The hardest job in the room
Ask a strategist what keeps them up at night and plenty will say the brand platform. It’s the thing the whole brand has to live by. Not a rulebook exactly, but a set of guardrails that tells partners, agencies and anyone speaking for the brand what fits and what doesn’t.
The best ones fold an entire company into a handful of words. Just Do It. Think Different. Everything else hangs off them. Getting there is slow, lonely work, and in Dublin it’s often lonelier than it should be. Strategy teams here are small, sometimes one person, sometimes three, and all of them flat out. There’s rarely anyone free to tell you your route is a dead end.
The long list
That’s where AI earns its keep for me. Not by writing the platform. It can’t, not yet. Ask it for three words that capture a brand and you’ll get three words that capture every brand.
What it’s brilliant at is the long list. When I’m circling a territory, I ask it for every word and phrase it can find in that space. Dozens of them. Most are rubbish. That’s fine.
The rubbish is the point.
A playground in the wild
I was working with a national outdoor tourism body. The brand was about the places nature has given us, and using them well. Ditch the nine to five. Get outside. Switch off and be part of something bigger for a while.
I had a half-formed thought that it was a kind of theme park in the wild. Somewhere you escape to. So I built the long list, and there it was. Playground. Sitting among forty other words, doing nothing in particular.
I knew it the second I saw it. That became the platform: Nature’s Playground. I’m still proud of it. I don’t think I’d have got there on my own, and I certainly wouldn’t have got there as quickly.
Getting the bad ideas out
That’s the part people miss. The real value isn’t the good idea. It’s how fast you can burn through the bad ones.
The old way, you’d find out a route didn’t work halfway through, or worse, in the first presentation with the client looking at you. Now I can test a thought before lunch, drop it by two, and be down a better road by the end of the day. AI sharpens my headlines, questions the flow of a deck and pokes holes in a structure. I don’t even type most of it anymore. I talk, and Wispr Flow gets it down at 200 words a minute. Thinking out loud has become literal.
Space to think
None of that is AI thinking for me. It’s AI clearing the ground so I can think properly. It’s a sidekick I can argue with at eleven at night, when there’s no one else left in the building.
The judgement stays mine. Which word lands. Which one is lazy. Which one this brand, this client and this moment actually need.
AI gives me the list. I still have to know the word when I see it.