Andy Jordan
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The technology was never the story. People were.

By Andy Jordan

Ask me what I do and I'll say brand, creative, storytelling. Ask me why, and the answer is shorter.

I help unlock human potential.

It's the thread through every company I've worked for. The technology changes: satellites, machine data, agentic AI. The belief underneath doesn't. People can do more than the systems around them allow, and a good story is how they find out.

Start with what you believe about the world

A great brand doesn't begin with what a company makes. It begins with what the company believes about the world, what it wants to change, and why anyone should care. The belief opens the door for the product to grow, and the product, in turn, proves the belief true. Positioning, narrative, architecture, identity, voice and campaigns are all expressions of that belief.

Human perception is limited. Human potential doesn't have to be.

Spire: there is more to our world than we can see

Spire operated satellites and sold data. That wasn't the story. The story was that most of the world is invisible to us, and understanding what we can't see gives people the power to shape a better future.

That's a much more interesting proposition than satellite data analytics. It gave the company a worldview, a purpose (improve life on Earth with data from space), a position (the space company focused on the future of planet Earth) and a promise to customers: from invisible signals to confident action.

The strategic foundation of Spire:

LayerWhat it says
WorldviewThere is more to our world than we can see. Human perception is limited. Human potential doesn't have to be.
PurposeImprove life on Earth with data from space.
PositioningThe space company focused on the future of Planet Earth.
Customer valueKnowledge that enables better decisions. From invisible signals to confident action.

Then the belief had to work as a system. Spire was six autonomous businesses that needed one "last name." Brand architecture is a business strategy before it's a design exercise, so the answer was a corporate brand strong enough to unify them and flexible enough that each could still speak to its own market. The brand narrative tells the design story. Red, black and white, with white dominant. A digital-twin Earth. A brand about what you don't see, in a category that defaults to foreboding darkness.

The voice carried the belief too. Grounded, brilliant, credible, optimistic, worldly. The muses were Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Katherine Johnson and Mark Kelly: experts who never make you feel small. Technically brilliant without being inaccessible. Ambitious without being arrogant.

A brand voice is the personality of the company's beliefs. It should make you recognizable even when the logo isn't there.

The campaigns then took the same belief at three angles. Beyond Visible: there's much more to the world than we can perceive. We Hear You, Earth: understanding begins with listening. The Promise of Space Is Here (the film): technology's value is a better future, here on Earth.

What exists beyond our perception? What does it mean to listen? What becomes possible once we understand more? Not three campaigns. One idea, explored.

The business results followed the clarity: ARR from about $40M to $100M through the IPO window, organic traffic up 156%, MQLs up 69.9%. A team and a company did that. A story people could repeat was part of it.

Eightfold: people are more than their résumés

Different company. Same belief, pointed at people.

For decades, hiring has leaned on résumés, degrees, titles and previous jobs to decide what someone can do. But people learn, change and reinvent themselves in ways those systems never see. Human potential is greater than the systems we use to measure it. Eightfold's mission was the right career for everyone in the world. My tagline: The Future Works Here. I didn't invent the mission. My job was to translate it into a new era.

The brand architecture:

LayerWhat it says
WorldviewPeople are more than their résumés. Human potential is dynamic, not fixed.
PurposeThe right career for everyone in the world.
PositioningAI-powered talent intelligence that unlocks human potential.
Customer valueSee what people can become. Better talent decisions, meaningful careers, stronger organizations.

That era was agentic AI, a technology that can sound abstract or intimidating if you lead with the machinery. So we led with the human benefit: opportunity, growth, what people can become. And we practiced what we said. We rebuilt the brand in under three months and made a brand film that was ideated and led by people and executed with generative AI.

The technology was never the ultimate story. The people it could empower were.

Human-led, machine-scaled. This is Eightfold AI and How AI can unlock human potential are the films.

One belief, different technology

The two stories rhyme more than they look like they should.

SpireEightfold
The beliefThere's more to the world than we can see.People are more than their résumés.
The problemValuable information is invisible.Human potential is overlooked.
What the technology doesReveals what's unseen.Recognizes what's possible.
The human outcomeA better-understood planet.Better careers, stronger organizations.

Reveal what we can't see. Recognize what we can become.

It goes back further than those two. At Splunk it was machine data nobody could read. At Expanse it was an internet no one had a full map of. Different industries, same job: find the human on the other side of the technology, and build the story around what they can now do.

It starts with the right question

It started in newsrooms, with a question. A reporter's whole craft comes down to one: what do you want me to understand? Everything else is just how you ask it.

People want to be heard. They want to be understood. And, if they're honest, they want to be remembered. I learned that in labs and living rooms and the field, microphone in hand, long before I knew what a brand was.

A good question isn't a trap. It's an invitation. Ask it with real curiosity, then be quiet, and people tell you what no one has asked them before: the scientist ten years into something the world hasn't noticed yet, the ordinary person standing in the middle of a very large story. They don't need you to be clever. They need you to listen well enough to get it right.

Technology companies are made of the same people. The engineer who knows exactly why the product matters and has never been asked to say it plainly. The customer whose work got easier, whose company got safer, whose story nobody has collected. The candidate who is more than one page. The work I'm proudest of began in those conversations: asking until I understood the human reason underneath, then building the story so that person was heard, understood and remembered.

Every story I've told started the same way: a good question, and the patience to hear the answer.

Why brand still matters

I'm optimistic about marketing, and not because it's my trade. The numbers keep landing on the same side. When anyone can make anything, belief is what's left to compete on.

  • Trust is a reason to buy. In Edelman's 2026 survey of 17,688 people in 15 countries, 88% called trusting a brand an important or critical reason to buy. That's level with quality (89%) and value (88%). (Edelman)
  • Most brands are interchangeable. An audit of 250 B2B homepages put nearly 4 in 10 in the "invisible middle." (PitchKitchen) Of 100 B2B SaaS and AI brands, 78 scored generic on distinctive brand assets, and AI-native companies were no more distinctive than incumbents. (STFO)
  • Buyers decide before you walk in. About 40% of B2B deals die from fear of getting it wrong, and peer recommendations were more than 3 times as influential as features or price. (LinkedIn and Bain, via PPC Land) Forrester found 94% of nearly 18,000 business buyers used AI during their purchase. (Forrester)
  • Automating the story didn't pay. MIT found 95% of organizations got no measurable return from enterprise generative AI, even though more than half of those budgets went to sales and marketing tools. (MIT NANDA, via Fortune) Roughly two in three consumers say brands are putting out too much AI-generated marketing. (Gartner) Only 7% trust a brand more when the AI is visible; 31% trust it less. (Klaviyo, via eMarketer)
  • The machines are reading you, too. The average brand shows up in 16.3% of AI answers. Category leaders show up in 56.5%. (AthenaHQ) And 84% of the 25 million-plus links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini were earned media. (Muck Rack)
  • Companies are hiring for it. "Storyteller" job postings roughly doubled in a year. Executives said "storyteller" or "storytelling" 469 times on 2025 earnings calls, up from 147 in 2015. (WSJ, via Standard Advisors Group)

Read those together. Trust is a reason to buy. Generic is easy to skip. Models and buyers alike reward the company with a clear point of view and proof people repeat. And the shortcut, producing more content faster, is the one that's failing.

That's not an argument against AI. I use it every day, and I say so when I do. It's an argument for knowing what you believe before you ask a machine to say it.

"Won't agents just market to agents?"

I hear this one a lot. Buyers will send agents to do the research, agents will read the web, brands will write for agents, and the humans will leave the loop. It's a tidy story. The data doesn't back it.

Agents are the new research assistant, not the new buyer. Yes, 94% of business buyers used AI during a purchase. But look at who still carries the risk. About 40% of B2B deals die from fear of getting it wrong, and peer recommendations beat features and price by more than 3 to 1. (LinkedIn and Bain, via PPC Land) Fear of a bad call is a human feeling. An agent doesn't get fired for picking the wrong vendor. The person does.

Agents read what people made. Of the 25 million-plus links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, 84% were earned media: reporting, reviews, customer and analyst voices. (Muck Rack) Models summarize the human record. Starve that record and there's nothing worth summarizing. Fill it with machine-written content and you get slop, which two in three consumers already say they're getting too much of. (Gartner)

Agents aren't oracles. In one study, 600 volunteers ran the same prompts nearly 3,000 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI. Fewer than 1 in 100 runs returned the same list of brands. (SparkToro) When the gatekeeper is that unpredictable, I'd bet on the brand that shows up the same way everywhere it looks: one clear belief, repeated by people who mean it.

And buyers check. 62% of B2B buyers use AI to fact-check sales claims, and 56% have dropped a vendor after AI surfaced a gap between the pitch and the product. (AI Revenue Institute, via MarketingProfs) Agents raise the bar on truth. They don't take people out of the decision. A story the company can't live up to just gets found out faster.

Agents can read your brand. Only people can believe it.

So write for both. The agent needs the story clear, consistent and findable. The person needs it to be true.

Strip away the satellites, the data, the agents and the logos, and what's left is a small, stubborn idea. People are more capable than the systems around them allow. They want to be heard before they're sold to, understood before they're served, and remembered after the meeting ends.

The technology will keep changing. Satellites gave way to machine data, machine data to agents, and something we can't name yet is already on its way. The need won't change. Someone still has to ask the right questions, find the human on the other side of the technology, and tell the story so well that people see what they could become.

I make the invisible visible, so people can see what they're capable of.

That's my why.

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