The Need for Context

Many AI-enabled advertising tools are sped up versions of the old creative workflow. More hooks, videos, competitor clones and variants. More, “give us your product, we’ll make 100 ads.”

The approach can deliver winning ads, but it leaves the most interesting problem untouched. What does the generative system actually know about the brand, product, audience, claims, constraints, and commercial contexts it is supposed to work within?

Brands are rarely just asking for more ads. They are asking for systems to create beautiful, performant assets while operating inside strategic and commercial boundaries. Today they’re scattered across prompts, brand decks, Figma boards, product feeds, Slack threads, agency briefs, campaign docs - you name it. So while AI is accelerating almost every part of the creative workflow, most brands are still feeding tools with random files and one-off instructions.

It’s clear the workflow has a weak link: a prompt is too thin a container for brand strategy.

Brand kits help with design consistency. Product feeds carry price and attribute data. And of course, a thoughtful prompt can guide output. But none of these are scalable interfaces for what creative systems increasingly need to know.

I’ve been thinking about this missing layer as a “Context Catalog.”

A structured, portable way for advertisers to express the contextual boundaries of their product, brand, service, audience, uses, claims, tone, constraints, and creative intent.

• → Product truths
• → Audience moments
• → Claims and proof points
• → Approved context territories
• → Prohibited scenes
• → Competitive context

The attributes represent a structured map. They don’t replace the “100 video” approach with “100 prompts”. The goal is to give AI systems a richer understanding of the spaces they should explore and the boundaries they need to respect.

It also creates a cleaner feedback loop (hallelujah): If an asset performs, teams can trace back to the inputs that shaped it: product truth, audience moment, claim, context territory, or visual proof. And the platform doesn’t need to reveal the user-side context that led to the match.

Craft still matters. After all, the job is understanding where product capability, customer emotion, commercial context, and creative judgment meet.

Take a humble golf glove.

• The legacy approach: make 100 ads with the glove in different scenes.
• The context-driven version: here are the product truths, audience moments, allowed claims, visual proof points, and learning goals. Explore relevant commercial contexts: Grip confidence. Weather. Practice. Beginner anxiety. Gifting. Premium identity. Shopping proof.

Craftspeople still define the strategy, claims, constraints, and boundaries. Systems generate, recombine, adapt, and learn within them.

Useful today for better briefs, prompts, and product-in-context creative. Critical tomorrow as generative video, real-time production, and world models start to change how we experience advertising.