Lesson 2 of 3 · 4 min
Voice and palette
Copy sounds like you wrote it, and colour stays inside your brand.
Brand voice is the setting most likely to be filled in badly, because the obvious thing to write is a list of adjectives, and adjectives steer nothing.
Steps
- Write your brand voice as a sentence you would actually say out loud.
- Add your palette, including which colour is for text and which is for accents.
- Generate an ad and read the copy aloud.
- If it does not sound like you, make the voice line more specific and try again.
Why adjectives fail
"Confident and modern" describes almost every brand and steers almost nothing. Compare it to "we talk like a senior engineer explaining a tradeoff to a colleague, short sentences, no hype". The second one rules things out, which is what a useful instruction does.
The test: if the opposite of your voice line is something no brand would ever choose, the line is not doing any work.
About the palette
Naming which colour carries text matters more than the list of colours. Without it you get technically on-brand images where the headline is unreadable, which is worse than being off-brand.