July 3, 2026
Nobody's calling it a crisis. That's part of the problem.
Marketing teams are shipping more content than ever. AI tools have turned weeks-long campaign timelines into hours. By every output metric, things have never looked better.
Then you actually read the content.
The website sounds like a seasoned operator. The Instagram caption sounds like a chatbot trying to relate to Gen Z. The sales deck sounds like it was written by a committee who'd never met a customer. Technically, each piece is fine. Together, they describe three different companies.
That's brand drift. It's happening quietly inside organisations that think they're doing well. And the fix isn't a better AI tool. It's a person.
Let's get the obvious thing out of the way: the title sounds like someone who guards a museum.
It isn't.
A brand custodian is the person whose job is to make sure the company still sounds like itself - across every channel, every campaign, every piece of content the AI generates at 11pm when no one senior is reviewing it. They own the voice. They protect the positioning. They're the one who says "this isn't us" before something goes live that makes your most loyal customers do a double-take.
That used to be an informal responsibility spread across whoever happened to care. It worked when content volume was low enough that human eyes could keep up.
The volume is no longer low enough. Not even close.
85% of marketers are now using AI writing and content tools. Around half use AI to generate images or video. The AI-in-marketing market hit roughly $47 billion in 2025 on Statista's forecast, compounding at about 37% a year.
Here's the number that should stop you: only 23% of marketing teams have any guidelines at all for how AI tools should be used.
23%.
And having a policy is the easy part. Gartner's research finds most marketers still can't reliably train AI to produce on-brand content. The gap between "we have a style guide" and "our AI tools actually know about it" is where brand identity quietly disappears.
The commercial stakes are real. Lucidpress, now Marq, found consistent brand presentation can lift revenue by up to 33%. That's not a brand-equity abstraction. That's revenue you're leaving on the floor.
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Consumer trust is also shifting. In 2023, 60% of consumers were comfortable with brands using AI in advertising. By 2024 that had dropped to 46%. Customers are developing a sense for whether content is genuinely coming from someone - or just being produced and published on autopilot.
The custodian's job now includes managing that perception. Knowing when a campaign needs a real human voice to lead it. Knowing when AI output is good enough to go out with light editing. That's sophisticated judgment - requiring someone who knows the brand deeply, understands the audience genuinely and cares about the long-term relationship rather than the short-term metric.
Most organisations don't have someone formally responsible for that.
It's not a style guide review process.
Coca-Cola's approach shows what this looks like at scale: AI generating creative variations, but inside guardrails built by people who know the brand cold. As the company's head of generative AI has described it, a lot of the creative decisions are still made by humans, working to defined tools and guidelines that protect more than a century of equity. The AI has room to experiment. It just can't drift.
The custodian isn't an approval bottleneck. They build the infrastructure so the team doesn't need constant approval. They train the tools. They make "on-brand" the default, not the outcome of a late-stage review.
They also follow the brand everywhere it surfaces - sales decks, support emails, the "About Us" page last updated in 2021. Customers don't distinguish between touchpoints. They just form an impression.
The function belongs to whoever most deeply understands the brand and has the authority to protect it. In many organisations, that person exists but without a formal mandate.
Michael Eisner put it well: a brand "is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures." Those gestures are now happening at machine speed, across a dozen channels, every single day.
Someone needs to own the direction of that compound curve, with a title and a real mandate - a seat at the table where content strategy gets decided, not just where it gets approved.
You don't need a new role this week. But you do need a named owner.
Embed voice guidelines into the tools, not just the documents. Put senior eyes on what actually matters - campaign launches, positioning statements, crisis communications. And audit what's already out there: pull a week of content from every active channel and read it consecutively. If it sounds like multiple companies, that's your baseline - and your case for change.
Brand drift is quiet. It compounds. And by the time it's visible, a lot of equity has already left the building.
The highest-risk organisations aren't the ones producing too little. They're the ones producing too much, with no one accountable for what it adds up to.
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