Generative AI has taken the brand world by storm. But how is the planet’s best-known AI company building its own brand? Like everything to do with AI, the brand aspect of this category is evolving and changing seemingly week to week. There’s newer brands like Anthropic, Perplexity, and DeepSeek, alongside established giants’ own sub-brands like Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant, and on and on.With about 400 million users, and almost constant news coverage, OpenAI may be the best known purely AI company.In episode seven of Fast Company’s Brand New World podcast, host Jeff Beer talks to OpenAI’s chief marketing officer Kate Rouch about the strategy behind their Super Bowl ad, how the company defines its brand values, and why, despite helpful lessons from the last 30 years of tech, new precedents will still be set for the AI brand category.
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37:17
Don't be evil
In episode six, host Jeff Beer is at Google’s world headquarters in Mountain View, CA to talk to chief marketing officer Lorraine Twohill. We dig into the brand’s overall GenAI strategy, not only for how they’re working as a marketing organization, but also how they’re marketing Google's own AI tools like Gemini.We also chat about how Lorraine and her team are balancing between third-party tools like Brandtech Group’s Pencil Pro, and WPP’s One, and the company’s own proprietary tools.Of course, we get into the lessons learned over the reaction to Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympic ad for Gemini last summer, but also how the ultimate goal for AI’s impact on the brand’s marketing is to come up with an idea in the morning, and see it out in the world that afternoon.
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41:34
Finding the right foundation for AI in beauty
Sephora is compelling for any number of reasons, and one is it’s been a leader in the beauty industry working with GenAI and broader AI technology.A McKinsey piece reported earlier this year that Gen AI could add up $9 billion to $10 billion to the global economy based on its impact on the beauty industry alone.As consumer brands go, the beauty industry has been ahead of the curve on AI, with companies like Sephora, L’Oreal, Dior, Estee Lauder, P&G, all creating AI-powered tools for customers to use as early as 2017.In this episode, host Jeff Beer talks to Sephora’s US CMO Zena Arnold, and Vlad Kuznetsov, the company’s Chief Information Officer, to get a peek under the hood for a glimpse at how one of the most powerful brands in an incredibly influential consumer industry is thinking about Gen AI right now.
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49:53
I'd like to AI the world a Coke
This past December, Coca-Cola released a set of holiday ads made entirely from generative AI. They asked three different studios to create their own interpretations of the 1995 Coke holiday spot called “Holidays Are Coming” using AI video-generation models, including Leonardo, Luma, and Runway. The brand got three unique adaptations from studios Silverside AI, the Wild Card, and Jason Zada’s Secret Level.
Even though the AI ads were supposed to be a reimagining of Coke’s holiday ads from the '90s, which is a pretty innocuous concept, the backlash was intense. The reactions were passionate and numerous enough to get coverage from The New York Times, USA Today, NBS News, and more. Despite the backlash, the ads were effective and these new AI ads also got the job done. Coke is confident that its early experimentation is not only fun, but a meaningful investment that—despite the negative reviews in the short term—is setting the company up for long-term marketing success.
In this episode, host Jeff Beer talks to Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola's global vice president for generative AI, about the companies' approach to using AI, creative risk-taking, and those holiday ads.
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42:25
The Next Creative Revolution
If GenAI is the biggest technological advancement since the internet itself, then the creative possibilities are or will be pretty much endless. From a brand marketing and advertising perspective, we are still very early days, but there needs to be those willing and able to push the envelope, test boundaries, make mistakes, learn lessons, and evolve from there. Yet how far should the boundaries of brand content be pushed?
In this episode, I look for some answers by talking to two founders of boutique creative shop Food Arts & Technology, industry legends creative technologist Iain Tait and designer Richard Turley. I also sat down with Jason Zada, founder of AI-focused production studio Secret Level, who has worked with major brands like Coke on utilizing these new tools.
There are so many different perspectives on how this tech will and should be used creatively. Here you’ll get a glimpse into the perspective of people trying their best to push the tech and their own creativity for brands.
Artificial Intelligence will be the single most disruptive force the world has ever seen. It will change the way we work, the way we communicate, even the very nature of our existence. The world as we know it will be torn down and AI will build a new utopia from the ashes. Or . . . maybe it will do none of that! In reality, it’s way too early to predict the scope of AI’s impact on the world. But, one area we are starting to see AI have some mastery over is the world of advertising.
Welcome to ‘Brand New World,’ a podcast about this nascent moment in marketing and advertising as it all begins to take shape. Join ‘Fast Company’ senior staff editor Jeff Beer who takes a look at how creatives see their work evolving, how ad agencies are embracing this technology, and how big companies such as Google and Coca-Cola are leading the way in deploying AI to grow their brands. Jeff has been covering marketing and brands for the past two decades—during which he’s seen Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, Mac versus PC, Red Bull jump into the stratosphere, and a ‘Barbie’ movie—but never anything quite like this.
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