with that, it had to be planned ahead. Few brands have writing teams and art directors ready to create new ads or content every week. Not if you care about quality and consistency.
AI removes that constraint. If you are willing to build a system.
Grumpy foxes
The title of my first book, and now my consultancy, is Run with Foxes. My grumpy fox is my distinctive asset character. Or foxes, there's more than one.
I've built an ad engine that creates ads using my fox. I can brief my system and get back something in a few minutes. The level of consistency, right down to the grumpy attitude of the fox, is impressive.
It took a few marathon sessions to get this right. But once built, a lazy prompt like "grumpy fox drinking coffee" will get me what I want almost always first time. If it makes a mistake, my focus is not on the output, but on why it didn't do what I hoped, and how to fix it for next time, so it works every time.
We started with images, but I've patiently trained it to understand that images need space for headlines. It must think about headline placement before it creates the image. It has been trained for contrast, for different font styles, different colours, alignment of the headline: all the small decisions you would intentionally make when you are making ads.
It can create video too. I'm still just creating short videos, under ten seconds, but that is mostly what's needed for ads. I've focused on two types. One is my Tarantino-style cinematic ones: high on visual impact, low on any messaging.
But often we need video ads that are more informative, with datapoints, benefit headlines, charts and CTAs. For these, the role of the fox is just a small nudge to make it easy for people to notice the brand. The headline is often the hero. These are what some call sales activation ads.
My focus is quality and speed. Speed is easy if you don't care about quality. But I do. Getting both takes more time. The best way I've found is to build each system for a very narrow use case and put the hours into getting that exactly right, every time. I've lost hours of my life testing, over and over, that the headline is not touching the fox. I'm not saying this is a good way to spend my time, but it upsets me otherwise.
How it writes headlines
I spent many years in direct-response advertising, the predecessor of performance marketing. Back in my youth I learned the finer details of what headlines work and why. I studied the classics: Drayton Bird, David Ogilvy, John Caples, Claude Hopkins, Bob Stone.
So before writing any headline, my system has been trained to answer two questions from classic direct response.
What is the strongest benefit to the reader?
What would make a stranger stop scrolling?
Only after answering those does it write headlines.
Build a system
The fundamentals are the same. Attention decay is a thing. Purchases come from retrieving things from our brains: our memories are the biggest search engines. We must make sure the brand gets noticed, not just the ad. And building distinctive brand assets is as important as ever.
What's changed is that one person with a terminal window can sweat these assets every day, in every format.
My focus is not making an ad. But building a system that makes quality ads consistently, easily. If your brand is distinctive, visually or in voice, that system is available to you. We build it with you: your assets, your voice, your rules.
Isa will answer in our voice. Which is the point.