👋 Hi {{first_name}},
I will admit this - I was running on fumes over the last few months until Sep.
I even contemplated handing off writing the newsletter to a different writer at times. But I had tried handing off before, and the experience has been varied. Some writers are a natural in adapting your tone of voice, some struggle despite multiple weeks and attempts with your content.
Building your brand voice and guidelines consistently has been a passion project throughout my career. Having spent my time building design and data orgs at Deloitte Digital and Nike, I always watched design systems and content engines break at the point of execution at scale.
It is no different with newsletters, as it is with anything you would build over time. You start off with what you think sounds tonally right, from your color palette, to your unique tone of voice to address different content scenarios.
I follow content and brand designers with acute interest, in the hope that I understand what makes brand design consistent, as it gets tested during the execution phase at scale.
That’s where Little Plains set things off in my head this week.
In partnership with
You built the audience. Can you reach them?
You can have thousands of people following your work and still need an algorithm’s permission to reach them. Creators know the drill: you post, you pray, you check the numbers, you try again tomorrow.
A newsletter changes that relationship. On beehiiv, you can build a subscriber list you own, reach readers directly, and turn their attention into a sustainable business with subscriptions, sponsors, a global ad network, and more.
Keeping brand intact for humans and agents alike
The fine folks behind the New York-based studio Little Plains wrote about their thesis on the future of branding with agentic systems, aptly called ‘Agentic Systems are the Future of Brands’, and I found myself thinking about it for the rest of the day.
(These folks write so fine, give them a follow!)
The blog from Little Plains
I have found myself in similar scenarios before. Brand and design teams build the guideline, but every other team interprets it differently, be it marketing, sales, or engineering. By the time someone realizes that the other teams have veered off track, it is usually months past the original brand thesis.
Agents, especially coding and content agents, are no different.
In fact, they might be the worst offenders, since they do not ask clarifying questions as a curious marketer or account executive would. A coding agent would simply go off on its own to build a landing page or sales collateral, before you realize it too late than it has gone off course.
This is a flaw we all have seen before. But the scale at which content and code compounds in a hybrid team of humans and AI agents like we see today can perpetrate the flaw manifold.
How to arrest that flaw before it becomes a crime
The good part about using AI agents throughout your org can be a blessing, but only if every team commits to drinking from the same stream.
Let me explain with the example of a newsletter.
You design the copy of the newsletter yourself, but in parallel:
Your web dev is visualizing how to add more interactive elements to its web version
Your designer is thinking about the visual assets
Your social media specialist is thinking of repurposing this content into byte-sized nuggets for Instagram
The effective way to implement an agentic brand system would be to document your decisions about design and brand elements. Add that to providing as much examples from prior hand-made newsletter issues as possible, and you may have a working system for your brand.
But the part which will make your brand system truly consistent is:
have a parallel set of web agents checking against brand guidelines
scans your different properties such as your socials, and web content every week for branding issues
keeps fixing branding inconsistencies behind the scenes
updates the branding system log to catch these errors at the creation phase itself.
You make it sound like you have done this before
Funnily enough at LetterStack, we found ourselves building a similar loosely-patched design system like the one from Little Plains above.
We migrated from Kit, Webflow, and Transistor into beehiiv this week (Hurray!), but we ran into a riot of design inconsistencies. Simply put, it was a herculean task for my small 2-member team to catch hold of each discrepancy manually.
So we let our AI agents loose on our beehiiv instance, where it caught hold of:
font alignment and spacing problems across web and newsletter content
dead links across our prior newsletter issues
created visually consistent thumbnails for each issue
Did it fix everything I wanted it to? Hell no.
Did it catch a lot of surprises I never knew existed? Oh yes.
There’s a lot of work to be done post the move to beehiiv, but boy, is it well worth it to have a bunch of extra (agent) eyes looking over your business.
I am going to keep hammering down this approach until I get the site in order.
Thoughts on building a similar agentic brand system which heals itself across your business? I am happy to be your sounding board.
Let me know by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to [email protected].
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Cheers,
Renga from LetterStack
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