Brand is a system. Figma wants to rule it.
Edition #4 - Artificially Intelligent, practical AI for Marketers
Marketing is no longer a pipeline. It’s a loop.
And the tools are starting to reflect that.
This week, Figma declared war on the entire design stack. Midjourney flirted with true brand consistency. And Apple, the immovable gatekeeper of mobile monetization, lost its grip.
All signs point to the same shift:
The creative stack is being re-architected from static systems to flexible and generative ones.
This edition dives into:
Why Figma’s “brand OS” is sexy but risky
Where Midjourney’s new reference feature still falls short
How Apple’s courtroom loss could unlock new AI-powered acquisition funnels
Let’s unpack what’s real, what’s hype, and what to test next.
💧 Design is about to get fluid.
Config 2025, Figma’s annual conference, happened this week, and they are going after everyone else in the design space:
Figma Buzz vs. Canva: Create and scale social media assets, display ads... Design templates and set which parts are editable, ensuring everything stays on brand.
Figma Make vs. Lovable: Turn natural language prompts or existing designs into working prototypes.
Figma Draw vs. Adobe Illustrator: Make illustrations with a high level of control (expressive brushes, dynamic strokes…).
Figma Sites vs. Framer: Build and publish fully responsive websites.
Why it matters:
The friction between brand strategy and creative execution is where performance dies. Figma wants to solve that with a unified creative operating system. The world where one campaign = one set of static visuals will not exist anymore. We’re heading to a world of fluid and infinite design, and it opens plenty of marketing opportunities:
Roll out 12 micro websites for each persona and improve them constantly.
Let local teams tweak campaign visuals without ever breaking your brand.
Building micro apps to tease your product instead of recording a Loom video.
But is Figma really able to fight on all fronts? On paper, their vision is amazing. But delivering a strong product on so many different use cases sounds very challenging. In 2024, Figma announced Figma Slides, which I’m not sure disrupted PowerPoint's business. But AI is commoditizing software, so it might be the right play. Let’s see!
How to go further:
Read Figma’s Config website about their new features. It includes many images, videos, and links to the product so you can better grasp what it is about.
📏 Midjourney is flirting with brand consistency
“Put THIS in my image”. This is how David Holz, Midjourney’s CEO, described this new feature.
It sounds magical. Feed it a photo, get infinite variations. Budget shoots, gone. Visual consistency at scale. Creative freedom with control.
Why it matters:
But does it work? Sometimes yes, but it doesn’t do the job in general => not really usable by a marketing team looking for efficiency.
I got good results on fashion and my face.
But it was completely off on simple products like a deodorant or mascots.
The results are very inconsistent, even when you keep the same prompt and reference.
ChatGPT is still leading the way on zero-shot learning (i.e., replicating a product without retraining a model), but seeing Midjourney pushing this feature makes me optimistic about the future tech progress. To date, the best option for brand consistency remains custom models, like what Lasqo is offering.
How to go further:
Min Choi gathered 10 examples of Omni-reference. If you want to get deeper into the feature capabilities, I encourage you to read this one.
Alban Glazman also made an insightful recap of how to play with the parameters of this feature.
🤑 Apple lost and it may make your app rich
In its epic fight against Epic Games (yes, yes), Apple has lost. They can no longer charge commissions on purchases made outside the App Store. Developers can now include external payment options freely, keeping 100% of revenue without paying Apple's typical 15-30% commission.
You may think:
This happened last week. You’ve got a point, but the decision was made public after I published the newsletter. So I have the right to talk about it!
This has nothing to do with AI. Well, it paves the way for more flexible acquisition journeys, and AI can play a great role here.
Why it matters:
It opens a new monetization channel. Paywalls will now exist outside of mobile apps:
Before: User sees your ad → downloads app → registers → hits paywall
Now: User sees your ad → lands on custom web experience → converts before installing the app
This new monetization channel will be way more profitable with Apple’s 30% cut and require new marketing strategies. And I think AI could enable these:
Fully adaptable conversion journey with AI running experiments in autopilot
Web-based experience of the app to give a sense of it before downloading
How to go further:
If you want to understand better what the court ruling is about, this article is made for you.
Unsurprisingly, Paddle wrote an interesting article called A new era of app monetization. By the way, Stripe also noticed the opportunity.
Thanks for reading Artificially Intelligent. If you come across an interesting piece of news you want me to write about, drop me a message and I’ll try to discuss it in next week’s newsletter.