One campaign, and the rule that runs through it
You're in the campaign studio. What you're doing this lesson: run one fall relaunch through a check before anyone approves it. You do not need to write a script today. Demo code, if it appears later, is optional.
You're the marketer at Fieldnote, a coffee-subscription brand. Fall relaunch in three weeks: a new subscription tier, then a two-week push across email, social, and paid. AI will draft every piece of copy. That part is settled. Nobody is going to pay you to type first drafts by hand.
What they will pay you for is this: nothing publishes without a named approver, and nothing gets in front of an approver that hasn't passed its checks. Copy has to sound like Fieldnote before Dana sees it. Calendar rows need a yes before they hit the scheduler. Report numbers have to come from the export before anyone upstairs quotes them. The AI drafts; you check; a human named in the file approves. Three distinct jobs, and the middle one is yours.
The CMO Survey's Spring 2026 wave puts AI in 24.2% of marketing activities and climbing. The drafting already moved. The checking mostly didn't.
The brand book problem
Every brand has voice guidelines. Almost none of them are checkable. "Warm but confident." "Punchy." "Sounds like a knowledgeable friend." You cannot test whether a sentence is warm — and neither can the model. That's why pasting the brand PDF into a prompt produces copy that gestures at your voice while shipping "game-changing" in line one.
The fix is to split the guidelines into two piles:
- Testable rules. "Sentences under 20 words." "No exclamation points." "One idea per line." You can check every one of these.
- Banned phrases. The cliches, the superlatives legal can't back, the competitor names. A list. If the phrase is in the draft, it fails.
A real voice pack (the short list of measurable rules a script can check) looks like this: three testable rules, four banned phrases, a named owner (Dana), a version, a date. You'll see one in the next steps — skip the demo if you want. When Dana tightens a rule in August, the version bumps to v4 and every check downstream picks it up. That's the difference between a voice pack and a PDF nobody opens: the pack is attached to the campaign, not filed next to it.
Why write the pack down, not just paste it in the prompt
You'll still put the pack in the prompt — the model drafts better with it. But the prompt is a request, not a check. The model complies most of the time, and "most of the time" across 40 variants means three or four violations sail through per batch. After the model drafts, the same pack flags every violation mechanically. Same source of truth, two jobs — brief the model going in, check the model coming out.
Where this lesson goes
Next you'll watch a linter catch a bad draft, then tell banned phrases from mood words, then write the check yourself and run a five-variant batch through it — the exact pass that runs before anything reaches Dana's approval queue. By the end, "on-voice" stops being a vibe and becomes a list that comes back empty.
One placement note now, paid off in lesson 3: in a live stack this pass isn't a file you remember to run. It's a step between the model and the approval queue, so every batch walks through it whether anyone is watching or not.