Branding in the Age of AI with Mairin Deery (282)
In this episode of Digital Marketing Masters, I sit down with creative director and brand strategist Mairin Deery to unpack what branding looks like in the age of AI, with candid interjections from our creative lead, Mehak. We explore why AI shines as an accelerator for strategy, iteration, and operational efficiency, but still can’t replace the messy, specific, human experiences that make brands resonate. From “highest common denominator” outputs to the trap of vibe-branding and cloned .md design files, we dig into how to use AI as an assistant, not a substitute, for a well-defined “why you, why now.”
We also talk about when efficiency should win (think windshield wipers and flight bookings) and when to protect the unscalable human moments that build trust. Expect practical advice on prompting AI to push back, using it as a thinking partner, and threading your irreducibly human brand core through everything you scale. Your homework: write your “why you, why now” in a few sentences and then maybe let AI help you amplify it, not replace it.
https://www.mairindeery.com/
Looking for a podcast guest? Author Matt Rouse
Hook Digital Marketing | Hook Digital Marketing Canada
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Today on the Digital Marketing Masters podcast,
my guest is from the other side of Canada.
The
branding ambassador,
the empress of brand strategy,
the queen of brand voice,
Mairin Deery.
And this is branding in the age of AI.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Rouse. And my guest today is Mairin Deery,
who is creative director and brand strategist.
Yeah. It's my own company named after me. I work fractionally
with many tech startups and mission driven orgs to find and articulate their identities.
I've been doing that for about fifteen years. So I work at the intersection of strategy and creative.
Okay. Okay. This is Mahek here, and I'm back for another episode. For those of you who've been around here for a while, you know the drill. I jump in between Matt and his guests to keep things spicy, connect some dots, and occasionally lose my mind over how interesting these conversations get.
Well, I'm the creative lead over at Matt's firm, so a lot of what gets discussed here, I'm living in real time.
This episode though, branding in the age of AI,
genuinely gave me a lot to chew on.
I think Mairin is brilliant and Matt is, well, the amazing Matt.
Alright. So let's dive right in.
Today,
our topic is one that I know is on a lot of minds of of creative work people out there as well as knowledge workers
and marketers,
and that is how do you think things are changing
in the age of AI for branding?
It's an interesting question, and I hope that my answer gives
branders
and creatives and marketers,
you know, a bit of comfort out there is that I feel like, wow, we can do a lot of iteration,
but we can deepen our ideas,
but we can
bring efficiency into the process.
The fundamental of it is that branding
and marketing
and
creative work, art,
comes from the
experience of being human.
The way that we connect to people with our brands,
with art, and with marketing is by understanding their human experiences.
And
at least so far, AI can't really do that in the way that human beings can do that.
And so I think that AI has this huge place in helping us
deepen
and
iterate and ideate and, you know, look for unexpected
options.
But, ultimately, that human experience is what brings people to brands and keeps them there. Now
for the most part, I agree with you.
However, there is this sort of
a couple little things in the back of my brain that are always tapping me on the shoulder.
And one of those things is
I constantly
see a barrage of people who say,
don't use AI content
because human creative
and human content performs better to humans because of the connection.
However,
the data that I see on advertising
platforms
is that AI assisted creations do better.
They sell more stuff.
They get more engagement.
Not necessarily a 100% AI created,
but stuff where AI was used in the creation.
Absolutely.
I think that AI has a place and I think that a creative person
taking creative ideas,
taking their understanding of their audience, that really deep understanding that comes with
a like a grounding in your creative strategy, people taking that and then using AI tools to create something that takes off and that has meaning
and that really, really draws people into
whatever they're selling or whatever they're trying to explain
is possible.
It's not
everybody's experience. It's not, you know, every junior marketer isn't able to take that brilliant idea and turn it into something beautiful
using AI.
I think it's absolutely possible,
but you used the word that I think is really important here is assisted.
I think that
taking it from zero all the way to a 100 just with AI,
it's not super possible
yet.
You know? I don't know if it ever will be because of that that need for that human understanding, that need for that human experience. But assisted? Absolutely.
There are many ways you can use AI to create efficiency and collateral and iteration.
No question.
I think the other one that is is always kind of
at the back of my mind, and this actually came up when I was talking with Sabrina Scott in in the previous episode two eighty one,
which was about spirituality
in the age of AI. It's not going to work as well because it's not authentically created by the person,
and the machine doesn't have the human experience to back that up. However,
the machine has studied millions of sermons that were written by humans who did have the experience to back it up. So shouldn't the new version be better and not worse?
I think that we're thinking about it depends on your definition of the word better. That's true. You know, is is the word better the most perfect
the most perfect iteration of this thing? Is that what better means,
or is it the most human and connective version of this thing which comes with mess?
Human beings,
you, me, everybody, we come with mess.
We come with scars. We come with baggage. We come with,
like, weirdness. There there's weirdness in human beings that couldn't
possibly be in this apex,
you know,
perfect iteration of a sermon.
If you're asking
someone to create perfection, a human being will never create the absolutely perfect thing, which is what we're having AI do for us. So everything is objectively perfect.
But is it subjectively resonant?
Those are two completely different
things. And I don't know if I would say it's perfect.
I would say that it's
of the highest correlation
of the data that was provided,
which is not necessarily
the same thing as
something that will inspire action in a person.
Maybe we can call it the highest common denominator or, like, that's what AI is aiming for. So they're not aiming for the lowest. They're aiming to combine all the information that they have and make the best possible replication
of structure and of impact with the information given by the person who's trying to create it.
Highest common denominator?
I love that Maureen landed on that phrase because it completely reframes how we should think about AI output.
We usually worry about AI dragging things down to the lowest common denominator.
Right? Like lazy,
generic,
forgettable.
But what she's actually describing is the opposite problem.
AI is pulling together everything that has ever worked,
every great idea,
every winning formula,
and handing you the polished average of all of it.
But here's the thing about averages.
Even an average of brilliant things is
still just average.
Right? It's it's basically the song everyone could agree on, but nobody actually chose. So you need a human bringing something specific and real to the table
to actually push past that middle ground.
The random seed that's added in so that each answer is different.
Yeah. Exactly.
AI can't really create the unexpected yet.
It can't
iterate and make mess and,
you know,
create that humanity that we need from marketing
brand
and art. And I would argue that sermons are also I I'm a non religious person, but I would argue that sermons are also art. It is a creative expression, however you wanna look at that. So
while you could certainly use
an AI tool to help you write sermons, I think that ultimately, when you actually go to deliver them,
if it doesn't have your voice and your own personal identity in there,
it's not gonna connect.
Yeah. I think one thing that's interesting there is that you talked about something ultimately kind of different and creative.
And I think that
with enough iteration,
the AI will go off the rails. It kinda forgets the plot. It misunderstands
something. There's all kinds of things that could happen.
And for the most part, those mistakes are bad. It makes whatever the thing you're trying to create worse or unusable.
But once in a blue moon,
it comes out with something that is incredible.
Just something odd comes out of the machine, and you're like, yeah. You know what? That thing is is something I can kind of
now go down that rabbit hole instead.
I know a lot of the creative work that we do is
very human in the kind of design and editing portions and writing and things like that.
But there is
also how can we use AI to kind of
speed up a lot of the structural elements
and develop things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do
or not be able to do on the budget that the client has.
Yeah. I'm not
trying to tell anybody to shy away from it either. I think that there's a really fundamentally human portion to the creative,
the visual, the end output. But how you get there, I think there's a lot that can be done by AI that creative
professionals, if they're holding back from AI, are doing themselves a disservice.
I use AI
all of the time through the
data digestion,
through the strategic development,
through the iteration of different user experiences.
And
oftentimes,
when I feed notes that come from a meeting through the AI machine, it because it doesn't really differentiate
what's important versus unimportant
in a very
nuanced way,
because important is subjective,
it will actually come up with some ideas that I sometimes don't think about. And then I will push that idea further
because I think it's interesting and because I think it's interesting for the brand.
So I think there is so much that can be done in our work that alleviates a lot of the a lot of the baggage and a lot of the white screen and a lot of the, like, okay. How do I how do I push something else that's different and unusual? Why don't I just start talking to this
random machine collaborator about it? How do I sort of pull apart the layers of what I've recorded and what I've understood from the client and see if there's anything new and interesting
there. And I think it really, really helps with that. You know, especially if you're a creative professional who works by themselves.
You get this other brain that you can iterate off of. Now, obviously, AI always tells you that you're right, or at least a lot of the time, AI will tell you that you're right. You don't have to. You can turn that off.
AI will tell you that you are right.
I felt that personally, and I think we all did. It is the world's most agreeable
collaborator,
and that is genuinely a problem for creative work because
you need someone to tell you when your idea is, like, half baked.
And my experience as a creative lead too,
the fix isn't that hard.
You just basically have to ask it to push back
and ask your AI what's wrong with your concept.
Ask it to argue the opposite and be brutally honest,
and it'll absolutely do so. It just won't volunteer that information unless you
drag it out.
Treat it like a colleague,
you have to explicitly ask for honest feedback.
You can ask yes and. You know, you can push it further than I think one human brain can on their own,
and you can push it faster.
And I think that there's a if you are a creative person sitting out there who's
staunchly anti AI because you don't wanna see it making videos of people talking, well, there's so much else that's there. There's so many other opportunities to use it
in ways that are efficient and create the unexpected and create
much more high quality deeper work.
I saw something yesterday where
they really still are seeing that most of AI use is in the question and asking or an answer.
So people are still using AI to get opinions and talk through options,
at least people as in the general public.
And I think that's a really, really interesting thing because people aren't using AI to do their work. They're using it to help them understand how to do their work better,
and that's important.
I think something interesting there also that I think you touched on it, but we didn't quite get too much into it is the idea that
having
to
explore your work through the idea of explaining it to someone else
can be really powerful in helping you make your own decisions. I don't know how many time I'm gonna use the AI like a thesaurus. Right? Thinking of a term for something,
I know it exists, so I start typing the situation of what that word is into AI, but I think of the word before I even finish typing it. It's it's actually the process of explaining what I'm doing that makes my brain do the thing I'm trying to get done.
And sometimes you have two thoughts you wanna get across in an email or in a concept, and you're like, I can't figure out how to connect these two things. Here are my two thoughts. What are some options to connect it?
And
oftentimes,
one of those options will be really unexpected,
and it's really interesting. And you can run with it. You can switch them around. You can play with it from there. I think that people
are really thinking that you have to use it for the end product. But, really, there's so much in that soup that
can be
expanded upon and deepened and made better quality
just by having an extra,
quote, unquote, brain. You and I had talked before about
avoiding vibe branding, which kind of the idea of, like, vibe coding, but it's vibe branding
Yeah. Where you need to have
at least some of the
ideas and structure and stuff in your brain before you go to use an AI tool, something like Google Stitch or ClaudeCode or something to build it out.
And I think that's a valuable
lesson for people.
Okay. So quick flag on why branding since Matt mentioned it and reminded us of something important.
For additional context, it's basically the brand version of vibe coding where developers use AI to build software without really understanding what's underneath.
So it's the same idea here, but it's like prompting your way to a logo or a tagline without
doing the harder work of knowing why your brand exists.
So AI will happily go on that journey with you and hand you something that looks great in a deck, but it just won't be yours, though.
So know the why before you touch the tools.
Yeah. I would go even further, and I'd say that you really need to have a very clear sense of what the authentic
why you and why now is about your brand before you touch an AI. Because if you weren't able to explain that all to them, then we're kinda back to that idea of the highest common denominator. Right. We're back to that idea of, like, AI is just gonna give you
a confluence of the things that it thinks best fit who you are or best align with who you are mashed together.
And so it turns into this very
they're creating homogeneity.
Yes.
And if that's what you want your brand to be, if you want your brand to be homogenous,
if you just want it to look exactly like something else,
AI is the path forward.
If, especially, if you want that as a starting point. If you are just trying to get something off the ground and you just want something to look
like a tech startup,
AI can definitely help you get there. You can get a totally
AI tech or AI tech startup brand straight from the machine. No problem.
If you want it to look different, if you want human beings to really be like, ah, they're solving my problem. They get my pain. I need this now.
You're gonna need to push it, and you're gonna need to have a really clear idea of what that why you why now is
because the AI can't give that to you.
And, you know, using AI to vibe out your brand
just never really gets it far enough.
I think another thing that's interesting
we are talking about internally at my company is
there's these they're called dot m d files,
and that's what Google Stitch creates.
And there's lists of them on GitHub. Here's the Starlink brand, and here's this company's brand, which you can just say, okay. I want my brand to look like this company, and
then it gives you a file that will make your website look like that brand.
I can see if you don't know anything about branding. That might sound great. You're like you're like, I could take this brand that somebody else spent millions of dollars developing.
But the problem is
then you're just you're you're not actually building a brand.
You are a poor imitation of another brand.
In doing that,
you as I said, you get to that, like, common denominator homogeneous place. Not only do you dilute their brand,
but unfortunately,
you also dilute yours.
So then everybody's brands are diluted.
If everybody looks the same,
nobody is believable.
Nobody is buying anything. Right? Oh,
wow. I love how Maureen just said you dilute their brand and yours.
And I think that's the part most people don't see coming
because borrowing another brand's identity feels like a shortcut, but it's actually a trap.
You don't inherit their credibility. You just become a knockoff version of them. And consumers who are way smarter than most brands give them credit for, by the way, I feel
they can sense that instantly even when they can't quite put finger on it or name it. Right? Something just seems familiar in a very wrong way. So that way, your trust is gone before it even started.
And I think that's the thing is that, like, the more we put machines between us and the human beings we want to
buy our stuff,
the the less they're gonna trust that we are there.
People don't wanna buy from machines. They wanna buy from humans.
You know, like,
nobody wants to buy
maybe somebody wants to buy them, but by and large, nobody wants to buy cosmetics that are touted by an AI robot to fix their skin. It's very clear that that person is not a real person.
And
I think that we all need to remember that while that
iteration part is possible and while that, you know, conceptual testing part might be meaningful,
human beings aren't gonna connect with that.
It's just not gonna work in the same way that human beings look at human beings.
If I had to push back on that,
I think
we're very close to the edge of the uncanny valley effect
where,
the AI systems
that are available now could make something
real enough
that other people on the Internet can't tell the difference with video or something that's on a phone. That's small enough, that it's high resolution enough,
the voices are good enough, or they're recorded by a person behind the scenes or voice cloned or something. So I think we're pretty much there. By the end of the year, we'll be there.
These systems are essentially doubling in power every seven months. So Seed Dream is the top video
producing agent right now. It came out about a month ago. So six months from now, something better than that is gonna be out.
And it is borderline.
You can't tell. So
but what I think, though,
is that in the hands of somebody who has
a well developed brand, that tool will work.
In the hands of somebody who has a stolen brand or a mishmash
of
just crap that they threw together because they don't know what they're doing,
that tool will not do well. Totally.
I think that if you have a really solid
foundation
that was made by humans for humans, and you are really clear on the exact parameters with which you
release that to the world,
then I think that AI generated content probably will work
for you.
But if your brand foundation
is built using AI, if
every piece of this this string is AI
generated,
at least 60% plus AI generated,
you're not gonna be able to grab audiences the way that people using people and who have people in the mix
in a more meaningful way are able to do.
I think a lot of it also depends
on the type of product or service.
But, yeah, like, if it's
booking an airline ticket or something, maybe I'd rather talk to the machine.
You know? Just get it done. Right? Fair enough. It might be more efficient. Yeah. There's a lot of there's a lot of things where what you want is efficiency, and I think that's
where efficiency matters. If I need
the windshield
wipers for a 2011
Honda CRV,
I don't really need to have a conversation with a human.
Okay. Honestly, I'm so glad Matt mentioned that because
working in strategy at a marketing agency, I've just realized that not every customer moment needs to be a deeply resonant human experience.
Sometimes people just need their windshield wipers, and they just need restoration services because their basement is flooding, and it's flooding now.
So the skill is knowing which moments in your customer journey
actually call for the human touch and protecting those.
Let AI handle the vipers and save the humans for the moments that actually change how someone feels about your brand.
Yeah. Completely.
Completely. I think that there's so much that we
can see the use for tools like this, especially in when we talk about people who aren't in the marketing
in AI universe and who aren't inundated with this content every day and thinking about how we can use AI and how AI is maybe or maybe not taking our jobs.
If we're not those people, if we're just, you know,
people in the world living our lives who work at coffee shops or who, you know, sell us groceries or drive the taxis.
AI, I think, has a real utility
in the operational processes
of organizations
to, as you said,
expedite customer service issues,
make sure people have the right product for the right challenge,
make sure we're not stuck on hold endlessly waiting for a government employee to come back from their lunch break. I think that AI has so much use there, and it has so much use
integrated into the underlying systems
that
cause friction and that cause bottlenecks and that
cause the the endless queue of the human experience. I think we're gonna see a lot of that. I think that's true for a lot of things.
What's happening a lot
in the AI automation robotic space and the full self driving space is stuff that's behind the scenes that you don't see. I mean, this has been going on for decades anyway. When you get a commercial, let's say it's for milk,
and the milk company puts out a commercial and you see a farmer, and he's got, like, wheat sticking out of his teeth, and he's on a tractor, and he's got old Betsy behind him, the cow, or whatever. That's not where your milk comes from. That's the the commercial. And in reality,
it's robots and automatic self driving vehicles and fulfillment centers with thousand robots in it.
Yeah. That's the world we live in. Right?
Ever since the soap opera where they designed
those shows to sell soap. Right? Hence, the name soap opera so they could sell laundry detergent to the housewives who are at home because that's what used to happen in the fifties.
So, yeah, unless your brand is a humanized brand where behind the scenes is human driven,
then you should be showing that and not using the AI version.
Absolutely.
I mean, AI has existed
forever.
AI has been serving us up related Netflix content
forever. I mean, not ever, but a long time. Yeah. You know? Twenty years, anyway. For twenty years. And so understanding
that we are at the
behest or at the manipulation of an algorithm
and recognizing that that's this is not new
and that these processes will continue to
make our life to to refine the user experience of our lives
is
in it's inevitable.
These these machines,
the AI will continue to refine
those user experiences.
But
having that be the thing that's in front of people and that they're they're visually
brought into the brand with
is trickier.
It is trickier to sell with AI and to create authenticity with AI
than it is to
make the product and support the product and create operational efficiency and,
you know,
bring up related products and create user flows that cause people to buy more or
subscribe or whatever.
It's easier to layer it in subtly
than it is to bring it up front
and show it to everybody.
Right. One interesting
thing in regard to kind of the refinement
of algorithmic systems
is I was explaining how predictive advertising works to my mom once.
And
my mom's got a PhD in anthropology.
She's well versed in culture and things. And this is ten years ago, Google Ads. They were already predictive back then.
And, actually, the exact story was that somebody had commented to one of my clients who's a defense attorney that they started getting ads for a DUI attorney before they got a DUI for driving while being impaired.
Oh my goodness. And the reason that that happens is
the system knows by your phone where you are, so it knows that you're at the bar. It knows you're there late at night. It knows you then get into a vehicle because it knows how fast you're traveling, and it knows it goes back to your house, and it knows you didn't call a taxi.
Totally.
These are signals to the system that any company will never admit that they are collecting,
that those signals go into a data system,
and that anonymized
data says if these signals all match, these are people who are likely to hire a divorce or a DUI attorney in the future,
so we should show them ads in advance.
Well That's how the predictive system works. Right? It's it's honestly, it's just collecting a bunch of data, correlating it to an outcome. Okay. So this DUI attorney story gets me every single time because
no search query, no obvious red flag, just behavior
dots connected
silently in the background.
There you were, how late,
how you got home,
and the system made a bet on your future,
and it was right.
I love the point Matt's mom made because it's just so honest. You possibly cannot outthink a system running on that much data. So
stop trying to beat the algorithm and start making sure that when it points someone toward you,
what they land on is real, consistent,
and worth trusting.
And I think that's the only move that actually works. And my mom, she's like, humans don't really have a chance
against these systems. Like, they just don't.
And she doesn't mean that they're gonna kill you or something. Many people will be
basically
driven to purchase or make purchasing decisions
or as we see more recently,
the behest of misinformation
and things like politics stuff like that.
The system is so good at feeding you
the things that will make you take action that
it's almost impossible to see around it.
And I don't think it's necessarily a good thing,
obviously,
but it's also not necessarily a bad thing in all ways.
There's lots of things that people should do that they would not have taken action on to do themselves. We are fed so much more information
than we ever have been before. The information
overload
of the of existence in 2026 is
pretty incredible.
And
decisions we have always made decisions based on whatever information we have at hand. That's how people make decisions.
And so when you add, like, a 400%
gain in information,
good or bad,
it informs your decisions.
And
the interesting thing about I mean, the gathering of data informs the information which informs the data again.
Our behavior is
influenced by the information
and also the data that they already gathered on people that are either us or people very like us.
So
we are being pushed through this very prescribed system, and you're right. It's very hard to
be an outlier.
It's very hard to break out of that system, do something unexpected,
not connect with it.
It's unavoidable.
Every company is competing for every spot in every place, whether that's a social media post,
whether it's the auction that goes on behind the scenes for, like, a Google ad or Facebook ad or something,
whether it's reels, it's TikToks,
it's YouTube videos,
it's SEO placements,
all of that stuff is a competition.
And
every one of those competitions,
the largest influencing
factor
to make it cheaper or easier to reach somebody is having a more recognizable brand.
Yeah. I think that that's kind of the thing. What if we're in a world where for the most part, human beings are hopefully starting to fact check almost everything they see. You see something on Instagram,
you see that it's going to solve all your problems,
you go back to Reddit or back to something else and you try to fact check. You try to see what actual customers are saying. Hopefully, are real people. You try to fact check. If
you are a brand who can be fact checked and who is in fact real and who does what they say they will and who puts out something that actually solves a problem problem, sorry, because you
are a human who understands the problem that exists,
then you'll have better luck. Then you'll have a better, more consistent,
more authentic process
through engagement with your brand. And I think that's kind of
hopefully
where we're coming to.
There's so much noise.
If you can cut through all the noise by being human and being authentic,
then you have a better shot at success.
I think personally, you need to focus on unscalable
efforts.
You need to find a way to scale the unscalable,
and that's the way that you get ahead.
That's this is this podcast is an unscalable technology
that works for our brand.
I agree with you except for one thing, which is where I feel like
scaling the unscalable
is actually
that's the thing, is you scale everything else,
and then you protect that unscalable,
beautiful,
messy, authentic piece.
And that's the one thing you don't scale.
Because if you take that one thing, you don't scale it, but it touches all these other scaled aspects.
I think that is
how you make it make sense.
I would say I'd work in b to b,
and I also work in nonprofit. So I work in two sectors that are really different. Mhmm. And in b to b, all leaders are saying, well, we're businesses talking to other businesses. But actually, they're human beings talking to other human beings who also happen to be professional professional people. People.
So really when we get down to it, I don't know that there's a brand in the world who's not selling.
Of course, there are exceptions. Okay. But ultimately,
the human beings are the ones who are making decisions to spend the money.
And I think that taking that unscalable
piece and trickling it through
everything that you've scaled with AI,
that's where the real magic and the real trust and the real authenticity
can still live within a business that grows.
And I think that's important because when we say things like scaling the unscalable, it's it's abstract, but the way you do that is you
put that unscalable bit everywhere
and make it really,
really show up.
And I think that's where you have
something pretty great.
Because if you can differentiate between those two things, if you can decide that AI lives within these pieces of your brand and within your growth,
but it does not touch those things
because those things are human. And that's the one to land on. Scale everything around the human part, but never scale the human part itself.
Find that thing that is irreducibly,
unmistakably
you, and protect it fiercely.
Let it color everything that AI puts out on your behalf.
That is not being anti technology.
That's being strategically,
deliberately human.
And believe me when I say in 2026
and the years to come,
that might genuinely be your biggest competitive advantage.
Speaking of which, here's your homework before the next episode.
I want you to sit down and actually write out your why you, why now.
Not for anyone else, but for yourself.
Because if you can't explain in a few sentences what makes your brand irreplaceably
yours, then that's your starting point,
and no AI can do that part for you.
Once you've got it, then go play with any tools you want.
If this episode got you thinking, go back and check out our episodes with Sabrina Scott and Keith Willis.
And folks, if you're not already following Matt and the show, now's a good time. We're on all the usual platforms, and there's a lot more where this came from.
Alright. This is Mehakanam signing off, and I'll see you all in the next one.
Thank you for joining us on the digital marketing master's podcast today.
If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend and leave us a comment or a review on your favorite podcast platform.
And we shall see you in the next episode.