Ramon Peralta is Founder and Chief Brand Officer at Peralta Design, a Shelton, Connecticut-based full-service advertising and marketing agency. He’s also a TedX speaker and author of “Launch Your Brand: The Fastest Way to Supercharge Any Business,” a treatise on brand-building that advises that companies maintain build strong digital footprints.
I wanted to touch base with Ramon to talk about branding, rebranding, and naturally, one of the hottest topics in the agency world and beyond: generative AI and its potential role — for better or worse — to disrupt and redefine the creative process.
Ramon has overseen multiple branding and rebranding projects and we dive into what makes a rebrand — often necessary after a merger or acquisition — challenging. We talk about the fact that one must be careful moving too quickly from one presentation to the next, and chat about brands that have failed to deliver on their promises. We converse about the value of .com domain names, the fact that expiring domains are often reclaimed by “hijackers” and the value that different kinds of brands and institutions should place on acquiring a .com address vs. settling for a less desirable TLD type.
We address the elephant in the room: the promise and threat of generative AI systems like ChatGTP, MidJourney, and Dall-E. Ramon is an optimist who believes that agencies and businesses generally cannot afford to hide their heads in the sand vis a vis AI. “I’m in the camp that we must embrace it. It’s there to stay. There are tutorials on TikTok on how you can generate the content in AI, and have it pipe right through to Canva and generate graphics right into your social media feeds without a human touch and all this other stuff. I’ve got staff — my business is set up with fulltime employees, and they’re looking at each other, like, ‘are we going go go the way of the gas station attendant? Are we being replaced?’ And the truth is that we need to embrace it as a tool. The reason we don’t have computers and AI deciding court cases — we have human judges — is because I think there will always be some grey in everything that we do. There are things that AI can do, but it’s not always so black and white.”
While Ramon and I agree that AI must be embraced, it’s clear that some negative effects of making these powerful tools widely available are already being seen. He notes that he’s observed some folks using AI to generate content without proper attribution, and would like to see this practice end.
We close with a discussion of trends that Ramon is excited about for 2023 and beyond.
