Public speaker
Maarten speaks at conferences and inside organisations about virtual brand ambassadors: the mascot, rebuilt with generative AI and still run by the brand. His case is that within five years every self-respecting brand will treat one as a brand asset, in the same way it treats its logo. He has been creating them with his team since 2019, so what he brings on stage comes from projects that ran, including the ones that did not survive contact with reality.
Humanising Technology:
The Renaissance of Mascots as Virtual Brand Ambassadors
The Michelin Man has been around for 130 years. Ronald McDonald, the Duolingo owl. Characters like these survive one technology generation after another, because identity outlasts technology. That is the whole point: the way to humanise technology is not to hide it, but to give it a face people can relate to. Generative AI did not replace the mascot. It gave it a voice, put it on every channel at once, and turned it into a virtual brand ambassador.
It started in 2019, when Maarten and his team created Esther Olofsson, the first virtual influencer in the Netherlands, long before generative AI reshaped the field. Since then his team has created ambassadors for companies and for government bodies, and Biek now does the job for RAUWcc itself. The agency runs what it sells.
In the keynote he shares the three principles that separate an ambassador that holds up from one that quietly disappears:
- design for feeling, not just function;
- identity outlasts technology;
- think big, start small, learn fast.
It is a branding story first and a technology story second.
Besides keynotes, Maarten regularly joins panel discussions. He has spoken to rooms of twelve and to halls of several hundred, on location as well as online. Dutch or English, whichever the room needs.
He rewrites the keynote for every room, based on who is sitting in it and the sector they work in. A marketing team gets a different version than a group of civil servants, and both leave with something they can use the next morning.
