As AI Search Rewards Recognition, Distinctive Brand Assets Become A Discoverability Edge

Every marketing team wants the kind of conversation it doesn't have to pay for. The branded chatter that spreads on its own, gets people tagging their friends, and turns a menu item into a cultural event is the hardest visibility to manufacture and the most valuable to own. It also feeds the systems that now decide what gets surfaced, since AI answer engines and search alike reward brands with distinctive, frequently referenced identities. Red Lobster's Crab Fest offers a working example, and it starts with an object customers already associate with the brand: this year's Bestie Bib, a two-headed bib built for two best friends to wear at once.

Sam Bonds, SVP, Group Creative Director at BarkleyOKRP, leads creative on the Red Lobster account, where the annual Crab Fest promotion gives the brand a recurring moment to reconnect with its most engaged customers. An award-winning creative who pitched and won that business and also helms the agency's AMC Theatres work, he has spent his career building the kind of recognizable brand moments this campaign is after. For this year's Crab Fest, his team gave that familiar object the design weight a marquee product would normally get. The thinking opens a broader question about which brand elements deserve that kind of investment.

"We took a brand treasure, which is the bib that most people are really familiar with, and make it a catalyst for the social experience. We want to facilitate the idea of enjoying this meal with your friends," Bonds says. A brand treasure carries meaning the audience already holds. Turning the familiar bib into this year's Bestie Bib gave the campaign a story people were ready to share from the start, no explaining required. Those shared conversations are what decide whether a brand surfaces in an AI answer, and the whole approach runs on recognition and conversation feeding each other.

Building on a brand treasure

A brand treasure is an element a company already owns and can activate on demand, which pays off only when the brand treats it with real care. Because the audience already knows the cue, a considered execution sharpens the brand's identity for AI-mediated discovery, giving both algorithms and audiences a consistent thing to latch onto. Red Lobster invested in a designed object worth keeping. Bonds frames that investment as something the moment was owed. "We wanted to give it that thought and make it feel like it was a special thing to be coveted, to be desirable. It felt like we owed the experience that thought," he says.

Not every treasure earns that promotion, and the team is disciplined about when to reach for this one. The bib works only when the occasion makes the object feel inevitable, which is why it stays in reserve most of the year. Bonds points to a long habit of pitching bib concepts and waiting for the right campaign that would carry one. "With the bib, it's always something we've been championing," he notes. "They're not always opportunities to bring it forward and have it make sense, but for Crab Fest it just makes sense. You're likely going to be wearing it anyway."

Designed to be shared

The content worth designing for is the photo a customer takes and posts on their own. The bib hands customers a physical experience communal enough that documenting it becomes the obvious next move. Those posts and tags accumulate into the public record a brand is known by, the same material AI systems draw on when they summarize or recommend one. Bonds is precise about where the value lives, placing it squarely in the physical room. "It's not just social online, not us giving fodder for the social conversation, but us giving you tangible, literal, in-restaurant sociability that's inherently something you want to share online," he says. "We wanted to create a moment that felt like it was built to be socialized."

The design also assumed the friend on the other side of the table. Built for two, the Bestie Bib turned the meal into something relational and handed the resulting post a second person to tag. Two people sharing one bib also means two feeds carrying the moment outward. Bonds recalls prototyping that got physical, with the team lined up beside one another to see how the object would land on camera. "We're miming the eating experience, but at the same time miming the experience of the brand and how it might be portrayed in photos and selfies," he explains. "It was really trial and error, working out the right proximity for people eating together and trying to protect their clothes."

Owning the association

The real prize lies beyond any single Crab Fest. When one object shows up for a brand year after year, it moves from a promotion to part of how people identify the brand, the way Red Lobster's free biscuits register even with people nowhere near a table. A competitor can't copy a link like that, since it's earned through years of repetition and belongs to one name. It also shapes who gets found now, because AI assistants and search engines surface the brands that come up most often. A symbol brought back every year keeps a brand in that conversation.

Bonds treats the bib as a fixture in the making, and his team is already working up the next round of ideas for it. He sees a chance to make the bib theirs alone, an association rivals would struggle to answer. "There will be more bib ideas to come," he concludes. "We feel like we're in a unique position amongst our key competitors to really own that and have it have the stature of the Cheddar Bay Biscuits."