BrXnd, a new organization at the intersection of brands and AI. The mission is to propel marketing forward with events, education, consulting, and experiments that combine the power of brands with the amazing potential of AI.
We’ve launched the first experiment, an AI-generated brand collaboration tool called CollXbs available at BrXnd.ai. In addition, I’m excited to announce our first event: BrXnd: The Intersection of Brands and AI. It will be a one-day conference held in New York City in the spring of 2023. The day will bring together brand builders, creatives, and technologists to discuss projects, techniques, ideas, and trends at this convergence.
Want to read more? Check out the BrXnd.ai backstory.
CollXbs is an experiment that uses AI to generate imaginary brand collaborations. All the images and copy for the collabs were generated by AI. Some are better than others, and that tends to relate to how strong the brand is. In some ways, the goal of branding—to create recognizable patterns—is perfect for the goal of machine learning, which is, effectively, to recognize patterns in large datasets.
We designed this experiment to encourage user participation. Every day we release a certain number of collaborations for users to dream up. New drops are announced on Twitter and you can always try and submit a collab. If we have run out of free collabs for the day, you can always buy some credits to generate your own.
I have long been fascinated by brands. In 2008, I built a tool called Brand Tags that flashed up a random logo and asked people to type in the first thing that popped into their head. The idea was that if brands live in people's heads—something I believe—then asking consumers for their first brand reaction would provide invaluable insight into how a brand was perceived. By compiling their responses in a tag cloud that showed the most common answers in the largest type, brands would be able to access a powerful view of how the public saw them.
In some ways, BrXnd is an extension of that same idea. Made possible by advances in AI—specifically, large language models—it imagines brand collaborations. What stands out about these pretend collabs is just how powerful the world's best brands really are. They have established such a solid identity than even a machine learning model can ascertain its attributes.
Thanks for visiting and playing.
BrXnd is the brainchild of Noah Brier. Noah has spent the last twenty years operating at the intersection of marketing and technology—first at award-winning agencies, and later as an entrepreneur. In 2011 Noah co-founded Percolate, the world's leading content marketing platform. Percolate worked with brands like Uniliever, GE, and Google and was backed by Sequoia, First Round Capital, and Lightspeed. The company was acquired by Seismic, the leading Sales Enablement Platform, in 2019.
Noah has been recognized as one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine, as a digital innovator by Bloomberg Businessweek, and sat on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council for Social Media. He built Brand Tags in 2008, an experiment in brand perception that was acquired by Solve Media and has written for AdAge, AdWeek, Contagious, and Fast Company amongst other publications. In 2019, Noah co-founded Why Is This Interesting?—a daily newsletter read by 20,000+ intellectually omnivorous individuals.