Jason Barnard is founder and CEO of Kalicube, the digital brand engineering consultancy he built around controlling what Google and AI systems say about a person or company by name. He coined Brand SERP optimization years before generative engines made the same corroboration problem obvious to everyone else.
WTPL Music and Boowa
Barnard's first company was WTPL Music, which he ran through the 1990s with deals at EMI and Warner Chappell while releasing albums with his band The Barking Dogs. In his own time he built a children's site around the characters Boowa and Kwala. That side project grew large enough that in 2000 he founded UpToTen around it while based in Mauritius.
As CEO of UpToTen through 2011 he scaled educational games and entertainment that, by his account, took tens of millions of visits and a billion page views in a peak year, and produced a fifty-two-episode series with ITV Studios that aired on Playhouse Disney across many countries. He voiced Boowa, the blue dog. An economics and statistical analysis degree from Liverpool John Moores University sat underneath the entrepreneur path even when the public face was a children's character. All three companies he founded, including Kalicube later, have remained trading.
Searching for His Own Name
After the children's-media years, searches for Barnard's own name often returned the cartoon dog rather than the entrepreneur. That mismatch made entity confusion concrete. He treated the Google results page for a brand or person name as something teams could design, corroborate, and defend, and in 2012 he coined the phrase Brand SERP for that page.
In 2015 he founded Kalicube in France to productize that work. The Kalicube Process and later Kalicube Pro grew around tracking how a brand appears across knowledge graphs, web indexes, and large language models, then aligning official sites, press, Wikipedia-scale facts, and structured data so machines have fewer contradictory stories to choose from.
Kalicube Pro is built on a dataset of billions of data points about how brands are represented, replacing what used to be manual Brand SERP audits.
Brand SERPs and AI Engines
When AI assistive engines arrived, Barnard extended the same logic. If machines summarize a company from the same graph of sources that feed search, then controlling that graph is how you shape the summary. He describes a brand as what the machines say about you when you are not in the room. He has written and spoken under labels including Answer Engine Optimisation and Assistive Agent Optimisation as the interfaces changed, and he still uses the Brand SERP Guy nickname in industry circles.
In 2022 he published The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business, a practical guide for owners and marketers who want the brand-name results page to work like a digital business card.
Running Kalicube
Barnard still runs Kalicube as founder CEO across France and the United States, with Mary-Ann Buarao as Chief Team Officer for the remote team. The product and consulting mix includes courses, the SaaS platform built on a large entity dataset, and selective client work for entrepreneurs and executives who care how decision-makers see them in Google and AI answers.