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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

About

If you're thinking about reaching out to me, please go ahead and do it.

Hi, I'm Noah Brier, an enterpreneur, experimenter, and writer. Here is my formal(ish) bio from the Brxnd.ai Marketing X AI site:

Bio

BrXnd is the brainchild of Noah Brier, a seasoned marketing and technology professional with a career spanning over two decades. Noah began his career as a journalist, copywriter, and creative director at award-winning agencies like Naked Communications and The Barbarian Group. His entrepreneurial journey started in 2011 when he co-founded Percolate, the world's leading content marketing platform. Percolate partnered with global brands like Unilever, GE, and Anheuser-Busch and was backed by venture capital firms Sequoia, First Round Capital, and Lightspeed. In 2019, Seismic, the leading Sales Enablement Platform, acquired Percolate.

In addition to his work with Percolate, Noah has received numerous accolades. He was recognized as one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine and as a digital innovator by Bloomberg Businessweek. He also served on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council for Social Media. As a writer, his work has been published in AdAge, AdWeek, Contagious, and Fast Company, among other publications. In 2019, he co-founded Why Is This Interesting?, a daily newsletter read by over 20,000 intellectually curious individuals.

In 2022, Noah launched BrXnd, an organization at the intersection of marketing and artificial intelligence. BrXnd's mission is to drive marketing forward through events, education, consulting, and experiments that fuse the power of brands with the incredible potential of AI. The inaugural BrXnd conference, held in New York City in spring 2023, is part of a series of events intended to engage the marketing community with the benefits and opportunities of AI. In addition to these initiatives, BrXnd partners with marketing organizations to create content, events, and AI-powered products.

A significant part of BrXnd's work involves leveraging AI to understand and innovate with brands. In 2008, Noah created a tool called Brand Tags that provided a unique view of brand perception by asking consumers for their immediate reactions to brand logos. This concept has been extended in BrXnd's CollXbs initiative, which uses AI, specifically large language models, to imagine brand collaborations. This experiment underscores the power of well-established brands, whose identities are so distinct that even a machine-learning model can ascertain their attributes.

BrXnd embraces AI as an extraordinary creative accelerant, even in its early days. The organization is committed to exploring the potential of this technology and helping marketers, and brands navigate this new era where AI plays a transformative role in personal and professional lives.

Noah graduated from New York University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Study from Gallatin School with a focus on media, technology, and culture. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters. You can follow Noah and BrXnd's work in BrXnd Dispatch, a weekly newsletter on the practical realities of using and building at the intersection of marketing and AI.

“Print” Credits*

How Mastering 'Stock and Flow' Will Boost Your Content Strategy.” Advertising Age. November 15, 2011

Want to Tweet? First, Teach Your Brand to Speak.” Advertising Age. August 2, 2011

Stalked? Not Really: Noah Brier Responds.” Assembly Journal. July 30, 2010.

How to make display ads suck less.Advertising Age. March 10, 2009.

Listen and Learn… or learn to listen?.Boards Magazine. March 1, 2009.

Brand Tags' Noah Brier: How My Website Took Off (PDF).” Advertising Age. September, 2008.

Ways of Seeing (PDF).” Contagious Magazine. June, 2008.

Power to (a Few) People.” Media Magazine. August, 2007.

What to Expect from CGC.” iMedia Connection. May, 2006.

Viral marketing: making the right connection (PDF).” Admap. October, 2005.

Contagious Creations.” adBUMB. August, 2005.

Coming of Age.” American Demographics. November, 2004.

The Net Difference.” American Demographics. October, 2004.

This Way App.” American Demographics. September, 2004.

A $1 Million Difference.” American Demographics. July/August, 2004.

Move Over, Prime Time!American Demographics. July/August, 2004.

Buzz Giant Poster Boy.” American Demographics. June, 2004.

* Many of these never actually appeared in print.

Speaking Engagements

Globes Israel: Marketing & Communications Conference (July, 2011)

Internet Week: The Art of the Side Project. This panel discussion, featuring an assortment of thinkers and makers, will explore how to balance your side project with work hours, continue momentum and overcome creative and technical hurdles to keep the process going. (June, 2011)

Institute of Communications Agencies Canada: Future Flash 2011: Marketing in Flow: How brands need to think about publishing on the web. (May, 2011)

University of Montana: Entertainment Management. (March, 2010). This marked my fourth year visiting Missoula to spend the weekend talking about media, technology, entertainment and the web.

Thoughts on Innovation. VCU BrandCenter (March, 2010).

Media Thinking Congress Asia. Singapore (December, 2009). “Noah Brier, head of strategic planning at Barbarian Group, was first up at the speaker sessions at today's inaugural 2009 Media Thinking Congress held at St Regis in Singapore. ”

Taking Online Communities Offline

“Brand Exposure: Practical Strategies in Social Media”. Internet Week (June 2, 2009). “On June 2nd, during Internet Week, Toby Daniels of Social Media Week and Celia Chen of Notes on a Party will launch the first in a series of events that are designed to provide senior brand marketers with practical strategies in social media.”

Fast Company: 100 Most Creative People in Business (2009)

“Good Ideas in 2009 in Digital”. “This morning's Good Ideas Salon focused on Digital, exploring new ways in which individuals and brands are storing, sharing, and archiving their online narratives. The panel, moderated by Piers Fawkes (PSFK), included Claire Hyland  (Electric Artists), Johanna Beyenbach (Naked), Mike Arauz (Undercurrent), and Noah Brier (Barbarian Group) and touched upon a range of topics spanning from the evolution of virtual identities and collaboration to mobile technologies and the relivening of analog through digital.”

“Spread The Good Word”. Boards Summit New York (October 24, 2008). The Big Idea? All well and good, but unless you get it out it there to consumers, it's worthless. New media platforms, fragmented outlets and ADD consumers mean that digital strategy is taking an increasingly crucial place in agency thinking. Hear from some of the digital world's top strategists as they discuss how to get your creative to go global.

“The Great Re-bundling Debate: Should Media and Creative Come Back Together?” ad:tech Chicago (July 31, 2007). “Despite protests from a consistently familiar group of agency executives, the issue of re-bundling is back on the table. Interestingly enough, we rarely hear from clients that an “unbundled” world is a better world and a whole new class of new-breed agencies have risen up to offer clients a world of bundled services not out of convenience or differentiation but out of necessity and real-world market conditions. And although some agency executives may be in denial about what is happening across their own networks and agencies, the reality is that even in the world of unbundled agencies, re-bundling is occurring in plain sight. In this Exchange Series session, we want to hear from you on this subject and hear exactly why you think the world should remain unbundled or whether a re-bundled world is inevitable.”

“Social Media: Evolution to Execution.” Promo Live (September 19, 2007). “As consumers are increasingly taking control of their media consumption, smart marketers are evolving their contact strategies. With Social Media (aka Web 2.0) evolving from theoretical discussion to executable strategy, marketers are looking for ways to capitalize on the new consumer landscape. What do consumers respond to? What determines success? What can Social Media achieve for your brand?”

“Are Brands Prepared for 2010?” Nielsen Buzzmetrics CGM Summit 2007 (October 25, 2007). “What are the leading brands doing to rewire their DNA for a world increasingly impacted by CGM? How are they changing the way their companies listen, the way they communicate, and the way they manage customer relationships? How have past CGM experiments and lessons informed marketing innovation and planning for the future? Where are we certain, where are our vulnerabilities?”

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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.