Branding in the Age of AI with Teemu Suviala

This episode of a change of brand is brought to you by standards. The no-code platform for building web-based brand guidelines with total design control. Keep listening to learn more. Hey, also, this podcast is produced by Matchstick. The brand identity house for leaders taking bold steps towards a radically relevant brand. AI can orchestrate the hyper-personalized moments that include, again, visual and verbal can motion and send and all that. But all this beautiful craft, like how it's being created and the vision for that craft and the soul of that craft, that will remain in our hands. Hey everyone, welcome to a change of brand, a show featuring behind-the-scenes stories of re-brand, flurry, drama or disaster. I'm your host, Tracy Clark. And I'm your host, Blake Howard. Hey, Blake, how's it going? TC, what's up? Not much, I'm good, I'm good. So this episode is a little different. Well, a lot different. Because instead of talking about one brand in particular, I've got a hot take on AI across branding, like all brands. How it affects us throughout the brand world? That's pretty big. That's big. And I got to admit, I'm super torn with this whole topic, because on one hand, I really am excited for what the future holds with this. In terms of doing new things, you know, discovering new front tears of branding, I know that it is a tool in our arsenal. But Blake, this tool is wily. It's hard to harness. It's pulling me in all directions. It's kind of creating chaos sometimes. So it kind of feels like, I don't know, how have you been feeling about it? Yes, I agree. And you're not alone. I think a lot of people are saying, what is this going to mean for the branding industry? And it feels a little bit like a runaway train, you know, like it is just headed down the tracks. You know it's here to stay, but you don't really know where it's going to end. And currently, for me, I feel confident that AI is a great tool to help with research and many, many things. However, the originality of a human idea applied to a certain client in a certain context with a certain problem in a certain audience is still ours. We as practitioners will still provide value in that. However, as soon as AI can start creating original ideas, I think we're in. We're in trouble. We're cooked. Yep. But at least it's not doing the, you know, the melty images and, you know, it can't create, it can't like draw fingers and stuff like that. At least it's moved on from that, right? Well, yeah, not that long ago we were messaging on Slack, making fun of how terrible generative AI was. It creating images of people with their weird finger claws and how bad it was at typography. We could never like put, you know, fake type on a sign or anything and in general things just sort of looked melted in the background, but here we are, it's advanced, it's advanced quite a bit. Yeah, we've passed that pretty quickly. I mean, if we look at it now, it's way, it's come such a long way and it's shepherding in an exponentially better level of finish. Like I totally see that. On the other hand, it's also bad at a lot of things that I, as a strategist and researcher need, like, like math, but I know it's a language model, not a calculator. So I shouldn't be using that for it anyway, but, but it also hallucinates with, with this unearned confidence, that kind of makes me mad. And as a researcher, it just doesn't seem to match my pragmatism. What about you, like as someone with a design and creative background? Well, first, are you, are you kind of like an onery person about AI, like when I first started graphic design? It was, you know, into the era of Photoshop. And I was overlapping with former people that were working on presses all day or they were creating layouts with cut paper and film and layers and working with their hands. Into them, the computer represented, like, an insult to the industry and the practice of graphic design was, was no more. It was going away. But, you know, as time evolved, we just learned that the computer is another tool. But, are you, you sound a little onery? I'm a little pumped up, I guess, yeah, I'm not, I'm not angry on, onery. But I am, here's the thing, I'm usually an optimist. But I needed, but I really need some convincing in this particular topic because it often, again, it often disappoints me. I needed some inspiration, you know, someone outside of my close-knit sphere, an actual human person who could tell me why I should use AI beyond, you know, everyone else is doing it. But before we get that take, I would, I want to give us some AI backstory, are you up for that? You got it. You need a brief end. Should I read the one that Chad GPT wrote for me or should I put my brain to use and read that one? Yeah. I mean, all of the above, right? All right, here we go. Okay, where to start with a brief end on AI? It's a big topic, for sure, and difficult to cover at length. However, it still feels pretty new to many of us and its roots run deep way back in time even. The term machine learning, for example, a specific subset of AI, focused on enabling machines to essentially teach themselves, was first coined in the 1950s. But the framework that would serve as a leading approach to machine learning was developed way back in 1763. For those of you not attuned to world history, that's before the United States ever existed. The term artificial intelligence was originally coined in 1959 to describe a summer research proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, all leading thinkers at the time from Dartmouth, Harvard, IBM, and Bell telephone labs. The workshop, which took place the following year, is generally considered as the official birthday of the Newfield. The earliest applications of AI used in visual design occurred in the 1960s and 70s, through experiments and simple algorithms to produce geometric shapes and patterns. This is also when computer aided design tools came onto the scene allowing artists to create more intricate designs. Fast forward to the 80s and 90s, when we witnessed the development of programs like Aaron, the earliest artificial intelligence program for art making. Visual artist and inventor of Aaron Harold Cohen said, "I wrote it to discover what independent machine intelligence might do, given some knowledge of the world and some rudimentary physical capabilities. And in the process to have it teach me about possibilities I hadn't yet imagined." Of course there are many other milestones to highlight here in developments through the years, too many to cover, really, that have shaped how AI has transitioned from an expert's only subject to mainstream tool in our arsenal. Throw in some engineering, neuropsychology art, and science fiction perspectives along the way, and you get where we are today. Management, confusion, misuse, intrigue, questions, and advancements, it's a lot to take in. And it's evolving at a pace that leaves a little room for the average person to digest it all and find ways to incorporate it into the rest of their lives. For practitioners and branding, there have been a few flagship or lightning rod scenarios that have caught the industry's attention. The first is Pintagram, and design legend Paula Shares work on the performance.gov website. They created an illustration style using mid-journey. With handmade and cut paper inputs, they experimented with prompts to get the right set of icons and illustrations, which were needed for an endless library on the website. When the project was launched and promoted on December 4th, 2024, the Internet exploded in design professionals in particular were outraged. Pintagram, this self-taulded, largest, independently-owned design firm, had sold its soul to the AI Devil. At least that's how some people felt. Literally that same day, December 4th, 2024, Smith Indiction, a smaller design studio and current personal favorite of mine, published a case study on their own work for a brand called Alma, the world's first nutrition companion. This app brand needed to visualize thousands of food items, and with a limited staff and budget, Smith Indiction turned to AI program visual electric to solve the problem. The result was AI-generated imagery for the brand, a similar solution used by Pintagram for performance.gov. Interestingly though, this work was mostly praised, and at the very least received little criticism as compared to Pintagram's case study. I point out these two examples to highlight the polarizing nature of generative AI in the field of branding. Agencies and organizations alike are navigating ambiguous territory when it comes to AI and brand identity. So here we are, at an impasse. Not too dissimilar to when the personal computer disrupted cut paper, film layers, and the physical nature of graphic design. Should designers hold firm to their craft and draw an ethical line in the sand? Or will AI just be another tool we must learn to use in harness? Well today we dig a little bit deeper, so stay tuned to get one take on what the future might hold. My name is Deimos Vélas, I'm the Global Chief Creative Officer at Landor, and I started as a cartoonist, then went into graphic design, and then I did record covers, I did music videos, and typefaces, and I was in clothing, and then went into branding and started a couple of design companies and joined a shoewear company, and then went to all fall-ins, then to call in spence six years at MEDA, leading in brand design across AR and VR and retail and events and spatial and digitally name it. But here we are today at Landor. So I'm going to do a little bit of an icebreaker. Would you rather have an AI partner, whatever that is always right, and super rude, or one that's wrong half the time, but pretty charming? I think that's an easy one. No one can't be right all the time, even that is just super rude and annoying. I'd rather have the wrong half the time, or even most of the time, but charming. And I think in general being wrong is, and it can be very stimulating, and you can find real truths in that, like opportunities to look at things from a very tilted perspective. So I think acknowledging the fact that there's weirdness to be tapped into, and take it for what it is. Yeah, the world is like absurd, and to me it's a similar place as where we were like 100 years ago, and you know what we came from World War I, and there was crazy new technologies. People were flying in the air and moving to photography from painting, and there was pandemic, those panes flew like all these things. So the creative became weird as well, because the world was kind of like in a weird place. And I'm hopeful that in this kind of multi crisis that we've been for many years, we actually get something out of that. There's a silver lining. There's lots of discussions around AI, but it's confusing as hell, honestly. And navigating that complexity, the capabilities from a strategist perspective, like we think very pragmatically, like the legal aspects, the privacy aspects. To me, when I first started engaging with it, very much excited, and maybe overreaching on like, hey, I don't know if I'm supposed to be doing this, right? So it kind of felt like a magic bullet at first to your point, it's a tool, right? So I can use it for a starting point of a plan, or some research thinking, or getting a gut check on something, right? But then the cracks for me started to show, because I don't know if I can be uploading this data, you know? And here's where we're delving into that fear and the promise. So how do you and your team balance that fear and promise that it offers? Yeah, I'm actually seeing a bit of pendulum shift from fear to something that's quite practical and utilitarian, where people start to maybe even question the superpowers of AI and seeing the flaws that are in there, maybe it's not as intelligent as we think, it's just like great in recognizing patterns, which is also what we human beings do, like that's what our brains do all the time, it's like trying to connect the dots to find a pattern. Yeah, you've seen the recent MIT Media Lab study about how CHEDG-BT maybe eroding critical thinking skills. How do we as creatives and strategists and in the agency world come back that? To me, AI really handles the how, and we should be defining the why, and that's how we should be looking at it, we shouldn't be trying to become the AI, like with two different beings. You know, we have the understanding of core insights of what's humanity. We understand emotions, and brands need to be more emotive than ever. They need to feel more, they need to be feeling like something, and more variety, the better, like a study show, the more differentiation in emotions in your interaction with the brand, you get more deeper connection. And there seems to be a consensus on a critical truth, which is that authenticity and humanity remain key. So yeah, it was more about like the powerful augmentative tool that AI is and can be. And there were some conversations. There was the director, Brady Corbett, who did the brutalist, and he put it in a way saying, when production costs go down, the creative risk goes up, which suggests to me that AI should empower us to go even more unattainable previous creative visions, now that we can do it, rather than how we can speed up on how we can be more effective or save resources. I think that's the race to the bottom, and frankly, a rather dull one. But I felt that AI and data, they take us to a place that's reasonable, and we creatives need to be gloriously unreasonable. This brings up another challenge, AI is being used in ways that are not optimizing its strengths, like efficiency, like scale and mirroring, which we'll get into later. Many non-AI experts like myself are using it to cite factual sources, to solve math problems and to conduct specific scientific research. And I wonder if the population can be vigilant enough to handle this level of critical thinking and train our brains to nurture those neural connections. This is where we can really run into trouble. But I have to tell you, I feel like sometimes because of the hallucinations of AI, sometimes that's not gloriously unreasonable, but frustratingly unreasonable, right? So when it's doing things like hallucinating, how do we know when to stop believing, or do we just take it as a weird tool, can we rely on it? Yeah, I think I had a great conversation last night with an old schoolmate of mine, and he runs a biotechnology company, and we're talking about AI and how they're using it. And they can't really use AI, because when AI starts to hallucinate in that environment, it comes up with proteins that never existed. It's like number, sound like a real protein, but then that's not real. But then for me, as a creative who has a little bit more freedom, and the data doesn't have to be perfect, give me something to work with, rather than be specifically right. And that's how I think we should be using AI and be careful where we're using it. We need to be looking at scientific methods that have proven to give us the real deal. But then when we're in kind of a more fluffy, creative space, I think we have a bit of a more room to play. And I think that it's such an interesting challenge, because AI output feels like fact, right? And it's sometimes not. Often it's not, because like you said, it's learning patterns just as we humans do, so it's probably in some ways more human than we think I'm realizing. But when it feels like fact, I think people use it for factual work, you know, and that is maybe the mistake. That is the most mistaken. What is needed from us, humans, whether we're creative or not, like we need to be better in critical thinking, our general understanding of the world, education is going to be so important that we know and can read what's right and what's not, because that's going to be more complex in the future to say, like what is real and what is hallucinated, with lived experiences and knowledge and the taste that we process, we can work with the AI and go into places where we are finding beauty in the imperfection and not trying to push for perfection. Yeah, and there's a case for not trying to get to perfection anyway in the creative world, right? Creativity fives in the messian unexpected. Perfection comes at some point, but the creative process should be very messy, but then AI can be the tool to even amplify the messiness. That's kind of what I'm trying to push here, like the creative process is messy and crazy and wild and weird, AI can help to even amplify that rather than try to pinpoint us into the right answer from the get go. When you mentioned it's our responsibility to double down on education and critical thinking skills, which I completely agree we have to do that as a society. Do you think that in this current landscape and where we are today with technology, do you think that we can step that up? I definitely believe in that and there's always pendulum shifts in the world and things are going to go back and forth between many different things. I believe that we kind of have to gain more information. If we want to survive on this planet, if we want to create amazing, creative work and all of that, it's just requires us to gain more knowledge and everything so like we have all these channels and we have all these opportunities to educate ourselves. I want to make sure like in our education we're also taught to lean into our intuition and empathy and wonder. In an ideal world are we finding production houses to be of that same mindset or are they saying oh we can just do it better and cheaper and faster. In the production space we can do more complicated things. Movies can look way more expensive than they actually were going back to the Brutalists with I think a budget of 8 million and it's looked very epic when you saw it and it's like the little enhancements in production as well. How can make things feel more real and authentic and if I'm looking at them one more thing at the Brutalists like they enhanced Adrian Broder's dialect when he was speaking Hungarian touch to make it perfect it's like those little tweaks can make things more authentic. So we're not talking about handing over the creative keys it's about getting ourselves beyond prior limitation of time and experience outside of our own expertise like perfecting a Hungarian dialect rapidly to I don't know make a movie. This is a fuzzy line in terms of creative ethics though so how can we hone this tool responsibly and it all feels like we've never experienced anything quite like it in terms of technological advancement. I've been hearing a lot of we've been here before. Right along with this is unprecedented what are we going to do this is crazy. Now I think the thing that's different is unlike other things that transform society like the internet right I don't remember as much fear yeah I think you're right I think there's something because it's it's moving in such a speed but also at scale it's available to everyone and it's going to impact every industry so just the scale and speed are quite different from the past. How was Landore first responding to generative AI what were sort of the first steps involved in first conversations. Yeah one of the reasons why I was excited to join Landore and WPP is part of WPP group was their advancements in AI in general and I was coming from a very AI and data driven place meta but when I was looking at what Landore was doing that vision and investments in tools and their kind of proprietary WPP open platform for all work was very intriguing and looking at WPP in general we have our chief AI officer David Holm who's been involved in AI around 25 years and 20 years ago like he did his PhD on modeling brains of bumblebees so we have these great minds in the company who've been in this space for a long time I think it's now just being more evenly and democratically spread but yeah I think Landore has been working quite a bit and we've been fairly fast in moving into places like training our own models and embedding AI to all parts of their creative process. What is AI doing well for you all at Landore? I think of the multiple different things. If I'm looking at this brand systems and governance there's like a lot of supercharging that AI is doing and you know as we're moving beyond printed guidelines and PDFs to create kind of more dynamic brand brains for our clients. This is kind of work that I'm excited to build kind of AI powered platforms that aren't just digital repositories for stuff but they can actively understand and interpret and help apply brand rules and generate new content. Now we're all just creating awesome work where the AI is helping us augment but then I think the governance space is interesting like if we can create these so-called brand brains for clients and companies that's what keeps me excited because then you can enter consistency at scale and automate compliance and you know have more of a collaboration between different entities and have a real time inside improvements. Now does AI touch every role at Landore? Yeah, we've been doing AI training for everyone across the roles. It is really exciting. I think it really needs a village and everyone needs to be on board. It can be just with creative or strategy. Let's talk about the challenges. So I have a real life example. Mine is you know again as a strategist I'm kind of mining to get a little bit ahead on background work, on competitive landscape because I'm maybe some customer information that sort of thing. When I was putting in some research opportunities you know say hey if I were looking for this and I'm this kind of person or this kind of client and I'm seeking this type of audience how much would I need to be statistically relevant knowing that it's global and I put all these inputs in very specific and it gave me a really good answer. It gave me an answer that it seemed like it passed the sniff test, right? I did that similar exercise for maybe two more clients and it started doing the same thing and I was like these are vastly different clients and it's giving me the same statistically relevant set. We've seen that you get the similar type of answers or patterns. The more you use it, the more you kind of recognize this kind of the same thing again and again just like with couple of tweaks just general concern that I have is people start using the way that AI thinks and recognizes patterns and even speeds out content that we can we've human beings we kind of adapt or adopt a lot of that and start using that in our own output so we have to be careful with that in general but I'd say from a brand perspective and design perspective the lack of humanity and human touch and thinking can lead to very dull and boring generic outputs and it becomes even more boring because it's a sea of sameness like everyone's doing its things they all are pulling from the same pool of everything and depends how the algorithms are built they're going to speed similar type of answers and then the works are going to be the same everywhere which in some cases can be good but if in our business worries about partly relevance and partly differentiation the differentiation part is what can be missing so that's something that I see as a challenge and early on I saw like people getting so excited we talked about this earlier the tools were so exciting so we let the tools do too much of the work. We were asking also like cases where we've maybe seen the challenges or maybe the opportunities I think the opportunities are I mentioned like creating differentiated work and good example of that is the work that we won at Cannes Lions this year we got bronze for this brand Imperia in Italy and they do you know pasta machines and I think only with the lived experiences of our team in Milan we were able to go to the right places for inspiration which was the product itself the history and then art movements local art movements and artists like Bruno Munari and his idea around useless machines and that was this then spun into this concept where we went wild with you know making pasta the answers to everything the whole brand was built from pasta including the best bespoke typeface but that's an example of project where we went really heavily on like we need to rely on our human experience rather than AI and seeing a bit more of that where we're stepping away from AI and I think we're going to be seeing more of that where we have projects where we're really relying on on AI and then where we are kind of celebrating the craft and the Wabi Sabi so we have this type foundry within the company with great custom typefaces for all the big brands and small brands as well and the the technology status enhanced our process by generating like using AI to generate the process and the tool were kerning off the funds where you have like thousands of characters and multiple weights to work with we reduced the time to do that from multiple weeks to two three days and that's like it's a very practical example where use of technology and some AI magic can help us to be more productive and let the team focus on more interesting creative tasks now could it make a mistake could it just randomly like get one wrong like a kerning it's just like went wonky it's good but this is why we all need to become sophisticated curators and kind of creative directors we all will be doing crates with the machine looking at okay where things went well and when to improve so that's another kind of a way of working when you learn now as nice as chat gpds to me because it's awfully friendly to me it's kind of solus at the same time like it's patronizing and solus right to me now i'm a strategist so i don't need it to have a soul honestly and creative doesn't need it to have a soul either really i mean so we need it to do what you were talking about to do our best work what do we need it to be it has to be a springboard to generate ideas and variations and freeing us from a blank page but then also it's important it's mirroring where AI can be used as a partner to bounce these ideas or maybe the outputs as well i mean we even tested and things you can generate kind of synthetic audiences in AI tools that we use like this is you know we can generate all kinds of audiences and big things in the testing like how would people react if we did this if we did that so like mirroring is another use of AI AI is leaning into perfection and we need to human beings we need to embrace imperfection and unpredictability AI is going after logic and often great branding and creative thrives on the illogical and the surprising and really wants to you know gain your attention with something that haven't been seen before and it's it's about balancing the familiar and the novelty this is like the the rayman loyalty approach where he talked about like with everything you have to find the right balance like what's new and then how much of it has to be familiar and comforting and we human beings so we can kind of try to find this right balance that's not for AI I can give us different options as creatives and creative adjacent like myself we can get jaded sometimes let's be real and we can feel as though every brand problem and solution is predictable I was intrigued by what that balance of familiar and novel could look like to sparks of new thinking when we come back from the break we'll hear more about that real life execution what if your brand guidelines were as easy to edit as a doc or as precise as your design files and you didn't need a single line of code that can't be true you're saying it's not possible well guess what it is and that's where standards comes in the no code platform made just for brand guidelines from pre-built outlines and asset hosting to advance permissions and automation it gives you total control in zero development headaches whether you're a nimble studio or a massive in-house team standards scales with you check it out at www.standards.site that's S-I-T-E and finally bring some order to the brand chaos again that's standards dot site hey everyone I want to take a quick minute and give a hat tip to match stick it's where I work and our producing partner for the show we specialize in helping growing brands take their identity to the next level if you need help clarifying your message or standing out in the market be sure to visit us at matchstick.com that's m-a-t-c-h-s-t-i-c dot com and if you're enjoying this in other episodes be sure to tell a friend or leave us a review okay back to the show when we left off I wondered how AI could empower that much needed balance of the familiar and the new when it comes to brand execution temu had some examples to help me visualize just that the beauty of of AI the unpredictability that we should be embracing as I said earlier I'll give you like very recent examples so we created this experience for Pinterest with our kind of creative technology arm called deep local and the experience was built together with Adobe Firefly and it was a an interactive tool in the physical environment that kind of like reads your creative aura by like big databases you answer certain questions and then you kind of find what's within our creative aura and that's where like the AI modeling tools they were really important it's just like work with that data in the background but all the creative and the ideation that's like pure human that's one one example how AI was being is a very very recent example and let's say with google one example is in new york we created this electro magnetic flowers as an installation that reacts to both the times of the day or people interacting with these flowers which certain gestures so we kind of taught the model to interact with people who are inside the space but also outside the windows so AI was there to kind of build this system that runs this experience and somewhat similar thing what did for google was a and this was connected more with the kind of google cloud space where our team with deep local work with google in the cafes where they created these robots that filled the cafe chalkboards with real-time content both from google cloud showing the weather and traffic patterns and just like made something that's both very familiar and human a chalkboard applied with you know real-time data help with the algorithms within google cloud so I think the trick is when we work with technology you have to have the kind of a very human aspect in the mix as well yeah I mean the human side is is paramount right and I do think that there is still a struggle in my mind around things like you know I will use AI to tell me a positioning statement that I will not use as a skeptic what good is it for me right it's going to eat it own shit it's going to hallucinate and it's going to spit out the ubiquitous things that everyone says those platitudes that just give me the egg yeah I like the approach of using AI to find in the wrong answers like okay getting all that stuff out that you know someone might go through anyways so that's one interesting way to look at when working on a positioning or early you know brand identity concepts or activation concepts just like get that stuff out yeah I really believe in in numbers like having lots of ideas going through a lot of things and then kind of curation of everything so our work really is great we're curating words we're curating meanings if I'm looking at design we are curating different elements whether it's like a little bit typography here there's color there's you know movement there's patterns there's you know our direction and you know putting all that together so if you have quantity that AI can help with and then we can push out the things that we know that are not going to work but then we end up let's say you know five great things but then as humans we can start to kind of build unseen connections between what came out and that starts to be interesting you mentioned a little bit about how AI can be used to enhance multi-sensory brand expression let's talk a little bit more about that how else can we create that multi-sensory brand expression I think what AI can do with that is start to connect the different sensorial elements together I'm thinking about algorithmic scent and sound design happening simultaneously where AI could analyze our emotional responses to different senses and then create kind of this sensory profiles that can be both scientifically informed but also very personalized so I think there's an interesting place where you know abstract brand attributes can be turned into very tangible experience is a very personalized experiences with the help of technology and I could see you know luxury brands being in this space and doing many different things I think I mentioned like personalization I often ask for customer journeys like do we know how these people will behave with this brand but I was like what are the sensory journeys that someone might have with a brand so AI could help to map that AI could create the dynamically these retail experiences where you know lighting and sense and sound and spaces change based on customer data and creating this unique engaging environments for each and then lastly sensorial immersive storytelling this is where AI could help quite a bit AI can weave the sensory elements into cohesive brand narrative that is connected back to the roots and foundations of the brand so meaning that visuals and bespoke sounds and all kinds of tactile elements you things you touch they become dynamically optimized to to the brand. Typically what's there within sonic space like we've done so much with a where we created different models we can look at all the sounds that your competitors are doing what are the tracks like with the tools we have we can look at that and then we can create sonic DNAs that are combinations of orchestrations and harmonies instruments then that becomes like the core of your sonic brand sonic and music they generate the most memories all the brands will need more sound as we move forward because this is where the world of technologies also going there's going to be more products out there in the world that are non-screen based that you'll be wearing and your interaction with the product and different brands connected to the product will be either sonic or haptic so brands need to be thinking about like what is this sonic approach but also haptic approach like how does this brand feel when it's kind of tapping you on your wrist or by your ear so there's more work to be done and that's kind of exciting brands like visual brands will always be around but there will be moments when we're going to navigate through these brands just through these other senses how should companies think about integrating AI without losing their authenticity the human hand has to be shaping the brand all the way through and the embracing of what is I'll be that I mentioned earlier is going to be important in order to have that human side of the brand like what are their little mistakes that are in there and people are more allowing for brands to do mistakes and behave in non-consistent way like in the past we tried to create brands that are always the same in every channel and and look and feel the same but now consistency can be gone like brands can have more flex and that should be celebrated and I think you're right I think that consumers and organizations alike are leaning more into imperfection yeah and maybe we have two high standards for technology and you know it's built by humans it's built on human data or human input so we should be acknowledging that this was a bit of a breakthrough for me that our standards are too high for AI output if you seek aesthetic or creative judgment AI is the wrong place to find it but AI is really good at generating creative output you know producing visuals with precision and scale that sort of thing that's why font systems for example can be built up nearly perfectly so use it for those technical repetitive scalable elements even springboard idea exploration for volume but don't use it to curate editor create worthiness it can't decide what creatively is right only humans can stakeholders who want things fast cheap and good which we all know you can only have two of the three how can we empower those key stakeholders to make the right decision to me with all the stakeholders in any situation is to bring everyone to the journey and open up the process taking the mystery out of the process that will help people to be more engaged be more educated and understand where everything it goes to me like that's it's all around transparency that then generates trust generates relationships and and then hopefully with all the stakeholders you can kind of align on like this is the best way we should be using AI let's not get over excited find the right roles where to use it but yeah that's it I've really challenged and stretched my comfort zone with AI in this conversation and I'm grateful for that I'm not fully raw raw so I might need to let go of what my understanding and expectations are for AI because currently I and probably much of the world and still navigating this role right now it's as if we're handed a language translator at but we then ask it for directions or or if you give a violinist the sheet music for the bassoon part they're gonna try and play it but there will be some confident maybe wild improvisation happening so it's up to us to command the pragmatic parts of AI and sharpen our critical thinking and our discernment and we need to flex our analog brains if we're going to go to those weird and wild places that AI can take us if we do all that what does AI do for us branding folks in a few years time when AI can power brands to be more dynamic and help to create these brand brains that you know help govern a brand that is a little bit more complicated than the brand systems of today using brand as a platform for innovation and change much more than just fixing an identity challenge second is we'll appreciate more the humanity AI will enable kind of more deeper and more anthropological understanding of people at more empathy and allow brands to connect better with customers and then lastly going back to the ideas of wabisabi and craft I think craft will be a key differentiator AI can orchestrate the hyper-personalized moments that include again visual and verbal and can motion and and send and all that but all this beautiful craft like how it's being created and the vision for that craft and the soul of that craft that will remain in our hands the soul is up to us the soul is up to us Temu shared some valuable lessons that speak to a few key tenets of great brand building one is that AI can serve as a brand brain to help govern complex identity systems which means that things like control and consistency become much easier to achieve another point is that brand engagement can evolve exponentially with AI through things like hyper-personalized moments which brands need to create things like attraction distinction and devotion I mentioned earlier it's not about handing over the creative keys because that's just going to make it spit out flat mundane fake perfection maybe AI is more of a charging station you know giving us jolts when we need it when we plug in to spark our thinking and take us in weird wild directions to make our world more limitless and brands certainly need and deserve that expansive limitless thinking if we play our cards right and protect and expand our critical thinking skills brands can be supercharged in ways we hadn't imagined so let AI swim alongside us in terms of generation exploration and processing the highest value creative work will be ours that's a wrap for this episode be sure to tune in next time when we featured the rebranding of the beloved comfort food staple Managevets huge thanks to Temu Suviala at Landor for the great discussion and insight and to Alisa Katen and Sean Eaton also at Landor for helping to make this conversation happen I'd also like to give a big high five to our incredible team today's episode was edited and scored by Adam Audio and produced by Brianna Belcher Michael Martino designed this episode's artwork and big thanks to Blake Howard for the briefing I'd also like to thank chat GPT for the great icebreaker question and for reminding me that I can write the script better myself to see more on today's episode or to sign up for our email go to achangeabrand.com or follow us on Instagram I'm your host Tracy Clark signing off