Human Centered

Episode Summary: For years, the "segment of one" has been the holy grail of digital marketing. Thanks to AI and programmatic media, brands finally have the technical capability to deliver hyper-personalized content to thousands of micro-audiences at scale. But this incredible power comes with a dark side that few marketers are talking about: the erosion of shared brand identity. When an algorithm serves 10,000 different versions of a brand to 10,000 different people, does that brand still stand for anything collectively?

In Episode 45 of Human-Centered, host Nick Brunker sits down with Chase Howell, Group Director of Content Strategy at VML, to unpack the "Content Consistency Paradox." Chase argues that our obsession with one-to-one marketing is quietly fracturing the cultural, communal moments that build true brand legacy. Iconic campaigns like Coca-Cola's holiday ads or Nike's "Just Do It" work specifically because they represent a shared truth that we all recognize together.

To solve this paradox, Chase explains why the traditional model of brand governance—relying on static brand books and manual approval of individual assets—is completely dead in the age of generative AI. Instead, brands must shift their governance upstream. Marketing teams can no longer police the output; they must learn how to govern the systems, rules, and AI prompts that generate the content.

Chase breaks down his actionable three-layer framework for scaling personalization without losing your brand's soul:
  1. The Core: The non-negotiable essence of the brand that AI is never allowed to touch (like flagship campaigns and cultural tentpoles).
  2. The Adaptive: Content scaled by AI, but tightly governed by human logic and strict channel rules.
  3. The Dynamic: Real-time, automated personalization operating inside a highly controlled sandbox.
The two also discuss the nuances of "deep consistency" versus surface-level consistency, how to translate fuzzy brand adjectives into rigid AI instructions, and the crucial moments when brands should actually say no to personalization to avoid crossing the line into creepy territory. If you are struggling to balance the demand for high-volume content with the need for brand integrity, this episode is a masterclass in modern content strategy.

Timestamped Chapters
  • [00:00] Intro
  • [02:06] Meet Chase Howell: From sports journalism to Group Director of Content Strategy.
  • [03:22] The Content Consistency Paradox: How AI is breaking shared brand experiences.
  • [05:43] The cultural power of the "Campfire Moment" (Coke, Nike, Ford).
  • [08:00] Why traditional brand books and manual creative approvals are dead.
  • [11:00] Surface-level consistency (fonts/colors) vs. deep brand intent.
  • [13:00] The Spotify Wrapped example: Hyper-personalization wrapped in a communal event.
  • [14:28] Translating soft brand adjectives into actionable AI constraints.
  • [16:15] The 3-Layer Content Framework: The Core, The Adaptive, and The Dynamic.
  • [18:50] When to say NO to personalization and the danger of false urgency.
  • [20:40] Applying the 3-Layer framework to modern web strategy and UX.
  • [23:15] Who owns brand integrity in an automated world?
  • [24:25] Rapid Fire: The verdict on automated balls and strikes in baseball.
Links Mentioned in the Episode
Guest Bio: Chase Howell is the Group Director of Content Strategy at VML, leading content strategy for premier clients across the US digital ecosystem. His career is defined by a slow march from "words to systems," beginning as a sports journalist for ESPN and the Cincinnati Enquirer before shifting to data, analytics, and brand marketing. Today, Chase sits at the collision point of brand identity, technology, and personalized customer experiences.

 If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to Human-Centered on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review! Your feedback helps us bring more incredible insights from the top minds in experience strategy.

Creators and Guests

Host
Nick Brunker
Nick is a Forrester CX-Certified professional with a versatile portfolio including more than a decade of discipline in human-centered experience strategy, insight-based digital transformation, eCommerce & omnichannel planning. As part of VMLY&R’s CX practice, Nick is responsible for cultivating a deep understanding of customer motivations and business needs to deliver best-in-class experiences for our clients – and, as importantly, the people they serve. He collaborates with senior leaders to drive strategic alignment, push thinking into action, and helps architect CX measurement frameworks to achieve customer and business objectives. Additionally, he is actively expanding the agency’s industry footprint through thought leadership and IP development. During his career, Nick has partnered with various Fortune 500 clients across numerous categories, including Ford Motor Company, Google, General Mills, Fifth Third Bank, and Southwest Airlines, among others. He and his wife, Abbey, reside in Cincinnati, Ohio, with their children Nolan, Emma & Ainsley, and their ten-year-old pup, Bailey.
CH
Guest
Chase Howell
Group Director, Content Strategy - VML

What is Human Centered?

At VML, it is our unique ability to integrate our BX, CX and Commerce practices - creating connected brands to drive growth - ultimately combining real customer benefits with a deep brand bond, consistently pushing to exceed customer expectations and deliver unique and generous experiences.

On Human Centered, we explore how brands – both large and small – are creating meaningful customer experiences, and discuss how professionals like you can tap into industry best practices to create value and gain traction in transforming your business.

Nick Brunker:

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Human Centered. I'm Nick Brunker, managing director of experience strategy at VML and your host for the show. We talk a lot on the show about the segment of one, the holy grail where every customer gets exactly what they want right when they need it. If I'm in Chicago in January, I want my favorite retailer to show me parkas, not swim trunks. If I'm a loyal coffee drinker, which I am, I want my app to know my order.

Nick Brunker:

We know AI makes this technically possible at a massive scale, and it continues to get better and better each day. But there's a dark side to this capability that we really haven't discussed enough. If a brand speaks differently to 10,000 different micro audiences, does it really even stand for anything anymore, or does it just dissolve into a mirror reflecting whatever the algorithm thinks that we wanna see? Today, we are tackling what we're calling the content consistency paradox.

Chase Howell:

How to

Nick Brunker:

use AI to get closer to your customer without actually fracturing the brand identity that made them like you in the first place. Joining me today to talk about this is Chase Howell, who is the author of a provocative new piece that you'll be able to read at vml.com entitled the content consistency paradox, scaling personalization without fracturing your brand. Chase, really excited to have you on the show. Before we get to business, I know we're recording this in March, so we've already shifted to March madness in basketball. But I have to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

Nick Brunker:

It is a championship year for your Indiana Hoosiers. They are officially college football national champions. How in the world did that feel as somebody who is coming from Miami University, another school that's not very good at football, to actually be able to claim victory as a national title winner?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. I still have to pinch myself to make sure it's real. So I went to IU for grad school, and I have been an absolute lifelong Hoosiers fan. This very much feels like watching a fairy tale come to life. But definitely, Worth, I wanna call out, I think, for the record Okay.

Chase Howell:

The last undefeated team in both college basketball and college football is the Indiana Hoosiers. So that is a sentence I never thought I'd get to say out loud. Pretty cool stuff for sure.

Nick Brunker:

Now I don't wanna bring you back down to earth, but I I honestly haven't been following the brackets. Normally, I do. And you are you're a sports guy just like I am. Is Indiana in the the dance this year, or are they not?

Chase Howell:

Well, we don't have to focus on the here and now necessarily. We're talking about the the past, and we'll just we'll just together celebrate your red hawks who are on a very special run of their own right now. So they're are. Thirty two and one. And as of recording right now, they play later this afternoon in their their second game of the tournament.

Nick Brunker:

Well, out of the chute, we've established that we are both big sports guys. For our listeners who might be meeting you or hearing your voice for the first time, I wanna give you the floor. Give us the sixty second version of your background, what you do at VML, the path that you take and have taken to end up here talking about content strategy, brand governance, and the intersection of both.

Chase Howell:

For sure. Just I'll give you the full overview. So I like to joke that my career has been very much a slow march from words to systems. So I started out actually as a sports journalist writing for outlets like ESPN and locally here, the Cincinnati Inquirer. That very much taught me how much story and point of view, matter if you want people to care.

Chase Howell:

So from there, I moved into the agency and brand side of marketing, eventually running marketing and comms at a data and analytics company that worked very closely with Google. In that role, I very much just got obsessed with how technology actually changes what brands can do. And then less than a year ago, I joined VML as a group director of content strategy. And today, I lead content strat for one of our premier clients, Ford, across their US digital ecosystem. That puts me right at the collision point really between, again, brand, technology, and what we're gonna talk about quite a bit today, personalization.

Nick Brunker:

And and you've been watching brands, the ones that you've led and even just ones that you've covered, navigate this content explosion, content factories, and all that that good jazz. In the piece that you wrote, which again, for listeners, we'll link on our podcast show notes page. The more you personalize, the easier it is to fracture your brand identity. That goes against the grain of the last five years of marketing advice because everything content is king. What was the specific moment or observation that made you realize, well, hold on a second.

Nick Brunker:

We might be breaking these brands by trying to fix them.

Chase Howell:

Yeah. That's a good question. There honestly wasn't one single grandiose moment or, let's say, like, a faux pas that caught my attention. It was definitely a pattern that I started seeing across a lot of really sophisticated brands. So, you know, I'd sit in meetings where, okay, one team is showing data proving that sustainability messaging works best for one audience, and, let's say another team was showing that power and performance work best for a different audience.

Chase Howell:

And in this hypothetical scenario, a third was optimizing around family safety, and honestly, every one of those teams was right in their own way. But then you look at the actual customer journey and recognize that, okay, a real person doesn't live in one segment. Right? They move. They research on one device.

Chase Howell:

They buy on another. They talk to their friends. They see ads in the real world. And suddenly, that same brand, feels like it has all these multiple personalities. So that's kinda when it clicked.

Chase Howell:

So if we're not careful, you know, brands aren't just personalizing. They're actually slowly eroding what I would call that shared idea of what the brand actually stands for. Once that happens, you know, you don't have a brand anymore. You have a very efficient content machine, but not so much a brand.

Nick Brunker:

Yeah. And when you were writing the piece, the other thing that that struck me was the idea of these communal experiences. Brands are communal experiences like Coke's holiday ads, which, you know, continue to resonate every year because we all get the reference. If I see a version of it, and you mentioned, you know, of Ford that that emphasizes safety, my neighbor sees a version that emphasizes speed. Have we lost the cultural moment?

Nick Brunker:

And how dangerous is it to lose that shared truth where you see an ad and you're like, I completely resonate with that, and everybody can resonate with that.

Chase Howell:

Yeah. So you touched on the danger right there. So brands don't live inside algorithms. They live in this collective culture. So you you mentioned Coke's holiday ads.

Chase Howell:

I'll say Nike's Just Do It or something like Build For Tough.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

Those work because we all recognize them. They give us a shared language when talking about these brands. In the article, I call these the campfire moments. These are big shared brand experiences that people gather around. So think like these flagship campaigns or cultural tent poles.

Chase Howell:

Those aren't things you personalize.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

Their whole job is to create a shared signal. Now the risk with hyper personalization is that it quietly breaks that shared truth. So if I'm being shown a version of a brand that to go back to our example a while ago, all about sustainability, and you're seeing one that's all about luxury, and someone else is seeing one that's all about low price, we might all like what we're seeing, but we're no longer talking about the same thing. That becomes dangerous because brands get their power from being social.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

So we talk about them. We reference them. We make jokes about them. If everyone has seen a completely different version, you just don't lose consistency. You actually lose, like, that cultural gravity.

Chase Howell:

So personalization can make a brand more relevant to, say, me. But if you don't manage it carefully, it can also make the brand disappear as something we all share.

Nick Brunker:

Yeah. And I think what's really tricky these days is the fact that in a good way, we've gotten very technically savvy with being able to create and deploy assets at scale automatically, programmatically. Yep. And you think about the old days where you have brand books and hex codes and logos and how much logo space you need to have and tone of voice, all those things still exist. And what I I also really like is in the piece you argue that the traditional model of approving an asset is is dead, especially as I go back to the idea of programmatic ads, thousands of variations, and, you know, the quote unquote brand police can't manually patrol the beat anymore because the beat is way too big and it's at scale.

Nick Brunker:

And and again, with all the automation technology that's in play now, there's no way a single human or even a set of humans could ever do this manually. So how do you talk about and think about the world we're in right now where there is so much automation yet trying to get things consistent is the name of the game? And

Chase Howell:

that's hard. Yeah. The real issue is that most brand governance, honestly, was designed for a totally different era. So, you know, you've just mentioned brand books. Those made sense when you were running a handful of campaigns a year.

Chase Howell:

You're producing a finite number of assets that could all be annually approved. That model just doesn't scale, quite frankly, to the world where content is being generated continuously. So today, I know we all know programmatic media spins up thousands of variations, And then you've got email. You got on-site experiences. You have social content all changing in real time.

Chase Howell:

You can't approve everything. And trying to actually gives you the illusion of control without actually protecting the brand. So, what replaces that manual approval is a shift upstream. So instead of approving individual assets, brands have to govern the system that creates them. That means defining the rules, constraints, and the decision logic well ahead of time.

Chase Howell:

These are the things that AI is never allowed to violate and then letting the content operate operate, excuse me, inside those boundaries. So that's how you govern an infinite content supply chain. Humans protect the meaning and the intent of the brand and then team up with AI, which can handle the scale.

Nick Brunker:

And I think that plays nicely into the next theme we were gonna talk about, which is having some resonance with consistency and distinguishing between something that's that is at its level, surface level, very consistent across any touch point, the colors, the logos, those things are gonna you know, you think of even something like Coca Cola, the Coca Cola red or the Ford blue. Like there there are things that are very obviously gonna be at surface level always consistent and true. And and deep consistency, which are more like values and intent. So it may not be this singular asset gets approved or this singular message is correct. It's, again, a different level in a different layer.

Nick Brunker:

And I think you started to explain the difference. How can a piece of content have the right logo and the right font, but still feel completely off brand?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. That's a a great question. So service level consistency is I don't wanna oversimplify the the easier part. So like you just said, logos, colors, fonts, templates, and that stuff matters very much. But deep consistency is about intent.

Chase Howell:

It's the point of view behind the message. You can follow the exact same visual system and still feel off if the content isn't coming from the same place emotionally. So that's why you can see something as a consumer that looks right and still think, that doesn't feel like them. The brand didn't break visually necessarily, but it broke at a deeper level. So in a world where AI can perfectly replicate, again, those surface elements, protecting that deeper consistency is where I think the real work is.

Nick Brunker:

There's an example that you had in the piece that really struck me, and that is back in the holidays, early towards the end of every year, the Spotify wrapped, and you talked about that as a gold standard. There's millions of unique variations, but it it always continues to feel maybe this is why it resonates universally Spotify. It's something that they own, and it is unique by definition, but it's also very holistically something that they can hang their hat on it. That's a Spotify thing. I know it.

Nick Brunker:

I recognize it. Break that down for us. Why does that work? How do they manage to be hyper personal, but still create a shared cultural event that everyone posts every year on Instagram? It gets blasted everywhere on every social channel beyond Instagram too.

Nick Brunker:

Take us through that a little bit.

Chase Howell:

Yeah. Spotify Wrapped works because it's personalized inside a very strong point of view. So every Wrapt is different, but the intent is always the same. We see you, music is personal, and your taste is worth celebrating. That idea never changes.

Chase Howell:

So the tone is very playful. The framing is, let's say, generous, not salesy, and the experience always rolls up into a shared cultural moment at the same time every year. So even though the data is hyper individual, the meaning of Spotify Wrap is communal. So people don't just consume their wraps. They post it.

Chase Howell:

They compare it. They joke about it. It becomes, again, this cultural moment. And I think that's the lesson for marketers, advertisers to take away. Personalization doesn't fracture the brand when the brand truth is doing the organizing.

Chase Howell:

Spotify isn't letting the algorithm decide what the experience means. It's using the algorithm to express something that already believes.

Nick Brunker:

So I have to ask, Spotify, what was on your wrapped list? What was at the top? Like, were you are you a t swift fan? I'm I'm sure you are.

Chase Howell:

No. But we definitely share nothing against Taylor Swift by any means. We definitely share our Spotify account in our household. So between my wife and

Nick Brunker:

my kids,

Chase Howell:

it's it's got, you know, the power rangers theme song is definitely up there as well as a a lot of country music. So, yeah, it's it's a interesting mix that we have going at the moment. No. Since you've power

Nick Brunker:

you've got power rangers in there. You're you're dadding you're dadding correctly. I I don't I don't care what anybody says. I would have never expected that. But, hey, love that it's still making a comeback or at least it's it's consistent for you.

Nick Brunker:

That's awesome. One of the things that I I find really tricky in personalization land is that we are now in a world where for for all the best reasons, we're leveraging AI, large language models, agents, and agentic AI in totality to help our teams, our strategists, and ultimately the clients that we serve. And if you're listening and you work as, on the client side, your teams are probably feeling this way too. How do you find that balance between I have to tell the machine that I need you to be authentic, and authentic means these things for us. This is what we stand for.

Nick Brunker:

I found it's a huge challenge to actually translate that and that's more of like a soft fuzzy, you know, feel good sort of authenticity, warmth. How do you get to translate that into a prompt that AI can actually execute on?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. This is a very difficult question. And honestly, I think this is where brands get tripped up because like you said, we're used to describing ourselves in adjectives. We'll say things like be authentic or be warm be warm. And that works fine when a human being is writing a copy, but an algorithm doesn't know what we want it to do with that.

Chase Howell:

It actually needs more instructions.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

So the shift is to stop defining the brand by how it sounds and start defining it by how it decides. So instead of, let's say, be helpful, you give guidance like when there's a trade off, prioritize clarity over cleverness. Or instead of, again, saying be human, you might say don't use urgency unless it's actually true. You're basically teaching AI what the brand would do in a gray area. So you're not you're not asking it to you're not asking it to feel authentic.

Chase Howell:

You're giving it rules that consistently produce authentic outcomes. Once you make that shift, I think AI stops being a risk to the brand and actually starts becoming a way to express the brand more consistently at scale.

Nick Brunker:

Alright. Shifting to the the next theme, and, you know, there's something that you had written in here called the three layer framework. And I'd love for you to kinda take us through each layer individually. But to kinda set the scene, the solution you proposed is you don't personalize, but rather organize differently. And you kinda touched on some of those in the last few minutes.

Nick Brunker:

But you set up those three layers as the core, layer one, the adaptive, the second layer, and the third layer being the dynamic. Layer one being the core, what are the things that AI is absolutely never allowed to touch?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. So layer one, like you said, is the core. It's it's the soul of the brand. So positioning, voice principles, key messages. It also includes, what, you know, I referred to earlier as campfire moments.

Chase Howell:

So your big shared brand expressions like flagship campaigns or cultural tent poles. Those are not candidates for personalization.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

Humans own that completely, and AI does not get to touch it.

Nick Brunker:

The second layer, the adaptive. This seems like the sweet spot. How does AI assisted differ from AI driven?

Chase Howell:

Layer two, this is where most campaign content lives. So humans define the concept and the logic, and then AI helps scale it responsibly across audience and channels. And I think it's very important here. Channel context matters. What works on your website or email is very different from TV or social.

Chase Howell:

So the logic here in layer two has to adapt to that.

Nick Brunker:

In layer three, this is where we talk, I'm assuming, real time in action changes are happening at, you know, half second, if not less less than half second scale. If humans aren't approving these assets, what are the guardrails?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. In layer three, I mean, this is where that real time personalization is happening. So things like subject lines, product recommendations, dynamic creatives. Like you just said, humans aren't approving every execution

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

But they're setting the boundaries and watching for Drift. So we set clear limits on things like tone, claims, urgency, how personal the message can get, and then the system operates within that sandbox.

Nick Brunker:

One of the other things you mentioned that sometimes by following this framework, you might have to say no even when the data says yes. It's an interesting paradigm, and I'm sure it gives performance marketers hives when they think about something like that. Give us an example of when a brand shouldn't personalize even if it might get a higher click through rate.

Chase Howell:

Yeah. A classic example, I think, of this is urgency. So data will almost always tell you that urgency works. So, you know, we we see this online all the time. Only a few left or act now.

Chase Howell:

Don't miss out. That type of language. Click through rates go up when we use that. But if urgency isn't actually true or if the brand uses it everywhere, it starts to erode trust. Another example is, you know, very topical to what we're talking about today, over personalization.

Chase Howell:

Just because you can reference very specific behavior or location data doesn't mean you should. We can almost get borderline creepy at times. So when personalization crosses that line from helpful to creepy, you might win the click, but you're gonna lose, I think, out on the relationship long term. So, you know, sometimes the right call is simply to say no. Not because the tactic doesn't work, because it works in a way that actually chips away at that long term brand.

Chase Howell:

So, again, short term performance is easy to measure, but brand trust isn't. It's a lot harder to rebuild brand trust when it's gone.

Nick Brunker:

One of the other double clicks I'd like to take with you is the interesting dynamic of having all of this data coming at us and being able to make decisions systematically. And a lot of the work that we've historically done and continue to do is on the web. The web is is shifting. I had a great conversation with Dave Altus about about this, one of our chief creatives at VML. If you haven't listened to that episode, you guys gotta go back and listen.

Nick Brunker:

It was one of one of my favorites and certainly was more provocative in the, like, well, what what could the future of web look like in a world where we have so much data and we can personalize so much? Just thinking about the here and now though, knowing things are gonna change rapidly even over the next few months, the rest of the year. When you're building out a web experience and you know that you wanna personalize, but you don't wanna personalize every single pixel of every single page. As a content strategist, how do you start kind of building yourself a system that allows you to be flexible enough to move things around and adjust copy and adjust imagery while also realizing that you still have to have some sort of, you know, organizing principle for how a page is built. How do you as a content strategist think about that?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. I think that we actually go right back to that three layer framework that we talked about earlier, where you have the core, you have the soul of the brand, you have that second layer that's adaptive where most campaign content lives where, again, the humans are defining the concept and the logic, but then AI is helping scale it responsibly across audiences and channels. And then layer three, again, that's that super dynamic, real time personalization. Those areas on a website, if we're talking about web strategy specifically, they can change dynamically within the guardrails that we've set. So I think if you apply that framework and there are certain things that, you know, don't touch you just don't touch, whether those campfire moments or those brand temples all the way down to, okay, here are the things within the context of the web page that are available for hyper personalization.

Chase Howell:

I think that gives a content strategist or anybody building out a comprehensive web web strategy a little bit more guidance and understanding as to where they can and cannot personalize, based on whatever goals they're trying to achieve.

Nick Brunker:

What I think is cool about that is it translates not just from a strategic perspective, not that creative execution is not also amazingly in in, you know, requirement to be strategic. But that's a an applicable pattern for our creative and UX professionals as well listening to the show because you imagine applying that same layer cake. You could say whatever the words and the pictures are gonna be in there, maybe this functional component that we have doesn't have to be this one. It could be three or four because that is structurally something we're willing to adapt versus they're, you know, essentially UX non negotiables or creative non negotiables. So you can you can see how this sort of structure applies not only to the story you're trying to tell literally on the words and ultimately the order of things, but also how that that creative is being represented.

Nick Brunker:

And that's what I think is is really fascinating about, you know, making the pivot from, okay, we have a system, but how do we operationalize? What is the so what, and how do we get traction within the clients that we serve or or in the businesses that we we operate? For CX leaders listening who realize their brand might actually be going down that wrong road, they may be fracturing right now. If I wanna fix this tomorrow, do I start with my data team, my creative team, my strategy team? Who owns the whole brand integrity comment in the age of AI?

Chase Howell:

Honestly, no single team, I would say, owns this anymore. The first step is just getting real about your infrastructure. Before you try to personalize at scale, ask, do we actually have the data? Do we have the platforms and the systems to support this effort? Creative can't protect brand integrity alone.

Chase Howell:

You know, data team can either. It has to live in the middle, usually with strategy. And, obviously, I'm a bit biased there, but usually with strategy.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

So if you to answer your question, if you wanna start tomorrow, get creative data and customer experience strategy, etcetera, aligned on what's nonnegotiable about the brand, then translate that into rules and guardrails everyone is going to operate within. So brand integrity really isn't a function now. It's it's a system.

Nick Brunker:

How do you deal with just the ever changing world that we live in? There are different mood swings, cultural trends. Sometimes there are crises. And when you're building out experiences that, you know, are updated sometimes by the hour, depending on what line of business or industry vertical you're in, the human in the loop process, you've talked about a lot on the show today and you wrote in the piece, AI fails at understanding context shifts. Some of those things like I mentioned, there's some sort of PR crisis that could impact this sort of campaign that we're running or a particular message just kinda falls flat because of this other piece of, you know, cultural trend change or mood swing or whatever.

Nick Brunker:

How do we build in the kill switch or some other human workflow to be able to intervene in an otherwise completely automated system or largely automated system that in in most days works great. But when something happens, I gotta be able to jump in and and kinda pivot the machine.

Chase Howell:

You know, like we've said, AI is great at optimizing inside a box. But you just touched on, it's really bad at sensing when the world changes. Mhmm. So the kill switch isn't this dramatic red button. It's just a a shared understanding of when humans step back in.

Chase Howell:

So if there's a crisis or, let's say, a cultural shift or something sensitive happening, you know, maybe internally or externally, automation needs to pause and people fully take over.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

So the important part here is that this isn't improvised. So teams have to have an understanding who can pause things, what gets reviewed, and then collectively when it's safe to turn those systems back on. So AI can run, day to day execution, especially again going back to our framework in layer three and some in layer two as well. But humans still stay responsible for the context. I think that is the balance.

Nick Brunker:

Alright. Before we run out of time, we always do our rapid fire fast facts and fun facts to get a little bit more, inside our guests' mind and they just learn a little bit about more what they they like to do off the clock. On the spirit of the personalization, is there a specific example of a personalization initiative or campaign you've recently seen or engaged yourself that felt creepy or just plain wrong?

Chase Howell:

I so, obviously, I know how the sausage gets made. So personalization itself doesn't really creep me out. I will say, kinda harkening back to our Spotify wrap thing, what's actually is more jarring to me is when it's wrong.

Nick Brunker:

Mhmm.

Chase Howell:

And, again, this is usually because my wife or my kid are sharing an account or a device with me. So, you know, I'll log in and get a recommendation for a product or something like, why in the world is it showing me this? The algorithm thinks I've completely changed as a person overnight. And that's that's when it's kinda jarring to me more so than what actually knows who I am or what I want.

Nick Brunker:

If you we talked about the things that are consistent that always show up, you know, whether it's a color scheme or a logo or even you think of things like Netflix where they have the very iconic sonic branding for sounds. You you hear something and you know instantly that is Netflix or any of the other brands that use those things and there there are many or even tone of voice. If you could hypothetically only keep one of those brand assets consistent forever, what would you say it would be?

Chase Howell:

I'm gonna say tone of voice because so logos can evolve.

Nick Brunker:

Yep.

Chase Howell:

You know, visuals are always getting refreshed. Tone is how a brand thinks out loud. So if that changes, people feel it immediately even if they can't explain why they feel it.

Nick Brunker:

It's these hypotheticals are always hilarious because I I would have immediately said, oh, it's gotta be logo because that's that's that. But then you're you're so right that we've seen so many both really bad cases and good cases of when you change a logo, it it's a it's a big deal. Like, it's a major deal. So consistency actually in some cases is good because like, oh, yeah, that's the same thing, but then there's no evolution. So that's a that's a good hypothetical and I I like the argument.

Nick Brunker:

I like the argument. Alright. A little bit off the clock then. We know you spend your days talking about personalization, thinking about operationalizing brand truths, and and just helping your your brand clients, just get the best out of their experience and and build great great experiences for them through content and storytelling. But what keeps you busy when you aren't on the clock?

Nick Brunker:

What's your obsession right now?

Chase Howell:

Yeah. Most of my time off the clock, honestly, spent, you know, with my two kids right now, shuttling them to activities. So they just wrapped up basketball and ski lessons. So now we're in a dance and t ball right now. So life is pretty active.

Chase Howell:

Personally, I, you know, I run and golf and just try to stay active physically. And then, you know, we're right around the corner from baseball season. So there's a good chance you'll catch us at the ballpark watching the reds any opportunity we get.

Nick Brunker:

Alright. So we're just a couple minutes left before we wrap up. In fact, less than that. But I do want to throw a landmine at you. We talk about technology and AI and, you know, the the future of of how all of these amazing technologies are are adapting our lives.

Nick Brunker:

The big sports related AI ish sort of tangent tangent tangential thing is automated balls and strikes in baseball. You mentioned you're a huge baseball guy. Yep. There are often two different very distinctly different schools of thought when it comes to baseball and rules and technology. Are you pro automated balls and strikes or against, or do you not have an opinion?

Chase Howell:

I am very pro ABS. Simply, as I'm sure anyone who's listened to this podcast in its entirety at this point understands, like, I'm all about consistency and guidelines and rules. So if a player can practice and know the zone and not have to wonder if it's gonna change game to game depending on the human behind the plate. Mhmm. I think that's a huge advantage for the hitter.

Chase Howell:

I think it's a huge advantage for the pincher. So I am all for let's institute ABS across the board and just make it quick so there's no arguing over balls and strikes.

Nick Brunker:

Amen. And, well and you know what? That last piece is is really, I think, where most people get wrapped around the axle, which is why I just can't can't make this game longer than it already is. Although they've done a good job in baseball, you know, making it much more fan friendly in terms of length. But I'm I'm of the this is the exact same mindset, and I'm sure there'll be people that just throw hate mail at us after this because they're baseball purists.

Nick Brunker:

But my my mentality is rules is rules. If you wrote the rule book to say this is a ball and this is a strike, call that sucker consistently. And you know what? In the days where we didn't have technology, sometimes that human element was gonna get in the way, but we're we are in the future now, boy. We we have that.

Nick Brunker:

We have technology. So I am completely in your camp, and we'll we'll see how much hate mail we get for that from the baseball purists. I'm sure we'll find some, but very excited to see the baseball season start for sure. And and very appreciative too that you took the time to not only write the piece and share it with us, but also spend extra time talking about the same subject with us. Chase, thanks again, and we'll talk again soon.

Chase Howell:

Thanks, Nick. I appreciate you having me on.

Nick Brunker:

And to our listeners, we've linked Chase's article, the content consistency paradox in the show notes. Definitely log on and check it out. We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show. You can give us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have a topic idea or wanna reach out to either Chase or myself or anybody that is at VML, you can reach out to us on social at Nick Brunker's, my handle.

Nick Brunker:

The show email is HumanCentered@VML.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.