Who Owns Your Brand in the Age of AI?

OpenAI’s decision to pull Sora 2’s ability to generate videos of historical figures, after users created “disrespectful” deepfakes of Martin Luther King Jr., should send a chill through every marketing department. It’s a story about ethics, yes - but more urgently, it’s about control.

Sora 2, the latest text-to-video model from OpenAI, can conjure hyper-realistic films from a handful of words. The technology is astonishing - and already under fire. The Motion Picture Association has accused OpenAI of enabling copyright infringement by scraping its members’ films for training data unless studios explicitly opt out.

So the risk isn’t theoretical. A deepfake of your CEO announcing a fake merger, your heritage mascot dropping into a meme, your campaign line twisted into satire - all entirely plausible, and all capable of spreading faster than your comms team can type a statement.

This isn’t another skirmish over brand safety. It’s a fundamental question of authorship. When anyone can recreate your look, tone, and story at will, what does 'your brand' even mean?

And yet, this isn’t a moment for panic. The technology is extraordinary. The possibilities for creative storytelling, prototyping, and personalisation, are vast. It’s just that the power now sits in everyone’s hands, not just in the brand's. No one externally is likely to uphold brand values or rules. In fact, they're likely to go directly against them in the name of entertainment or sheer vandalism. 

The smartest marketers will treat this not as a compliance headache but as a creative frontier - and they’ll make sure they’ve got the right people alongside them.

This next chapter isn’t about learning to prompt an AI better than your competitors. It’s about taste, judgment, and stewardship. It’s about knowing when a shiny new tool elevates your brand - and when it endangers it.

That’s where the best agencies come in. Not the ones dazzled by the tech, but the ones smart enough to use it wisely. The ones who can push the creative boundaries while still protecting the meaning at the core of your brand.

Every brand needs that mix of bravery and restraint right now. Bravery to explore what’s possible. Restraint to know when to stop.

If the early chaos around Sora tells us anything, it’s that the old certainties - authorship, ownership, originality - are all up for grabs. But marketing has always thrived on uncertainty. Entire industries have been built out of disruption before. And it will be done again, provided it's done with care.

Because in the end, great brands aren’t defined by the tools they use. They’re defined by the people who shape them. And in this new world of machine-made imagination, survival won’t come from locking everything down. It will come from partnerships with the smartest agencies and creators you can find.