Right now, anyone can make an ad, a post or a whole campaign in a few minutes. Content has never been cheaper to make. And it’s never been harder to be remembered.
I think the analogue is the most underrated thing in branding right now. Meeting in person. The network. The community. And the founder’s own face.
Gary Vaynerchuk calls it a barbell: extreme technology at one end and extreme real life at the other. I agree. And I’ve seen it work in practice.
When something becomes free to make, its price falls
The more there is of something, the less each piece is worth. That’s where content is now.
AI makes it easy to produce something that’s technically correct. It doesn’t make it easy to produce something people remember. When everyone can write the same posts, it’s not the post that stands out. It’s the person behind it.
What you can’t make with a prompt is what actually happened. A handshake. A dinner. An evening when people were really there.
That’s what people underrate. It takes more time than a post. And that’s why it gets remembered.
Personal branding isn’t about followers
I’ve never set out to get 10,000 followers. I said that too when Christina Barré was a guest on my Danish-language podcast, Den Nye Standard. My personal brand has been about creating what I missed myself when I was an employee.
I still believe that. And with AI, it matters even more.
Because AI makes polish free. The perfect text. The perfect picture. But it can’t make honesty for you.
When Ditte Julie Jensen was a guest, I put it like this:
“How do you get people to open up about the things that are hard? Because I believe that inspires more people than just saying: Look how insanely good I am.”
That’s what personal branding is to me. Not showing how good you are. Showing who you are.
A face-to-face meeting can’t be generated
What I’m best at is meeting people and looking them in the eye. And bringing people together.
In fact, I started out on my own because I wasn’t allowed to go networking as an employee. I’ve written about that in Self-employed or employed?.
Since then, I’ve learnt that networking isn’t the same as going to networking events. A lot of networks stop at the talking. Fewer actually make things happen for each other.
“A networking group only gets really good when you put energy into the people in the group outside the facilitated network.”
The value is in what happens afterwards. The call the next day. The introduction to someone they ought to know. The dinner where nobody’s sitting there with an agenda.
Community beats reach
I was an ambassador for the Danish Red Cross’s Klub 10 in 2023/24 and I’m now a member of Klub 100. It’s taught me a lot about what a community can do.
One evening at Kosmopol, we raised DKK 696,000 for the Danish Red Cross. On a livestream from Rådhuspladsen, I helped raise DKK 170,000 in five hours. And an auction in the chat turned into a dinner with three entrepreneurs.
In all three cases, it wasn’t the content that made the difference. It was that people were there at the same time and for the same cause.
That goes for online too. What works is what’s live and shared. Not what’s produced for a feed.
What it means in practice
For a company or a founder, it means the analogue has to go into the brand strategy. Not as window dressing. As part of it.
- Show your face. The founder’s own name and face are hard to copy.
- Use AI for the groundwork. That leaves more time for meeting people. We’ve built our own AI agent that does the groundwork, and a person makes the decision.
- Create spaces where people meet. A dinner, an event or a community around a cause.
- Be honest rather than polished. Anyone can do polished now.
- Give it time. The analogue feels slow. You can rarely measure it by tomorrow.
I think the companies that win in the next few years will be the ones that use AI to free up time. And spend that time on people.
If you’d like to hear more about brand and attention, that’s what my talk on marketing and brand is about.