Hi Reader, welcome back to Brand Credential, a platform where I share insights on personal branding and marketing from my experience as a 10-year marketing industry professional.

This week’s edition will focus on new AI marketing software, personal branding advice from Mad Men (yes, the TV show), and a personal career update that will bring new insights to the Brand Credential community.

Weekly Personal Branding Tip: Don’t Let Imposter Syndrome Get in the Way

This quote was featured in my recent article about personal branding quotes. The article featured insights from a host of sources, including the Chief Marketing Officer of Zapier, a prominent writer and entrepreneur, and this bit from my favorite TV show.

The reason I included a quote from a silly source like TV in such an important piece is because it perfectly captures a mentality that I think everyone should keep in mind as they persevere through the doubts and imposter syndrome that come with personal brand building.

If this quote were to be said today, you could just as easily replace “this is America” with “this is the internet.”

1. If you want to become an ecommerce business owner, setup a Shopify store and get selling.
2. If you want to write for a living, get on Medium and Kindle Direct Publishing and start making money.
3. If you want to be a freelance digital marketer, start applying for gigs on Upwork and Fiverr.
4. If you want to grow a newsletter, start a newsletter like this one.

This list can go on. The point is, the opportunity we have because of the internet and its tools is an amazing one. The barrier to entry has never been lower for someone who wants to build a business or embark on a new career path.

In the words of Bobby, pick a job, and become the person who does it.

Read more:

• Brand Credential: 5 Must-Read Personal Branding Quotes​
• Medium: 5 Must-Read Personal Branding Quotes​

Insight From the Head of Marketing: What I’m Building This Week

The latest news from my desk is a bit of personal news. I started a new marketing job!

I am not sharing this news because anyone necessarily cares about my personal career path. I am sharing it because the core of the marketing strategy insights and lessons I teach via my Brand Credential content come from my "day job" as a marketing professional. And those insights just got a significant boost.

For the past 5 years, I've served as the Vice President of Marketing for Talespin, a tech startup building an immersive learning platform. The platform uses VR and AI to simulate conversations with virtual characters (think video game NPCs) to help people learn new skills.

After a journey growing the Talespin brand from scratch into an industry leader, and having the honor of building an amazing marketing team, our company has been acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand, one of the leading learning companies in the world.

For Brand Credential, this means I have a host of new insights from growing a business to this scale, and will gain a bunch more in my new marketing role at Cornerstone.

Going forward, I will be mixing the following into Brand Credential content:

• I just spent 5 years building a startup from launch to acquisition by a major company, and learned plenty along the way about entrepreneurship and marketing strategy.
• Crafting personal brands for executives and entrepreneurs.
• Marketing team building and management.
• Lead generation, SEO, product marketing, branding, and plenty of other marketing skills.
• New marketing technology trends, like generative AI and spatial computing (XR / VR / AR).
• An inside look at the marketing operations of a leading global brand.

I feel lucky to have this new opportunity, and I am very excited about what I will be able to continue learning in the marketing space and bringing back to share with the Brand Credential community.

Read more: Cornerstone Becomes End-to-End Learning Content Solution with Spatial Learning Acquisition​

This Week in Marketing: AI Marketing Automation Continues—This Time From Adobe

Marketing tools adding AI capabilities and new AI marketing tools popping up are trends that aren't going away. That's no surprise—marketing is one of the industries where AI, and generative AI in particular, is expected to see significant adoption.

This week, Adobe, one of the leaders in marketing and creative software, announced a host of new AI capabilities coming to its platform. These new features coming to its GenStudio product are designed to help marketers create content at scale, and most importantly, tailor it to a brand's specific audiences and standards.

This is big, because one of the concerns the marketing community has with generative AI and automation is the dilution of brand narrative, or even worse, accidentally publishing something that damages a brand.

Check out some of the new capabilities below:

• Workflow and planning: Plan content in alignment with marketing campaign needs, centralize assets, and track cost of content creation.
• Content creation and production: Create new content that is brand approved and commercially safe thanks to new content safeguards, and edit and refine AI-generated content prior to publishing.
• Activation and delivery: Publish AI-generated content across various marketing channels from a central location, from social media to websites.

Canva had already brought generative AI tools to the creator community with its Magic Studio update. Now, Adobe users ranging from freelancers and creators to enterprise marketing teams can leverage a host of new AI tools to create and deliver personalized marketing content.

Key Takeaways

As AI adoption in the marketing community continues, I am less focused on how AI might take people's jobs, and more so focused on what we can all do to grow.

I think there is a significant opportunity presented by AI for marketers who choose to learn and adopt early. This sentiment is captured in a LinkedIn post from Ivy Xu:

I love this quote because it captures the mentality I think the marketing and creator communities need to have right now. AI is here, and everyone is going to use it at some level. There's not much we can do about that.

Our best bet for maintaining our moats and growing in an AI-augmented market is to leverage AI ourselves. We need to make it our assistant to help us create better content at higher volumes than we ever could on our own.

The people who ignore the the utility of AI, or who leverage it just for the status quo, put themselves at risk of being left behind in my opinion.

The people who use AI to further proliferate and scale their creativity, strategy, and unique voice will be the ones who succeed in that environment.

Read more:

• ​Adobe’s GenStudio brings brand-safe generative AI to marketers​
• ​3 Skills Marketers Need in the Age of AI Technology​

More Ways I Can Help

That’s it for this week! As always, thank you so much for reading.

If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:

• Read more on my website, Brand Credential​
• Check out my latest Medium articles​
• Read my free book, “The Personal Brand Blueprint: A No-Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding in the Age of the Creator”