AI Storytelling for Brands That Want to Stand Out

Full video transcript

Our next session of the Scale with AI summit features Tracey Bauer, joining to talk about visual storytelling. Tracey is the founder of Lens on Luxury, a digital marketing agency redefining how premium and service-based brands show up online. With over 30 years of experience in the luxury optical industry, Tracey has worked with world-renowned fashion houses including Chanel, Tiffany & Co., Bulgari, and classic eyewear icons like Ray-Ban and Persol. In this session, she reveals how to harness AI video for top-of-funnel brand awareness — from concept to content strategy — and how to weave it intelligently into marketing to boost visibility, connection, and conversion.

Tracey opened by noting she’d talk more about the business concepts behind social media. She left corporate America to start her own marketing agency, helping smaller businesses with social media and branding. While working on the Chanel brand, she audited dealerships and found that five years ago 90% of them failed the digital presence portion of their audit, putting them at risk of losing the brand — which is part of why she started her agency.

She explained that most business content gets very low engagement because people don’t know how to work with social media or how to stop the scroll. Content needs to be relatable to the end customer, built around “discovery content” that gets people to notice the business owner or the brand at all. Coming off nearly two weeks at conferences — AI Marketing World and High Level’s Level Up Summit, where Neil Patel was a keynote speaker — she emphasized that founders need to step in front of their brand and build a personal brand, or designate a spokesperson if the founder won’t do it. Discovery content matters because old-fashioned Google search is dying; business owners often blame “the algorithm” when really they don’t understand how social distribution works.

She distinguished top-of-funnel discovery content — the AI viral series she focuses on — from middle-of-funnel content like origin-story filming, which people generally won’t watch until they’re already invested in a company. Being memorable is key: she described her own “Standup Marketer” series, in which she wears a distinctive orange jacket, and how people recognized her from it at industry events.

Citing stats from Neil Patel, she noted the industry is in a “discovery revolution,” and 45% of people find new brands and products through social media feeds. She advised pushing content across all channels since it’s impossible to predict what will hit — citing her own experience where a video reviewing a Ritz-Carlton got 600–800 views on Instagram but 800,000 views on TikTok after she was later filmed shaking a bag of M&Ms on a plane. Viral moments like that drive people to look up who made the content and explore other channels, pulling them toward middle-of-funnel content.

She described the old marketing funnel as obsolete, replaced by “liquid intent” — audiences bounce between platforms and channels before buying, doom-scrolling, then searching further via ChatGPT or Google. The average number of touchpoints before a purchase decision is now about 11.1, per Neil Patel’s figures. To get noticed at all, brands need to spark curiosity that makes people want to engage, save, and share.

On building AI viral series, Tracey referenced frameworks from Hormozi-adjacent creators like Brendan Kane (Hookpoint) and Adley (Viralish): hook attention immediately, then build a story connecting to the audience. She offered a custom GPT as a resource for identifying a brand’s viral character, built around the company’s identity and customer pain points.

She outlined how to build “pause-worthy” moments using humor, relatability, and curiosity gaps. Ideally the business owner or founder is the on-camera spokesperson, though tools like Veo3 and Sora make it easier for people who are camera-shy. She distinguished HeyGen-style content as more middle-of-funnel rather than top-of-funnel discovery content. For structuring a series: roughly half should address customer pain points, 30% should be aspirational (especially common with luxury brands), and the remainder should deliver a mind-blowing perspective shift.

As a case study, she described “Debbie Does Eye Bags,” a recurring comedic character she created for a client — an ophthalmologist specializing in eye bag and eyelid surgery. While the client’s standard content (staff skits, etc.) earned 300–3,000 views, the Debbie series generated 1,000–6,000 views per episode and grew a following. She emphasized that Instagram and YouTube are must-haves: as of July, Instagram opened up to Google’s algorithm as part of SEO, and YouTube — owned by Google — rewards well-written descriptions and captions that speak to the end consumer. On YouTube, series episodes can be organized into a playlist; on Instagram, a newer feature lets creators link a series of videos together, which she reinforces by posting each new episode to Stories and pinning it to a highlights bubble linked to the previous episode.

She played several clips from her AI-generated series, including “Debbie” (a frazzled character with a Starbucks cup who lives in Bakersfield, California) and her “Standup Marketer” alter ego, which channels a George Carlin-style delivery about social media algorithms. She noted that for the Debbie series she often generates multiple Sora clips and stitches them together into a longer storyboard rather than relying on a single 8-second generation, since the first output usually isn’t exactly right — she reruns and refines prompts multiple times before editing the results together.

On cost, she contrasted the pre-AI era, where a viral series would require a creative agency, multiple film crews, and $100,000 or more, with the current landscape, where an agency like hers can produce a series for $3,000–$6,000, and individual business owners can create similar content themselves cheaply using tools like Sora.

She recommended that before using her custom GPT, brands should have their brand documents ready; if not, the GPT will ask a series of questions, and the more detailed the answers, the better the output. The GPT can also pull from a company’s website when available. She asked that access to the GPT not be shared outside the program, calling it her intellectual property.

On testing, she noted that marketers should always A/B test: Instagram’s trial feature lets creators test content with non-followers only, since existing followers won’t see trial posts. Her GPT produces two different character concepts, and she recommends testing both in trials rather than picking based on personal bias, then doubling down on whichever resonates more — treating the whole process as build, measure, learn.

Her closing takeaways: discovery is dominating, and social channels are the primary place people find new brands. Content needs “stickiness” — a useful gut check is whether you’d genuinely spend your own time watching it. AI tools, especially newer versions of Sora, make this more accessible than ever for business owners to do themselves. This type of content isn’t the only content a brand needs — it should sit alongside more middle-of-funnel content and a much smaller share of direct sales asks.

In the Q&A, a viewer asked about creating a web page specific to LLMs. Tracey advised working with a developer to ensure robots.txt files and site settings allow indexing by Bing, OpenAI, and other systems, along with making sure YouTube channels and Instagram content are set to be searchable by LLMs — settings many businesses haven’t updated. She also stressed the importance of personal brand content, separate from company branding, pointing to her own Instagram as an example of where she posts more personal content.

Closing the session, participants added their own takeaways: the value of thinking through an entire storyboard rather than defaulting to a single 8-second clip, the importance of the CEO or a designated spokesperson being the face of the brand, and the idea that audiences relate more to imperfection than to polish. Tracey closed by encouraging attendees to lean into what makes them distinct, noting that being authentically yourself attracts the right audience rather than trying to appeal to everyone.