Brand Lockup: Design Systems for Advertising
Feb 2026
Advertising at scale breaks when every asset is handcrafted. I built Brand Lockup to fix that: design systems for advertising that behave like code. It's the same thesis behind Design Systems as Code — and the same pattern that powers my investment in agentic infrastructure.
Problem
Creative teams spend too much time on repetitive execution — resizing, reformatting, and rebuilding assets for every channel and market. In pharma and regulated industries, MLR and compliance add layers of review. The result: slow time-to-market, inconsistent brand expression, and no bandwidth for real optimization. Each campaign is a new build. A brand refresh can take months because every asset is touch-up work.
I've seen the numbers: 12 markets × 8 channels × 3 formats = 288 assets for a single campaign. Someone is hand-crafting all of them. That's not scalable — and it leaves no room for testing, iteration, or learning.
Approach
Encode brand rules and creative logic into a system. Design tokens (colors, typography, spacing) that cascade — change the primary blue once, and every component updates. Component libraries (heroes, cards, CTAs) that inherit. Assembly workflows that compose approved elements instead of creating from scratch. Pre-approve structures; let creatives focus on what's distinct. Version, branch, and validate like code.
The key insight: the system handles the scaling; humans handle the judgment. Creative directors approve the primitives. The system assembles the variations. Compliance is baked into the components. No more one-off review chains.
Outcome
Faster campaigns. Consistent brand. Capacity for testing and iteration. Creative teams reclaim time for strategy and concept work. The same pattern that made engineering teams 10x more productive — applied to advertising. And it's a foundation for the agentic future: when brands encode their identity into structured systems, AI can assemble on-brand content at scale.