Jason Barnard‘s journey from a professional musician to a leading expert in digital marketing exemplifies the power of adaptability and creativity. Initially gaining recognition as the lead singer of the punk folk band the Barking Dogs, Jason transitioned into the world of children’s entertainment, where he founded a successful edutainment company. However, after exiting this venture, he faced the challenge of redefining his digital identity, which led him to explore the intricacies of online branding and search engine optimization.

Recognizing the limitations of traditional SEO techniques, Jason founded Kalicube to help individuals and businesses effectively manage their online presence. He emphasizes the importance of crafting a centralized brand narrative that is clear, consistent, and authentic. By focusing on entity SEO, Jason empowers clients to take control of their digital identities, ensuring their unique stories resonate with audiences and build trust.

To further support those navigating the complexities of digital marketing in the age of AI, Kalicube offers a range of free guides designed to help you master essential strategies and techniques. Visit Kalicube’s Guides to access valuable resources that will enhance your understanding of digital marketing and empower you to create a compelling brand narrative.

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Listen here: The Power of a Unified Story: Building Your Centralized Brand Narrative with Jason Barnard

Published by: Your Brand Amplified. July 09, 2025. Host: Anika Jackson Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube.

Jason Barnard Reveals How to Shape Brand Success and Stand Out in the Age of AI

[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: So the techniques we’re using to move the needle with Google and now AI are very, very different to the ones that the SEO community uses, which is basically keyword counting and link counting. If anybody’s talking about that, please take a big, big, big deep breath, take a big step back, and step into.

[00:00:21] Anika Jackson: The world of success with your brand amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I’m your host, Anika Jackson, and I’m on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. This is going to be a fun one today. Jason Bernard of Kalicube, you have such an interesting story. And what you’re doing for people now in this new era of figuring out what our brands mean in the digital ecosystem and the AI ecosystem and how we best portray them is a topic that you know very dearly. I say you’re the foremost expert on this.

[00:01:09] Jason Barnard: Thank you.

[00:01:09] Anika Jackson: And I’m really excited to dive in.

[00:01:12] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Thank you very much. I’ve been looking at this for 13 years, but I started before AI was a thing.

[00:01:20] Anika Jackson: Right.

[00:01:20] Jason Barnard: And whether it’s luck or whether it’s skill or foresight, I was looking at how to manage how Google understood my brand and my company brand back in 2012. And it turns out the way that I deal with that is exactly the way you need to deal with that exact same question with AI today. And it’s suddenly so much in everybody’s vision and so important for everybody. How does AI understand you? How does it represent you? And when does it present you in the conversations it’s having with its users?

Jason Barnard Transforms His Online Identity From Blue Dog to Digital Expert

[00:01:58] Anika Jackson: Exactly. So before we dive into that, which is, of course, a topic I love, I want to talk about your background in music in production, and your amazing story of how you discovered that your brand wasn’t sharing the story you wanted it to.

[00:02:14] Jason Barnard:  Right. Well, music is actually something I still do.

[00:02:19] Anika Jackson: Wonderful.

[00:02:20] Jason Barnard: So I was a professional musician for many years. Punk folk music with the Barking Dogs. We made a decent living from playing punk folk music in Europe. That was wonderful. We played on the same bill as Bob Dylan, which is one of my greatest claims to fame. I didn’t meet him. Oh. And we played right at the bottom. He played right at the top. But that doesn’t change the fact we were on the same poster, which is delightful. And then I segued from that into children’s cartoons, writing songs for children, making cartoons. And I built up one of the biggest websites in the world for children’s edutainment. So it’s an ed tech company, but specifically aimed at children. And I ran the company. I signed deals with Disney, with ITV International, with Radio Canada. We were competing with the BBC, we were competing with pbs. I was the CEO and founder of a phenomenally successful independent edtech company. But one of the things I did in that company was voiceover for the blue dog in the cartoon we produced. And that’s where the problem you mentioned came from, is that when I exited that company in 2011 and then moved back to France in 2012, my biggest problem was that when I was talking to potential clients about digital marketing, which was my new field, they would Google my name and Google would say, Jason Barnard is the voiceover artist for a company cartoon Blue Dog. And that lost me literally millions of dollars. And from there I thought, okay, so Google understands me to be this voiceover artist for cartoon Blue Dog, which is true. How can I get it to focus on? Jason Barnard is a CEO, founder of an edutainment edtech company and an expert in digital marketing. And I spent three years figuring out exactly what somebody said earlier on how to manipulate Google’s focus so that I can strategically change the message. And I really like the way they said that.

[00:04:41] Anika Jackson: Yeah.

[00:04:42] Jason Barnard: And that’s what I did. And then after three years I realized that when you Google my name, it said, Jason Barnard is a world leading digital marketing expert and the CEO and founder of multiple companies. I had succeeded in manipulating Google’s focus and to change strategically what it was saying about me. And then I founded Kalicube because I know that’s a problem that everybody in business has.

How to Guide AI and Google to Understand Your Expertise

[00:05:07] Anika Jackson: Just thinking about how many of us have different roles. I mean some people stay in the same industry, but many of us jump in and out of different things like yourself. And so I remember when I was moving into one role, somebody said you really need to think about what you want to do and make sure that your LinkedIn mirrors that. Well, the truth of the matter is that I still do all of the different things. And so tailoring everything to just one industry isn’t really going to be effective for me. But being able to show people how all of these things tie together and create my expertise and how I can help them is of interest. And so I want to ask what are the things that you did? What are some techniques that you used to make sure that Google said. And now of course LLMs say that you are this digital expert that you are.

[00:06:02] Jason Barnard: And that’s a great point that the LLMs, the AI assistive engines say the same thing, because they all function fundamentally the same way. And I think what we have at Kalicube is a fundamental foundational truth that applies to everybody and that works for every single one of these engines. And whether I was foresightful or lucky, it was the strategy that I used to change the way that Google perceived me that functions across the board. And you’re very, very right to say that we need to, number one, embrace everything we’ve done. Trying to hide it is not going to work. However, we can do multiple things. Number one is to re-focus the attention of the AI. Number two is to reframe what we’ve done to better serve our current situation. And there’s a great example of what I managed to do with up to 10, which was the company that they founded. The Blue Dog was part of Uptoten. And I reframed the entire story to say, actually, I was primarily the CEO and founder of this company. I signed a deal with Disney, I signed a deal with Orange, I signed a deal with Radio Canada, I signed a deal with ITV International. And by the way, I also did the voice of the cartoon Blue Dog.

[00:07:26] Anika Jackson: Yeah.

[00:07:27] Jason Barnard: And it’s by the way that really keeps things in perspective. And so today I tell the story very much from an entrepreneurial perspective, rather than a cartoon Blue Dog voiceover artist songwriter perspective. But if I wanted a career in songwriting or voiceover as a voiceover artist, I could honestly simply change the perspective, change the narrative, and be able to build a career there. So that’s the key, is to take control.

Own Your Online Narrative by Creating and Corroborating Your Brand Story

[00:08:01] Anika Jackson: Yeah. Well. And how does one do that? You know, the exercise that you had us go through at AI Mavericks, which I was so happy, it was such a delight to run into you there because we had met a couple of years before, perhaps. I was on your podcast. I think we talked about having you on my podcast. And now we’re finally here. But you, the thing that you shared, one of the things that you shared that we can do is, of course, Google ourselves, maybe incognito, so it doesn’t have all of our biases in. Yep, go through all of the different LLMs, see what it says about us. And I use that with my students at USC now, where I tell them, you need to take ownership of your brand. I talk about you, and then I say, let’s do it right now in class. Put your name into an LLM and see what it says. Is it bringing information up? And that case study has had students go, wow, I’m not really. I don’t consider myself a runner, but it’s saying that I do all these runs. I do them because my parents like to do them, not because I’m passionate about it. I just do it to have fun with them. But it’s making me out to be this person who’s really focused on that. I’m like, see, that’s why you need to get that out of your brand, of your main story, because that’s not what you’re pursuing. And you want to make sure you’re selling the right story well, 100%.

[00:09:20] Jason Barnard: And that perspective of saying, well, you’re a runner or you’re a blue dog in my case, is all to do with the weight of evidence. And the important thing is to look at where the weight of evidence is. And it’s not necessarily the most pervasive information. It’s the information that’s in places that Google and AI are looking at for facts. So Wikipedia is the very obvious example of if it’s in Wikipedia and it’s not true, you’re in trouble. So anybody who thinks, oh, I want a Wikipedia page, think again. Because it has such dominance in knowledge at the moment, that’s diminishing, but it’s still there. But then for the Blue dog, it was IMDb, it was music Brains, it was Rotten Tomatoes, all of these sites that have enormous influence. And so for me, a site like IMDb, Music Brains, Deezer, even because we were playing music, outweighed all of the information about me as a digital marketer. Not because there was more of it, but because it was in places that were more influential.

[00:10:30 Anika Jackson: Yeah, yeah.

[00:10:31] Jason Barnard: And you really need to think about what is influential. So these sports sites are potentially simply very influential, but not necessarily the most voluminous, if we want to say it that way. Yeah. And the weight of evidence is to do with both volume and authority of the source. So you need to look at your digital footprint and analyze it to see where that weight of evidence is taking Google and AI. And then you take control. And taking control is as much about changing that information as it is building your own central hub that gives your version of the story. And that is the key that people don’t think about, is Google and AI have no reason to tell a version of your story that isn’t your version. They just don’t know what your version is. So create a website, two pages, a homepage about a page that you control. So you could use LinkedIn, which you mentioned earlier on, but you don’t control LinkedIn. It could change. They could delete your account. Somebody could change the information on it. I would not take that risk because this is permanent. Buy a domain name, build a two page website, tell your version of the facts, then go around your entire digital footprint and make sure that the entire Internet that references you corroborates what you’re saying on your own, what we call entity home, your own website, and link out to those corroborative sources and if possible, back from those corroborative sources to your central hub, entity home. At that point you have Google and AI who are actively looking for that entity home. Google calls it the point of reconciliation where they reconcile the information about you. They don’t believe you on your own. Good word. Unless everything else on the Internet corroborates. If you can pull that trick off, you get control. And when you’ve been doing it as long as I have, I can say pretty much whatever I want on my website and Google and AI will spit it out as though it’s true without double checking.

Why Controlling Your Personal Brand in Google and AI Matters Now

[00:12:41] Anika Jackson: Yeah, One of the techniques that you mentioned is one of the great things about your website is you can go and you can get a free analysis about what your footprint looks like, what you can do on your own, and then of course, working with Kalicube, what you can do that is even more focused. And my brand obviously is very associated with my podcast. Every time, you know, if you put my name in the podcast, that’s going to come up, interviews I’ve done on other people’s podcasts or my podcast, or, you know, teaching at USC or things like that, which are very important to me and very aligned with what my goals are. But you pointed out to me that you also have to separate the business from your personal brand. And I think that’s a problem a lot of people have who are working in large organizations. They may be very high up, but they are only known in the ecosystem of whatever tech company they’re at, or whatever large, you know, a Fortune 500 company that they’re in and not externally as who they want to be when they leave that job or whatever they want to pursue next.

[00:13:48] Jason Barnard: Yeah, 100%. And that’s kind of the career pivot. The point is it’s great to be known for what you’re known for today, but I would argue that it would be great to prepare for that pivot. And if you don’t have any kind of control over your personal brand representation in Google and AI, that pivot is going to take you a year, maybe two. But if you have control, it takes three or four months. Potentially even less. And I think people are pushing it back and saying, well, I don’t need to deal with it now. And I would disagree. There are a couple of things going on here. Number one is if you get control now, your pivot will be easier in the future whenever it happens. But number two is AI is laying down the foundations of its own knowledge. And if you leave it too late, you will be too late and you will be knocking at the door of a walled garden that has no handle and nobody you can talk to in order to get through that door to be understood for who you truly are. So taking control today gets you inside the brains of the AI inside that walled garden, which means you can then change things. If you’re not inside in the next two to three years, you are going to be really struggling to actually get yourself heard because the AI is on what we call what I would now call an information gap mission. If it thinks it knows something. For example, Jason Barnard is the entrepreneur, CEO, founder of Kalicube who was a cartoon blue dog. It doesn’t need to get that information a second time because it knows it. If it has it wrong and it doesn’t go looking for the information because it believes it has it right, I’m in trouble. And that’s what’s going to happen in three or four years. And the audit you talked about is on the kalicube.com website, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E.com and just search in there for an AI audit and you will be able to find an AI audit that tells you what the AI currently thinks about you and your management of your own personal brand. And that will give you a really good insight into number one, what it thinks about you, but also suggestions about what you might want to do about it.

Why Updating Your Online Presence Is Critical for Accurate Brand Representation

[00:16:09] Anika Jackson: Yeah, I found that particularly interesting because I think we probably have a perception that we all are in control of our brands and our narrative. But then I’ll have somebody say something and I’m like, oh, that’s a really outdated bio. Where did you get that from? It’ll be some website. I’m like, oh, okay, I need to update it on that membership website because we also aren’t always good about managing is all of our information updated on all these other places that are feeding information to Google or to LLMs? You suggested having your own website, like you said, where it’s even if it’s a simple site, but it’s somewhere where you make sure that that’s the most up to date. Information, I think that’s really important. And I was surprised, you know, when I got mine because I was like, oh, I thought my scores would be a lot higher because of the work I put in. But I have reserved my URLs for my personal name for a very long time, but I haven’t done anything with those yet. So yeah, 100%.

[00:17:06] Jason Barnard: And the AI reports often come up with that fact. There is no obvious central point of reference that I can use. So I’m a bit confused, number one. Number two is there are different bios, so I’m not sure which one to believe. So you need to update them. And the other is there isn’t reliable third party corroboration and often it isn’t that, that corroboration, third party saying great things about you. It’s not that it’s not there, it’s that they can’t find it. So they can’t find the central hub, they can’t figure out which bio to use and they can’t find the third party corroboration that demonstrates that you’re telling the truth. Those are the three fundamental problems. And on the screen back here behind me, kalicube.com guides, there’s a free guide for how to do this yourself. And as you mentioned, we have clients at Kalicube. Our clients tend to be high powered entrepreneurs with great ambition who want us to do this for them. And that’s great. We have a wonderful client base. We serve them very well, we give them great value. We serve the people who get immense commercial financial value. But because I personally see this as a fundamental existential question for everybody, we give it all away for free.

Own Your Story Today and Avoid Regrets Tomorrow

[00:18:25] Anika Jackson: Yeah, yeah. Which is brilliant and such a service, but also a lot of people don’t have time to do it themselves. But if you can at least do a few things and then when you get to the point where you can work with an expert, all the more better. Right?

[00:18:40] Anika Jackson: So you talked a little bit about how we need to own the narrative because in two or three years it’ll be too late. How long did it take you to change the narrative from amazing musician, the CEO and of this great edtech company, edutainment company, also the voice of the blue dog to being seen for who you wanted to be seen for?

[00:19:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah, that’s a very unfair question because I started from scratch and I tried to figure out how it worked. So it took me a long time. Then I kept pivoting and kept changing my mind because I hadn’t figured out initially what I actually wanted to say. And so it’s an ongoing process. And let’s say three years ago, I think I got it. Absolutely. Like, I wanted it. So that took me 10 years. Yeah, 10 years. For our clients, it doesn’t take that long because we understand that you need to define who you want to be known as what your brand narrative needs to be. And I’ve built a machine that can find all of the resources that Google and AI are looking at to understand about you, so. Oh, sorry. And we can build the perfect website, which is what we do for our clients. We build the perfect website to feed the machines that perfect entity home, that perfect point of reconciliation that the machines are actively looking for and will use. So I’ve compressed my 10 years to one year.

[00:20:11] Anika Jackson: Yeah, but for one year. Well, so that’s a good measure. And I see similar things in my work in podcasting, where, you know, if you count the work that I did before I went into podcasting, when I had a radio show, that’s probably nine, ten years that I’ve put into this, not including other times when I was emceeing and appearing on camera before that. And I’ve taken this time to test everything, also figure out what works, what doesn’t work, so that now I can help other people do it in a very, very short timeframe compared to all of the time that I put into it. But you have to go through that process so that you know that you have a great story, that you know the formula, and you have what works. Right?

[00:20:59] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, we say that about lawyers, if you’re not paying the lawyer for the time, you’re paying the lawyer for the experience and the ability to say that’s the solution to your problem. And more so potentially than a lawyer is, we had to go through the really hard stuff to get here. And so when somebody comes to me and says, I have this particular problem and I need a solution, either I’ve seen it because I’d made that mistake in the past myself and I can help them to avoid making that mistake, or I have the data that can help me to tell them exactly what they need to do, or I have the common sense to bring those two together and figure out something new that didn’t necessarily exist before. And I had that experience earlier on. I was talking to a client earlier on who asked me a very specific question about a very specific thing that I had never seen before. And yet I could look at the data in my platform, Kalicube Pro™ Plus. My experience and say, well, 95% sure this is what’s going to work for that. And it took me three seconds. Nice. And without the experience, without the data and without having lived through it, I wouldn’t have got close, right?

How Kalicube Transforms Personal Brand Narratives by Taking Control of Google and AI’s Storytelling

[00:22:05] Anika Jackson: Absolutely. And I was actually going to ask you if you could share a story or two of before and after of working with Kalicube and being able to really have the digital footprint that a brand or a person wanted to have.

[00:22:20] Jason Barnard: Well, we have some online reputation management clients who, for whatever reason, had a piece of bad news that came up about them and that dominated their lives for many years. They tried traditional online reputation management techniques, which basically involves trying to publish as many articles as possible to drown it. That simply doesn’t work. You need to, as my friend said earlier on, manipulate the algorithm to refocus its attention, to strategically get it to show what you want it to show. That’s the solution to reputation issues. Absolutely nothing to do with reputation. In fact, a positive reputation. This guy behind me, Scott Duffy, came to us saying, well, I work with a traditional SEO agency for my personal brand in Google and the whole thing collapsed. The whole thing went wrong. And the reason for that was that traditional SEO techniques do not work for brand management. In Google and AI, traditional SEO is all about getting to the top four, buying red shoes or a fridge for my kitchen, whatever it might be. But these commercial kinds of keywords and a brand are very, very different. Google needs to understand the brand in order to represent it correctly. It needs to understand the audience of that brand in order to represent it correctly in a meaningful manner for that audience. So the techniques we’re using to move the needle with Google and now AI are very, very different to the ones that the SEO community uses, which is basically keyword counting and link counting. If anybody’s talking about that, please take a big, big, big deep breath, take a big step back and read about entity SEO. Read some of my articles. It will help you realise that that’s not the future. But for Scott, what happened is he had a company that he sold to Richard Branson, and one of his issues was that I sold this company to Richard Branson. That’s a big deal. I want that to appear on my search results page when somebody searches my name, that I’m associated with Richard Branson, that I sold this company. And as you can see here, the photo does appear. He wanted this description to say that he’s a successful entrepreneur. He wanted the subtitle to say that he’s an entrepreneur, whereas before it said he was an author. So what we did is change Google’s perception of him. He’s not an author. He sold a company to Richard Branson. His description should say that he’s an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur who now works in AI. And we can get Google to say that every time you search his name. And now if you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google AI mode, which is going to be Apple, absolutely huge. They are not only very accurate about this, but they’re also very enthusiastic. A successful entrepreneur, a world leader in AI in business, a partner with Richard Branson. This kind of thing, which has a lot to do with framing, but framing and getting the machine to repeat the version of my story that makes sense to my business today.

[00:25:31] Anika Jackson: Yeah, that’s a huge shift. And I think that’s where a lot of us, when we do have a lot of different things that we’ve done, that’s where we see the confusion. Right?

[00:25:43] Jason Barnard: Yeah. I mean, if we look at my story, what it could say if you search. My name is Jason Barnard, lead singer in Stanley the Counting Horse. That doesn’t mean anything. It was my very first group in Liverpool. It was a blues band and it was called Stanley the Counting Horse, which was a silly name and it was fun, but that could potentially dominate my life 40 years later. We obviously don’t. Well, I don’t want that for my current career. And for me, the fundamental truth and the important fact here is I can take control. I don’t have to leave it to luck. I don’t have to leave Google and AI to decide who I am. I can decide for myself and encourage them to give my version of the story. And when I say encourage, I’m actually kind of saying force them. And one thing perhaps that we can really keep in mind is they have no reason to tell any version other than your own. They just need to know what it is and they need to believe it.

[00:26:46] Anika Jackson: Yeah. And I think that’s where people get in trouble, is letting other people control our narratives. And as we see in today’s world, particularly with people, some people loving AI, but also taking it with a grain of salt, people having a lot of distrust or mistrust in what’s going to be the future and people wanting to have that authentic connection with the brands and the people that they interact with, if it’s all over the place, it doesn’t tell the right story. They don’t necessarily get a full sense of who we are in this moment now. And maybe like with Scott Duffy, how experience shaped what he’s working on in artificial intelligence and all of his businesses..

[00:27:26 Jason Barnard: I know one thing that really does strike me. You mentioned authenticity, and I know that a lot of personal, brand and brand frameworks talk about being authentic, which is great. How do you make sure that your authenticity shines through, through the lens of Google and AI, so you can be as authentic as you want? If they don’t reflect that, you’re in trouble. So think about your own authenticity, but also how that authenticity is reflected and amplified by Google and AI.

Navigating Name Ambiguity Online: How to Clarify Your Personal Brand Amid Multiple Identities

[00:27:56] Anika Jackson: So I mentioned at the top some of the things that you had told us to do. Google ourselves in incognito mode, check out different LLMs and see what they have to say about our name. Does it even bring up the right person? Right. Because that doesn’t always happen. Right. There are other people with my name, some of whom are university professors like myself, but some of whom are track stars or lawyers in other cities. So how do we make sure that it’s framing the right narrative? What are some other tips that you would give people?

[00:28:25] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, that ambiguity of you have multiple facets to your personality, to your life is very important. Google and AI will by default imagine it’s multiple different people. So I’ve written a book, I was in a band, I have a company, I’ve had two other companies. That’s potentially five different people straight away. Then you have all the other people with your name who are actually different people. That’s a second ambiguity, which is a huge problem for them. And at the end of the day, if you can help them to understand, they will run with it. They will be on your side. They have no reason not to understand. And your goal is to be incredibly clear about who you are, who you have been and who you’re not. And the problem with who you’re not is you can’t actually tell a machine, I’m actually not that person over there or it’s very difficult. That’s the hardest thing to do. All you can do is be incredibly clear about who you are and what you’ve done in the past and once again have that website that brings that information together. So if we take Jason Barnard is not the podcaster in the UK, I can’t explicitly say to the machine, I’m not that guy over there. What I can do is not talk about podcasts and music. He has a music podcast on the same page. There is a university professor in San Francisco. If I happen to be also a university professor, I would have to be very careful to say, Jason Bernard, University professor in Montpellier in France, to ensure that it sees that it’s two different people and the story goes on and on and on. And I think what we don’t realize is the subtleties involved of disambiguating me from the other people with my name and ensuring that Google understands that all the different facets of my life, the musician, the cartoon blue dog, the CEO, the founder, the digital marketer, the author, are seen to be the same person. So that podcast, also, podcast of hair, it gets complicated. Yeah. Is that they are the same person and it doesn’t start thinking, oh, this is multiple different people.

[00:30:41] Anika Jackson: Yeah.

[00:30:42] Jason Barnard: So I suppose the lesson at the end of the day is have your own entity home, your own website, own your story, be incredibly clear and make sure that your entire digital footprint supports what it is you’re saying on that entity, home, centralized hub, point of reconciliation.

Leveraging Podcasts and Books to Drive Business and Command Google’s Attention

[00:30:59] Anika Jackson: Nice. And speaking of being an author, being an ongoing contributor to many publications, having a podcast, can you tell us a little bit about your other endeavors? Right, so talk a little bit about the podcast. And where in the journey did you start that?

[00:31:17] Jason Barnard: I started the podcast as an excuse to travel around the world. I asked my accountant if I could just travel around the world and pay it on the company’s expenses. And they said no. I said, well, oh, they actually said, you have to have something to show for it. And I thought, okay, well, if I’ve got content to show for it, is that fine? Because the content will drive business and it has driven a lot of business. And they said, yeah, that’s fine. So I thought, okay, I’ll start a podcast. Went to these conferences, interviewed people in the corridors of the conferences and produced a lot of content that has driven, number one, an enormous amount of education for me personally, education for my audience, but also driven business, which has been hugely, hugely interesting, is that it’s placed me at the center of brand focused digital marketing with SEO baked in, because the podcast started with SEO, moved on to digital marketing, moved on to brand, and is now all about entrepreneurship. And I’ve become, with that podcast, and I love the podcast for that, the center of my own little universe, which is entrepreneurs who care about personal brands within the sphere of digital marketing and making sure that they are correctly packaged and ready for search and AI.

[00:32:34] Anika Jackson: Nice.

[00:32:35] Jason Barnard: And the podcast demonstrates that absolutely perfectly. So I love the podcast. I’ve really got a big kick out of it. And you were on it and you actually have a very special place because Google has what we call the Knowledge Graph, which is a massive encyclopedia like Wikipedia, but 15,000 times bigger. And every podcast episode gets into the knowledge graph, but a lot of them just disappear after a couple of months.

[00:33:01] Anika Jackson: Oh, really?

[00:33:02] Jason Barnard: So we get into Google’s encyclopedia and then it disappears. And that’s the way the podcast has worked. And most podcasts work for multiple reasons. Not very particularly important right now. But yours has stayed in the knowledge graph for three years, and for some reason, and we haven’t figured out why it won’t move, really. Google likes you. Yay.

[00:33:26] Anika Jackson: That’s nice to be liked by Google.

[00:33:30] Jason Barnard: And then I’d publish books. I’m up to three now. And one thing that people don’t realize is that publishing a book can create an enormous amount of confusion. So we think, oh, I’ll publish a book, and that will bring me enormous authority, and it does to the human audience we’re talking to and we’re actively, proactively communicating with. But what happens in Google and AI is they see a book by an author, they see the same name, but they assume it’s somebody new. So you end up with that authority actually not being applied to the original version of you. In their brains, it’s completely separate. So when you publish a book, think, number one, it brings authority to my audience, but I need to communicate that authority. The ambient authority that it brings through search and AI needs to be worked upon. You need to make sure that Google and AI understand that the author of this book is the same person as the Anika Jackson who has the podcast. Jason Barnard who owns Kalicube also wrote this book. Otherwise, that authority and the credibility signals that it sends to these machines is completely lost.

Mastering Your Brand’s Digital Echo in an AI-Driven World

[00:34:45] Anika Jackson: I’ve learned so much. I really, I always enjoy listening to your podcast, hearing you speak at conferences, and this time that we’re having together right now. And I’m looking forward to many more conversations and going back through, as I’m looking at my next shift right now, going back through that report and seeing what I can do to improve my brand resonance and brand intelligence and hopefully be able to work with you in the not so distant future.

[00:35:17] Jason Barnard: That would be lovely. I mean, honestly, the reports almost always say more or less the same thing. Create that entity home that you own, that gives the machines your version of the truth and ensure that what we now call the digital brand echo is consistent and meaningful and supports what it is you’re saying on your own website. If you can do that, you’re going to win this game with or without Kalicube’s help.

[00:35:50] Anika Jackson: Well, with your help, because you’re also helping put together these reports and giving us guides. So you’re offering a lot of benefit whether somebody becomes a paid client or not. And I thank you for that.

[00:36:04] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean, I, I really, truly want people to be able to take control or maybe maybe we could say take back control of their personal brand or their corporate brand for that matter. It works the same way. Their personal corporate brand in Google and AI.

[00:36:21] Anika Jackson: Well, Jason, we’re going to have links to everything in the show notes and give you lots of great material. Yes, you’re pointing out guides, a link.

[00:36:32] Jason Barnard: To the katticube.com guides, which is a free download. And truly and honestly, I’m promoting that because I truly believe it’s useful and I want people to be able to take back control of their personal or corporate brand in Google and AI.

[00:36:47] Anika Jackson: Yeah, and thank you again. I think we all need as many tools from the experts that we can get right now as we’re looking at this huge shift and how it’s going to shift even further as we get into, further into Web three, Web four, and, you know, have our agents, our agentic AI owning our brands and communicating to other agents. Oh, wow.

[00:37:08] Jason Barnard: That’s a conversation in two years.

Claim, Frame, and Prove as the Foundation of Digital Brand Intelligence™

[00:37:10] Anika Jackson: Yeah. Yes. But I’m getting ready for it now. So, yeah, we’re going to have you back on and I will also be starting a new podcast or two that I’m going to have you on. So I’m really looking forward to it. I haven’t actually announced anything yet. This is the first time anybody’s hearing about it, so I won’t share the name or anything until I get everything set up. But you’ll be one of my first guests, so I look forward to that conversation. And Jason, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto, words that continue to inspire you to help others and serve others really understand their brand intelligence?

[00:37:51] Jason Barnard: That’s a question nobody has ever asked me before. And one thing that I’ve really become obsessed with in the last couple of months is a new concept that I created, which is claim, frame and prove. And I created the Calicube process, which is what you get with these guides, which is the universal solution to controlling and amplifying your brand, personal or corporate or product in Google and AI, using understandability, credibility, deliverability. And if you read the guides, you’ll understand exactly what understandability, credibility and deliverability mean and you’ll understand why it’s a universal solution and why it’s timeless. But recently I was looking at what the foundational actions we take within those three phases, understandability, credibility, deliverability, what the foundational micro actions we take. And it’s all about claim, frame, and prove. I claim that I’m an entrepreneur. I frame it in a way that makes sense to me today, and then I prove it by linking out to the resources that demonstrate that it’s true. And that idea of claim, frame and prove is the single most powerful thing I have discovered in the last 12 years. And I personally believe I’ve discovered quite a lot of powerful things. Darwinism in search, understandability, credibility, deliverability, the digital brand, echo. These are all powerful things. But the single most powerful thing I’ve discovered, which is a fundamental truth and fundamentally important to everything you do online, is claim, frame and prove.

[00:39:37] Anika Jackson: Amazing. Well, thank you. And thank you for giving a part of your evening, I believe.

[00:39:41] Jason Barnard: Yes, it is my evening. Good point.

Looking Ahead: Career Pivots, Giving Back, and Jason Barnard’s Valuable Constructs

[00:39:44] Anika Jackson: And again, I just look forward to many more conversations and I want to thank everybody who’s watching this episode or listening to it. Go check out Jason’s resources. They are invaluable and they will make a huge difference. I know so many of you are at that career pivot point or you’re at that point where you’ve exited your company and maybe for lots and lots of money, but now you’re looking for that. What next? Or you want to give back in some way. Jason’s constructs are the way to do it.

[00:40:17] Jason Barnard: Ooh, I like the word construct. It makes me sound intelligent.

[00:40:20] Anika Jackson: Well, you are.

[00:40:23] Jason Barnard: I was fishing for the compliment. Thank you.

[00:40:25] Anika Jackson: Of course. Happy too. And with that, you’ll be hearing again from Jason on this podcast. And definitely check out his. We’ll have that in the show notes for you as well. And have a beautiful day everybody.

[00:40:38] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much, Anika.

[00:40:40] Anika Jackson: Absolutely. Thank you, Jason. Thanks for listening or watching this episode of your Brand Amplified. Don’t forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.