Red Antler’s CCO on the new era of brand building

The design landscape is changing rapidly. In some ways, it’s more accessible than ever as AI tools flood the market and AI companies pitch consumers and businesses alike on its ease of use. In others, it’s becoming more difficult to balance the need for personalization, the myriad touchpoints, finding ways to stand out amid the onslaught of AI slop, and more.

To understand how brands are managing this shift, Marketing Brew caught up with Kiser Barnes, chief creative officer and partner at Red Antler, who is set to speak about that topic at our upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 10.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You joined Red Antler last year as partner and chief creative officer. Tell us about what you’re doing. What I’ve been doing over the past year is really helping to evolve Red Antler into the new era of what brand building means. Brand building now is much more multidisciplinary in terms of the touchpoints that it needs to impact, the touchpoints that it needs to affect.

How so? There are two things that are happening. One is [that] tech and marketing are merging. Tech brands are becoming marketing brands. Marketing brands and agencies are becoming—are being forced to become—tech brands. And the tools are accelerating the speed at which we need to get to market. They’re also accelerating the ability to personalize and customize brands in ways that it’s never been before…The second part of that is about social and the idea that people are interacting with brands in very fragmented ways and multi-touchpoint ways around social. The first way you might interact with a new brand might be through a social post versus the traditional way of the past, which was typically through advertising or through a website or through some sort of marketing material…In order to be a brand expert and a brand builder, now you have to be able to think about how you orchestrate across all of these different touchpoints. You, of course, have to think about the tools and the ways that those tools become increasingly relevant to the work that you do, and you have to evolve constantly.

How does the cultural desire for personalization change the design conversation? It’s so exciting from a design standpoint. It means that we have to build increasingly modular brands. A lot of the ways that we think about brands are shifting from this idea of the brand bible that sits on a shelf somewhere and collects dust into this mode of a living, breathing thing that should always be evolving and always shifting…It means that we have to build a wider toolkit for brands. We’ve got to build enough of a toolkit that can be taken right by social influencers, or it can be taken by vendors, or it can be plugged into experiential in the real world. And so we have to really think wide now. I don’t think that brand teams ever did that in the past…To build a brand now, you can’t just think about the logo and the font and the color and that stuff. You’ve got to not just test it out but really think about how it shows up in the real world as experiential or retail, how it shows up on social platforms. And you have to really know those spaces…It just means that we have to build brands from a design standpoint, brands that are much richer, much more modular, much more connected to full-ecosystem thinking.

That’s all happening at a time when people have much stronger reactions to brand changes today, like we just saw with Cracker Barrel. Brands are much more fluid, and they’re really responsive to culture now. This old idea of a pristine brand sitting in an ivory tower is not as relevant anymore. And again, it’s this influence. It’s the impact and amplification of social and influencer[s]. If you think about it, we’re in a culture of influencer. I don’t think that’s set in, but our president is an influencer, our entire cabinet is made of influencers. Not to be provocative, but we are in a culture now of influence, where influence is king. That means that brands have to be more democratic. They’ve got to really think about what their people and their fans and their loyalists really think about and care about in the brand.

Ultimately—hopefully—that’s a good thing for brands. It means it’s more influenced by [the] community, it’s more influenced in the sense of co-ownership. But I do think that’s a huge pivot.

Another major shift that we’ve touched on is the introduction of all of these AI tools to the market. That’s changing the design landscape. I’m curious, if everyone is using the same tools and those tools are trained on what has been, how can design continue to push the envelope? The tools are really great for, in my mind, workflow, amplification of ideas, creativity. I have a thesis that the human soul is about experimentation. What makes us really creative, and what makes us feel, what creates differentiation is experimentation. It’s like when jazz came into the scene and it created a new language of music. Every single cultural shift and change has been driven by this incredible explosion of creative experimentation. And that is what makes us uniquely human…The machine and AI can’t do that, certainly not now. I’m sure it’ll be programmed to do a little bit more of it. But that’s what makes us unique, and I do think we’re already starting to see a response to AI and to this mass adoption of AI.

You’ll see it in fashion and luxury brands are going back to stop-motion and handcrafted techniques for creating content, which is really beautiful. I do think there’s always a pendulum swing…Brands go back and forth. But I do think, ultimately, the tools allow us to do things more rapidly. They allow us to touch more spaces, and they allow us to have more depth in terms of strategy research, the foundational pieces of brand building. So from a design perspective, they allow us to take an idea and really amplify it…I do think we will always have to, as creative leaders, show up in ways that feel differentiated and cut through that sort of clutter of noise. There’s this idea of AI slop, that everything will be kind of created by AI, and it’s bots speaking to bots—the dead internet theory. There’s so many kinds of theories around this and that. Ultimately, we’ll have to find ways to differentiate, and once those tools become widely adopted, we will come up with more interesting ways to approach creativity and to approach marketing. I believe that strongly. That’s what the human spirit’s all about.