Happy Tuesday, fabulous entrepreneurs and brand enthusiasts!
It's my last Tuesday before my vacation, and that means two things: my out-of-office reply has had three drafts that my inbox still doesn't believe, and you're getting a little extra homework since you won't see another issue from me for a full two weeks. I miss you already :-(
Have you ever thought about how stepping away always seems to do something useful? It shows you, fast, which things were never as urgent as they seemed to be. This week's issue borrows that same distance to look at who's actually speaking for your brand right now, since lately it's rarely just you.
1. OpenAI is rolling out a self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT.
This feature will have cost-per-click bidding, letting businesses buy placement directly inside the app, while Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education plans stay ad-free.
Why It Matters
Paid placement is now showing up inside the tool that a lot of people treat as their first stop for recommendations. I know, goal post move, once again.
What This Means for Your Business
That changes what "getting found" means. As organic mentions and paid ads start sitting side by side in the same answer, the brands that get recommended for free will be the ones distinct enough that the model has something specific to say about them.
L.A. Branding Perspective
Don't wait for the ad product to mature before you think about this. A "we do everything for everyone" positioning gives an AI platform like ChatGPT nothing worth repeating when someone asks for a recommendation.
2. Adobe and LinkedIn launched AI Essentials for Marketers on June 16th.
This is a free global initiative offering four role-based AI skills courses through LinkedIn Learning, available in 47 languages, with completion certificates marketers can post directly to their profiles.
Why It Matters
LinkedIn's own data shows the share of marketing job postings requiring AI literacy has jumped 113% year over year. LinkedIn and Adobe built this because that gap is already showing up in who gets hired, not as a goodwill gesture.
What This Means for Your Business
Don't skip this because you already "get AI." Take the course anyway (I'm definitely going to take it) and see what a major platform and a major creative-software company think the baseline AI skill set for marketers should be right now, because that baseline is about to become what your clients and competitors assume you already know.
L.A. Branding Perspective
You can't go wrong with my favorite price, free ninety-nine! The program is available in 47 languages and broken into modules short enough to actually finish without zoning out. That's a low price to pay to stay ahead of any assumptions you don't want to be caught without.
3. Canva launched Canva AI 2.0.
I'm a Canva groupie, so I will always skip to my lou about wonderful updates. This launch includes a Brand Intelligence feature that automatically applies a connected Brand Kit's fonts, colors, and tone to anything generated inside the platform, with no prompting required.
Why It Matters
This is genuinely useful, and it's also a quiet trap. The tool will keep your visuals consistent, but it has no opinion on whether what's in your Brand Kit is actually right.
What This Means for Your Business
If your fonts and colors were locked in two years ago by whoever happened to be in the room that day, Canva will now enforce that decision flawlessly and forever, without anyone questioning it.
L.A. Branding Perspective
Before you connect your Brand Kit and let the AI run, it's worth a hard look at what you're asking it to repeat. I use Canva constantly, and the first thing I did with this update was audit what was already loaded into my Brand Kit before I let it generate anything.
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A Thought From Behind The Brand: The Email I Didn't Write
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Last week, I was offline for two days taking care of some things for our upcoming family vacation, and my dad randomly fell ill. I'd left my oldest daughter covering a few client emails for me. When I got back to things, I read through the thread before I caught up with anyone. Everything she'd written was accurate. The deadlines were right. The pricing was right. The next steps were right. But it didn't sound like me. It hedged where I'd usually detail things. It was a bit straightforward in places where I'm usually long-winded and personable. Nothing in it was wrong, and that's exactly what made it so strange to read: all the facts, none of the person.
That's the experience a lot of founders are about to have with their own brand, except the stand-in won't be my daughter. It'll be a plethora of software. Google's AI search results are now writing little summaries of who you are based on whatever copy you've already published. ChatGPT is about to sit paid ads next to whatever it already says about you on its own. Canva's new assistant can generate a finished piece of work from a single line of text. Every one of these systems is going to represent you, with or without your permission, using whatever you've already put on the page.
If what's there is vague, the summary that comes back will be vague. If what's there contradicts itself from one page to the next, the system will average it out into something forgettable. None of these tools are inventing a flattened version of your brand. They're reflecting one you already wrote, usually some time ago, usually in a hurry.
Your brand voice was never just a writing style sitting in a forgotten style guide. It's the instruction manual everyone else, human or otherwise, is about to use to speak for you when you're not in the room.
Quick Tips & Tricks
Before you publish your next post, email, or page, ask yourself: if an AI tool had to sum it up in one sentence, would that sentence still sound like you, and would it still say what you actually meant?
It's a small habit, but it adds up over time. The sharper that one sentence is, the less weight the rest of it has to carry.
This Week's Dos & Don'ts
Do: Put a fifteen-minute quarterly review on your calendar for whatever "About" paragraph lives on your website and in your Brand Kit. That paragraph is what every AI tool, every new hire, and every prospective client is about to lean on first. Treat it like load-bearing copy, because as of yesterday, it is one.
Don't: Mistake a clean design system for a clear brand! I see this constantly with brilliant, accomplished founders: gorgeous templates, consistent colors, perfectly chosen fonts, and when you ask what the business actually stands for, the answer takes four sentences and trails off into "...if that makes sense?" A polished look with a fuzzy point of view is just a well-dressed problem.
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One-Sentence Brief
This is a single page that states, in plain words, who you serve, what you do differently, and why anyone should care, written simply enough that a twelve-year-old could repeat it back accurately.
Write this page before you connect any AI tool to your brand, Canva included, and keep it open while you work, or feed it directly into your tool's brand or custom instructions.
I help my clients with drafting theirs before we touch a single visual!
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Marketing Prompt of The Week
Here's some more fun brandwork before I put some distance between us over the next two weeks.
A lot of smart, capable businesses never get known for anything specific, and that's a sneakier problem than people realize, because nothing about it looks broken from the inside. This prompt is built to surface that fast. Run it on your own messaging and you'll find out within a few minutes whether what you're saying is actually creating recognition, or just noise that happens to sound fine.
Prompt: Analyze my current marketing messages from [website copy / social posts / sales emails — list whatever you're attaching] from the past [6-12 months] and identify the three core ideas I repeat most often. For each idea, tell me whether it's something a customer encountering it for the first time could accurately repeat back, or whether it only sounds clear because I already know what I mean. Then check each idea against how [competitors/peers in your category] typically describe themselves, and flag anything that's true of my brand but isn't actually different from what everyone else in the space claims. Suggest specific ways to sharpen the language so it's harder to confuse with a competitor's, without adding more ideas or more complexity. Many businesses struggle because they're unintentionally known for nothing specific, or for the same thing as everyone around them.
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Community Engagement Corner
This week's question:
When was the last time you let someone else, a teammate, an assistant, a tool, speak for your brand, and what did that reveal about how clearly you'd actually defined it?
Hit reply and tell me about it!
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Before I Let You Go...
Send me the marketing or branding questions you've been sitting on, the ones you haven't gotten a straight answer on yet. It can be tactical, it can be a gut-check on a decision you're about to make, it can even be something you're embarrassed to ask anyone on your own team. We can work on getting the answer together!
See you in two weeks!
Lena Anderson
Founder & Chief Branding Enthusiast L.A. Branding
