Avoid AI Clip Art

AI is here, leaders, time to get used to it. It’s goning to make a huge impact on your ability to do your marketing in a lot of great ways. It’s going to enhance the productivity of your team, and it’s going to allow you to increase the performance of your marketing function exponentially. But along with all of that value comes some risk. And one of those risks is to your visual identity. And what I want to share with you today is why you need to be careful to avoid letting AI be like clip art.

So what I mean by that is AI already has the power to allow anybody on your team to very easily generate images from scratch, that can be so many different things, right? And there’s a rule in marketing that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And this is a case where you’ve probably seen it as well, there’s a lot of images on LinkedIn, on PowerPoint slides, on the web that are amazing. But do they look like your company?

Sometimes I look at AI generated images on a brand’s properties, and I think, oh, they have a new brand. Well, that brand is kind of AI, right? Because AI without direction can produce images that kind of have that AI accent to them, right? So the opportunity you have, and the important thing that you need to do for your brand, is steward your visual identity and make sure that your team keeps your visual identity as a priority and not let AI drive the ship.

Clarity
There three reasons that’s important. One, clarity. So many AI images are complex. They are works of art, they look really impressive, but there’s a lot there. And less is more in marketing and often that big visual can get in the way of the message you’re trying to get across, whether it’s on your website or a presentation slide. So it’s important to have purpose and guidance and rules about what you will do in terms of complexity with your images and what is the message that’s important and have the, the visual support that and enable that message rather than, oh take over consistency.

Consistency
Another risk here is that because AI can create anything and it looks good, you end up with different images, with different themes and different looks, and even different colors and, and styles, because it’s so easy, right? And part of the power of your visual brand is the consistency in the look and feel of it. That’s why we have brand guidelines. So you want to have intention about making sure that the images you create with AI or otherwise are all driving to that same look and feel and message.

Character
And then third, character. This is about who you are. What’s the authentic being of your brand? You don’t want to let AI decide what your brand looks like. You want your brand to your images and, and graphics. All those things to be authentic visualizations of your message, your value, who your people are, all those things. So it’s important for you to safeguard that and make sure that what you’re creating visually is honest to who you are and is transparent to what you’re trying to portray to your clients.

Jump on the AI bandwagon for sure, because there is a lot of exciting capabilities that will be on tap for your team that will help them keep up with everybody else for one thing, but also chart new paths. But you wanna be the boss. Don’t let AI decide what your brand looks like.