The creative company R/GA thinks the marketing and advertising campaigns of the future will act like living systems, evolving with real-time data and responding to site-specific conditions. To make that possible, it says new platforms will have to come online—and it’s starting with a new AI tool called the BRDNA Sequencer.
The BRDNA Sequencer trains itself on a company’s brand guidelines—including fonts, colors, layout rules, and tone of voice—and translates them into a format that artificial intelligence agents can read and understand. (BRDNA stands for “brand DNA.”) From there, the company can use simple plain language prompts to generate directly editable assets like social assets, marketing emails, and CRM systems. R/GA is launching the tool this month as a service for its direct clients.
Other major AI companies, including Canva and Anthropic, have released features that allow companies to upload their brand guidelines as a code base for visual projects. According to Sadie Thoma, a 15-year Google alum and R/GA’s new global chief business officer, what makes the BRDNA sequencer different is that it’s “platform-agnostic.” The tool can be hooked up to any major AI chatbot and work in tandem with it, which, Thoma says, takes into account an era when workflows live across a diverse array of AI tools, and when creative campaigns are shifting from one set of deliverables to ever-evolving efforts.
Essentially, R/GA is betting that it can use its expertise as a tech-focused creative agency to create AI tools by designers, for designers.
In early 2025, after 23 years as part of the advertising and marketing services holding company IPG, R/GA bought back its independence. Since then, the brand has been dialing in on a new creative direction focused on developing not just campaigns but the tools required to execute them—and seeing business gains as a result, including a 27% revenue bump from 2024 to 2025.
“Proprietary products like [the BRDNA Sequencer] wouldn’t have been possible under the previous ownership model,” says George Griffiths, R/GA’s global head of communications. “Independence has really been a catalyst for us to be able to invest in this kind of new wave of creativity.”
R/GA is innovating around a thesis that the creative world will need to become much more responsive, local, and omnipresent as AI shortens the timeline from marketing concepts to final assets.
As one example, in late 2024, R/GA began a partnership with Google Shopping that experimented with a hyperlocal out-of-home campaign on digital kiosks across New York City. The campaign used several AI models, including Google Gemini, to pull timely data from Google Maps and Google Trends and build real-time ads that were specific to each city block. During the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, one kiosk on part of the route updated to read, “Parade view might be blocked, but deals are in full view.”
“These types of systems are meant to be living, so that they evolve and grow as technology evolves, and as your brand evolves,” Thoma says. “It’s really an interesting concept to think about the future of marketing as creating living systems that are keeping humans at the center, keeping your brand DNA at the center, but able to flex with technology.”
Increasingly, Thoma says, that means marketers need to shift away from relying on a single AI platform to house their creative assets, given that these platforms can change so quickly. Instead, she says they need their own place to build the living systems that work with any AI tool—and that’s where the BRDNA Sequencer comes in.
To use the BRDNA Sequencer, R/GA’s clients onboard as much data about the way their brand shows up as possible. That includes visual brand guidelines, verbal systems, messaging, positioning, values, a component library (logos, packaging, etc.), and real examples of marketing materials for the model to train on.
From there, Thoma says, the tool ingests the data and becomes a brand quasi-expert that can teach other AI platforms about the brand. Imagine it like the AI agent version of a flash drive: When the sequencer is plugged into Claude, Figma, or any other AI platform, it gives that platform access to use all of its insights. Users can then prompt their AI chatbot as usual and request specific assets, which will be produced within the given brand guidelines in a fully editable format. Right now, the BRDNA Sequencer is built only to generate static media, like marketing email templates and social campaign assets. But in the future, Thoma says, it will be trained to create video content as well.
“The reality is, all companies use different tech stacks, and all are using different tools, so how do you make sure that you’re creating a tool that lives within any environment?” Thoma says.
The answer, she believes, is designing tools that live in the cloud and can function with any AI platform. That way, as AI companies update their models, creatives can stay in front of the curve.
“We can’t be thinking, ‘Create this for that,’” Thoma says. “There’s too much evolution and too much speed. Any tools or any outputs that are being created right now need to be built in an agile way to ensure that marketers and creative teams can always stay 10 steps ahead.”