Business Portugal Magazine recently published an interview with me about the future of branding in an era dominated by artificial intelligence. The question that kept coming back throughout the conversation is the same one the market still hasn’t answered: how do you build something that lasts in an environment that keeps rewarding speed?
I’ve been running D’FRONT for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve watched the creative industry go through several versions of the same anxiety. Desktop publishing was going to kill designers. Stock photography was going to kill photographers. Templates were going to kill design agencies. None of them did. But each one permanently changed what the job actually was. AI is doing the same thing, only faster, and at a scale that makes every previous disruption look like a warm-up.
What is actually happening to the market
AI is making “good enough” cheap. Proposals, presentations, visual concepts, copy and layouts. Things that used to take days now take minutes. The barrier to producing something acceptable no longer exists. And when acceptable becomes free, the market stops paying for it. That’s not a threat to good work. It’s a threat to mediocre work that was charging premium prices because it was hard to produce.What rises in value when execution becomes a commodity is judgment. The ability to look at a brand and understand not just what it looks like, but what it needs to become. To know which direction to go and, more importantly, which directions to refuse. That’s what branding actually is. Working the perception we have of a brand. It’s not a logo. It’s not a color palette. It’s not a brand guidelines document. It’s a perception decision. How does this company exist in the mind of the people it wants to reach? What does it need to make them feel before a single word is read?
Those questions don’t have answers in AI. They have answers through thinking, through the ability to interpret nuance and emotion, because that is what we are, emotional beings who respond to emotional thinking. Strategic thinking is therefore informed by experience and shaped by taste. And it is becoming the rarest thing in a creative market full of noise.
How D’FRONT uses AI without losing strategic direction
Like most companies that aren’t asleep, at D’FRONT we incorporated AI into our process structurally. It makes us faster by letting us explore more options, test more ideas, and remove friction from the parts of the work that don’t need friction.
On the Volkswagen Group Digital Solutions project, AI allowed us to raise the level of creative ambition without sacrificing the vision. The result was not only awarded but also asked to be replicated for Volkswagen’s operations in India and Germany. But every project still starts the same way it always has. What is this brand trying to become? What does it need to stop being? Who does it need to convince, and what do they need to feel? The AI doesn’t answer those. We do. And then we use every tool available to execute on that answer as well as possible.
What separates the agencies
The branding agencies and founders who understand this distinction early will build very different businesses over the next five years. Not because they’ll have better tools, everyone will have the same tools. But because they’ll have something tools can’t replicate. A point of view, built over years of making calls that mattered.
In a world that keeps getting noisier, branding with real substance is becoming rarer. And more decisive.
Read the full interview: here
