Sephora is compelling for any number of reasons, and one is it’s been a leader in the beauty industry working with GenAI and broader AI technology.A McKinsey piece reported earlier this year that Gen AI could add up $9 billion to $10 billion to the global economy based on its impact on the beauty industry alone.As consumer brands go, the beauty industry has been ahead of the curve on AI, with companies like Sephora, L’Oreal, Dior, Estee Lauder, P&G, all creating AI-powered tools for customers to use as early as 2017.In this episode, host Jeff Beer talks to Sephora’s US CMO Zena Arnold, and Vlad Kuznetsov, the company’s Chief Information Officer, to get a peek under the hood for a glimpse at how one of the most powerful brands in an incredibly influential consumer industry is thinking about Gen AI right now.

This past December, Coca-Cola released a set of holiday ads made entirely from generative AI. They asked three different studios to create their own interpretations of the 1995 Coke holiday spot called “Holidays Are Coming” using AI video-generation models, including Leonardo, Luma, and Runway. The brand got three unique adaptations from studios Silverside AI, the Wild Card, and Jason Zada’s Secret Level.

Even though the AI ads were supposed to be a reimagining of Coke’s holiday ads from the '90s, which is a pretty innocuous concept, the backlash was intense. The reactions were passionate and numerous enough to get coverage from The New York Times, USA Today, NBS News, and more. Despite the backlash, the ads were effective and these new AI ads also got the job done. Coke is confident that its early experimentation is not only fun, but a meaningful investment that—despite the negative reviews in the short term—is setting the company up for long-term marketing success.

In this episode, host Jeff Beer talks to Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola's global vice president for generative AI, about the companies' approach to using AI, creative risk-taking, and those holiday ads.

If GenAI is the biggest technological advancement since the internet itself, then the creative possibilities are or will be pretty much endless. From a brand marketing and advertising perspective, we are still very early days, but there needs to be those willing and able to push the envelope, test boundaries, make mistakes, learn lessons, and evolve from there. Yet how far should the boundaries of brand content be pushed? 

In this episode, I look for some answers by talking to two founders of boutique creative shop Food Arts & Technology, industry legends creative technologist Iain Tait and designer Richard Turley. I also sat down with Jason Zada, founder of AI-focused production studio Secret Level, who has worked with major brands like Coke on utilizing these new tools. 

There are so many different perspectives on how this tech will and should be used creatively. Here you’ll get a glimpse into the perspective of people trying their best to push the tech and their own creativity for brands.

To paraphrase a great philosopher, brand ideas are like small intestines – everybody has one. But could you build something with that idea in less than an hour? In this episode, we meet with David Jones,founder and CEO of The Brandtech Group, a $4 billion company which invested heavily in integrating AI into marketing and advertising services by acquiring leading companies like Pencil and Jellyfish. Jones says GenAI tools tailored to brands make that idea possible, so we challenge him and creative director James Dow to make it happen, right here, right now on the podcast. 

While that’s happening, we also take a look inside a few of the large-scale tools being deployed by major ad agencies right now. Omnicom Advertising Group chief operating officer Deepthi Prakash gives us a peek under the hood of TBWA Worldwide’s CollectiveAI platform, which it has built working with companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and more to create tools trained on decades of successful strategies, creative work and philosophies, then utilized to help inform and evaluate new work and ideas. 

I won’t spoil the brand idea we have, but by the end, you may just have a new favorite toothpaste.

David Droga is a legendary advertising creative and executive. He’s also CEO of Accenture Song, one of the largest advertising and marketing services firms on the planet. 

For those two reasons, we kick off Brand New World with Droga at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Why there and then? It’s the world’s biggest convergence of media, marketing, entertainment, technology, and brands, and a mirror of what's happening and a bellwether of what's to come, on a global scale. There’s no better time and place to start a conversation about how brands, and the marketing and advertising industries are approaching AI at this nascent moment.

In this episode, I talked to Droga about what Accenture’s $3 billion commitment to AI means for his work, how it compares to the first digital revolution two decades ago, where it may be headed in the not-so-distant future, and the impact it will have on the art of persuasion and pop culture.

AI is everywhere, and no more is the hype as big and ambiguous than across an industry known for both chasing and utilizing new technology: advertising and marketing. In a recent chapter of the book ‘Our AI Journey,’ released in March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that artificial general intelligence will be a reality in the next five years or so and, as a result, ‘will replace 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today.’

But we’re not there . . . yet. How brands and ad agencies use AI is already influencing what they know about us, how they will use it, and subsequently, how this technological shift will revolutionize consumer and pop culture.

If brands are the connective tissue between business and culture, how will AI impact the ways in which they build meaningful—and profitable—connections with audiences? What are the lessons that are and can be used from the first digital revolution? How are the leading players in the industry not only using this technology today, but thinking about how it can, will, and should be used tomorrow? Join 'Fast Company' senior staff editor Jeff Beer as he embarks on a journey to find out.

The result will be not only a snapshot of this moment in time, but an evergreen look at the AI philosophies, strategies, and work that will determine the future of brands.