Brandon Murphy- Chief Strategy Officer- Trade School- Atlanta

Brandon runs strategy at Trade School which is the creative agency which was born out of 22squared in 2020, 

The agency's clients include- Makita, Home Depot, Shark Ninja, Publix and Advent Health. 

Brandon's experience includes time at Campbell-Ewald/Detroit after which he joined West Wayne in Atlanta which became 22 Squared.  

In our conversation we talked about the evolving role of marketing, the importance of brands and brand meansing and how AI is shifting and re-shaping the shopping journey.

Here are some soundbites from Brandon from the podcast. 

“We are a dopamine-driven ephemeral society. That is very difficult for brands. And I think that's why you see a lot of brands chasing attention.”

“Brands are having a hard time creating memory structures because they're chasing attention. People just don't remember any ads at all. I think only 4% of ads are recalled three days later.”

“Our agency spends a lot of time and it's probably because we've, we, we work with a bunch o  complicated, multiple-location, retail type brands, but from hospitals to banks to grocery stores, to home improvement stores. We spend so much time doing the internal work, the alignment, the branding campaigns internally, getting people rallied around the heart of the brand and how they live it.”

“The whole product and brand discovery process is getting completely changed by AI. We're going to have to re-engineer our journeys and what we invest in and our technology in terms of it's no longer about search engine optimization. It's about content. It's about making things discoverable for AI, all these things, right? But the thing that I think will matter more than anything is going to be the brand meaning.”

“For a long time, we've associated brand with frivolous type advertising and communications that are a luxury to have. Brand is an operating system for companies. It’s not a new thought, but it's a true thought. A mental organizing form for action, which is how people think about the world and about the category you're in and about the actions that they take and what it means for them”