Manifestos, AI-Powered

If there was ever a marketing ritual that needed a hit of AI, it's the brand manifesto. And now we've got it, thanks to Noah Brier and his Manifesto Machine.

Writing manifestos is a profoundly weird way to spend your time. No creative writing class ever prepared me for hurriedly tapping out a prose poem to a brand and, tbh, it can be kinda fun.

They have a unique creative logic, which is to basically posit that the universe will collapse but for the existence of the brand in question, no matter how non-essential that brand might be.

Seeing how this very specific form interacts with AI is what Noah is doing with the Manifesto Machine. Plug in a brand, tweak a few parameters, push submit, and a few minutes later you get a link to your video.

In giving it a spin, I decided to pick the worst brand I could possibly imagine, The Trump Organization. I asked the tool to begin with the end of the dinosaur age and, in an attempt to throw it off, I asked it to hit a random moment in time: the first hip-hop party, in the Bronx in the early 1970s. Even more absurdly, I also asked for a CTA using the language of trust.

It was not thrown off. The result was fairly terrifying and something I could see the Trump brand stewards (?) nodding along with. And it made me realize something about manifestos that I probably should have realized long ago. They carve out an intellectual space where you can say pretty much anything and it has a chance of working. Trump, dinosaurs, hip hop, empires.... sure! Both everything and nothing makes sense.

AI-powered manifestos so strong you’ll think you’re writing with both hands at once.

Click here to read it and see it.

Make your own manifesto here.

And read a really interesting BTS of the making of the machine here.