Brand APIs // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 006
What would it look like if we made brand guidelines for machines instead of people?
Hi everyone. Welcome to the BrXnd Dispatch: your bi-weekly dose of ideas at the intersection of brands and AI. I hope you enjoy it and, as always, send good stuff my way. NYC spring 2023 Brand X AI conference planning is in full effect (targeting mid-May🤞🤞). We are grateful to Red Scout & LinkedIn for being our first supporters. If you are interested in speaking or sponsoring, please be in touch.
For several years, I’ve had an idea pinging around in my head about “brand APIs.” An API is an “application programming interface” and represents a set of protocols for interacting with another computer. GPT3 and Dall-E have an API that I use to programmatically generate brand collabs. Twitter famously has an API that, until last week, was used by a bunch of different apps to provide access to users. Your operating system has tons of APIs that allow all the different software you run to do the things it needs by accessing OS X/Windows/Linux functions. These perform various tasks rather than requiring every software developer to reinvent the wheel every time they need to allow a user to copy something to the clipboard or take a screenshot.
Put simply: APIs allow others to build things using what you’ve created.
To that end, I’ve always thought they’re an interesting analogy for brands. What is a set of brand guidelines, if not an API for producing work in the voice and aesthetic of a brand? A strong identity, voice, and set of brand guidelines is a must for any brand at scale. It’s the only way to ensure the large number of people producing work on its behalf are creating stuff that’s on brand.
One big and obvious difference between brands/brand guidelines and APIs is the end user, APIs are written as an interface for one computer to talk to another, while brand guidelines are obviously created for humans. What this means, in practice, is that API docs are very technical—the best APIs are self-documenting, meaning that the code is written in such a way that the documentation can be generated directly from it. Brand guidelines, on the other hand, tend to be full of flowery language and stunning visuals. That’s because they’re written in such a way that someone doesn’t just read the voice and see the aesthetic, but they also feel it. The best brand guidelines are the ultimate manifestation of those very guidelines.
What I’ve been thinking about lately is whether that approach is long for the world. More specifically, I wonder if it isn’t time to start seriously considering writing a set of brand guidelines that look a lot more like API documentation. As these various marketing AI tools play a larger and larger role in brand-building, a critical piece of the equation is going to be how you inform the machine of how your brand looks, acts, and speaks. At the very least, brands should start to build up their own corpora so that they’re ready to train models on their own look and feel. However, that still just feels like step one. I have to imagine the next step is that the brand, just like the applications they’re working with, has its own API that makes the guidelines accessible in a machine-comprehensible way.
I don’t quite know what that looks like yet, but it’s an idea that I think is worth exploring and something I’m very interested in talking to brands about. Let me know if that’s something you’ve been thinking about.
— Noah
New BrXndscape Companies
New companies listed on BrXndscape, a landscape of marketing AI companies (writeup in case you missed it). If I missed anything, feel free to reply or add a company. (The companies are hand-picked, but the descriptions are AI-generated—part of an automated pipeline that grabs pricing, features, and use cases from each company’s website and one of many experiments I’ve got running at the moment.)
[Vector Generation] Illustroke: Illustroke allows users to easily create stunning vector illustrations (SVG) from text prompts. Generate three variants of the same illustration, download in SVG format, and use without any attribution or extra fees.
[Music Generation] Beatoven.ai: Beatoven.ai uses advanced AI music generation techniques to compose unique mood-based music to suit every part of your video or podcast. It features multiple genres and moods, unlimited customization, streamlined output, and free music download for the first 15 minutes.
[Video Editing] vidyo.ai: Vidyo.ai provides a powerful AI platform to help you create shorter, shareable clips from long-form podcasts and videos. It offers features such as video subtitling, content repurposing, video resizing, video clipping, auto video chapters, and social media templates.
[Content Generation] Thundercontent: Thundercontent provides a powerful AI-writer assistant that can generate high-quality blog posts, articles, and other content in multiple languages. It is 100% unique and passes all plagiarism checkers. It also has a clean and clear text editor with a modern and rich interface.
[Advertising Generation] AdCreative.ai: AdCreative.ai is an Artificial Intelligence-powered ad creative and banner generator which provides up to 14x better conversion rates compared to creatives that are not data-backed, and integrates with Google, Facebook, and Zapier. It also allows up to 25 users to generate creatives simultaneously under one main account.
[3D Asset Generation] Scenario: Scenario is a 3D asset generation tool that unlocks the power of AI-generated gaming assets, allowing users to create high-quality, style-consistent, proprietary assets quickly and easily. Users can create their own generative AI engines with their own data, quickly test new game concepts and ideas, generate unique, high-quality content, and pick and upload their own training data.
[Text-to-Speech] ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs offers long-form speech synthesis, up to 30 voices in Voice Lab, API access, commercial license, dedicated support, and multiple language support.
Thanks for reading. If you want to continue the conversation, feel free to reply, comment, or join us on Discord. Also, please share this email with others you think would find it interesting.
— Noah
I like the thought! Perhaps an interesting starting point would be to use AI services to create a set of brand guidelines? While they would be read by humans rather than machines, it offers up some thoughts on how they might already see a brand. From there, it would be possible to determine what 'parts' of a brand's guidelines could be created for machines rather than humans.
Related: I once wrote guidelines for Nokia on how to design icons for its phones and web presence(s). These were really technical (I worked alongside a specialist icon designer) and, given the consistent nature of output, albeit at difference sizes, I'm certain they could have been created from those guidelines by machine. Only the language would need to change.
Which brings me to a further point: will we see copycoder as a job role? Part copywriter, part coder? Perhaps it already exists but isn't reified as a specific role in agencies. Is it what we currently call a prompt engineer?
As you'll see, I have more questions than answers. Thought it worthwhile throwing out my initial response to the post and see where others built or dismantle.