A CEO Letter To BrandGuard Customers: What To Expect in 2024
More models, more integrations, more use cases for brand governance
This past year was a whirlwind for us. We started 2023 as a generative AI company called Nova, creating thousands of hyper-personalized ads for Google and Facebook platforms but quickly hit a stumbling block. Most CMOs we presented to told us, “Creating 5,000 custom Facebook ads is awesome, but we have to check all of those to make sure they are on brand.”
After we heard this several times, we regrouped to see if it was possible to teach machines to understand brands and branding. It turns out we can, but it is an incredibly difficult technology problem requiring dozens of different AI approaches just to evaluate a simple ad. As we began to demo this “BrandGuard” feature, everyone kept asking more about it, and BrandGuard became the company.
We realized that, whether they were using generative AI or not, companies already had a brand governance problem. So many channels, formats, and brand guidelines to meet across all of them make it slow to approve, reject, and modify consumer-facing assets. Having an automated system like BrandGuard that understands your brand style and guidelines and can check for violations across it all in a matter of seconds makes the whole process faster and creates a more consistent brand experience for your customers.
This insight led us to create the world’s first Brand Governance Platform. Now, just 6 months after our beta launch, we have multiple Fortune 500 companies, top brands, and global agency conglomerates using the product. I’ve done 3 SaaS startups and sat on the boards of several more, and this is the strongest interest level and fastest adoption of an enterprise software tool of anything I’ve worked on in my career.
Despite having more than a dozen different AI models in the production product, another dozen in development, and support for text and image assets, we’ve gotten many requests for new models and features. So, I want to let our customers know what is coming in 2024.
More AI models - We have a DEI model that is close to launching so that you can evaluate your entire ad portfolio for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion metrics if you have those. In addition, we have improved logo detection models that deal with all the nuances of the problems we’ve seen in our customer base and models for various industry verticals like pharma, consumer finance, and healthcare. We are also working on models for the various requirements around marketing to children. And, of course, we will launch the much-requested AI models for supporting video.
More integrations - We know that generative AI is getting built into everything and that your marketing workflows span dozens of tools. BrandGuard is committed to supporting to guarding your brand everywhere you work. In Q1, we will launch our Figma and Canva integrations and announce our first DAM integration partners, where we can score content that you store in your digital asset management system.
More use cases - We launched the product with support for creative teams who want quick feedback on the “on brandedness” of assets in the design process and production teams who are trying to slice and dice all these assets for their various end uses but still keep strong adherence to style guides and brand guidelines. Support is coming for licensing relationships, including franchisee-franchisor structures, retailer-distributor structures, and advertiser-influencer structures. We’ve seen growing demand for situations where one party controls a brand but wants to share assets with another party who is allowed to modify brand assets but not too much. BrandGuard will keep everything in compliance.
More BrandGPT functionality - The surprise product hit for us this year was BrandGPT - the ability to chat with a style guide to get quick answers about brand topics. We are expanding BrandGPT’s functionality this year to help with prompt generation, explainability, and more.
We didn’t set out to define a new software category, but that’s where the market needs have taken us. As the leader in brand governance, you can count on us to stay innovative and in front of the market, delivering novel solutions for the challenges you face as you adapt your marketing workflows to AI. Thanks for your support in 2023. You have to be a little bit crazy to use an early product made by a startup, but your support and ideas allowed us to raise more capital, grow fast, and build a product that surpassed the market expectations. We appreciate everything and look forward to an even better 2024.