Beyond Billboards: AI Rewriting Brand Stories Through Space and Sight
Explore how AI moves beyond speed to craft deeper brand rituals and retail theatre. Includes ready-to-use prompt templates to prototype your next big idea.
Branding now lives in two worlds: the outward campaigns that shape a brand’s story and the immersive retail spaces that let people step inside it. Traditionally, crafting ad narratives or designing a store’s flow was time-intensive, reliant on static mood boards, lengthy copywriting rounds, and physical mock-ups. Today, AI is reframing all of this, making the process not just faster, but radically more exploratory.
Campaign narratives & ad creative: from copy lines to concept universes
Previously, teams would spend weeks brainstorming slogans, refining taglines, and rewriting campaign decks to fit each locale. Now, LLMs like ChatGPT or Gemini can spin multilingual festival campaigns or hyper-local taglines in a day. For example, you can use ChatGPT to generate three distinct narrative directions for a Diwali campaign, each with its own emotional hook, from family nostalgia to urban sparkle, a process that would have taken traditional teams multiple workshops to explore.
ChatGPT prompt template for Campaign Theme & Tagline Strategy Brief:
Act as an experienced brand copy strategist with a deep understanding of emotional storytelling, audience insight, and campaign development. Develop three distinct thematic campaign directions for a [festival/brand name], targeting [specific audience], and aiming to evoke a [desired emotional undertone].
For each campaign direction, include the following:
Theme Title (2–4 words that capture the essence)
Short Rationale (2–3 sentences explaining the narrative arc, emotional hook, or cultural relevance)
Sample Tagline (concise, evocative, and aligned with the theme)
The output should feel cohesive, imaginative, and rooted in brand storytelling principles.
This means less time wrestling over wording, more time designing the immersive feelings behind the words.
Visual campaigns & ad films: from laborious shoots to AI-directed stories
In the past, you’d sketch a rough storyboard, hire photographers, models, crews, and hope the final shoot captured the intended mood, often spending weeks and substantial budgets. Today, with tools like Midjourney for stills and video generators like Kling or Runway, you can explore dozens of creative directions and even produce an entire ad film in days, with far fewer resources.
Crafted in Midjourney’s conversational flow, where prompts meet imagination.
These aren’t just prototypes; many of these AI-generated visuals and videos are polished enough to be used directly in campaigns, slashing both time and production costs.
Interior concepts & spatial theatre: from hand-drawn plans to AI-woven brand stories
Store layouts once emerged from hand-drawn planograms and intuition. Now, we brainstorm entire concepts for retail interiors with strong brand identities by using LLMs and diffusion models.
ChatGPT prompt template:
Act as a retail design strategist. Propose three innovative interior layout concepts for a [brand type] store that embody a [brand personality] narrative.
Be highly detailed and creative—do not miss anything. Each concept should translate brand values into immersive spatial experiences.
For each concept, include:
Narrative Essence – The core story or emotional idea guiding the spatial identity.
Circulation Logic – How people move through the space (flow, rhythm, focal points).
Product Display Strategy – How items are presented, discovered, or interacted with.
Emotional & Sensory Triggers – Use of light, sound, texture, or symbolism to evoke feeling.
Atmosphere & Materiality – Mood, materials, palette, and ambience that express the brand.
Sustainability & Innovation – Visible eco-conscious choices or phygital integrations that add meaning or utility.
This lets us not just draw a store but design how customers will feel inside the brand story.
More than efficiency: crafting strategy, rituals, and brand meaning
AI doesn’t just speed up campaigns or polish visuals. It empowers brands and designers to explore endless directions — testing moods, spatial flows, and cultural nuances without heavy upfront costs. It’s a way to prototype not only how a brand looks, but how it feels and how people inhabit its story.
This goes beyond quicker selling. It’s about creating layered narratives and experiences that let customers step into new versions of themselves, through a store visit, a digital scroll, or even a brief ritual they take home. Used thoughtfully, AI becomes a tool for shaping deeper emotional ties and writing a new language of brand storytelling across both space and sight.
From insight to practice: workshops, courses, and collaborations
If you’re ready to move beyond experimentation, we offer hands-on ways to embed these capabilities into your practice.
Ask for our 6-hour AI Fundamentals – Retail Edition workshop, tailored for designers, brand teams, and marketers who want a sharp, practical start. Or dive deeper with our 2-month customised course, designed to build long-term fluency in AI-driven branding and spatial storytelling.
We also collaborate on AI-generated ad films, brand campaigns, and immersive retail concepts, helping you craft stories that are as strategic as they are sensorial.
Get in touch with us at sahil@rbdsailab.com to explore how we can shape your next chapter, in campaigns, in space, and in the minds of those who step inside your brand.
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I’m Sahil Tanveer of the RBDSai Lab, signing off for the week. I promote, consult, and apply AI for Architects along with my Architecture and Design Studio, RBDS. If you liked this Substack,
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