AI and Its Impact on Branding: Current and Future Trends

Martin Sully, a brand strategist and founder of Snapper Studio, discusses the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning on branding. 

He explores the tools currently available that incorporate AI, including Chat GPT, photo editors, AI-generated logos and even the emergence of AI-assisted brand development tools. 

However, he also emphasises that while AI can help streamline certain design processes and content generation, it can never replace the emotional and human touch in branding. 

Martin believes AI will change the graphic design landscape over the next two years, including Adobe's potential move into providing AI-assisted brand development tools.

00:53 Introduction to the Podcast

01:17 Impact of AI on Branding

03:01 Exploring AI and its Limitations

04:02 First Experience with Generative AI

05:33 Understanding Emotional Branding

08:42 Current AI Tools in Branding

12:01 Real World Uses of Generative AI

12:13 The Role of AI in Podcasting

17:48 Adobe's AI Innovations

23:16 The Future of Branding with AI

28:48 Conclusion: AI's Role in Design and Branding

Transcript

[00:00:00] Why Consistency Matters

I want people to serve, you know, to, to grow. I want to see that happen. Um, and if, and I can be at the forefront of, uh, helping people, you know, be positioned, being, giving people that sort of transparency where they feel like, oh, um, Martin has generated some of this with AI and it's been, it's been incredible.

His openness to, to sort of, you know, thinking about the possibilities and how that can speed up things. And literally the one thing that I will say come from that will be that consistency that I always bang on about will be a lot easier for people to maintain. And that is a really, really good thing.

[00:00:53] Level Up Podcast Intro

This is the Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Martin Sully, a brand strategist, [00:01:00] designer, and founder of Snapper Studio. And I'm on a mission to help you gain clarity and confidence in your brand. I'll arm you with bite sized tips. and introduce you to friends of the show who are taking their brand to the next level.

[00:01:17] AI and Branding Outlook

Machine learning and AI, how? Are these things gonna affect branding over the next sort of 24, uh, 24 months or so? This is a really interesting conversation to have. And particularly because generative AI and the, the way things have increased over the last 12 months in particular, um, I don't think people really grasped when it, when it first came around, um, and started to be used [00:02:00] a lot more prevalently.

in early 2023. So obviously we've been through this last sort of 12 months or so. And yearly, I really enjoy doing a bit of a roundup of things that have happened and things that are likely to happen and the impacts it is going to have on, uh, graphic design trends. Um, and more specifically this year because obviously, because I am heavily involved in branding, how Everything's going to be impacted.

How branding is going to be impacted. So I've got a, like a small list of like basically like questions that I want to answer myself and have not really spent too much time thinking about, but I've used that as an opportunity to kind of get things off my mind, but also try and word it in a way that.

What somebody else would come to me with and ask me and how [00:03:00] I kind of see things being impacted. So, uh, I want to first start out just by talking a little bit about how AI and, um, obviously if you don't know what AI is by now, um, AI is a, like a machine learned. Set of information that you can basically access and get it to do tasks for you.

Um, get it to do some pretty, some pretty interesting stuff, but there are some limitations and obviously most people have kind of explored some of those things and how it kind of work, how are trying to work out how it can work and how it can. Um, speed up your day to day life, um, and really kind of get a grasp of, you know, what can it actually do for me, what can, what can, you know, what can be done with it?

Um, there's something obviously I've been, I've [00:04:00] been, I've been interested in to find out.

[00:04:02] First ChatGPT Experiment

So my first experience with, uh, generative AI, I got chat GTP, and I think I might have spoken about it on the podcast. I don't exactly remember, but this was probably, probably six to eight months ago. I tried to get it to do a task for me and to write a blog post, write me a blog post and how, you know, See what it produced.

Was it in my tone of voice? So obviously you need to feed it prompts and the prompts I gave it were along the lines of, can you write me a blog post about, uh, I can't exactly remember what it was about, but basically you use this specific tone of voice and I fed it. Some information that was in my tone of voice that had been taken from a previous blog post Try to distill it.

Anyway, at the time it couldn't do it and I believe that since then if you [00:05:00] pay for Subscri the subscription version of chat GPT, you can kind of basically feed it your tone of voice It's not really my sort of thing. I um Not nervous of it. I am skeptical and wanted to still obviously me being able to sort of introduce my brand to new people and for it to be in my tone of voice.

It's something I need to investigate further, but at the moment I'm not ready for it. 

[00:05:33] Emotional Branding Basics

So, I guess the first thing to do is to speak a little bit about what is emotional branding. Because it forms a heavy part of the process that I go through, how I develop brands and how, for the most part, it's, it's the one thing that sets, [00:06:00] uh, humans from computers.

So for me, obviously this is a. This is a big thing that, um, a lot of new businesses and a lot of businesses that have been running for 10 to 15 years have may have in the past touched on some of this, but because of it's, um, because of the impact it's impact. often doesn't get thought about quite enough.

Um, but so it's, it's not that it's a new thing. It's been around for years. Advertising and people in advertising have been playing with your emotions for a very long time. Um, even as back as far as, you know, the twenties adverts and things. So what is emotional branding? Effectively, we use emotions in branding.

To [00:07:00] this is gonna sound really bad because it it is really bad, but we use it to sell you shit

So there you go we use it to sell you stuff and It's and not in a sleazy way like if we could if people in branding if you can do it in a way that isn't sleazy then Don't be a slimeball. Um, but anyway, like we as humans need that connection and that's one of the massive things about Um, we'd spoke about it on a few podcasts back when I looked at the deep, dark past of branding is that, um, is that openness and transparency, how we don't want to be secret.

You want it? We don't want to be holding secrets back. We don't want to be the people are gatekeeping branding as a, as an institution, as a, as an industry, we want [00:08:00] to be able to explore it. Help it grow, but help it grow in a way that is, um, that is wholly organic and yeah, that actually, yeah, you focuses on collaboration and connecting people without all the secrecy, without trying to, you know, bend people's emotions and try to, you know, sell them things that they don't want, sell them things that they don't need in their lives.

That's not good branding. That's just taking advantage of people. Anyway, um, so we've covered emotional branding and what what that can do, um, how it connects people, people to your brand. 

[00:08:42] AI Tools for Designers

Um, are there any AI tools that can currently help? Well, from that perspective, I guess you can say There will be whether they are fully ready [00:09:00] to, um, to help you develop a brand strategy to help you develop your brand.

You can obviously get AI logos, you can use Photoshop, um, to generate images. You can generate images, um, using Bing, uh, that you can, you can generate photos of for your business. You can tell it, you can feed it prompts and you can get images from it. There's a few other bits and pieces like, um, Adobe Illustrator, they have just been sort of working through.

Their range of programs to help designers create, um, create imagery and create vector graphics. So vector graphics for people that don't know what vector graphics are, that is all your logos. Um, so if you can create vector graphics with AI prompts, um, say illustrator, can you create [00:10:00] me a bird logo and it will go away and it will create you three, four.

Bird logos. You can then obviously feed it a little bit more information. Tell it You know, give it a few more prompts that will kind of start molding it into what you What your final ideas are, it might be a really cool tool to generate ideas and concepts, and I don't think that's a problem. I think the problem becomes when you aren't being transparent about your processes.

So, we can do this, we can do it, we can absolutely do, um, do it. And we can be, but if we can be transparent about it, and how we go about generating images. Did we, you, did we get some help? Um, but it's from that point, if you've got concepts, amazing. How can your mind make them better?[00:11:00]

Um, so there are a couple of tools on the, the, the real creative, creative aspects of creating images. Obviously we've spoken about chat GPT and it's been covered. Massively by everyone, obviously we can, we can get market research from it. We can, we can find out about, you know, different, different statistics that may be relevant to our product and our idea.

Fantastic. Like these are all really useful things to. Um, generate, uh, your thought leadership in certain topics. Brilliant. Absolutely. Like definitely use these things.

[00:11:52] AI for Podcast Workflow

I guess one of the things that people might be asking is what will generative AI offer [00:12:00] me as a business? Like, uh, what are the like real world uses? And one of the things that I'm going to look at, and I will. Probably look at it for this particular podcast. So podcasting is a very, very intense platform, uh, publication method.

It involves a lot of work that you guys don't see and don't think you can quite grasp it until you've done it. So when you look at it from this perspective, we've got all the recording. Um, you might have a couple of cameras set up recording you. You might also obviously get somebody else to do all of that work.

You've also gotta generate all the show notes. You might also wanna put it together and put it as part of a blog post. Turn it into shorts that you want to basically yeah, promote [00:13:00] on your various social media platforms. Side note, one of the past. Um, podcasts I did recently randomly just exploded on tick tock, um, just for the creation of a short from that there was a slew of new inquiries and bits and pieces that off the back of it, people were like really interested in the podcast, really interested in what we did.

I don't know whether that then went on further affected the other person's business, but it was interesting to see how a short. Video Exploded and went a little bit viral. So I had like my typical views on like tiktok are like three to four hundred views this one got like 25 000 over the space of like two days um Which was, which was interesting.

I'm not really a, I'm not really a TikTok user and I definitely don't get [00:14:00] into, so yeah, into the dancing side of things. It's not really me. Um, but yeah, it's, it was really interesting to see. So, where I'm going with this story. Is, I will think the generative AI, the use, the thing that will help the podcast.

Um, so if you don't know, uh, there's a program called Descript who they basically, I started using them 12 months ago or so when I was doing the podcast originally. They would do all the transcribing and I would turn that into blog posts. Fantastic. There was still a lot of work that needed to be doing, done on it.

I pulled it out and it was fantastic. There was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of information in the podcast. It did need a lot of work and a lot of input to turn it into usable blog posts that were SEO optimized. [00:15:00] And for those of you that have never dived into SEO optimization, don't know what that is.

There's a lot of work that goes into that too. So you can see how one thing can kind of spiral anyway. What Descript have since done has to be able to, you can feed in video feeds. Um, so I've got two videos currently running off this, uh, whether I would have just used one feed, but either way, what is really interesting is that it will pull out six, um, you know, as many clips as you need and the best bits of your episodes to create short clips.

Now, this is something that is almost a secondary process for me normally, because I would pull it out. I would sync the audio with the video. So you've got audio and video together, pull it into a different, [00:16:00] uh, software. So pull it into Adobe Premiere pro from there, you would cut down, you would find the right bit of the podcast.

Well, anyway, AI. We'll now take, we'll find the best bits for me, we'll then take the video and the audio and basically produce me, you know, four or five clips. That, in itself, is super useful. It'll also, you can then prompt it and get it to basically produce your blog post. That's another thing I don't have to do.

It's literally a click of a button and it outputs it. So it takes a, don't get me wrong, there's still going to be some editing to be done, but it's going to make it a whole lot easier. And that is something, it was a conversation I had actually just earlier on today, it was like somebody said uh, you know, content, [00:17:00] it's just a lot of work to put content together.

Yes, it is. It's a huge amount of work to put content together. But if you can find a shortcut that doesn't kill your tone of voice, so obviously, like, it's gonna be my tone of voice because it's me talking to camera. Uh, it's me just having a conversation about things. It's you know, it's the podcast. So that's really really like a really cool sort of, you know Thing that's gonna be and I'm sure like they must be investing money into it to make it even better So like level one is this and level two what what's gonna happen after that now?

[00:17:48] Adobe AI and Canva Race

Just want to touch on this thing because I spotted this an article by Adobe probably two months ago now And [00:18:00] they obviously, yeah, for, for you, those of you that know, we spoke about it just a minute ago, uh, Adobe AI, the things that you can do with it, obviously you can cut out backgrounds on images.

They've integrated it pretty well into a few bits and pieces. Now, Lightroom allows you to create masks for editing photos really easily. So you can pick out things like your hair. Um, so if you've done portrait shoot, you can pick up people's hair, you can edit the color of people's hair, you can retouch their skin really easily, you can cut out the backgrounds, you can isolate the person and basically do a lot of things to them.

Um, you know, depending on what sort of editing feel you want to give the photos, you can do that. It's actually a really good little Piece of software it's sped up process is a huge amount for people And yeah, that's like side of [00:19:00] ai Like we're not looking to really drastically change things and change people.

Uh, we're just making looking It's a process simplification, which is fantastic. Saving people time to allow them to do more good quality work, uh, without and with quicker results, because at the end of the day, everybody's looking to save time because time is money, apparently, which yeah, as a conversation for another day.

What else, um, have Adobe done? So, obviously, they've been recently been working in the Photoshop app, uh, to be able to make, you know, generate, you know, do generative AI. And I've tested it, and, um, like Slightly unimpressed and slightly, slightly underwhelmed by the results, but that's just me. I [00:20:00] come from a very technical retouching background, have done a lot of very high end retouching in the past and results were kind of like, yeah, they're passable, but they're just not quite.

They're just not quite right. Um, when you know, you could generate a side of a, you know, a side of a photo that was missing, there'd be like a really obvious line going straight down the photo where it was like, well, that's not blended in really nicely. That's not, that's not really good retouching. That's pretty poor.

In fact, Illustrator, like, yeah, you can generate some. icons and some graphics and bits and pieces that like and recolor photos Um recolor illustrations There's not a huge amount of control yet But i'm sure it's coming Uh, they on like adobe is a thing. They are [00:21:00] absolutely chasing canva at the moment, um with a few of their programs like canva at the moment of Put in so much and got so many resources to, um, help them with the software side of things, like they are, they are steaming ahead and Adobe are really trying hard to catch up and they're, but they're always going to be slightly behind, but I think the big, the big, big change that was coming, that's going to be.

For them, the like, okay. So Canva, they're like here and like, obviously you can't see my hand cause this is a podcast, but it's like chest height, uh, these guys are doing a really good job of helping small businesses grow and start out getting them access to technical tools, you know, design tools that they wouldn't normally have access to cheaply and giving them the opportunity to be able to grow and start doing something.[00:22:00]

But there's a flaw, there's limited control over your brands, uh, there's limited, uh, it's just not quite as polished as it needs to be when it becomes something that is growing and growing at a faster pace, uh, something that would, we typically need, uh, a design agency's input, uh. To do, and this is where I believe Adobe will jump ahead of Canva in that respect.

So Canva down here for like semi pro design quality, uh, but like Adobe obviously is what the professionals use every day, day to day. They're like, they're, they're tools of the trade. If you are growing a brand and you're going to create a brand that won't, you want to last, you know, 10 to 15 years. You will use.

Adobe. I don't [00:23:00] know any professional designers that have gone and built a brand straight in Canva. It'd be an interesting, it'd be an interesting challenge. I think that'd be really kind of, uh, cool as like a weekend challenge. Maybe that's something we'll do one day. 

[00:23:16] AI Generated Brand Guidelines

But, yeah, this thing that Adobe are introducing, uh, it's basically along the lines of You'll do all your design work, you'll put together all your logos, you'll get all of that done.

You may use AI to do all that. You'll work out your, um, your layout structure and your grid structure for all your Um, various templates, bits and pieces that you basically need to yeah, control your brand. What you would typically do then is to put it into a set of brand guidelines. And from that, that's like your, um, your brand [00:24:00] guidelines are like the thing that guides you and every decision you make and everything you do, you look back, well, after a while you don't look back at it every day, but basically you use that as your day to day.

This is how the brand looks. It controls literally every part of your brand. What Adobe you're going to do is to make that an AI generated thing. So you'll get that first point. You'll get the brand guidelines, but you'll be able to feed it. All the information that you would typically feed it, so all your color palettes, everything, uh, all the fonts, you would specify all the, the size of fonts, how it's used, the gaps between fonts and, you know, surroundings on, you'd go into the, like the most minute details.

Day to day, people wouldn't notice it, but it just becomes part synonymous with your brand. And so you like, [00:25:00] you'll say, okay, so around images, I want to have a. a centimeter border or I want to have a um, I want to have a gutter that is between columns of text that is six mil wide. You'll specify all these things in set out parameters that your brand will stick to.

What you'll then be able to do is say, okay, I haven't got, I haven't got a poster, um, design me a poster and it will do it and it will get all the assets that it needs. Um, it might have to source, it might be able to, that you have to feed it, uh, a new photo or, uh, something that, you know, but it, it's going to basically start tying pieces together for you.

So rather than, yes, you'll feed it a lot of information upfront. Um, and the input from a designer up front will be big, but in the [00:26:00] long run, you won't have to go back to them as often. So what I mean from that perspective, what I expect to happen is that prices of branding and brand packages will go up because.

They'll, people will be investing a lot of time up front to be able to help you control your brand, but after that, like you'll have a self sustaining brand identity, um, that will be able to just, yeah, be rolled out and you'll be able to just call up and say, Hey, I X, Y, Z, you know, add in a prompt I need, um, I need a pull up banner, And it's got to have this text on it, can you put it together and it will draw from, you know, like your tone of voice, your identity, um, and every other little aspect, it'll all tie in together.

So there's a real [00:27:00] cohesive look between your, um, your website, people coming off there, people meet you in person, you'll have your business cards, your business cards will be matching your pull up banners and everything, like every little aspect will be. Controlled and that is what branding is. We're creating that image Um that brand image that's consistent and that people can you know trust Um and that It's gonna be worth its weight in gold And do you know what?

I'm actually not concerned about it because I want to be at the forefront of helping people to control Control their brand. I'm not particularly interested in Making, making, and, you know, profiteering, I want people to serve, you know, to, to grow. I want to see that happen. [00:28:00] Um, and if, and I can be at the forefront of, uh, helping people, you know, be positioned, being given people that sort of transparency where they feel like, Oh, um, Martin has generated some of this with AI.

And it's been, it's been incredible. Um, his openness to, to sort of, you know, thinking about the possibilities and how that can speed up things are literally the one thing that I will say come from that will be that consistency that I always bang on about. Will be a lot easier for people to maintain and that is a really really good thing So what have we learned?

[00:28:48] Wrap Up and 2024 Tease

Um Ai is not coming for you the designers jobs. Uh, Just yet. No, it's not going to come for the designers jobs Uh, it's going to be like [00:29:00] a fantastic tool to help designers and to help people, um And, but it will be a really useful thing for people to be able to command, but there's still going to be a huge amount of human input, um, to help humanize brands.

And that is like the thing to remember. AI won't replace that sort of emotional connection. You get to. Working with real people and yeah, I think 2024, I literally think, you know, we need to, let's keep our eye out, let's see where it goes, uh, at the moment it's not like it's not coming at, I don't know when it's coming exactly, but I do think it's coming.

Uh, there wouldn't be articles that have been published if it wasn't on the books and it was, wasn't coming. [00:30:00] Um, so yeah, that's, uh, that's the thing to look out for, um, in terms of, uh, other trends. Look, I will typically, I am going to still put together my graphic design trends, blog posts, and you'll just have to have a read on that, uh, next, next, uh, episode.

I have a, another guest on, so that's going to be. Awesome. I've got some really, I always say I've got some really cool, cool things sort of being talked about and being spoken, you know, people I've been, I'm having chats to and getting them involved. Uh, so you're going to just have to take a seat, soak it up and yeah, look forward to 2024 where we've got some more, um, more things happening.

Catch you on the next episode.

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