Unlocking the full potential of GenAI will define the next era of brands

Unlocking the full potential of GenAI will define the next era of brands.

We believe generative AI is a generational opportunity to reshape every category.

The brands with the ambition and ability to implement GenAI into every aspect of their marketing workflow will define their categories. Jellyfish has developed a custom GenAI adoption assessment to identify where brands need to focus their investment today, and how they can accelerate their GenAI implementation to unlock new efficiency, effectiveness and innovation gains. 

We separate brands into three tiers based on their GenAI ambition: Experimental, Integrated and Elevated. 

Experimental

Experimental brands concentrate their GenAI efforts on the final stages of the production workflow, primarily generating paid social assets or marketing copy. 

Brands in this tier are often licensing third-party commercial models for different use cases through their agencies, with the corresponding risks of data security and creative convergence.

While every brand will find cost and time efficiencies experimenting with GenAI in asset production, we believe that focusing on outputs alone creates a ceiling for GenAI’s true value. 

The more mature brands reinvest those savings into reimagining their entire workflow - training their own unique brand models and using GenAI to unlock new insights, audiences and strategic opportunities.

On this image: A Jellyfish latent audit comparing relative brand strength in luxury, guiding the brand to find the most distinctive prompts to include in creative briefs.

The first steps for every brand exploring GenAI

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Integrated

Brands in this tier have progressed beyond Experimental to Integrated. 

They have at least one unique brand model maintained by an internal or hybrid agency team, with regular calibration sessions to ensure it’s generating distinctive assets by tracking category creative norms. 

Their strategic teams are using persona prompts to interact with GenAI audience segments, with a large language model (LLM) creating on-demand focus groups.

Regular latent audits track how the major consumer-facing models perceive the brand and define the most effective positive and negative prompts to include in creative briefs.

These brands have moved beyond just generating faster and cheaper assets, they’re using an integrated approach of unique brand models and specialist agency applications to augment the entire marketing workflow.

On this image: The practical implications of emerging GenAI interactions like plugins are still being defined. Just as search created a new wave of aggregators, we anticipate integrators will be a crucial part of every marketing plan.  

Elevated

Today only a handful of brands have entered the Elevated tier. These are brands who recognize GenAI’s potential to change far more than just workflow, and are exploring entirely new customer experiences. 

These brands are focused on securing “share of model”: generating autonomous assets and experiences that shape the major models’ understanding of their category to their benefit. 

In the same way the last decade of marketing was defined by share of search, we believe share of model will become an essential metric for modern marketers.

Brands in this tier are already exploring structural changes to their business, like scaling ‘plugin squads’ of creative, CRM and dev talent to identify what’s needed for new customer journeys through GenAI interactions. 

The most advanced brands have plans to move beyond unique brand models to brand agents. Brand agents autonomously oversee and integrate multiple models to deliver more complex outcomes such as recommending a new sitemap to improve brand understanding for aggregator plugins.

We believe generative AI is a generational opportunity to build a better, faster, cheaper marketing model for every brand. The brands willing to push past the initial efficiency gains and reinvest in new processes and platforms will define their category on their terms.