“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.” So said Walter Landor, a pioneering marketer and one of America’s original ad men. Branding is all about perception – customers’ perceptions of a brand is at least as important as the brand guardians’ perceptions of it. Creating memorable and coherent brand experiences is therefore essential for effective branding.
Advertising has changed quite a lot since Walter and Josephine Landor launched their eponymous design agency in 1941. Today’s brands are thoroughly globalised, multinational entities; they operate in diverse geographies, each with unique requirements. A single brand might have thousands of ‘touchpoints’ in many different contexts, simultaneously. Each of these moments of customer interaction is an opportunity for marketers, influencers or content agencies to express the brand’s identity.
But ensuring consistency of style and messaging across touchpoints can be a challenge, especially for sprawling organisations with increasingly diverse customers. According to David Kaganovsky, global CTO at the Landor agency, AI may offer a solution to this problem.
Managing brand touchpoints with AI
Kaganovsky joined Landor about a year ago, at the back end of five-year rebranding effort, which saw the firm redouble its efforts to integrate digital technologies. An advocate for GenAI, Kaganovsky is on a mission to weave the technology into the agency’s fabric. One of the first steps is to ensure that Landor’s clients are “AI-ready” and that their brand principles are intelligible to AI.
The initiative was motivated in part by the proliferation of brand touchpoints and the outsourcing of content creation. Brands often employ external groups, such as influencers, to build content on their behalf. This means the brand has less control over its messaging than it would if it were to create all of its own content, Kaganovsky explains.
“The only way to manage a brand effectively is to use rules and brand guidelines,” he says. “But enforcing them requires a tremendous amount of human effort.”
Traditionally, that enforcement relied on brand books – weighty guides produced when a brand is born or at an inflection point, such as during a major transformation or reimagination. These documents cover everything from company purpose to how a brand’s image can be expressed visually, sonically or experientially.
Teams often struggle to understand these guidelines, let alone enforce them across different channels and jurisdictions, Kaganovsky says. This is where AI comes in: while we may question AI’s ability to create compelling content, one thing it is unquestionably good at is understanding and applying rules, such as those one would find in a reference book.
Automated brand guidelines
Landor and its parent company, WPP, have developed a taxonomic framework that will enable firms to convert their brand guidelines into a set of rules or instructions that can be understood by AI systems.
Presenting brand standards in ways that a machine can interpret and apply appropriately isn’t easy. The guidelines must be succinct but also “extraordinarily detailed” – describing everything the brand should do as well as what it shouldn’t do.
Once the guidelines have been transcribed by the framework, they can be used to train AI models. From there, Kaganovsky says, AI can do everything from analysing how the brand appears across touchpoints to generating content that adheres the brand’s guidelines.
Landor, in conjunction with other WPP entities, has already developed tools that use this framework. For one client, the team built a browser extension that scans content for breaches of brand guidelines and, like an officious Clippy, prompts the user to fix any offending sections. The tricky part will be turning these bespoke solutions into something scalable.
Might this automated brand policing stunt creativity? No, insists Kaganovsky. “AI is an exoskeleton for our own intellect,” he says. “It will speed things up but doesn’t eliminate the need for the human in the middle.”
AI sloppery slope
GenAI is under much more scrutiny today than it was when ChatGPT initially burst on to the scene in 2022. In some circles, the technology is facing a backlash. For instance, champions of the UK’s £124bn creative community, such as Elton John and Richard Osman, slammed a recent government proposal on AI and copyright, which would require creatives to opt out of allowing AI to use their work freely.
“The pushback on AI and copyright is an important issue,” Kaganovsky says. “But it doesn’t derail our approach. We’re aware of the legal and ethical concerns, especially when models are trained on third-party data without permission. Even when using models trained on copyrighted material, we advise our teams to engage in open discussions with clients, their legal teams and our legal team to assess the risks on a case-by-case basis.”
Meanwhile, some brands have provoked public ire with AI-powered disasters. In January, the Labour Party released a campaign video replete with glitching anthropomorphised animals, including an owl dangling a small waistcoat betwixt its flanks. A 2024 Toys ‘R’ Us advert made almost entirely with Sora from OpenAI was described by viewers as an “abysmal insult”; and even Coca-Cola, a brand that Landor helped rejuvenate in the 1980s, released an AI-generated Christmas advert that was labelled “soulless” by critics.
Kaganovsky acknowledges that consumers know intuitively when something feels artificial and wrong, but ‘AI slop’ isn’t in his vocabulary. He is hopeful that, even as the junk intensifies, GenAI will remain useful for creating content at scale.
The brands embracing AI now may even find themselves ahead in the long run, he says. After all, they’ve been bold enough to experiment with new approaches “even if the results are mediocre”.
Plus, he adds, Landor’s AI-ready framework could one day enable AI to police the very content it creates. With appropriately articulated brand guidelines, agencies could automate quality control to ensure AI-generated material adheres to strict criteria and prevent embarrassing slop from escaping the drafts folder.
Higher brand standards
For Kaganovsky, the framework is isn’t just about enabling technology; it’s a chance for brands to reconsider their standards. “You have to try new technologies, but it’s important to think about what your standards are,” he says. “How do you define those standards and how do you control for them?”
He adds: “Controls are needed now more than ever, especially as the volume of content being pumped out is going up because it’s so easy to generate content with AI.”
Walter Landor’s insight into branding is as true today as it was in 1941. Brands still blossom in the mind but, with computerisation and AI, the standards that make them stick may soon be supervised by machines.
“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.” So said Walter Landor, a pioneering marketer and one of America’s original ad men. Branding is all about perception – customers' perceptions of a brand is at least as important as the brand guardians' perceptions of it. Creating memorable and coherent brand experiences is therefore essential for effective branding.
Advertising has changed quite a lot since Walter and Josephine Landor launched their eponymous design agency in 1941. Today's brands are thoroughly globalised, multinational entities; they operate in diverse geographies, each with unique requirements. A single brand might have thousands of 'touchpoints' in many different contexts, simultaneously. Each of these moments of customer interaction is an opportunity for marketers, influencers or content agencies to express the brand's identity.
But ensuring consistency of style and messaging across touchpoints can be a challenge, especially for sprawling organisations with increasingly diverse customers. According to David Kaganovsky, global CTO at the Landor agency, AI may offer a solution to this problem.
