Ep 188: Offcuts Live, London - The Great Flattening: What's Left to Differentiate On When Everyone Has the Same AI with Eleanor Warnock, Max Ottignon & Natalie Varma
OffcutsShow Notes
On this episode, Offcuts went live again, this time in London, on stage at Forza Wine in Soho in front of a room of commerce and brand leaders.
I'm joined by three people who think about taste for a living: Eleanor Warnock, journalist and advisor to Bek Ventures, who started her career at the Wall Street Journal; Max Ottignon, co-founder of Ragged Edge, the branding agency behind Wise, Monzo and Granola and Natalie Varma, co-founder and CPO of Parfumerie, who previously led product at Farfetch, Net-a-Porter and Condé Nast.
The question for the morning: when every brand is using the same models, what's left to differentiate on? We split it into three parts.
Voice: who writes your brand, and where Eleanor lets AI in and where she keeps it out. Brand: why Max thinks the winners of the AI race will be decided by brand, and why Granola's identity was built as the opposite of tech slop. Curation: what happens to discovery when AI does the choosing, and how Natalie is tackling a category where you can't smell the internet.
We also get into whether AI will ever have taste, why the hardest part of brand building is deciding what to leave out, and why a little more friction might be good for us.
Recorded live with our sponsors Harper, Nolo and Centra.
Enjoy the show.
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