Thursday morning I met Brian Ellison, King of Purge, and Madeline Bryan, Creator of Playlist. These are their titles on the Funnel Design homepage. Within my pleasenties, I got the itch to ask Brian if it was a “Marie Kondo” type purge or “Walking Dead” purge. Turns out Marie Kondo, I would consider him a fat trimmer, making excess dissapear if it doesn’t bring joy. From that, we started talking about efficency in the marketing and graphic design world. A tool commonly linked with efficiency, is AI, which is where we jumped to next.
I asked Brian how they use AI in independent life as well as when working on projects with clients. He told me that in his own time he spends roughly thirty minuites a day with his daughter working on creative prompts to turn to art. In this time he won’t suggest ideas to her is meerly a sounding board to ensure her prompts will translate correctly to the AI website. He wants his daughter to be creative with the technology surrounding her as she works along side it.
Within the company of Funnel Designs, there are 22 clients and roughly 150 projects, ranging from 30-day signings to 15-year retainer clients. As expected there is a variety of projects, and services provided. Some of those full-serivces include, brochures, digital ADS, and social media posts. Having 150 different project, there are some that the team would and wouldn’t use AI on. Working with an Indonesian brand, in the States, they previously used Google to source specific photos for ADS. Now with AI as a tool, for a stpry highligh lasting only 25 hours, they can use a prompt describing an Indonesian beach to use as a background with text over. Brian explained that AI is commonly used within the advertising and design world, but within the bounds the company has established.
Shockingly enought to me, Brian let me know that AI is advanced enough to craft a website, when telling me the possible issues of trusting an AI website created for a client, the concerns were not what I expected. The worries Brian held were that the website could look too similar to a competitors, would there be the wrong layout to a consumer, and lack of origionality. I was waiting for a moral or ethical issue that could sprout form using AI to produce something so large for a client, which were listed… but not immediately.
This was a meeting set up by my dad, a Yukon High School graduate, just like Brian Ellison; who my dad got back in touch with at their 30 year reunion. Brian initialy went to University for Architectural Engineering, in his junior year he changed to Graphic Design. Similarly I switched my major from one department to a different college, Environmental Sustainability to Public Relations. It was the second time I took my dad’s true advice, the first was seeing Peggy Noonan in the Presidential Speaker Series. I was able to learn about the process that I will get to experience with a client, understanding the creative concepts, and hearing PR “stunts” that Brian simply refered to as getting your name out.
