Optimizely's new brand arrives at a time when AI is reshaping marketing faster than most teams can adapt. What was the catalyst for this rebrand, and why did this feel like the right moment to make such a bold statement?
The Optimizely platform has evolved far beyond its roots as an A/B testing company, but many people still associate the brand that way. Our rebrand serves as a reflection of who we’ve become: an AI platform that helps marketers create and optimize digital experiences. It’s a better representation of the progress and innovation happening as agent workflows now operate across our content management and experimentation solutions.
As for boldness? It was a requirement going into the project. Our goal was to stand out from all the other AI solutions in the market that look, feel and speak the same way.
The new brand is built around the idea that marketers should be "free to grow." How did that philosophy emerge, and what does it mean in practical terms for modern marketing teams?
We spent a lot of time in the early days of strategy formation on what we believe the Optimizely brand truly stands for. One word that names why we do what we do. The word that kept coming up was growth. “Free to grow” is our dual-purpose call to action. On the business side, so many AI companies are focusing on more tactical benefits like efficiency and cost savings. We chose to focus on the desired outcome our customers want from partnering with Optimizely.
The other side of the ‘free to grow’ coin speaks to the marketers and digital leaders that want to grow in their careers but are feeling stuck in a constant state of survival. Today, we are all expected to accomplish more with less resources, complete the work faster and have it be more impactful. All the while, marketers are expected to learn new AI skills and push that ever-present fear of replacement way down into our emotional depths. The Optimizely platform is designed to help marketers move from surviving to thriving by automating the mundane, operational processes that dominate our daily work, and allowing us to get back to doing more of the work we love. As a company, we are also committing to help educate marketers on how to use AI and deploy it for the right work through programs like Opal University and our new thought leadership program ‘Field Notes’. Field Notes will bring raw 1st and 3rd party perspectives of success, failure, learnings and frustration. We’ve been through it ourselves, and have lots of stories to tell that can help.
Many organizations adopted AI to move faster, yet marketers often feel buried under more content demands, approvals, and operational complexity. Where do you think the industry got the AI conversation wrong?
We’ve seen first-hand and read a lot of other accounts that paint a growing disconnection between executive teams and marketing teams when it comes to how we use AI. Of course, AI can be a solution to create more campaigns and content at a speed we never thought possible. And this is often the top-down expectation that comes with a side of pressure to prove value quickly. But the best marketers aren’t looking to create more content and more campaigns. We want to create better ones. Experiences that connect deeply with our desired audience and make them feel something about the brand or product. And something that makes marketers feel proud of the work.
Where we are going wrong is not pointing AI at the most important things.The things stopping us from being better. And it’s more than just needing a great tool with agents and brand and business context. It requires redefining workflows and RACI models, and deciding as a team what tasks AI will and more importantly will not take on. When you rebuild the operating model with AI at the center instead of layering it onto existing ways of working, you make space for more creativity and bolder thinking. Teams move faster, the quality of work improves, and the impact is measurable. These are the exact outcomes executive teams are looking for.
One of the more interesting aspects of the rebrand is its emphasis on human creativity rather than AI capabilities alone. Why was it important for Optimizely to put creativity, curiosity, and human judgment at the center of the story?
Working in marketing at an AI platform built for marketers, we felt immense responsibility to showcase how teams can and should approach a rebrand. There are great examples of how we used AI to migrate content to the new website, rebuild presentations, scale creative work, optimize content for GEO and much more. However, we agreed from the start what AI would and would not be used for, and we were adamant that the visual identity and core creative assets will come from the minds and hands of humans.
The best representation of that is through our partnership with Berlin-based artist Andrey Kasay, who has previously collaborated with brands like MTV, Nike, Gucci and Red Bull. In addition to visual differentiation, Andrey’s unique illustration style allows Optimizely to bring complex topics like experience creation, optimization and orchestration to life in highly visual ways.
At the end of the day, creativity is our favorite part of the job too. That chance to tell a story and present a visual experience that makes the reader stop the scroll, pause and reflect. Smile. Laugh. Wonder. AI can do a lot, but it can’t replicate human emotion in the same way. It was important for us to showcase that, as we not only represent our platform, but we are also standing for other creative teams’ rights to keep human creativity as a priority when so many brands are shipping creative work with AI.
The rebrand goes beyond visual changes and reflects a broader platform strategy. How closely are Optimizely's evolving product vision and brand identity connected?
Extremely close. Two years ago our AI capabilities were embedded within our individual applications like CMS and Web Experimentation. Then AI became its own application with a standalone brand, Optimizely Opal. Today, our Agent Platform is the center piece of our go to market strategy. We’ve woven the separate brand back into the core Optimizely brand and applied a visual treatment whose energy matches the special possibilities that it brings. We also re-labeled our flagship products agentic CMS and agentic experimentation, and confidently aligned the new brand positioning with “the AI platform for marketing.”
One of the strongest reactions we received is how the new visual identity was brought directly into the product UI, where Andrey’s illustrations and animations are being used to add little moments of delight and enhance the overall user experience. It supports the feeling of logging into an AI platform that is modern, bright, and easy to use.
What do you hope this rebrand signals—not just about Optimizely's future, but about the kind of marketing industry you believe should emerge in the age of AI?
If growth was the external theme to the rebrand, the internal theme centered around the idea of bravery. As a leadership team we agreed bravery would not be optional and we reminded ourselves of that constantly throughout the process. One of the most common reactions to the rebrand was that Optimizely doesn’t look like a typical B2B brand. For us, that was the signal we got it right. We set out to show up differently, and we did. The work stands apart, and that was always the point. We had so much fun creating it, and when people react with joy it’s a reflection of the fun we had.
There’s still a lot of work to do as we further establish the new Optimizely brand, and we have some extremely fun and creative projects launching in the coming weeks and months. And yes, they are all coming from the minds and hands of humans, thanks to agents clearing the way so we can focus more on doing the things we love.
