You’re getting this email as a subscriber to the BrXnd Dispatch, a (roughly) bi-weekly email at the intersection of brands and AI. I am planning some corporate AI events as well as my own conference in NYC for the Spring (I’m not sure I’m going to pull off SF). Re: my NYC event for the spring - I am starting to look for speakers and sponsors, so if you think you fit into one of those buckets, please be in touch.
In case you missed it, last week, I launched the Manifesto Machine, an AI manifesto generator I built in collaboration with Michael Grant. I wrote a bunch about it last week, but the idea is pretty simple: You use the form below, and the AI does the work of writing (and narrating) a brand manifesto. Like lots of the experiments I do, it’s not meant to be a thing that replaces human creativity, but rather an exploration of how this technology works and what it might mean for brands.
After building it, I got lots of interesting comments and feedback and wanted to feature a few.
Let’s start with this LinkedIn post (used with permission) from my friend Matt Creamer. Matt spent a large portion of his career covering the ad industry at AdAge before transitioning to the agency side as a creative director. In other words, Matt knows what he’s talking about. Here’s what he wrote:
If there was ever a marketing ritual that needed a hit of AI, it's the brand manifesto. And now we've got it, thanks to Noah Brier and his Manifesto Machine.
Writing manifestos is a profoundly weird way to spend your time. No creative writing class ever prepared me for hurriedly tapping out a prose poem to a brand and, tbh, it can be kinda fun.
They have a unique creative logic, which is to basically posit that the universe will collapse but for the existence of the brand in question, no matter how non-essential that brand might be.
Seeing how this very specific form interacts with AI is what Noah is doing with the Manifesto Machine. Plug in a brand, tweak a few parameters, push submit, and a few minutes later you get a link to your video.
In giving it a spin, I decided to pick the worst brand I could possibly imagine, The Trump Organization. I asked the tool to begin with the end of the dinosaur age and, in an attempt to throw it off, I asked it to hit a random moment in time: the first hip-hop party, in the Bronx in the early 1970s. Even more absurdly, I also asked for a CTA using the language of trust.
It was not thrown off. The result was fairly terrifying and something I could see the Trump brand stewards (?) nodding along with. And it made me realize something about manifestos that I probably should have realized long ago. They carve out an intellectual space where you can say pretty much anything and it has a chance of working. Trump, dinosaurs, hip hop, empires.... sure! Both everything and nothing makes sense.
In addition to being a good summation of what’s going on, that last bit really struck me. Part of the fun of building and exploring AI is that it teaches me a lot about how this stuff works and helps me build up my AI intuition. But the other part is that building and using these things naturally makes you think about the work itself. In some way, these models are a mirror—after all, they’re trained on the collective output of humanity—and in that way, they offer us opportunities to reflect on things in new ways.
Another interesting reaction came from Katie Welch, CMO of Rare Beauty. She was impressed enough with the Manifesto that she read it aloud onstage at Adweek X this week in LA. She also shared it on LinkedIn in its entirety:
In the year 2020, when screens became mirrors and likes became our reflection, Rare Beauty emerged, a fearless champion in the arena of authenticity.
We reject the digital masquerade of flawlessness.
We dismantle the filters that blur our true selves.
We cast shadows on the illusion of perfection.
We believe in beauty untamed, unfiltered, and unequivocally real.
We believe in the power of every freckle, scar, and asymmetry.
We believe in the radical notion that beauty should not conform.
We call on the bold, the spirited, the original.
Dare to bare your rare; dare to defy the standard.
Join us in a revolution where every selfie is a statement.
Here's to the rare ones, to the real beauty waiting to break free.
Shatter the glass of false ideals.
Let beauty – your beauty – defy the world.
Katie reading the manifesto at Adweek X via @adweek on Instagram.
There’s a lot of good stuff in there, and it’s interesting to see it resonate with marketers who spend a lot of time around this kind of stuff. Again, my take here is that it’s very good at finding nuggets of truth in the expected and unexpected connections it draws. Also, like most things AI, the output of this thing is highly dependent on the input. Good marketers build good brands by building up a set of distinctive assets over time. The stronger and more distinct those assets are, the stronger the brand (this is How Brands Grow 101 stuff). It seems pretty clear at this point that the training process for these models, in which they strengthen and weaken connections based on their training data, aligns quite well with the job of marketers. It’s classic garbage in, garbage out stuff. The Rare Beauty brand obviously has enough raw material to be able to produce legible, on-brand output. But that’s only because of the work put in prior.
Second, I’ll repeat that I don’t believe this is a threat to copywriters—at least not yet. But I continue to believe that even while we may not yet know the direction all this is headed, any serious marketer should at least be experimenting and building up their finger feel for this technology.
That’s it for now. Go have a play, make some manifestos, and send your favorites my way.
As always, feel free to be in touch if there’s anything you want to talk about or I can help with.
— Noah