If This, Then Brand: Landor’s AI Playbook for the Future

WPP’s brand transformation agency, Landor, is rolling out what it calls an “Intelligent Brand System,” a kind of AI-friendly blueprint that codifies brand behavior with if-then logic, data-informed guidelines, and governance structures. This system aims to serve as a real-time decisioning engine for anything from media buys to creative execution, ensuring that a brand’s essence is upheld consistently—even as AI takes the wheel. The rules, once digitized, can be invoked repeatedly in the background of ad production workflows, acting as a safety net that scales with automation.

David Kaganovsky, Landor’s global CTO, emphasizes that the key is interpretability. These aren't just vague mission statements—it’s a structured, standardized dataset filled with dos and don’ts. The agency is building tools to evaluate brand rules against its proprietary taxonomy, ensuring machine-readability and clear communication for both humans and machines. Among the in-house tech tools are “Brand Touchpoint Intelligence,” which scores brand interactions across channels, and the “Knowledge Analyzer,” which scans WPP’s global knowledge base to answer queries without assumptions.

Crucially, Landor’s approach tackles a subtle but serious challenge: AI doesn’t intuit context or nuance like seasoned marketers do. As Matt Kissane from Landor put it, “assumed knowledge is the enemy” in AI-driven marketing. That means explicit rules, no shortcuts. While in the past brand guidelines gathered dust in binders or PDFs, Landor’s agentic systems now allow brands to embed their ethos directly into the creative process. This groundwork echoes broader industry moves, such as Google's new A2A (Agent to Agent) protocol, signaling a near future where bots not only follow brand rules but negotiate and collaborate with each other to do so.

Full story at MediaPost.