— Esse Quam Videri
Real AI-generated marketing, graded against Anthropic's 4 D's of AI fluency. REI's backwards handlebars, Skechers on the test bench, and the anatomy of generic. Watch the archive.
Most premium brands freeze between adopting AI too fast and too slow. The House Line is the way out: a simple matrix and four tests that decide what AI absorbs, what it assists, and what stays human, plus the standard AI-touched work must clear before it carries your name.
Luxury's five-year safety binge was the anomaly, not the norm. Four houses, same sans-serif logo, identical beige palette. Bold choices have always been luxury's DNA. Here's what the data says is replacing the blanding era in Q2 2026.
You can spot AI-generated LinkedIn content from across the room. The problem isn't the tool — it's that nobody told it what to sound like. A five-dimension evaluation rubric for diagnosing generic voice, plus how to install it as a Claude skill.
Every company is scrambling to adopt AI for marketing, but they're skipping the foundational step. If you don't have clear brand positioning, AI just makes bad marketing faster. Positioning is the input layer for every AI system — and most companies are feeding it garbage.
Most people treat AI like a blank-slate conversation every time. That's like briefing a new consultant from scratch on every call. Your CLAUDE.md file eliminates that — here's exactly how to set one up.
Most brands don't know what they actually stand for. They know what they say, what they sell, and what their competitors are doing. But the irreducible truth underneath? That's another story. Here's how to excavate it.
The brands that fail with AI aren't the ones afraid of the technology. They're the ones who thought they could optimize their way past a weak foundation. What happens when you automate mediocrity.
Scale without clarity is just noise. The difference between a brand that resonates across every channel and one that fades into the background isn't how much content you produce — it's how crisp your signal is.
If something here struck a chord, I'd love to hear about it. Grab thirty minutes on my calendar and we can talk through what's on your mind — your brand, the AI question, or just the thing that's been bugging you about your category.
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