• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 22, 2024

Deloitte Digital will unveil next week something most companies have been hesitant to share: a live example of how it uses generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to brand and market its company.

The company created a way to build branding tools. Now it is sharing the strategy with others.

There has been a lot of industry talk about how brands and agencies implement the technology, but few have shared how they use it.

During the past few months, Deloitte Digital has been working on a global rebrand across 30 international markets.

This coming week at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, the company will invite the industry to witness firsthand how GAI is being put to use with Adobe Firefly and how it can be used in marketing. 

The GAI tool is called the Orb Foundry, and Mark Singer, U.S. CMO at Deloitte Digital, allowed me to test it using the words "California" and "Wyoming" --  two U.S. states in which I'm connected. 

Data that creates the image comes from Adobe Firefly. An API connects the Orb to Firefly. The creative teams at the company ran different algorithms and trained the GAI.

Singer said Deloitte Digital has about 25,000 employees who support clients worldwide.

Orbs are a bunch of ideas and thoughts that collide. The tool democratizes the ability to create assets that represent the brand. For example, life science and commerce departments within the company in Australia would have different clients, compared with an agency person in New York.

The Orb supports brand and risk compliance depending on where the employees live and work, and supports the company around the world.

My first two words when I tested the tool were umbrella and a beachball, which produced an interesting image, but when I gave Singer the words California and Wyoming, the GAI Orb returned a buffalo standing in an ocean under waves surrounded by mountains, pine trees, and snow.

The auto industry could use this to create a better dealership experience. A company could develop an identity and use the symbol in a presentation, on their website, paid media, owned media, in marketing material or even in spots and ad campaigns such as an audio tool like sonic branding.

Singer said Deloitte Digital has used orbs for the past ten years, but not tied to GAI. Many brand-safety rules needed to be worked out.

The focus is on creating more efficiency and scale — more personalization to personalize the assets, and personalizing the concept to consumers.

“We know generative AI is used to personalize content, emails, messaging, but it got us thinking — can gen AI be used as a way to personalize the brand?” he asked.

The answer is yes. Deloitte Digital started by going through a rebrand and enabling the entire organization to participate. It allowed creativity to embrace engineering, art to romance science, and AI, analytics, assets, commerce and code to meet strategy, brand, code and human behavior.