By Adam Katz, CEO Sightly
The tech industry loves to talk about brand safety. We’ve spent time and money creating blocklists, filters, and dashboards to make sure ads don’t run next to bad content. We’ve built entire teams around protecting brands from external threats.
Meanwhile, brands are destroying themselves from the inside. Because brand governance, the discipline of your brand before content goes out the door, has collapsed.
With different agencies, different creative specs across platforms, and teams across markets all managing creative campaigns, the work of making your brand consistent can be difficult to manage. If the logo is off brand or the tone is different, that presents brand risk.
The industry spent the last five years obsessed with moving at the speed of culture. While that is a noble goal, there is risk in brand dilution across channels, platforms, and markets.
I’ve watched agencies or brand teams launch campaigns where the social team, email team, and paid media team are all using different visual systems, not because they’re testing, but because nobody checked. I’ve seen global brands where the APAC market uses a completely different tone than EMEA, and neither matches what HQ approved. It can lead to organizational chaos.
Brand governance isn’t sexy, but it’s the thing that helps teams scale quickly without losing their identity. Think of it like a construction code. You can’t build a skyscraper by letting every contractor interpret the blueprints differently just because you want to move fast. If every team is taking liberties with your brand, you’re building a skyscraper out of cardboard.
What is at stake is wasted media spend, inconsistent branding, and teams that may have to move slower.
The advertising industry solved brand safety because advertisers demanded it and refused to accept that “it’s too hard to monitor millions of placements.” We need the same energy for brand governance.
A few tips for brand leaders:
- Audit how many different versions of your brand exist right now across teams, markets, and channels
- Require governance checkpoints before scaling any AI content production
- Measure brand governance as rigorously as you measure brand safety
- Work with a technology platform that can give you brand governance controls across platforms and markets
What the industry needs to do is to create brand governance measurement so that we have a similar language and framework for this idea.
Your competitors who nail brand governance will build mental availability faster, command higher prices, and waste less budget on incoherent messaging. Every quarter you operate without governance is another quarter of brand equity you’ll never get back.
The AI content explosion is here. You can either put governance systems in place now, or you can watch your brand suffer with AI generated assets with slightly different versions of who you are. The technology exists. The methodology is proven. The only question is whether marketing leadership will prioritize coherence before the chaos becomes irreversible.
