Brand and Butter
The straight-talking branding podcast for leaders who refuse to settle.
Brand and Butter delivers no-BS advice on how psychology, strategy, and design create brands that work. Host Tara Ladd, founder of Your One & Only brand design studio, breaks down the real influence and power of branding – how understanding behaviour and cultural shifts can transform how people see, think, and choose.
Sometimes funny, always honest, never dull. This is the podcast that cuts through industry jargon to talk about what actually makes brands stick.
Tara Ladd is the founder of Your One and Only, who design brands that breathe with culture through psychology, strategy, and design.
Brand and Butter
AI Won't Steal Your Creative Job, But People Who Use It Might
Every generation freaks out about new technology, and AI is just our version of the social media panic from 2007. While everyone's losing their minds about robots taking creative jobs, they're missing the real story... our brains literally evolve with technology through neuroplasticity, which means we're not the same humans who thought Facebook was "just a phase."
In this episode, I dive into why fighting tech evolution is like fighting gravity, how I use AI to amplify (not replace) my 18 years of brand experience, and why the creatives who'll completely own it are those who understand that AI is basically the world's most enthusiastic intern - brilliant at execution, hopeless at strategic thinking.
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you're listening to Brandon butter a straight-talking occasionally in your face. No BS branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners. Here for those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and how pairing associations, consumer behavior and design thinking can impact what people say, think and feel. I'm your host, tara Ladd, the sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable and often unapologetically blunt founder and creative director of Brand and Design Agency. Your one and only. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Brand and Butter. So I want to talk to you today about AI. I mean, I've stayed away from this conversation for a really long time, primarily because everyone else is talking about it and I don't want to add to the noise I believe I've had. I don't even know I can't even count how many people just enter my DMs asking about my opinion on AI and where I think it's going.
Speaker 1:And, to be quite frank, I think it was when social media decided to make it onto the scene. It was obviously MySpace and the involvement of that all coming through. But Web 2.0 really hit the scene around that time and this is where we saw a massive shift in the market. Now, even before that, we've had the evolvement of technology. These aren't big things. It's like every single generation experiences some big technological change and we're going to keep experiencing this, but in my opinion, it's just our version of it experiencing this, but in my opinion, it's just our version of it. So we were obviously welcomed to social media advancement with web 2.0, the ability to be able to have a two-way conversation. That previously didn't exist. It was just, like you know, eight bit websites. I mean not so much eight bit, but very much. And then we introduced that ability to converse with each other and, sure enough, it evolved.
Speaker 1:I remember distinctively speaking to adults at that time when I was considered Gen Y, about this is where you know this is just a phase. It's going to, you know, not last. It's something that's just a trend. No, did not happen. And this is the same with AI, and at the time you will see naysayers and people that will oppose what's going to happen with it. And it's like anything.
Speaker 1:I remember reading one of the books on psychology about the way that we think, act and behave, and I'm almost certain it was Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, talking about the invention of plastic. Now we're here and all there about that these days, but at the time, what they were talking about was obviously this new material and people were talking about making houses from plastic and all of these like huge. Remember when parents used to wrap, or grandmothers I should say some great-great grandmothers, depending how old you are used to wrap their furniture in plastic Like these are the things that were taught, were spoken about at that time in regards to that new technology. So there's always these big outlandish things that happen, but there's one thing at the center of it that will always bring everyone back down to be grounded, and that is human behavior. So in order for something to take off, humans need to adopt the technology right now, and obviously everyone's going to at one stage or another. It's just the beginning stages.
Speaker 1:We, as probably business owners and marketers, whoever you are in your space, and maybe just an early adopter the vast majority of people are not using it. You may be stuck in a silo, but I was having conversation with my mom about it the other day and I was like it like drastically reduces timeframe on tedious tasks. So you know, drastically reduces timeframe on tedious tasks. So you know, compiling things into checklists, or I use it so much for my ADHD brain, just as I before. I hit record on this.
Speaker 1:I was generating our content strategy for the next 12 weeks, just planning and mapping it out, and what I do is I create it and then I get really overwhelmed and then I don't execute a lot of it. So, yes, that's even for me, and what I've asked it to do is to simplify it so that I execute it, and it's given me steps. So it's now said. You know, if you aren't on or your brain's not in the time to execute because we all know that some days you have it, some days you don't here is an example of what you can do instead. Or, if you can only produce a certain amount of content per week, make sure it is this, this and this and, just to be sure, execute these backup pieces so that if you don't have time to do anything, you can just post them from the bank. And I was like, of course, that's such a great idea. So what I'm using AI for is a lot of frameworks, a lot of processes and a lot of step-by-step things. However, in order for me to develop these things, I needed pre-existing ideas, pre-existing knowledge, and no one is going to have what I have developed because it's come from my own brain. So when I saw that design was going out I mean, it's not going out, you're always going to need design I wasn't worried. Not even, not even a little bit, not even a little bit. And that's because I don't consider myself to be just an executor. I consider myself to be a creative thinker that can execute, and so with that, it means that my job that I've always done is visual direction, art direction, creative direction, and I'm considering, when I'm prompting AI, that it is the new way to art direct.
Speaker 1:I did a piece yesterday for a well, it was a script that I needed to write and I compiled this prompt with like. It was like a four page prompt. This is how I so much detail, by the way, I asked it to reference a campaign that I thought of. I spoke about the bits that I really liked about it, specifically the emphasis on the climatic part of the piece that I really liked, and wanted to do something similar with my version of something. So then I then fed in my idea the concept that I wanted the beginning, the middle and the end, what I wanted it to generate, the emotion that I wanted it to have. The core statements that are within this are my own words so it helped to just package out the bits around it and then it has then generated this piece that you know out of this world good, and you wouldn't tell.
Speaker 1:And that's where I think it's going, and I think people need to just be not resistant, but what's the right word for it? Just allow that ability to adopt a new technology, adopt a new tool. Design jobs didn't go away when Canva was created. It just allowed us a new thing to be able to use. In my opinion, ai has now enabled me to reduce the tedious tasks and spend more time on the creative thinking, and I think anything that allows me to spend more time in strategic, creative thinking is a winner. On my behalf, I knew that this was going to happen.
Speaker 1:By the way, one thing that you need to consider when you are in your industry is you need to be watching what's happening. So, to be fair, like anyone that's kind of behind the eight ball here should have been on top of this. It's about you, as an expert expert, I put in adverted commas need to be aware of your industry, where it's moving, what's happening, all of the things that are aligning with culture, innovation. I have Google alerts set up for this type of stuff on certain industries and certain things, so that it's telling me what's happening, what's coming out, the new things, the involvement, research, all of these things so that I can just be across it. It's so important to be across it because it gives you the ability to pre-plan, pre-plan what could happen, pre-plan or even just sharing that knowledge with people gives you the ability to showcase that you're an authority on that space because you know about it.
Speaker 1:I remember when I spoke about the Triple J rebrand, the reason that that entered my inbox was because I had a Google alert set out and it came in from the advertising agency or the branding agency's website itself, and it let me know that this case study was available and, to be honest, I thought it was freaking incredible. I did a whole podcast on it, but and you should go back and listen to that because it talks about the involvement it's kind of aligned really. I spoke about that. I spoke about that on Instagram, I spoke about that on LinkedIn and both posts blew up because no one had seen it yet and I was simply giving my opinion on it, and it blew up because no one had seen the Triple J rebrand, so they were using my data to be able to share the Triple J data, so it was like a value stack, and so I think that people really miss the mark when they're talking about their industry and doom and gloom.
Speaker 1:And why would you use AI? Like, just get over it? In my opinion, yes, but there's shit all you can do about it. So what are you going to do? Instead of being reactive, be proactive. Let's step up. What are we going to do about it?
Speaker 1:In my opinion, sure, it can take away my ability to write or to well, not my ability to write. You're always going to have the ability to write, but at the moment, ai just cannot execute the visuals that I have in my head. It just can't. So you know. But it does help you to do a whole lot of other things that are tedious, like retouching oh my gosh. Like retouching took me hours. Now you can just like bang, retouch, and even then it's still shifty. You still have to retouch some areas.
Speaker 1:But you know it's going to be obvious, and I've seen the conversation start to shift already, and I pegged this two years ago and I'll come back to what I was saying about. I knew that this would happen. This happens with every trend, with everything in the history of ever. It's a trend. Ai won't be a trend. It'll be something that we evolve, but the way that we well, I guess adopt that technology always starts off as a trend. So everyone's jumping all over it, everyone's using it, and then it becomes very obvious who is using it and who is not using it, especially when and I take that back if you are strategic in the way that you use it and you are very clever, you will likely benefit from this really well. So it's like the strategy or the thinking mixed with the tool. You will create something amazing. It's like a veteran with a newbie the newbie isn't going to know past experiences, it's not going to know all of these things that you just would run into, and therefore you're going to eliminate all of these potential issues that come along.
Speaker 1:Had an issue with a client recently well, not my client, but a lead that had come through and had to completely redo all of their branding because they had come up with a name and, unfortunately, that name was taken. And now this is something that we would already know. Before we even start designing any logo, any branded material. We ask if they have the rights to that, because there's no point spending thousands of dollars on something that you're then going to have to redesign. And so it was just the basic knowledge of knowing that you can't just create a name. There needs. You have to check your industry, there's a trademark search, there's intellectual property. Years in the game will tell you all of these little micro things that you need to be aware of.
Speaker 1:Accc, if you're in Australia, which is the you know um, consumer commission, blah, blah, blah, australian, you know what I mean. Um, and they basically check the, the rights that you can like, your t's and c's and and what you can and can't do, so you're not screwing over or misleading the consumer. Essentially so, understanding the laws, those things like minimum tech sizes, what you can do, what the claims that you can make, like you can't just go around and say, oh, I, I'm the best product business in Australia. They'll be like prove it. And if you can't prove it, you will get sued. So it's. You need to know these things and this is why I'm like look, ai can be good in some instances, but it also misses the mark and I've pegged it a million times.
Speaker 1:For instance, I tried to use it just to see if I could cheat to get some color codes, and I asked it to transfer some PMS color Pantones into CMYK color values. So, put simply for those people that don't understand what the hell that was, when you have colors and you're making branded colors, you use the Pantone matching system, which is the exact color match, and then you create a CMYK value of that which is a cyan, magenta, yellow, black, which is what every printer usually uses. It's the, you know, the overlay of cyan, magenta, yellow and black in an inkjet, or you know digital printer that overlays to make the colors, and so they will. There will be slight discrepancies there, but majority of people will use CMYK. When I asked AI if it could create those codes for me, they were so wrong and I was like God. So there's still some manual things that you will need to do, but my concern is that people are just using it in, you know, thinking that it's all correct, and then boom, you know there's an issue. So what I honestly believe is going to happen is that you're going to see the rise of true creativity, the true rise of experience, and it's going to eliminate a whole middle market, those that I mean.
Speaker 1:We look at Canva. People like used to shit on Canva about. You know, creating, in my opinion, like Canva is always like funny we used to take the piss about it as well but essentially it's just a tool. If you can create something that's really amazing in Canva and it still executes the same way, go for gold. There's obviously limitations in Canva as well. Like when you're doing like large format prints, you need to be able to have certain assets that you and information that you just can't access in Canva. You need to have Adobe to do that. So, yeah, there are limitations of what you can and can't do, obviously, but as we move on and as the program and tech advances, like there'll be more and more involved in that.
Speaker 1:But we can't sit back. If you're a creative, you can't sit back and just be like well, I don't want to take this on board, this is stupid. I'm just going to keep drawing Great. Do that. However, you will be the blockbuster like the Netflix camera, like what is it? The Kodak camera went out of business Kodak itself, I should say. They went out of business and they developed the digital camera themselves. Like they literally took themselves out of business because they thought that the film industry would just never go anywhere.
Speaker 1:This is the thing stagnation. We're in a really crucial time at the moment. I don't think a lot of people realize I keep harping on about this, but it's a pivotal moment in history in terms of societal changes, behavioral changes, technological changes, and they're all crossing over, very similar to the GFC. So if we look at this pattern, we're going back to the GFC huge, like financial crisis. Most of the world took a tank, except Australia, which somehow managed to kind of stay in the reins there, but still a lot of businesses really took a hit there. And what we saw there was innovation like Uber, airbnb, all of these, like the rise of all these brands. I think it was like Instagram and that boosted in that time as well. So we saw innovation happen in this space.
Speaker 1:It's almost like people need to understand that at the very core of the evolvement of technology is behavioral shifting. It's people behavior, and so you know, at the end of the day, humans need to adopt the technology you can tell everyone to go and use. Remember the QR code. I keep bringing this up as an example. We were putting QR codes on catalogs when I was in my agency 10 years prior to anything taking off. No one used them, no one knew how to use them because the phones didn't have the, you know. Take a photo and it opens up the QR. That just didn't exist, so you had to download an app and you had to do all these things.
Speaker 1:And the moment that the technology improved across smartphones and made it easier for people to use and obviously we had a worldwide pandemic, which made the technology really useful, we saw the technology be adopted, and so sometimes it's that people haven't evolved to it yet or it takes that time for it to, you know, for the wider community to actually adopt this. And that's the tipping point. It's the bell curve early adopters, you know, rising up, the mass, the mass market take on and then it, you know, falls off. We saw this with the rise curve early adopters, you know, rising up, the mass, the mass market take on and then it, you know, falls off. We saw this with the rise of, you know, reels, for instance, video marketing, you know. Everyone that knew how to do it at the beginning got a big push and then all of a sudden, everyone knows how to do it now not so popular, and so we see these rise and falls within business all the time.
Speaker 1:But at the very bottom, the very bottom of all of that is strategic foundations who you are, what you do, what you're about, who you're here for. All of the things above that are tactics what you're using, you know the platforms that you're on. Tomorrow, instagram could die on the ass. What you are, who you are about, like you know who you are, what you do, what you're about, who you're here for. It doesn't change just because Instagram dies out. What dies out is where you would then execute it now, and this is the thing that people don't understand. It's all about positioning memory. It's all about the way people can remember you, how they perceive you. It's all about audience and behavior, and that's why, two years ago I'll come back to this, it's like the third time I've Because I knew at the beginning, beginning phases, when they started to launch AI, I said people are going to hate this or people are going to go all in on this.
Speaker 1:And what's the opposing to? You know, human versus machine Human. So if everyone goes to machine, people then gravitate to human. So what you're going to see? Rise of community in-person experiences. You know people getting together, sharing experiences that aren't digitized. We have basically been inundated with what happened during COVID. Everyone was like immersed with, like online stuff. They basically read the whole internet, and so now people are craving that connection, and we're seeing this happen through online spaces. It's also bad. In the manosphere that they will all claim about, you know, there's negative things that people can be sucked into, and so we're really seeing the negative effects of this as well. So there is both good and bad.
Speaker 1:But what I would say to any creative out there is just you need to be aware of what's happening in your space. Any industry needs to be aware of what's happening in your space. Any industry needs to be aware of what's happening in this space, because if you think that what you're doing will never change, I've got news for you. It doesn't matter what you do. It does not matter what you do. All I would say is just keep an eye on it. It might come later, but coming back to it is that, yeah, humans need to adopt it. They need to adopt the technology, they need to want to use it.
Speaker 1:But also, the thing that people aren't talking about is, with the evolvement of technology is the evolvement of the human brain. It's called neuroplasticity. If you were to bring someone back to life from 100 years ago, they would not know what the hell they were doing in this timeframe. They would be so overwhelmed. We have phones, we have internet, we have digital TV. All of these things would be so foreign to them that it just would blow their mind.
Speaker 1:So you need to now look at where we are in our time frame and go back to how we've naturally progressed and evolved, and that same thing is going to happen across the board. So it's evolving with the human brain. So how do people now respond to it? What are they using it for? What are they? There's always going to be a seesaw. Too far one way, not enough. The left. You know what's the just right, where are, where are we looking and what is the just right? So I would like to challenge anyone that would be looking at this like I mean.
Speaker 1:Look to be fair, it's sad that that evolvement of design is here, but it doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Like human design is always and human design is in. Like art, design creative is always going to be something people want. There are always going to be. That's why we still see canvases in people's houses versus prints. You are still seeing people print things versus put things online. It's not going to knock out the industry, but it really will amplify those that can use it well and those that know how to jump the gun.
Speaker 1:So, if you can learn how to use it, if you're a creative, learn how to use it, not even just a creative. If you're someone that is just use AI, use it, figure it out. I have got it, creating me so many different frameworks. It's not about how I execute, it's not about how I think, but it's more about stitching those two things together. Like I said at the beginning, I can get really overwhelmed with things and be like I could create the best strategy and then I'd be like, oh shit, how do I now execute this? Because I've just overdone it and it's just about creating that nuance. You're understanding the nuance of where you can use it for the beginning stages and embedding your own knowledge into it, but also be careful of where you're using it, what the terms and conditions are of the platform that you're on. I'm using grounded AI, which means that you know it doesn't share your stuff, but also just be very cautious of you know how you can make things faster.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, the metric that people cannot buy is time. You cannot buy time. Well, actually that's a lie. You cannot get time time back, but you can buy time. That's what I meant to say. So you know like I will. I have cleaners that come to my house every fortnight. Jenny and Jason shout out app and cleaning and they clean my house for me every fortnight. I pay them and they literally just completely clean my house and I feel so good about it would take me hours to do that, and what that actually means is that I can spend those five hours that I probably would have spent doing it myself with my kids, so I can work and then I can play, and you know that means that I'm privileged enough to be able to do that, and that's that's more.
Speaker 1:The freedoms that I have in my business is having the ability to do those things, so AI can create you that ability too. So I would be looking more for how you can stay ahead of the game, understanding how to use it for research and data analysis, being very careful with how it's sourcing data, like make sure that you're getting, like fact checking, everything. You know, we all know where disinformation leads the world. So it's very, very important. But am I concerned that AI will overtake creativity? No, because at the end of the day, ai is built from pre-existing things that have already happened and innovation comes from new ideas. So, you know, get creative with it, see how you can map things out, and you, we will always. The human brain always evolves, it always adapts and we're just seeing the new era of where we're heading. So, yeah, I think, when we're looking at um, at ai, don't be, don't be all doom and gloom about it, but think about how you can use it to enhance what you're already doing, instead of being concerned about it.
Speaker 1:And as my lecturer said, like I mentioned before when I was in uni, he said to me expand horizontally, not vertically. You know, now I have the ability and so many, I have so many different side things. I can move into web design. I can move into print design. I can do all these different areas and you know design. I can move into print design. I can do all these different areas and you know strategy and psychology and data analysis, that I've got this huge big repertoire because I've studied all of that my whole life and you know value stacked. So all of those things are now jumping on top of each other. So I think we're designed to evolve with technology.
Speaker 1:Learn how humans are adopting it. See what the trends are that people are using. Don't jump on board the same shit that everyone is talking about. If I see another freaking person talk about freaking M-Dash on LinkedIn, I'm going to lose my mind. Even if they're complaining about people talking about the M-Dash, you're still keeping that dumb conversation going. Like, just talk about something better. Like, have conversations that are meaningful. Have conversations that are truthful. Use it for the good, not the worst. Train it, you know, if we're going to have the ability to use something like this in the future. Know that it also has behaviors. Reshape the behaviors that suck.
Speaker 1:Now. I've been very much using it for our diversity, equity and inclusion, making sure that I'm asking the right question, calling out the bias in the way that I would ask things and calling out the biases in the way that it responds to things, and I think that that is something that we also need to consider. So, yeah, just figure out what the why behind your creative decisions are, or the why behind why you're doing things are, and don't outsource your thinking, but outsource the execution of the tedious tasks that you know you otherwise would throw to someone else to do. It's just a really good way for people to be able to systemize and, yeah, I'm just a bit excited about where things going are going and um, really understanding that, uh, the brands that will win will be those that understand people. So if I could say anything to anyone out there that works in communication, it would be to learn people. So that's it for today.
Speaker 1:I hope you liked it and, of course, if you have a question like, slip on into my sorry, my squeaky chairs here, and if you can hear that um, slip on into my dms and we can have a chat about it. Until then, I will chat to you next time. Did you like that episode? I hope so, because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you listen on and rate and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at. You want to know? Only underscore au on instagram.
