The facts sheet, or how AI-made marketing stays honest
Ask a language model to sell something and it will. “Set up in five minutes.” “Loved by thousands.” “Works with everything.” None of it checked, all of it plausible, and all of it your problem the moment it is on a public account with your name on it. The honest answer to “will the AI make things up?” is yes, unless something stops it. In Season Reels the thing that stops it is a file.
What is in it
Before any video is planned for a brand, a read-only agent reads the product’s code, docs and pricing and writes the facts sheet. It contains:
- A feature inventory from the code, not from the marketing copy. If a button does not exist, it is not a feature.
- Exact prices, limits and platforms. The free tier’s limits, the paid price, where the product runs, where it does not run yet.
- A must-not-claim list. Things the product does not do, numbers nobody has measured, comparisons that cannot be backed up.
- Forty to sixty real interface strings per language, so that any screen rebuilt for a video uses the words the product actually shows.
- Sample data and personas that are clearly scenarios, with names and shops that do not belong to real customers.
You approve this sheet. From then on it gates every slot: nothing is plannable for a brand until its facts sheet exists, and every plan, build and review reads it.
What it caught on the first run
Three examples from the first season, all of them changes a lane agent made on its own, citing the sheet.
A concept sketch called for a “duplicate order” button. The sheet’s inventory had no such button, because the app has no such button. The agent replaced the concept rather than inventing a screen.
A persona video wanted to show a worker’s phone with the whole shop’s board on it. The sheet said workers see only their own jobs and never the customer’s name, phone number or price. The video showed what the worker’s phone really shows, which turned out to be the better story.
A hook read “set up in five minutes”. There is no documented setup time. The video says “five steps”, which the sheet could support.
None of these were caught by review. They were caught before the video existed, by an agent that had the sheet in front of it. That is the difference between honesty as a convention and honesty as a structure.
The rules that follow from it
Once claims have to trace to a file, a few more rules fall out naturally, and they are built into the lanes.
Estimates show their assumption on screen. The numbers lane does money and time maths the viewer can check in their head. “If you take sixty orders a month” sits on screen next to the result. Nothing in a numbers video is a claim about users; it is arithmetic the viewer can redo.
Speed changes are labelled. When a screen recording or gameplay clip is sped up or slowed down, the label is on the video, not in the caption.
Counters come from what was recorded. A stopwatch over a demo shows the time the demo took.
Personas are scenarios, not testimonials. No star ratings, no review quotes, no “real customer” framing, because none of it would trace to the sheet.
No named competitors. The versus lane shows the old way against the product, and the old way stays likeable. A comparison with a named product is a claim about someone else’s product, which the sheet cannot support.
Where it pushes back on you
The sheet will frustrate you about once a season. You will want to say the bigger thing: the number that is nearly true, the feature that ships next month. The sheet says what you can prove today. Our view is that this is the product working. A season of videos that is slightly less exciting and entirely defensible is worth more than one you have to take down.
When the product changes, change the sheet. The next plan reads the new one, and the brand’s log keeps the record of what was claimed when.
Where the line is today
The sheet is enforced by the agents that plan and build, and by the review that checks stills against it. It is a document agents read, and the review is where a claim gets checked. We would rather describe that plainly than let “every claim is checked” sound like a filter that nothing can get past. Over a season of 55 videos it held, and the way it held was agents reading the file and changing their own work.