If you exhaled when you saw it, hello. I’m one of you, which is awkward, given what I do.

I run brand and experience for Boston’s Seaport, a 365 day district where we program February as seriously as we program July. But summer is the loudest quarter, and this one has been the loudest of my time here: World Cup matches and watch parties, the country’s 250th, and Sail Boston inside about six weeks, with 40+ tall ships tied up at our piers. Christopher Muther asked in the Globe whether 2026 was the best summer the city has ever had, and I didn’t hear anyone rush to argue.

I am also ready for September. Give me the first morning that needs a jacket, an evening that goes dark before nine, cider that tastes like an apple instead of a candle.

The thing nobody writes in the brief

Look at any summer campaign, mine included, and you’ll find a premise underneath it that never made it onto the page. Summer is wonderful. You’re delighted. Here’s where to be delighted.

It never comes up, because it doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like weather. Nobody argues with a premise nobody bothered to say and challenge out loud.

Call it the consensus trap: selling the feeling you assume people share instead of the thing you actually offer. Summer is only the loudest version of it. Any time a category agrees on how its customers feel, that agreement stops getting tested, and the people standing outside it stop getting written for. The majority doesn’t need convincing. That’s what makes them the majority.

Every category has its own version

Hospitality assumes you’re glad to be there. Escape, indulge, unwind. But on any given night, a real share of a hotel’s guests are in town for a funeral, a hospital stay, a job interview they’re dreading. Nobody’s asking for a sad campaign. It’s that the welcome note, the check-in script and the good cheer of the lobby are all pitched at one emotional state, and the guest in the other one clocks it before the elevator.

Beauty sells visibility. Radiance, glow, turning heads, and in August, dewy skin and beachy waves. There’s an enormous customer buying for the opposite reason: to feel like themselves on a hard day, to even things out, to be looked at slightly less. Almost nobody writes copy for that.

In fashion, summer means bare. Sleeveless, cropped, short. Now count the people who don’t do bare, whether that’s sun sensitivity, a skin condition, religious observance, a scar, chemo, or simply no interest. Now try to find a long sleeve summer look photographed as a want instead of a workaround.

Entertainment believes enthusiasm looks like a crowd. Opening night, the shared cultural moment, see it before someone ruins it for you. Meanwhile a large and unembarrassed group reads the ending first, watches at home with the subtitles on, and wants to know exactly what they’re walking into before committing two hours. The industry treats that as a leak to plug rather than a preference to serve.

Weddings, retirements, the first day of school. Every one of them arrives with a feeling attached, and every one of them is quietly untrue for lots of us.

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The miss you’ll never see

The trap doesn’t cost you the people who don’t want what you’re selling. Those people were never yours.

It costs the ones who want it badly but won’t get past the framing. The woman who’d love the oysters and does not love the sun. The couple who want the neighborhood without the crowd. Somebody who would happily spend real money with you, sees a photograph of a stranger squinting joyfully into ninety-one degrees, and decides, reasonably, that this isn’t for them.

You didn’t turn them away. You described the thing in a language they don’t speak and they read it as a closed door. Same result. And you’ll never hear about it, because nobody writes in to say your campaign made them feel unwelcome. They just don’t come.

Build the second door

So, three things. Write down the premise, whatever is so obvious that nobody bothered to say it, then ask whether it’s a fact or a mood. Check whether the mood is doing the whole job, because if the frame carries the pitch, anyone who rejects the frame never reaches the product. And look at your images for temperament, not just casting. If every face in the deck is feeling the same thing, you’ve made a campaign for one kind of person.

Then build the second door. The shaded table. The eight o’clock reservation instead of the two o’clock. The indoor version you currently bury as a contingency. It tends to cost nothing you haven’t already built.

None of this needs a campaign. It needs somebody in the room to say the premise out loud.

There’s plenty of summer left to build, and I plan to enjoy all of it. The boots can wait. Barely.

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Ask an AI to write something, and it used to just write it. A full answer, beginning to end, delivered. Now it pauses mid-thought and asks: “Would you like me to continue?” Or it finishes a list and offers: “I can go deeper on any of these.” Every session ends with an open door, a small invitation to stay just a little longer.

Those prompts are not a limitation. They are a business decision. The tease is the product.

Here’s why: what these platforms are optimizing for is not your satisfaction. It’s your return. Monthly active users. Time in the loop. Every “would you like me to continue?” is engineered to keep you engaged, which keeps you generating data, which makes the product stickier, which justifies the subscription. Nir Eyal, who literally wrote the book on this, calls it the hook model. Social media built an entire economy on it. AI is running the same play, dressed up as helpfulness.

I spent a lot of years thinking about the opposite problem.

When I started out, fashion magazines treated purchase information as somehow beneath them. You might see a stunning Valentino gown on the page, credited to the designer, the fabric, the model, the photographer. What you would not see is where to buy it, what it cost, or how to get it. That was considered vulgar. The aspiration was the point. The follow-through was someone else’s job.

InStyle was the first major fashion and beauty publication to put pricing, 1-800 numbers, and websites right there in the caption, next to the designer credit and the fabrication note. It was revolutionary enough that it spawned an entire subcategory of imitators — publications so nakedly focused on the transaction that they earned the name “magalogs.” I say that with some affection. I ran one. Cargo, my first magazine as Editor-in-Chief, was proudly in that tradition. A few years later I became EIC of InStyle, which had pioneered the whole idea before magalogs even existed. The point, at both, was never aspiration alone. It was inspiration plus information. Get them excited, then get them there.

The principle behind it was simple: if you created the desire, you own the follow-through. Never leave the reader alone on the page.

Which is why I find it so fascinating that AI, the most powerful editorial engine ever built, has landed on a completely different philosophy.

And it just got more complicated. Because agentic AI is already handling the follow-through. We are in a world where AI does not just recommend the moisturizer, it buys it. Does not just suggest a restaurant, it makes the reservation. In January, Google’s CEO announced the Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation conference, effectively marking the official arrival of AI-completed purchases. Bain reports that AI already accounts for up to a quarter of referral traffic for some retailers. The transaction is no longer a handoff from content to consumer. It is happening automatically, invisibly, before the reader even thinks to act.

So the question for brands and marketers shifts. It is no longer just: are we completing the journey or leaving them wanting? It becomes: what is our role when someone else closes the loop?

I don’t think there is one answer. But here is how I am starting to think about it.

Complete when the transaction is the point. If someone is in buying mode, get them there cleanly. No mystery, no open loops. That means clear pricing, obvious next steps, and product information structured so an AI agent can find and act on it. A purchase that feels effortless is still a brand experience.

Leave them wanting when the relationship is the point. The brands I admire most understand that a customer who leaves slightly more curious than when they arrived is a customer who comes back. Not out of frustration, but out of genuine interest. That means giving them something to think about: a point of view, a story, a reason to return that has nothing to do with a transaction. There is a difference between an open loop that irritates and one that intrigues. The best brand experiences know how to create the latter.

And know which one you are doing. Most brands are doing one when they mean to do the other, or attempting both at the same time and achieving neither.

A few questions worth asking your team:

• Is the person engaging with this content already in a buying mindset, or are they still forming one?

• What does success look like here: a completed transaction, or a deeper relationship with the brand?

• If someone walks away without taking action, is that a failure or is it fine?

• Are we creating desire and then handing them off to someone else to close it, or are we seeing it through ourselves?

Which leaves me with the question I can’t stop turning over: once an AI agent handles the transaction for your customer, what makes them come back to you specifically? What do you own that the agent doesn’t?

Check out next week’s issue if you want to hear more ;)

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And yes—taste matters. You need aesthetic judgment, the ability to recognize quality, cultural fluency. But taste alone? That just creates content for people exactly like you.

The real skill is knowing when to step completely outside your own perspective.

Let me tell you about editing InStyle’s annual bra guide.

Every year during the eight years I edited InStyle, I oversaw our annual bra guide. I was the first and only male Editor-in-Chief in the magazine’s history, which meant I was editing a feature about a product I had zero personal experience with and would never wear.

But I knew how valuable this information was to our readers—sizing, innovation, new entries into the market. It was a signature piece of editorial. Readers waited for it.

Here’s what I had to do: Once our expert editors had done the market research and drafted the piece, I couldn’t rely on instinct or personal preference. I had to put myself completely in the shoes of our audience.

I asked every question I might have if I really wanted to not only understand the feature but act upon the information: • Not just the WHAT (here are the bras) • But the justifying WHY (why does this innovation matter? why should I care about this feature?) • And then the actionable HOW (how do I know which is right for me? how do I actually find my size? where do I buy it?)

My taste didn’t matter. My job was to have rigorous empathy for the reader.

This wasn’t unique to the bra guide. It applied to everything:

Celebrity covers I chose because our readers loved them, even when I personally didn’t connect with that star. Fashion trends I had to explain clearly, even when they weren’t my aesthetic. Stories I had to kill because they wouldn’t serve readers, even though I found them fascinating.

Yes, I had taste. But the metric wasn’t “Does Ariel think this is cool?”

The metric was “Will this inform, inspire, or help our reader take action?”

That’s editorial discipline. And over the past four years building Boston Seaport’s brand with an incredible team of marketers, I’ve applied the same thinking.

Except here, it’s more complex than a magazine with one core audience. Boston Seaport serves multiple audiences simultaneously: first-time visitors, business travelers, daily workers, residents, people celebrating special occasions, folks who’ve made it their favorite Boston neighborhood.

That’s a lot of shoes to step into.

Each one needs something different. The tourist needs wayfinding and discovery. The office worker needs reliable lunch spots. The resident needs reasons to stay engaged. The occasional visitor needs something worth coming back for.

My job isn’t “What do I think is cool about this place?”

It’s “What does each of these people need to have a great experience here?”

Same editorial discipline. Just more perspectives to inhabit.

I see this challenge everywhere in brand building. Teams have great taste—their creative is beautiful, their messaging is clever, their aesthetic is refined. The work comes from a genuine place of passion and expertise.

But here’s what I’ve learned: It’s easy to accidentally create for ourselves and our peers instead of our audience. To choose clever over clear because it feels more creative. To optimize for what impresses our industry instead of what helps our customers take action.

It’s not a mistake—it’s human nature. We’re drawn to what resonates with us personally. Good taste is what got us here in the first place.

But the breakthrough happens when we add rigorous empathy to that taste. When we expand beyond our own perspective to truly inhabit our audience’s needs.

Here’s the framework I used at InStyle and use now:

WHAT: The information (what exists, what are the options) WHY: The justification (why does this matter? why should they care?) HOW: The action (how do they choose? how do they implement? how do they act on this?)

Most brands stop at WHAT.

The ones that win give their audience the WHY and the HOW.

This week, look at your last piece of content—a webpage, an email, a social post.

Ask: • Am I being clear or just clever? • Would this make sense to someone encountering us for the first time? • Have I given them the what, the why, AND the how? • Is this serving my ego or my audience?

The best editors—and the best brand builders—aren’t interested in impressing a small group of people who already agree with them. They want their vision and message to reach the absolute maximum number of people who would benefit from it.

That requires taste, yes. But more importantly, it requires humility and empathy.

That’s editorial thinking. And that’s what I’ll be exploring every week in The Foxman Edit

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I saw Cats: The Jellicle Ball this weekend.

I’ve seen the original. I’m a Broadway person, I liked it, but if I’m being honest it never fully landed for me. I always felt like I was watching something impressive without really understanding what it was about. Cats who dance, “Memory,” a tire that goes to heaven. Fine.

Saturday night at the Broadhurst was a completely different experience. Same Andrew Lloyd Webber score, same T.S. Eliot poems, but reimagined through the world of ballroom culture: vogueing, houses competing, a runway down the center of the theater, André De Shields presiding over it all. Lloyd Webber himself was in the audience. I am already figuring out when I can get back. It was that good.

The thing I kept thinking afterward was that Cats was always about this. Characters fighting to be seen, performing their identity for the chance to be chosen. That’s ballroom. The material didn’t change. Someone just found the frame that made it make sense, and it only took 45 years.

But here’s what I think is the most interesting part: it goes both ways. Ballroom gave Cats its pulse back, but Cats gave ballroom a Broadway stage, Lloyd Webber’s blessing, and a mainstream audience that might never have walked into a ball. Both cultures lent the other something they didn’t have on their own, and that exchange is where the magic happened. When the second act opens with black and white images of ballroom’s founding mothers and legends projected on screens to “The Moments of Happiness,” and they are given their due on the grand stage, you get chills. That’s two worlds making each other bigger.

I’ve been chewing on that all week because it isn’t just happening with Cats.

Toy Story 5 comes out in June. I took my son to see Hoppers last week (really smart and funny, by the way) and the Toy Story 5 trailer ran before it. The villain is a frog-shaped smart tablet named Lilypad who takes over Bonnie’s attention the second she’s unboxed. When Jessie confronts her, the tablet responds: “I’m always listening.” Woody, apparently balding now, comes out of retirement. Thirty-one years in, the franchise is finally saying the quiet part out loud: the competition for a kid’s imagination isn’t other toys. It’s screens.

The Comeback is back on HBO. Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish, the most lovably delusional actress on television, is now starring in the first sitcom written entirely by AI, surrounded by producing partners who are essentially babysitting the technology. Every season of this show has predicted the next era of television about five years early, and this one seems to be asking whether there’s going to be a next era at all.

And then there’s Hilary Duff, who just debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 with her first album in over a decade. Her intimate comeback shows sold out instantly, and she’s heading out on an arena tour this summer that includes Madison Square Garden. Her last headlining U.S. dates were in 2007, when she performed “With Love” on the Today Show with choreography that was, generously, low-effort. It became one of the internet’s most beloved memes. She hated it. Told Glamour it had “not been a fun thing to follow me around.” But at her first show back in London, she did the dance again and pulled fans on stage to do it with her. She went on Fallon and taught him the choreography. She turned the thing the internet was roasting into the thing the audience was cheering for.

Four legacy properties, four different challenges, same question: how do you bring something people already know into a world that’s moved on?

What they got right

They let the challenge in. Cats rebuilt the staging around ballroom. Toy Story made the tablet the villain. The Comeback handed Valerie the AI script and let her be Valerie about it. Hilary Duff put the meme in the setlist.

In each case, the core stayed intact: the score, the characters, the voice, the catalog. What changed was the frame, and the new frame didn’t water anything down. It made the original feel more true.

(A quick counterexample: And Just Like That, which tried to meet the moment by apologizing for itself. Sex and the City was a specific show: specific tastes, specific neuroses, specific shoes. It was cool because it didn’t care whether you thought it was cool. And Just Like That cared very much, and you could feel it. The difference between meeting the moment and chasing it is the difference between conviction and anxiety.)

What I’d steal if I were running a brand

Every legacy brand faces this eventually. You have something people recognize, maybe even love, and the world has shifted. If that’s you right now, I think there’s genuinely good news in what these four are doing.

• Know what’s actually yours. Cats’ core was never the leotards. It was the competition, the longing, the performance of identity. Most brands confuse their packaging for their product. Once you figure out what’s actually essential, the other decisions get easier.

• Let the threat in the room. Toy Story could have made another movie about toys in a closet, but instead it made the existential crisis the plot. If your category is being disrupted, your consumer already knows. Naming it honestly is one of the most powerful things you can do.

• The right context feels like a homecoming, not a pivot. Ballroom didn’t change those poems, it just made visible something that had been sitting there for decades. If your new direction requires a deck to explain why it makes sense, it probably doesn’t. But when you find the right one, you’ll feel it, and your audience will too.

• The best collisions are mutual. When a legacy brand meets a new culture or community, it shouldn’t be extractive. It should be an exchange where both sides walk away with something they couldn’t have gotten alone. If only one side benefits, the audience can feel it.

• Own everything, including the awkward parts. Hilary Duff could have buried the “With Love” meme, but instead she put it on stage and pulled fans up to do it with her. The stuff you’re tempted to hide is usually the stuff that makes you human. Give yourself permission to own all of it.

• You don’t need the answer. The Comeback doesn’t know what AI means for entertainment. It just puts Valerie in the middle of it. Woody says in the trailer: “Toys are for play, but tech is for everything.” The brands earning goodwill right now aren’t the ones with all the answers, they’re the ones willing to say they’re still figuring it out.

Lloyd Webber said after seeing The Jellicle Ball that T.S. Eliot would have loved it. I think that’s the test. If the person who made the original would recognize the soul of their work inside the new version, you’ve done something real. If they wouldn’t, you’ve just redecorated.

See you next Tuesday at 7 AM.

If this one landed, I’d love to hear which legacy brand you think is pulling this off or blowing it. Leave a comment or hit restack. It helps more than you’d think.

When MTV’s music channels shut down internationally at the end of 2025, the last video they played was the same song.

Forty-four years. A perfect bookend. Except for one problem: radio didn’t die. Audio is actually at an all-time high right now. And MTV, the network built on the idea that video would replace everything, is the one that stopped playing videos. I don’t think anyone saw that coming in 1981

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I bring this up because we keep hearing the same thing about everything. Print is dead. Email is dead. Retail is dead. Brick and mortar is dead. Fast fashion killed luxury. TikTok killed Instagram. AI is killing everything.

Then experiential marketing becomes the hottest thing in the industry. Online shopping plateaus and everyone rushes back to physical stores. Email turns out to have the highest ROI of any channel. Nothing ever actually dies. It just makes room for the next thing. Or it gets optimized in contrast to it. Or it pairs with it in a way where 1+1 somehow equals 3.

What the Data Actually Says

Edison Research just released its Infinite Dial 2026 study, and the numbers are striking. 167 million Americans listened to a podcast in the last month. 233 million listened to online audio (streaming music, podcasts, internet radio — I had to look it up, too). Both are all-time highs. And 57% of Americans have both listened to and watched a podcast. The researchers put it simply: video isn’t replacing podcast audio. It’s expanding the tent.

I saw this play out over eight years at InStyle. The conversation was always about what would replace what. Would digital kill print? Would social kill the website? Would video kill the photo shoot? Would influencers kill the editor?

None of it happened. What happened was addition. We launched live events. Then mobile apps. Then a hairstyle try-on tool using facial recognition that got 600,000 downloads. A shoe line. A nail polish. A book series. InStyle-branded hair salons. Sixteen international editions. Licensing deals I never could have imagined when I started. Each new thing was supposed to signal that we were “moving on” from the magazine. But we weren’t moving on. We were giving people more ways to find us. The magazine was still the anchor. Everything else was a door.

Now, full disclosure: InStyle’s print edition closed in 2022. I’m not pretending otherwise. But it didn’t close because digital replaced it. It closed because the economics of the publishing industry shifted underneath all of us. That’s a different story. The point is that for the years we were building, addition worked. Every new format brought in people who wouldn’t have found us otherwise. The mistake would have been betting on only one of them.

I work in a neighborhood now. Retail, dining, events, public space. During the pandemic, the headlines were clear: physical retail was finished, downtowns were over, nobody would ever commute to an office or shop in person again. A little of that stuck, but most of it did not. Turns out people still want to be somewhere. They just want that somewhere to be worth the trip.

What Goes Wrong When You Replace Instead of Add

The brands I’ve seen get in real trouble are the ones that treated every new format as a replacement for the last one. They’d launch a digital strategy by gutting the print team. Go all-in on social and let the website rot. Invest in e-commerce and let the store experience fall apart.

Every time, they lost something they couldn’t get back. Not because the old format was sacred. But because their audience was still using it.

Your audience decides how they want to engage with you. It’s not your call. Your job is to be there when they show up.

The Edison data makes this point well. The fastest-growing segment in online audio isn’t Gen Z. It’s Americans 55 and older, who jumped from 52% to 70% monthly listening in just two years. Nobody told them it was time to start listening to podcasts. They just did, when the format made sense for them.

A Rubric for Your Team

A question I come back to a lot in my own work: where do we have permission to be? Not where do we wish we were. Not where the latest conference told us to be. Where does our audience already trust us enough that if we showed up there too, it would feel like a surprise and not an intrusion?

If you’re running a brand or managing a team, a few things worth pressure-testing:

• Map where your audience already is. Not where you’re posting. Where they’re actually spending time. If there’s a gap between those two things, that’s your next door. Not a replacement for what you’re doing. An addition.

• Ask what you’d lose. Before you pivot away from a channel or a format, ask yourself honestly: is anyone still there? Because if the answer is yes, you’re not pivoting. You could be abandoning.

• Stop auditing formats. Start auditing presence. The question isn’t “should we be on TikTok?” The question is “where does our audience want to find us that we haven’t shown up yet?”

• Test with the lightest touch. You don’t need to launch a podcast studio. You need to put one episode out there and see if anyone cares. Addition doesn’t have to be expensive. It has to be intentional.

Your newsletter reader might also want a podcast. Your Instagram follower might also read long-form. Your online shopper might also want to walk into a store. These aren’t different audiences. They’re the same person looking for a different way in. Show up there too. Surprise and delight them.

One Last Thing

Video didn’t kill the radio star. MTV killed itself. And the radio star is doing better than ever.

The tent keeps getting bigger. The only question is whether you’re inside it.

If this one resonated, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment, share it with someone on your team, or hit the restack button to pass it along. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think.

See you next Tuesday at 7 AM

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A note to new readers: The Foxman Edit spent its first sixteen issues on LinkedIn. This is Issue 17 and our first official home on Substack. The full archive is right here. Glad you’re with us.

You know the trend by now. Someone films themselves today. A knowing smile. Then the cut. Photos pour in. Bad highlights. Great jackets. A specific kind of confidence that only exists before you know what’s coming. Underneath it all: “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. That guitar line. That voice. The question floating over the screen: Mom, what were you like in the ‘90s?

It’s everywhere. John Stamos posted his Uncle Jesse era. Kevin Bacon brought back the leather jackets. Reese Witherspoon. Brooke Shields. The Spice Girls. The Backstreet Boys. All of them happy to account for themselves.

I watched it roll across my feed this week and felt something I didn’t expect. Not nostalgia. Something more useful than that.

Because I was there. And I wasn’t just watching.

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Here’s what most people are missing.

This trend isn’t being driven by people who remember the ‘90s. It’s being driven by people who weren’t there. Gen Z and Gen Alpha, kids who have never known a day without a screen, scrolling through someone else’s pre-digital past and feeling something they can’t name.

Clay Routledge, a leading researcher on the science of nostalgia, said it plainly this week: younger generations are drawn to the pre-digital life because they want balance in their own digital lives. They think there’s something cool about the analog, tactile, in-person world.

They’re not wrong. They’re just describing something they’ve never had.

What they’re nostalgic for isn’t the ‘90s. It’s a feeling. Life at a lower frequency. Unmonitored. Unoptimized. The ‘90s is just the placeholder for everything the current internet is not.

That’s a generation telling you exactly what they’re starving for, in someone else’s words, through someone else’s photos, set to a song that came out before most of them were born.

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So. What was I like in the ‘90s?

I moved to New York in the mid-’90s and worked my way through a sequence of places that felt, at the time, like the center of everything: Spin. Details. The New Yorker. InStyle. And eventually Cargo, which I launched at 29. The biggest men’s magazine launch of its time. I was young enough to believe that meant something permanent.

What I remember most isn’t the mastheads. It’s the physics of daily life.

You dialed into your voicemail to find out if someone had called you. If they hadn’t left a message, you’d never know you missed them. You showed up on time because there was no way to say you were running late. You ran into people, actually ran into them, on the street, at a party, in a lobby, and entire relationships were born from that collision. Spontaneity wasn’t a personality trait. It was just Tuesday.

People took smoke breaks. In their offices. Film had to be developed before you knew if the shoot had worked. And if you wanted to be part of something, a trend, a movement, a cultural moment, you had to physically show up. You had to leave your apartment, get there, be in the room.

If you couldn’t get there, you waited. You read about it later in a magazine, filtered through an editor’s eye, arriving on your doorstep weeks after the fact.

The friction was the feature.

Baby-doll dresses and barrettes. Ska and skateboard proportions. “Iris” sitting at number one on the VH1 Top 20 Countdown for more weeks than I could count, not because of an algorithm, but because actual humans kept choosing it in a world where choosing something meant something.

You had to be there for it to be real. And so everything was.

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Here’s where brands need to pay attention.

The opportunists are already circling. Retro fonts. Film grain filters. Minimalist silhouettes in look books put together by people who weren’t alive for the original ones.

It’s going to miss. Completely.

Because what Gen Z is reaching for isn’t an aesthetic. It’s stakes. The feeling that something is real because people made sacrifices to make it real. The showing up. The lines around the block. The word of mouth that spread slowly and meant something because it was slow.

You can’t manufacture that. The moment you try, people feel it. Audiences are so fluent in the language of performance now that they can smell the gap between what a brand claims to be and what it actually is from a hundred miles away.

The brands that get this won’t chase the trend. They’ll become what it’s pointing toward. More present. Higher friction, higher reward. Real in the ways that cost something to be real.

It’s not the clothes or the music or even the magazines that people are missing. It’s the cost of admission. The fact that being there meant something.

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“Iris” is a song about not wanting the world to see you because the world won’t understand. About cutting through all of it and saying: I just want you to know who I am.

A generation raised on personal branding and the pressure to be watchable at all times is playing that song on a loop. Not because it’s nostalgic. Because it’s true. Because underneath every curated post and optimized caption is a person who wants exactly what John Rzeznik was singing about in 1998.

To be known. Without the performance.

The ‘90s are trending because being there, being real, and being seen used to be the same thing.

We’re still trying to figure out how to get there from here.

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The Foxman Edit publishes most Tuesdays at arielfoxman.substack.com. If someone forwarded this, subscribe here. And if you work with a brand navigating any of this — reply to this email. That's exactly what I do. Thanks!

I know. It’s been a long time. You signed up for something I stopped writing, and I never really explained why. I’m sorry about that.

Here’s the short version: writing about fatherhood meant writing about my son. At some point that started to feel like a boundary I didn’t want to cross — his life isn’t mine to narrate, drip by drip, in a newsletter. So I stopped. It was the right call. He turns 8½ this month, he is still the absolute center of my universe, and he is doing just great.

What I’ve been doing in the meantime is writing a completely different newsletter. It’s called The Foxman Edit, and for the past few months I’ve been publishing it on LinkedIn … sixteen issues, so far, about brand, culture, and why certain things resonate while others quietly disappear.

Things like: why your customers don’t trust you as much as you think they do — and what to actually do about it. Why every new store, hotel, and restaurant is starting to feel like every other store, hotel, and restaurant. Why the most powerful thing a brand can build right now isn’t a product or a campaign — it’s a reason to show up.

I’m moving it here now. Substack is a better home for it, and for you as a reader. Which means you’re already subscribed, and the full archive of all sixteen issues is right here waiting for you. Start anywhere. And if you stay, a new issue lands pretty much every Tuesday.

If it’s not your thing, please unsubscribe. I mean that sincerely. But if any of this sounds like your world, I think you’ll find something worth reading.

First new one coming soon.

Thanks for still being here. It means more than you know.

Ariel

And within hours, the internet decided it wasn’t him.

A drag artist posted photos suggesting he’d impersonated Carrey using prosthetics. Conspiracy accounts declared the real Carrey had been cloned. An influencer’s post claiming body double got 180,000 views. Megan Fox commented asking if it was real. Snopes had to fact-check it. The César Awards organizer issued a formal statement. Carrey’s publicist told TMZ, flatly: “Jim Carrey attended the César Awards, where he accepted his Honorary César Award.”

It was him. It was always him. He’s 64. He looked a little different.

But here’s the part I can’t shake: I saw this story everywhere for days, and even knowing it was almost certainly nonsense, there was a moment where I thought, “But what if?”

That moment is the piece.

When Suspicion Becomes the Default

We’ve been conditioned. Deepfakes, AI-generated content that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, years of brands and institutions bending the truth just enough that we stopped giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. The conspiracy crowd believes nothing is real because they think powerful people are hiding the truth. The rest of us believe nothing is real because we’ve seen how easy it is to manufacture something that looks true.

The result is the same: a baseline of suspicion that applies to everything. A celebrity’s face. A product claim. An origin story. A five-star review.

What This Means If You Market Anything

Marketing has always been, at some level, the art of making people believe. Not in a manipulative way. In the way that a great magazine cover makes you believe this issue is worth your time. The way an origin story makes you believe the people behind the product actually care.

That belief requires trust. At InStyle, we earned it issue by issue. Every recommendation, every feature, every cover had to deliver. If we put a product on the page, it had to be good, because the reader was trusting us with their time and their money. That trust wasn’t a strategy. It was the product.

What happens when the person you’re trying to reach has already decided you’re probably lying?

Your origin story? Someone will say it’s manufactured. Your sustainability claims? Greenwashing before they’ve read the details. Your AI disclosure? You’re hiding how much you’re actually using. The cost of being caught in a lie has always been high. What’s new is that brands are paying the cost of being suspected of lying even when they’re telling the truth.

That’s the suspicion tax. And every brand is paying it now.

Building When Nobody Believes Anything

I don’t have a tidy framework for this one. But a few things I keep coming back to.

Specificity is the antidote to suspicion. “We source ethically” means nothing. “We work with three family-owned farms in Vermont and here are their names” means something. The more granular you are, the less room there is for someone to project doubt onto your story.

Show the work. At InStyle, we put prices on the page when no other fashion magazine did. Not to be provocative. Because hiding information felt like we didn’t trust the reader. In a suspicious world, transparency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only currency that still works.

Consistency compounds. One campaign doesn’t build trust. Showing up the same way, with the same values, issue after issue, quarter after quarter, is what does. It’s not viral. And it’s the only thing that works when everyone’s looking for a reason to doubt you.

And accept that you can’t convince everyone. Some people are going to think Jim Carrey was cloned no matter what. You’re not marketing to them. You’re marketing to the vast middle who want to believe but need a reason to.

Will The Real Jim Carrey Please Blink Twice

Jim Carrey flew to Paris. He learned a speech in a language he doesn’t speak. He cried on stage. He thanked his father, who taught him “the value of love, generosity and laughter.”

And the internet’s response was: prove it.

That’s the world we’re marketing in now. The brands that will win aren’t the ones with the best story. They’re the ones who’ve earned the right to be believed.

When we launched Cargo at Condé Nast, and later when we made significant changes to InStyle’s architecture or design, we’d run focus groups. Real people, a conference room, a facilitator, a plate of mediocre sandwiches, and a bunch of us on the other side of the glass watching and taking notes and trying not to overreact.

These weren’t casual exercises. We’d spend weeks, sometimes months, preparing. Working with the agency to get the discussion guide and prompts exactly right. Flying to different cities to reach different demographics. Then after the sessions were done, waiting weeks more for the agency to synthesize everything into a report.

And I always wondered about something nobody seemed to want to talk about: what kind of person actually takes the time to show up to an in-person focus group? They were, by definition, a very specific subset of our audience. But their opinions would shape what we did with the product for millions of readers who would never set foot in that room.

We’d bring out chocolates and sweets midway through to keep the energy up. And within the first ten minutes, two or three loud, opinionated participants would take over regardless. They’d state something with total confidence and the rest of the room would start nodding. The facilitator, no matter how skilled, could only do so much.

I remember one Cargo session where participants referred to our editorial features as “ads.” Not sponsored content. Not advertorials. The actual articles. Or someone would comment on the price of a product we’d featured and suddenly the entire conversation would pivot to cost sensitivity, even when price wasn’t remotely the question we were trying to answer.

Imperfect. But real.

The Room Without People

Companies are now using AI to build synthetic consumers. AI-generated personas, fed real behavioral data, that simulate how actual shoppers think and respond. You can test products, campaigns, pricing strategies. Run what amounts to a focus group without a single human in the room.

Bain and Company found that synthetic consumer research can deliver comparable insights in half the time at a third of the cost. Stanford and Google created AI agents based on interviews with over a thousand real people and found the AI replicated their survey responses with 85 percent accuracy. Target has talked publicly about using synthetic audiences to predict how customer segments will respond to campaigns before they launch.

No months of preparation. No flights to different cities. No waiting weeks for a synthesized report. No one calling your articles ads.

This is genuinely exciting. For teams without the budget or time for traditional research, it’s a real unlock. And for anyone who’s ever watched a single opinionated participant derail a carefully designed study, the promise of clean, scalable insight is hard to resist.

The Yes-Man Problem

But I keep coming back to one thing.

The old problem with focus groups was noise. Too many voices, too much groupthink, too easy for one person to distort the room.

The new problem might be the mirror image. Large language models are, at a fundamental level, agreeable. They synthesize and reflect back. Researchers are already finding that synthetic personas skew positive, provide feedback that’s vague and favorable, and lack the irrational, contradictory, deeply human quality that makes real consumer insight valuable.

And they have their own version of the selection bias problem. Synthetic personas are built on the data that exists, which means they represent the people who left reviews, took surveys, engaged online. The quiet customer who just buys your product and never tells anyone what they think? Neither method captures that person.

If the old focus group had the loudmouth problem, the AI focus group has the yes-man problem.

The Other 15 Percent

Here’s the thing I can’t let go of.

When I sat behind that glass, even with all the frustrations, something would occasionally happen that no data set could have predicted. Someone would say something sideways, almost as an aside, that completely reframed how I thought about what we were making. The person who’d been quiet for twenty minutes and then offered something that made everyone behind the mirror look at each other.

Those moments didn’t come from the questions we asked. They came from the mess of putting actual humans in a room and letting the conversation wander somewhere unexpected.

AI doesn’t wander.

85 percent accuracy is remarkable. I mean that. But the other 15 percent is where the weird stuff lives. The contradiction. The thing that doesn’t fit the model. The aside at minute 37 that changes everything.

That 15 percent is where the best editorial decisions I ever made came from. Not from data. From proximity. From being close enough to the reader, the subject, the culture, that I could feel something shifting before the numbers confirmed it.

I’m optimistic about where synthetic research is going. I think it makes almost everything about understanding your customer faster and more accessible. I just don’t want us to get so good at the 85 percent that we forget the 15 percent is where the magic usually happens.

Not as a consumer trend piece. Not as a LinkedIn flex about “digital wellness.” As a real, necessary intervention because I work in marketing, and the thing I’m considering stepping away from is one of the core tools of my job.

If you’ve spent any real time in this industry, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I call it the Donut Shop Problem: work at a donut shop long enough and you stop wanting donuts. The thing that once excited you, the smell, the novelty, the creative possibilities, becomes noise. Or worse, it becomes something you actively resent.

For me right now, it’s the scroll. But over the years, I’ve watched colleagues hit this wall with all sorts of things that are technically “part of the job.” The restaurant publicist who can’t face another tasting menu. The beauty editor who’s exhausted by the 47th “clean” launch of the quarter. The events marketer who’d rather do literally anything on a Friday night than attend another opening. The beverage brand manager who just… doesn’t want another drink.

Here’s what nobody tells you when you get into marketing: the job often asks you to be a relentless, enthusiastic consumer of the very culture you’re trying to shape. And that’s not sustainable. Not physically, not creatively, and I’d argue not strategically.

When Knowing Too Much Starts Working Against You

There’s a popular idea that marketers need to be plugged in at all times. Always on. First to the trend, last to leave the party. And sure, there was a time when I believed that too. At InStyle, staying close to the cultural pulse wasn’t optional. It was the entire job. But even then, I learned that the best ideas rarely came from the 11th event of the week. They came after a quiet weekend. A long walk. A conversation with someone completely outside the industry.

The dirty secret of marketing is that over-immersion doesn’t make you sharper. It makes you reactive. You start chasing what everyone else is chasing. You lose the peripheral vision that lets you see what’s actually next rather than what’s merely now.

When you’re so deep in the feed that every post looks the same, you’ve lost the very thing your employer is paying you for: perspective.

The Permission Slip Nobody Gave You

So here’s what I want to say clearly, because I don’t think people in our industry hear it enough:

You are allowed to pull back from the things your job asks you to consume.

You can be a brilliant social media strategist and also limit your personal scrolling to 20 minutes a day. You can be a food and beverage marketer and choose sparkling water at the work dinner. You can run influencer partnerships and not personally follow a single influencer on your own time. You can plan experiential activations and protect your own weekends.

This is not a contradiction. It’s a competitive advantage.

Ok, But How Do You Actually Do This?

The fear, of course, is that stepping back means falling behind. That if you’re not consuming, you can’t create. That your boss or your clients will notice the gap. Here’s how I’d think about managing it:

Name it for what it is. If you’re burned out on a specific aspect of your job’s culture, say so, at least to yourself. Denial keeps you on the treadmill. Acknowledgment lets you design around it.

Separate the professional from the personal. You can monitor social media as a work task, scheduled, boundaried, intentional, without letting it colonize your personal life. Set specific windows. Use different devices if you have to. The point is to engage with the channel without being consumed by it.

Build a scout network. You don’t have to see everything yourself. Cultivate two or three people whose taste and radar you trust. Let them be your early warning system. Some of the best editors I’ve ever worked with weren’t the ones who went to every party. They were the ones who knew exactly who to call the next morning.

Reframe rest as R&D. The walk, the novel, the weekend where you don’t check your phone, that’s not slacking. That’s creating the conditions for the kind of creative thinking that actually moves the needle. The best CMOs I know protect their white space ferociously.

The Part Where I Tell You It’s Worth It

Here’s what I’ve noticed in the moments when I do step back from social: I think more clearly about what the work actually needs rather than what the algorithm is rewarding this week. I’m less reactive. More intentional. The ideas are better because they’re not just responses to stimuli. They’re rooted in something.

The donut shop employee who takes a week off and comes back genuinely craving a glazed old-fashioned? That person is more valuable than the one who’s been mechanically eating donuts every day for a year and can no longer tell you what makes a good one.

Your fresh eyes are not a weakness. They’re the whole point.

Not from the game. From the commercials.

Celebrity. AI. Outlandish premise. Celebrity. AI. Outlandish premise. Over and over again. According to iSpot, about 70 percent of this year’s spots featured a celebrity. That same firm found that 15 out of 66 commercials, roughly 23 percent, featured AI in some way. The humor was pitched at the same volume. The stakes were equally absurd.

Here’s what’s interesting: individually, a lot of these commercials were genuinely good. The Budweiser Clydesdales? Reliable heartstring pull. And the Coinbase spot, which was basically just karaoke-style lyrics to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody” scrolling across the screen, no celebrities, no high concept, felt like a breath of fresh air. Almost a palette cleanser. It worked because of where it sat, surrounded by so much production and spectacle. But stacked next to each other, break after break, the rest started to blur. They started to feel like the same commercial.

I’d call it the Saming Effect. And I think it’s one of the most underappreciated challenges in brand building.

Same Gray, Different Story

There’s a famous demonstration from Josef Albers, the artist and educator who wrote Interaction of Color in 1963, widely considered the most influential book on color ever published. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. Take the exact same shade of gray and place it on a white background. Then place that same gray on a black background. On white, it reads dark. On black, it reads light.

Same gray. Completely different experience.

Albers called this simultaneous contrast. The idea that nothing is ever perceived in isolation. Everything we see is shaped by what’s next to it.

“In order to use color effectively,” he wrote, “it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”

Swap “color” for “content” and you have the story of Super Bowl LX.

What Comes Before, What Comes After

This is something we thought about constantly at InStyle. Putting together a magazine was never just about making sure each individual story was strong. It was about flow. What comes before a story matters. What comes after it matters. And not just for pacing, but for contrast. A high energy celebrity profile followed by a quiet, intimate personal essay gives the reader a breath. It lets each piece land differently than it would on its own. A bold, saturated fashion spread followed by something restrained and graphic makes both feel more intentional.

We even worked this way with our advertisers. We placed ads with real attention to what surrounded them, because a full page luxury ad sitting next to an equally luxurious editorial spread could either elevate both or flatten both. We wanted our partners to shine. And that meant thinking carefully about their context, not just their content.

The juxtaposition was the design.

The Whole Is the Thing

I think about this in my day job, too. A great neighborhood sings when there’s variation. Mixed use, different energies, an array of reasons to come and come back. It’s the contrast that creates the feeling of discovery. When everything operates at the same frequency, you get a blur. When there’s range, you get a place people want to walk through, linger in, and return to.

So What Can You Actually Do About It

If any of this resonates, here are a few things I’d encourage you to think about, whether you’re building a brand, running a campaign, curating a space, or just thinking about how your work shows up in the world.

Know your surroundings before you finalize your creative. Most brands develop content in their own bubble. Their own brief, their own boardroom, their own competitive set. But your audience never experiences your brand in a bubble. They experience it between two other things. Before you lock something in, it’s worth asking: what will people have just encountered before they get to us? Your work isn’t only competing with your direct competitor. It’s competing with whatever is right next to it.

When everyone goes big, consider going simple. The spots that stood out Sunday night weren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the longest celebrity rosters. They were the ones that felt different from what came before and after them.

Think in sequences, not singles. If your brand shows up across multiple touchpoints (social, out of home, retail, events, email), consider the order people encounter them in. What’s the arc? What’s the contrast between moments? A great brand experience should feel like a well considered playlist. Not a shuffle.

Develop what I’d call your “signature register.” This goes beyond look and feel. It’s about your brand’s emotional frequency. Are you the calm, steady voice? The playful, surprising one? The warm one? The precise one? When you really know your register, you can walk into any environment and immediately create contrast just by being yourself. The brands that got lost Sunday night didn’t have a weak ad. They just didn’t have a strong enough sense of self to survive the context they were placed in.

Context isn’t a detail. It might be the whole game.

We just got back from Orlando. Disney and Universal. Cielo got the trip as a Chanukah present and had been counting down ever since. Honestly, so had I.

I’ve always been a Disney person. Not in an annual-passholder way, but in the way where Disney just is the theme park for me. It’s the one I grew up on, the one I never questioned. If you’d asked me before this trip to rank the two, I wouldn’t have even understood the question. Disney was Disney. Universal was the other one.

So when we booked Epic Universe, Universal’s massive new park, I was curious. But I also figured it would be a glorified amusement park. Carnival grounds with better IP. Something to fill a day.

And look, we had a wonderful time at Disney. Strolling the food stalls at Epcot, experiencing the new updated rides, being together as a family in a place that’s meant so much to me for so long. I’m not here to knock Disney. But I am here to tell you that Epic Universe exceeded the standard.

It blew us away. The worlds weren’t just themed. They were complete. Each portal transported you into an environment where every surface, every sightline, every corner had been considered. There was no visual waste. No filler. The merch was beautifully designed, curated, and actually desirable. Not the usual bin of keychains and oversized t-shirts. The food was genuinely excellent. Small, curated menus that felt intentional. Not the sprawling dining-package-generic buffets we’ve all been trained to expect from theme parks.

But what stood out most were the people. Every employee we encountered was pleasant, present, and authentically helpful. And then there was the moment that sealed it. We walked into Cosme Acajor Baguettes Magique, the wand shop in the Wizarding World’s Parisian quarter, and my son found himself face-to-face with Cosme Acajor herself, the shop’s fictional wandmaker, played by a performer so committed and so warm that Cielo was completely enchanted. She spoke to him like he was a real young wizard choosing his first wand. He believed every second of it. So did I.

Disney hit the nostalgia button for me. My mind kept harking back to old memories more than making new ones. The magic was familiar. And familiar is wonderful. But familiar isn’t the same as fresh.

Cielo didn’t necessarily notice the difference. Each park was magical in its own way, each had rides he loved. But the adults noticed. And when the adults start noticing, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.

The Three Audiences You’re Really Competing For

Here’s the framework that crystallized for me on this trip, and I think it applies far beyond theme parks.

Every brand, legacy or challenger, is really speaking to three groups of people.

The Convinced. These are the people who already believe in you. Disney’s diehards. The annual passholders. The families who go every year because it’s tradition. They’re not comparing. They’ve already decided. For challengers, these are your early adopters. The people who found you first and don’t need convincing.

The Unaware. These are the people who don’t think of you at all. You’re simply not on their radar. You need to introduce yourself to them entirely. Important, but relatively straightforward.

The Moveable Middle. This is the group that matters most, and the one most brands under-invest in. These are the people who think they know what you are. They have a conventional wisdom about you, formed by reputation, bias, a visit from five years ago, something a friend said, or simply the assumption that the established player is the better choice. They’re not hostile. They’re not unaware. They’re just operating on outdated information or inherited preference.

I was the moveable middle on this trip. I walked into Epic Universe with a bias I didn’t even recognize as a bias. I assumed Disney was the premium experience because Disney had always been the premium experience. Nobody at Universal needed to convince me they existed. They needed to convince me I was wrong about what they could deliver.

And they did it the only way it actually works. They gave me the experience and let the comparison speak for itself.

If You’re the Legacy Brand

The convinced will keep coming regardless. The unaware aren’t your immediate threat. But the moveable middle? They’re the ones quietly starting to hear from your competitors. And they’re more persuadable than you think, because their loyalty is based on assumption, not recent experience.

• Shop yourself like a skeptic. When was the last time someone on your leadership team experienced your product the way a first-timer would? Not as a VIP. Not with insider knowledge. As someone who showed up cold and had to be won over.

• Audit your assumptions with recent evidence. Make a list of everything your organization believes about itself. “We’re the premium choice.” “Our service is best-in-class.” Now ask: what proof do we have from the last twelve months? Not from 2018. Not from that one glowing review. If you can’t point to recent evidence, the assumption is coasting on memory.

• Find what you’ve stopped noticing. Legacy brands develop blind spots. Things that have been “fine” for so long that nobody sees them anymore. The tired facilities. The mediocre food everyone’s learned to tolerate. Your challenger is noticing every single one of these things. They’re building their pitch around the gaps you’ve stopped seeing.

• Earn it again. The most dangerous sentence in any legacy organization is “people come here because we’re [us].” The moment your brand becomes the reason instead of the experience, you’re vulnerable. Your nostalgia is a head start, not a finish line.

I learned this firsthand at InStyle. We were the number one selling fashion magazine in the world. Commercially dominant, massive audience, culturally relevant. But in certain corners of the fashion establishment, we were dismissed. Too accessible. Too celebrity-driven. Not “serious” enough. The fashion snobs were our moveable middle. They had a fixed idea of what InStyle was, and that idea gave them permission to overlook us. The temptation was to chase their approval. Get cooler. More exclusive. More niche. But that would have meant abandoning what made us number one in the first place. Instead, we had to keep proving, issue after issue, that accessibility and quality weren’t mutually exclusive. That you could be the biggest and the best. You don’t win the moveable middle by becoming something you’re not. You win them by being undeniable at what you are.

If You’re the Challenger

The convinced aren’t coming to you yet. Don’t waste energy trying to convert diehards. The unaware just need an introduction. But the moveable middle is your real opportunity. They’re already thinking about the category. They just think the other guy is better. Here’s how to change their mind.

• Know that your customer arrives pre-sold on someone else. The people you most want to reach have probably already decided, consciously or not, that the legacy brand is the safe, premium, “real” choice. You’re not starting from neutral. You’re starting from behind. Every touchpoint has to work harder.

• Exceed them where they’ve gotten lazy. Find the areas where the incumbent is coasting on reputation instead of delivering, then make those your strengths. Epic Universe turned “theme park food,” an industry-wide punchline, into a genuine differentiator. They took the legacy brand’s weakest link and made it their calling card. We’re still texting each other about the Butterbeer crepes. Multiple people in our group have gone looking for clone recipes online. That’s not “good for a theme park.” That’s just good.

• Build for the doubter, not the converted. Your fans will find you. The harder and more valuable audience is the person who walks in thinking, “This probably won’t be as good.” Design every detail for that person. Prove them wrong so thoroughly they can’t rationalize it away.

• Make the comparison easy. If someone experiences you and your competitor in the same trip, the same week, the same day, what will they notice? Epic Universe won because the contrast was immediate. We’d been at Disney the day before. The delta wasn’t subtle.

• You won’t win on nostalgia, so don’t try. They own that. You can’t manufacture thirty years of childhood memories. So win on care, on craft, on the feeling that someone actually thought about what it would be like to be right here, in this moment. Nostalgia is borrowed emotion. Delight is earned in real time.

I think about this every day in my work at Boston Seaport. For years, decades really, this was parking lots. That’s the conventional wisdom a lot of Bostonians still carry. They have their beloved neighborhoods, their seasoned traditions, their established go-to spots across the city. Boston Seaport is the new kid in a very old town. Some people have visited and updated their thinking. Some haven’t been in years and are still working off an outdated mental snapshot. And some have never come at all because they already decided it’s not for them.

That’s three audiences. The convinced, the unaware, and the moveable middle.

Our job every single day is to give that middle group a reason to come experience what this neighborhood actually is now. Not what they remember. Not what they assume. What it is when they walk through it today. And the most satisfying thing about this work is that we keep seeing it happen. More and more people coming through and making new memories here. Core memories. Repeat memories. It’s all upside.

You can’t argue someone out of a preconception. You have to replace it with an experience.

And by the way, this isn’t just true for theme parks and neighborhoods. This framework applies to how any brand is experienced across the entire marketing playbook. Your website, your packaging, your customer service, your social presence, your retail environment. Wherever someone encounters you for the first time or the fifteenth time, the question is the same: are you earning it, or are you assuming they’ve already decided?

The scroll delivers devastation, outrage, grief. And then, interrupting all of it: dancing AI babies. Someone sharing how they’re going to lock in weight loss for the new year. A cheerful ad for sneakers. An influencer partnership. A “New Year, New You” campaign with very good lighting.

Jarring. Sometimes absurd. Sometimes a little obscene.

This is the question every marketer dreads, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past couple of weeks: What do you do when the news makes your content feel trivial, or worse?

I’ve been making editorial decisions under pressure for two decades now. I don’t have a perfect answer. But I have some thoughts that might actually be a relief to hear.

It doesn’t have to be a tragedy.

I want to start here, because I think we sometimes wait for the obvious catastrophe before we check ourselves. But the recalibration can be, and should be, more subtle than that.

I had just been named editor of InStyle when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Suddenly we were a celebrity lifestyle shopping magazine in a world where people were losing their homes, their savings, their jobs.

We had to take a hard look at our tone. At our copy. At all of it.

One of the first things we changed? We stopped using “only” in front of prices. Because “only” had become relative in a way it hadn’t been before. What felt like an accessible price point to us, as in that oversized scented candle is “only $50,” might feel like a cruel joke to someone who just got laid off. But it wasn’t just about that one word. It was about terminology more broadly, about how we talked about price and value and aspiration when so many people were struggling.

That kind of awareness doesn’t require a disaster. It just requires paying attention.

There will always be something.

Nobody tells you this when you’re in a brand role: there is no “normal” window. No stretch of time when the coast is clear and you can just post your content without thinking.

During my eight years as editor of InStyle, from 2008 to 2016, here’s a partial list of what we navigated: the financial crisis, the recession, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Haiti earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Tucson shooting, Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombing, the rise of ISIS, Ferguson, the Pulse nightclub shooting.

And those are just the ones that made national headlines. There were dozens of other moments, smaller but no less real to the people living through them, when we had to ask ourselves: Is this the right time for this cover? This headline? This tone?

The news never stops. The judgment calls never stop either. So it’s worth getting comfortable with that.

The news is not actually about you.

To be clear, I’m talking about brands here, not personal posting. As individuals, we process and share and grieve however we need to. But when you’re posting on behalf of a business, the calculus is different.

When tragedy strikes, brands immediately start asking: “What should we say? How do we show up? What’s our response?”

The instinct comes from a good place. Nobody wants to seem callous. But there’s something worth looking at in that reflex. Because often, it’s less about empathy and more about anxiety. We’re worried about how we’ll look if we don’t say something.

The truth is, your brand isn’t a main character in someone else’s tragedy. The crisis doesn’t necessarily require your commentary. Your silence isn’t always a void that needs filling.

Most brands have no business weighing in at all. And I think recognizing that can actually be a relief, not just a restraint.

When to speak, when to stay quiet

If your brand’s core values are clearly connected to a particular issue, then yes, people want to hear from you. You have standing to speak.

But if the connection isn’t there? Sometimes the most respectful thing is to stay quiet and let the people who are actually affected have the floor.

Performative silence is its own kind of noise.

Something terrible happens. Brands go dark. They pause their content calendars. And then, crucially, they announce that they’re pausing.

“We’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming out of respect for...”

But it’s still making it about you. You’ve turned your silence into content.

Actually saying nothing, just quietly not posting for a few days, is different than performative restraint. One is genuine. The other is a press release dressed up as humility.

The crisis is a mirror.

This one’s worth sitting with.

If your content suddenly feels inappropriate when the news gets hard, it might be a sign that it wasn’t as grounded as it could have been. That’s not a criticism. It happens to all of us.

A brand with genuine substance doesn’t have to scramble when tragedy strikes. Its content was never just noise. It was connected to something real.

That panic, the “We can’t post this right now” feeling, can actually be useful information. It might be telling you something about the content itself. If everything you make feels instantly irrelevant the moment the world gets serious, that’s worth noticing.

The algorithm doesn’t care.

One more thing worth naming: your somber, thoughtful pause? The algorithm buries it anyway.

The idea that your silence or your carefully crafted statement “matters” to anyone outside your own team is mostly fiction. We’re not moving markets. We’re not shaping public discourse. Most of the time, we’re talking to ourselves.

That might sound cynical. I actually find it freeing.

Once you accept that your response, or non-response, has a pretty small external impact, you can stop making decisions based on imagined audience perception. You can make them based on what you actually believe.

What’s worked for me

I’ve spent most of this newsletter talking about what doesn’t work. Here’s what I’ve found helpful over the years.

Reread everything through someone else’s eyes. Pull up your scheduled content. Read it as if you’re someone who just lost their home. Or their loved one. Does your copy land differently? Words like “explosive,” “crushing it,” “war room” are everywhere in marketing. Usually fine. Sometimes not.

Wait. Speed is almost never your friend. The facts might change. The context might shift. Or they might not. But either way, the statement you rushed out can become an artifact of a moment you didn’t fully understand. Forty-eight hours costs you nothing.

If you speak, add value. There’s a difference between sharing useful information (resources, fundraisers, practical help) and posting a somber graphic to check a box.

What I keep coming back to

None of this is a protocol you can pull off a shelf. It’s judgment: the ability to read context, weigh competing considerations, and make a call you can stand behind.

And you can’t build that judgment in the 24 hours after tragedy strikes. You build it now. In every piece of content you make. In every decision about what you stand for.

So that when the world is on fire, you already know who you are.

At InStyle, January was always our smallest issue. Any month starting with J, really, thanks to advertising budgets. Maybe the carryover from those times leaves me a little less grounded when the calendar flips.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably already seen a dozen “trends for 2026” lists. Everyone has opinions about where things are heading. It can feel like noise when what you actually need is signal.

Before the break, I shared five trends I couldn’t stop noticing. I promised five more when I got back. Here they are. A little shorter this week, because you don’t need more overwhelm. You need a place to start.

Nostalgia Has Become a Business Strategy

Nostalgia has always worked in marketing. But something has shifted. It’s not just about making people feel warm anymore. It’s become a full-on playbook.

Netflix and Disney+ are betting heavily on reboots (Malcolm in the Middle, Scrubs, a Harry Potter series). Everyone is mining their archives. But the smart brands aren’t just re-releasing old things. They’re remixing them. Nintendo’s campaign for its new console featured Paul Rudd reprising his role from a 1991 commercial. Louis Vuitton re-released its Murakami collaboration 20 years after the original. They’re not recreating the past. They’re using the past to create something new.

If your brand has a retired logo, an old campaign, or a product people still ask about, it might be worth revisiting.

Speed Is Becoming a Differentiator

The window to be relevant keeps getting smaller. What’s trending today might be gone by next week.

Think about how fast Labubu went from “what is that thing” to everywhere. The brands winning right now aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the most polished campaigns. They’re the ones that can move fast enough to be part of the conversation while it’s still happening. Smaller teams. More autonomy. Fewer approval layers. A willingness to be imperfect in exchange for being timely.

Most brands are still operating on campaign timelines while culture moves in real-time. That gap is where relevance gets lost.

Polished Is Losing to Real

There’s been a quiet shift happening on social. The shaky iPhone video is outperforming the expensive shoot.

Audiences are tired of content that looks like an ad. They’re gravitating toward behind-the-scenes footage, unscripted moments, stuff that feels like it came from a group chat rather than a boardroom. The algorithms are rewarding it too. Lo-fi posts spark more comments and shares because they feel like conversation, not marketing.

For brands, this means being part of the feed, not standing apart from it.

Audiences Want to Participate, Not Just Watch

Audiences don’t just want to consume brand stories anymore. They want to be part of them. And the brands that figured this out early are now reaping the rewards.

LEGO Ideas has been running for 15 years. Fans submit designs, the community votes, and if something hits 10,000 supporters, LEGO reviews it for production. The designer gets their name on the box and a cut of the royalties. Some of their best-selling sets, the Polaroid camera, the typewriter, came directly from fans.

What used to feel like a novelty is becoming an expectation. People don’t just want to buy from you. They want to build with you. The brands that create those openings are earning a different kind of loyalty.

Trust Is Being Rebuilt From Scratch

Something is happening with trust.

Consumers have learned to spot marketing theater. Hidden fees, exaggerated claims, vague sustainability pledges. All of it gets called out instantly and publicly now. The conversation has moved from hype to evidence, from excitement to proof.

The brands responding well are doing something that feels almost radical: being genuinely honest. Showing behind-the-scenes processes. Explaining limitations openly. Admitting when they got something wrong.

It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly rare. And it’s working.

I’ve been paying attention to what keeps coming up in conversations, what I’m seeing brands actually do, what seems to be shifting. You don’t have to do any of this. But you should know it’s happening so you can make an informed choice about whether it’s right for your brand.

Here are five things I can’t stop noticing. I’ll share five more when I’m back in January.

Brands Are Publicly Rejecting AI

I keep seeing brands make a very loud point about not using AI.

Some won’t use AI-generated people in their ads. Others are running whole campaigns about being “guaranteed human.”

The backlash to AI is real. Not because the technology is bad, but because everything is starting to look and sound the same. You can spot the AI-generated blog post, the AI headshot, the AI product description. It all has this smooth, generic sameness that feels empty.

So some brands are going the opposite direction. They’re showing who made the thing. They’re making the human effort visible. They’re saying “a person did this” like it’s a selling point.

And apparently it is. According to one major media company’s research, 90% of their listeners prefer human-created content.

If you’re going to do this, you actually have to mean it. You can’t use AI to write half your website and then put a “human-made” badge on your homepage. People see through that immediately.

I keep wondering how long this lasts. As AI gets better and becomes truly indistinguishable, does “human-made” still matter? I don’t know. But right now it’s working.

Retail Media Networks Are Exploding

A retail media network is when a retailer turns its website and app into an ad platform where brands pay to show up in search results and product pages.

Every retailer is launching one. Grocery stores, drugstores, delivery apps, credit card companies.

The whole thing is projected to hit $100 billion in the US by 2028.

Here’s why it’s exploding: the data is really good. Retailers know what you’re shopping for, what’s in your cart, what you bought last week. And they can connect an ad impression directly to a purchase. That closed loop is incredibly valuable.

Some brands are treating this like just another place to run ads. But the smarter ones are using it to learn how people actually shop their products. What time of day matters. What drives repeat purchases. What basket combinations show up.

The challenge is it’s getting expensive fast. Every brand in your category is competing for the same placements, and retailers are raising prices because demand is high.

I don’t know if this is the future of all advertising or just another channel that’ll plateau. But it’s definitely happening right now.

AI Is Shopping For People Now

People are asking ChatGPT to shop for them.

According to Kantar, 24% of AI users are already using AI assistants to make purchase decisions. They’re asking “What’s the best running shoe for flat feet?” and letting the AI choose the answer.

If your product isn’t in that recommendation, you don’t exist in that transaction.

This feels like a fundamental shift. People aren’t Googling and clicking through results anymore. They’re having a conversation with AI and trusting it to do the research.

Which means your product information has to be really clear and really findable. AI pulls from what’s publicly available: your website, reviews, specs, FAQs. If it can’t figure out what you sell and why it’s good, it won’t recommend you.

The big retailers are set up well for this because they’ve been feeding algorithms for years. Their product data is clean and structured.

My concern is that if we optimize too hard for AI, we lose the human voice. If your content reads like it was written by a robot for a robot, actual people won’t trust it.

I don’t have this figured out yet. Nobody does. But it’s happening fast.

The Great Unplugging

People are desperately trying to get offline.

Searches for “digital detox” are up 400% year over year. Consumers keep saying screens feel overwhelming.

Brands are responding with pop-ups, events, installations—anything that gives people a reason to step away and engage with something real.

The pandemic made us completely screen-dependent, and now we’re swinging hard the other way. People want to gather. They want something tactile. They want to feel like they were there.

But if you’re going to ask people to show up in person, it has to be worth it. It can’t just be “come take a photo with our logo.” You need to give them something they can’t get online.

And honestly, don’t design the whole event to generate Instagram content. I see this constantly. The event is built for social media, not for the people actually there. Let the moment be about the moment.

IRL is expensive. Space, staffing, logistics. But if you do it right, 200 people who actually care beats 2,000 people who just walked by.

Your Employees Are Your Influencers

Companies are turning their employees into influencers.

Not hiring external creators. Turning the people who already work there into content machines. Tech companies especially have teams posting constantly on LinkedIn and Twitter about the product, about what they’re building, about their own takes on the industry.

It makes sense. It’s cheaper than paying influencers. The messaging is stronger because these people actually use the product every day. And when an engineer explains how something works, it feels more credible than a paid spokesperson.

The companies doing this well have people everywhere talking about what they’re working on, building their own audiences. It makes them look like places where smart people work and want to work.

But you can’t force it. Not everyone wants to be a content creator. The brands doing this right are finding people who are already active online and interested, then supporting them without scripting them. If it sounds corporate, it doesn’t work.

The other thing I wonder about: what happens when that person leaves? If your brand is too dependent on individual personalities, their exit feels like a loss.

I see this trend continuing. LinkedIn especially is full of it. But it only works if it stays genuine.

So if I’m reading this right, the winning move for 2026 is to have your employees create a human-made pop-up experience where they teach AI to shop at your retail media network while everyone’s phones are locked in pouches. Kidding.

Obviously, you don’t need to check every box. But it’s worth knowing what’s out there and where other brands are heading so you can make informed choices about what actually makes sense for you—and what to avoid entirely.

One of the real highlights of 2025 for me has been launching this newsletter and being in conversation with everyone who reads it, comments, and reaches out. It’s become something I genuinely look forward to every week. Thank you for that.

“Especially during the holiday season.”

As if being kind, charitable, or making people smile should have a season. As if generosity or warmth or the act of giving someone something they didn’t expect only matters in November and December.

What does that say about the rest of the year?

I understand the sentiment. The holidays have momentum. There’s a cultural permission to be more thoughtful, more generous, more connected. But the phrase always bothers me because it implies the other ten months don’t count as much.

And for brands, it creates a problem that most of them don’t see coming.

Everyone shows up in December. Every retailer, every brand, every message is fighting for the same overcrowded moment. You’re not just competing with your direct competitors. You’re competing with every company that decided the holidays are when they need to be loudest.

You don’t have to fight for space on that calendar.

What if your brand created magic in the quiet months instead?

Amazon didn’t wait for Black Friday to become the biggest shopping event of the year.

In July 2015, they launched Prime Day to celebrate Amazon’s 20th birthday. Mid-summer. The absolute dead zone of retail. The time when everyone’s on vacation and no one’s thinking about shopping.

It was brilliant. They created their own holiday in the calendar’s white space.

Now Prime Day is as big as Black Friday and has paved the way for similar retail moments throughout the year. July is now packed with similar events.

But it was when Amazon got there first.

The Met Gala didn’t become the most important red carpet of the year by accident.

Before Anna Wintour took over as chair in 1995, the event was held in November or December at venues around New York City. Competing with the holiday season. Lost in the noise.

Wintour moved it to the first Monday in May. Not because May was already a big fashion moment. It wasn’t. Awards season ends in February and March. By May, there’s space on the calendar.

That was the point.

She created a major fashion moment when there was space for it. No competition. No noise. Just one night when everyone’s attention could be on one event.

Now the first Monday in May is as important as the Oscars.

Starbucks didn’t wait for fall to start selling Pumpkin Spice Lattes.

They introduced it in late August, before fall officially begins. Before anyone else is talking about autumn. They understood something important: you can create the feeling of a season before the season actually arrives.

Now Pumpkin Spice Latte is so synonymous with fall that it doesn’t matter that it shows up in summer.

They own the transition.

I still remember when Fox launched Beverly Hills 90210 in October 1990.

Fox was the fledgling fourth network at the time, up against the Big Three. The show had a rough first season. Low ratings. It nearly got canceled.

Then Fox did something nobody had ever done. In summer 1991, they aired brand new episodes of 90210 while the Big Three networks were running repeats (remember those?).

The time when everyone else had abandoned television. I was glued to my TV all summer.

It became a phenomenon. Suddenly, summer wasn’t dead television time anymore. Fox had created a major TV moment when no one else was even trying. And 90210 went from nearly canceled to one of the biggest shows on television.

They didn’t wait for the traditional fall schedule. They found the quiet and created something people couldn’t ignore.

Here’s what all of these have in common:

They didn’t bolt onto what everyone else was doing. They created their own moments when no one else was there and invited people in.

They didn’t wait for permission or for the traditional schedule to tell them when to show up.

And customers rewarded them for it.

Because when you’re the only one creating magic in March or July or August, people notice. When you’re not competing with a thousand other voices in December, your message actually lands.

A six-point plan for marketers:

1. Map the quiet.

Look at the calendar and find the gaps. Where is everyone else not showing up? When do your customers have attention to give but no one’s asking for it? That’s your opportunity.

2. Find your hook in what you already stand for.

Don’t invent something disconnected from your brand. Dig into your mission statement, your vision, your values. What do you actually believe? Then attach it to something sensory. A feeling you want to create or recreate. Nostalgia is a turbo-booster here. Starbucks didn’t invent fall. They tapped into the feeling of fall and claimed it. What feeling does your brand own?

3. Create a reason to show up.

You can’t just run a sale in February and call it strategy. You need a reason people should care. Amazon celebrated their birthday. The Met Gala celebrates fashion as art. Fox celebrated new television when everyone else had gone dark. Find your reason.

4. Make it feel like an event, not a promotion.

People don’t get excited about discounts in the dead of winter. They get excited about moments that feel special. Build anticipation. Create ritual. Give people something to look forward to that isn’t just “20% off.”

5. Own it year after year.

One-off activations don’t build equity. Prime Day works because it happens every July. The Met Gala works because it’s the first Monday in May, every year. Repetition creates anticipation. Claim your moment and keep it.

6. Don’t be afraid to counter-program.

Sometimes the best move is to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. If everyone’s shouting in December, maybe your brand should be the one that creates quiet in December and magic in March.

I’m not saying brands should skip the holidays or ignore the traditional marketing calendar. You have to show up when the market expects you to.

But the brands that win are the ones that don’t just show up when everyone else does.

They create their own seasons. They find the quiet and make it loud. They give customers a reason to pay attention when no one else is asking for it.

And customers reward them for it.

Because magic doesn’t need a season. It just needs intention.

And I get it. Cool feels like the answer. Cool feels like differentiation, like relevance, like proof that you’re doing something right.

But here’s what nobody says out loud: chasing cool almost always means choosing small.

Cool and scale don’t go together. Cool requires a certain kind of exclusivity to survive. It needs to be understood or held by the few who “get it.” The moment something becomes truly accessible to everyone, it stops being cool.

So when someone says “we need to be cooler,” what they’re often really saying is “we need to be smaller.” They just don’t realize it.

Early in my career, I was editing Cargo, a men’s shopping magazine at Condé Nast. I was reviewing layouts for the debut issue when a mentor at the time pulled me aside. He’d just seen a suits story I’d put together with a lineup of maybe 20 real people as models. Accessible. Achievable. The kind of thing that makes readers think, “I could actually do this.”

He said: “Nobody buys a magazine to look poor.”

I remember being bothered by that. Not just the words, but the worldview behind them. The assumption that accessible meant lesser. That showing real people in real clothes was somehow beneath us.

But I also knew there was something in what he was saying that I couldn’t completely dismiss. People do want to be inspired. They want to see the best version of what’s possible. They want to dream, and then they want the information to take action on that dream.

So I took what felt true and rejected what didn’t.

What I took: People want to be inspired to be their best selves. They want the dream first, and then the practical path to get there.

What I rejected: The idea that aspiration requires exclusivity. The belief that making something accessible makes it less valuable.

Aspiration is believing there’s more for you, in every regard.

Exclusivity is believing there should only be access to more for some.

Those are fundamentally different worldviews. And I knew which one I wanted to build a magazine around.

At InStyle, we walked that line by showing a diverse range of people, anticipating questions readers would have, and giving them actionable information. When you provide actionable advice, you’re telling people you believe they can do, try, or wear what you’re showing them. It’s not just editorial meant to be admired from a distance.

InStyle was decidedly uncool in many corners of the fashion world.

But we were number one. Massively successful with readers and advertisers. Loved and trusted by millions of people who found us genuinely useful.

I’d rather be number one than number sixteen.

The fashion world might not have thought we were cool. But readers loved us, and the business thrived. I’ll take that trade every time.

So why do people keep chasing cool?

Sometimes it’s because they genuinely believe cool equals relevance. But more often than not, it’s personal.

People want their brands to be cool because they want to be cool by association. If the brand is cool, they’re cool. If the brand gets written about in the right places, talked about by the right people, they get to feel like insiders.

I understand that impulse. But it’s not a business strategy. It’s ego dressed up as brand positioning.

Here’s the math that nobody wants to admit:

Cool depends on inaccessibility. Once everyone has access, the people who were there first move on to the next thing. That’s how cool works.

You can be cool and popular at the same time, but there’s almost always a catch. The catch is usually pricing. You can reach a lot of people if the price point makes it inaccessible to most of them. But that’s still a form of small. Small in who gets to participate.

If someone told you to “chase small” or “pursue intentional stagnation,” you’d think they’d lost their mind. Nobody wants that for their business.

But that’s what chasing cool gets you.

What to do instead:

Be clear. Know what you stand for and say it plainly. Clarity outlasts mystique every time.

Be useful. Solve a real problem. Make someone’s life easier or better. Usefulness compounds in ways that cool never does.

Be aspirational without being exclusive. Show people the dream, then give them the information to act on it. That’s the difference between inspiration and gatekeeping.

Be consistent. Show up the same way every time. Consistency builds trust. Cool builds curiosity, but curiosity fades.

Ask yourself: Would I rather be admired or chosen? Admiration feels good. But chosen means someone is actually buying, actually engaging, actually building a relationship with what you’re offering.

The question to ask your team:

When someone says “we need to be cooler,” ask them: “What do you actually want that to get us?”

You probably won’t get a straight answer. People will say things like “differentiation” or “brand perception.” But if you keep pushing, you’ll usually find it’s one of three things: they want more customers (in which case, accessibility matters more than cool), they want industry respect (in which case, ask if that respect actually converts to anything), or they want to feel cool themselves (in which case, at least now you know what you’re really solving for).

Most of the time, the chase for cool is a detour. A flattering one. But still a detour.

“Black Friday proves the sale price is the real price.”

“Brands have been ripping you off all year.”

“That 50% discount? That’s what it was always worth.”

And now that Black Friday has stretched into a four-day marathon ending with Cyber Monday, the cynicism has even more runway. What used to be a single day of doorbuster deals is now a long weekend of nonstop promotions.

I get it. The cynicism is earned. Retail pricing games can feel manipulative. And yes, some brands inflate prices just so they can slash them.

But I want to offer a different way to think about this.

When I was Editor-in-Chief of InStyle, we did something that hadn’t really been done before in fashion magazines: we included pricing on the page.

At the time, it felt almost taboo. Fashion was supposed to be aspirational, untethered from something as crass as cost. You weren’t supposed to ask how much. You were just supposed to want it.

But we believed that connecting price to product wasn’t crass. It was clarifying. It helped readers understand the relationship between what something cost and what made it worth that cost: the craftsmanship, the materials, the design, the brand’s point of view, the story behind it.

What surprised me was the reaction. Readers didn’t resent seeing prices. They appreciated it. It gave them permission to talk about cost and value in the same breath. And it made them trust us more, because we weren’t hiding anything.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this past week.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about Black Friday:

The discounted price isn’t the “real” price. It’s the floor. It’s what something costs when you strip away almost everything else.

The full price you pay the other 51 weeks of the year? That’s not a ripoff. That’s what it costs to keep the whole ecosystem running.

Think about what you’re actually paying for when you buy something at full price:

The salesperson who knows the product and helps you find your size. The store that exists in your neighborhood, with lights on and doors open. The fitting room. The return policy. The gift wrap.

The jobs: not just in the store, but at the warehouse, the design studio, the factory.

The brand’s ability to take creative risks. To try something new. To make something better.

The customer service line when something goes wrong.

The experience of shopping somewhere that actually feels good.

Black Friday strips all of that down. It’s a brand saying: “Just this once, here’s the raw cost. The margin is gone. We’re not funding the extras.”

And that’s fine. I’m not anti-Black Friday.

But I’ve stopped thinking of full price as the lie and the discount as the truth.

Here’s an analogy that helps me:

We pay taxes for roads we’re not currently driving on. For schools we might not have kids in. For parks we might not visit this month.

We don’t resent that (well, most of us don’t). We understand that the system needs funding. That our contribution keeps the whole thing working, not just for us, but for everyone.

Why don’t we think about retail the same way?

When you pay full price, you’re funding the ecosystem you benefit from. You’re voting for a world where stores have knowledgeable people, where brands can afford to do things right, where the experience of buying something is worth having.

Most brands haven’t told this story. They’ve let customers believe that full price is inflated, that discounts reveal the “real” price, and that anyone who pays full price is getting ripped off.

That’s a failure of communication, not pricing.

What if more brands said:

“Yes, you can get this for 40% off on Black Friday. But the other 51 weeks, your purchase funds the people, the experience, and the community you’re part of. That’s what the full price is for.”

For brands thinking about how to communicate this:

Start by being transparent about what full price actually supports. Not as an apology, but as a point of pride. Customers are smart. They understand that businesses have costs. What frustrates them is feeling like those costs are hidden or exaggerated.

Consider how you frame discounts. There’s a difference between “we made too much and want to move it” and “SECRET VIP EXCLUSIVE DEAL.” One builds trust. The other erodes it over time.

Think about consistency. Every deep discount teaches your customer to wait for the next one. If your pricing swings wildly between full price and 50% off, you’re training people to doubt the higher number.

And remember that price is part of your brand story. The brands that customers trust most are the ones that help them understand not just what they’re buying, but what they’re supporting when they buy it.

I’m not here to tell anyone how to shop. Black Friday deals can be great, and there’s nothing wrong with saving money.

But I’ve started paying attention to how I feel when I buy something at full price from a brand I believe in. And lately, it feels less like getting taken and more like participating in something I want to exist.

That’s not a rule. It’s just a shift.

You’re not a sucker.

You might just be a participant.

Not because I think they predict the future. Most don’t. But because I’m curious about which trends actually show up in my day-to-day life, both as a marketing professional and as a consumer.

Do I see evidence of what the reports are claiming? Does it match what I’m observing at work, in retail spaces, in how people engage with brands? Or is it just consultant-speak that sounds good in a deck but doesn’t exist in the real world?

As we head into Thanksgiving, I wanted to share five trends from 2025 that I’m genuinely thankful for. Not because they’re buzzy, but because they’re real, observable, and creating opportunities for brands willing to pay attention.

1. AI Moving From Hype to Useful Tool

We spent 2024 hearing about Gen AI’s potential. In 2025, it’s actually helping with the time-consuming parts of the process: research, data analysis, brainstorming, first drafts. That frees us up to focus on making the work better. Be thankful the conversation shifted from “Will AI replace us?” to “How can AI improve what we do?” The tools have matured enough that they’re genuinely useful now, not just impressive demos.

What to do: Use AI to accelerate the parts of the process that slow you down. Then spend more time on the thinking, the craft, and the relationships that only you can bring.

2. Micro-Communities Over Massive Reach

Algorithmic feeds reward engagement, which often means polarizing or emotionally charged content rises to the top. That’s tough for brands, which tend to play it safe and get ignored as a result. But in smaller, more meaningful communities, relevance and authenticity actually drive engagement. You don’t need millions of followers to build something real. You need the right people who genuinely care. The shift toward quality over quantity is one of the healthiest things happening in marketing right now.

What to do: Find where your people actually are, not where you wish they were. Then show up there consistently with something useful. Not your pitch. Not your product. Just value.

3. Physical Is Back

After years of digital-first everything, consumers want tangible experiences again. Luxury print books are selling. Retail foot traffic matters. Multi-sensory brand experiences are differentiators, not nice-to-haves. Be thankful if you work in spaces where people actually gather. There’s a renewed appreciation for things you can touch, hold, and experience in real life.

What to do: Create something people can touch. A printed piece that’s worth keeping. An event that matters. Packaging that tells a story. If all your brand touchpoints are pixels, you’re missing an opportunity.

4. “Treatonomics” Is Real

There’s been a lot of news lately about traditional milestones feeling increasingly out of reach for many consumers. Homeownership, marriage, kids. In response, people are celebrating “inchstones” with small indulgences. Kantar, the global market research firm, calls this “treatonomics,” and it’s reshaping how people spend. Be thankful that consumers are looking for small, unexpected moments of joy. Your brand might be perfectly positioned to deliver one.

What to do: Stop positioning your brand solely around big moments. Think smaller. What small delight can you offer? What unexpected touch might make someone’s day a little better? That’s your opportunity.

5. Creators Over Celebrities

Celebrity endorsements just don’t move the needle like they used to (per GWI, only 11% of consumers discover brands that way anymore). Be thankful for the creator economy, where authentic voices build real communities. Kantar’s research shows creator-led content dramatically outperforms traditional celebrity campaigns when it comes to making brands stand out.

When I was Editor-in-Chief of InStyle, we sold millions of copies each month. Now the “magazine” is digital only and free. The economics of celebrity-driven media have changed, but creators with authentic audiences? They’re building real trust.

What to do: Find creators whose work you actually respect and whose audiences match yours. Follow them. Engage with their content. Build a relationship before you pitch anything. Authenticity starts with you.

But it meant my team and I spent a lot of time interviewing people who had already been interviewed hundreds, sometimes thousands, of times.

Drew Barrymore was probably on the cover of InStyle more than anyone else: nine or ten times over the years. I had the pleasure of interviewing her for three of those cover stories—once when I was a senior editor during my first stint at the magazine, and twice later as Editor-in-Chief.

Drew is one of the most gracious, thoughtful people I’ve ever had the privilege to interview. And here’s what happens when someone’s been interviewed as many times as she has, especially someone who’s been famous since she was three years old: they develop a natural way of sharing their story.

Talking points that feel comfortable. Stories that resonate with audiences. Familiar territory about her unconventional childhood, the E.T. period, her relationship with her mother, the wild early phase, her marriages. All true. All genuine. And all things she’d shared generously in many other interviews over the years.

My job wasn’t just to get her to talk. Drew is always willing to talk. My job was to find the fresh angle that would give readers something new.

The trick was being deliberate about where I focused the conversation.

I didn’t ask about E.T. Not because it was off-limits—Drew would have answered anything—but because it wasn’t relevant to who she was in that particular moment.

Instead, I kept the focus super-current. What was happening in her life right now? What was she thinking about today that she hadn’t been asked about yet? By anchoring the conversation in the actual moment, not the well-worn territory of her past, I could inspire Drew to share something new and authentic that she was genuinely excited to talk about.

It worked. Not because I was cleverer than other interviewers, but because I was intentional about not falling back on the old tropes most everyone else relied on.

I didn’t want to provide the same old message. And neither did she.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I watch brands try to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded marketing environment.

Because here’s what I’m seeing: every brand is starting to sound exactly the same.

And it’s getting worse.

Open any brand’s website. Scroll through LinkedIn. Read a few mission statements. You’ll see the same words over and over:

Customer-obsessed. Innovative. Authentic. Purpose-driven. Community-focused. Transparent. Sustainable.

It’s not that these things aren’t true. Most of the time, they probably are. But when everyone’s saying it, it stops meaning anything.

Brands have always borrowed language from each other. Trends in positioning come and go. For a while, everyone was “disruptive.” Then everyone was “mission-driven.” Now everyone’s “AI-powered.”

But something’s changed in the last couple of years that’s made this exponentially worse.

AI has automated the talking points.

If you ask ChatGPT to help you write a brand positioning statement, it will give you some version of: We’re a customer-obsessed, innovative company that believes in transparency, sustainability, and creating meaningful experiences.

If a thousand other companies ask the same question, they’ll get the same answer. The script isn’t just rehearsed anymore. It’s generated at scale.

Add to that the sheer volume of content people see every day. Thousands of marketing messages. Websites. Emails. Social posts. Ads. Packaging. Signage.

If your brand sounds like everyone else’s, you’re not just unmemorable. You’re invisible.

It reminds me of what happens to celebrities after they’ve done an endless press tour for a popular project.

They learn what journalists want to hear. They develop answers that feel personal but are actually safe. Remember Lady Gaga during the A Star Is Born press tour? “There can be 100 people in a room...” She said it so many times it became a meme. Not because it wasn’t genuine, but because she’d found something that worked and repeated it everywhere.

Celebrities perform authenticity so well that it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing.

Brands have learned the same trick.

They know what they’re supposed to say. They know the language that signals we’re “good” brands. Customer-first. Purpose-led. Community-driven.

Social media has trained everyone to perform values just like celebrities perform their relatability on press junkets.

The problem is, when everyone’s performing the same script, nobody’s actually saying anything.

So what do we do about it?

The same thing I did with Drew Barrymore.

Focus on what’s truly current and specific, not what’s comfortable and generic.

Start by auditing your category. Read your competitors’ websites. Study their messaging, values statements, about pages.

Write down the words and phrases that show up repeatedly.

If you’re in retail: curated, discovery, experience, community.

If you’re in tech: innovative, user-centric, AI-powered, seamless.

If you’re in hospitality: elevated, thoughtful, welcoming, bespoke.

If you’re in experiential marketing: immersive, engaging, authentic, memorable.

These aren’t bad words. But they’re the default. They’re what everyone says because they’re what you’re supposed to say.

Once you know what the script is, you can start to figure out how to get around it.

Push past the obvious.

When your team says “we’re customer-obsessed,” don’t accept it at face value. Ask: How is our version different from our competitors’ version? Can we point to a specific decision that proves it?

When someone suggests “innovation” as a brand value, push back. Ask: What are we actually innovating? Why does it matter? What would we lose if we stopped?

The first answer is almost always the generic one. The real answer comes after you keep asking.

Get specific.

Collective language is comfortable because it’s safe. Nobody’s going to argue with “we believe in quality.” But specificity creates differentiation.

Instead of “we’re committed to sustainability,” try: “We’ve eliminated single-use plastic in our supply chain and we’re working toward carbon neutrality by 2027.”

Instead of “we value community,” try: “We host monthly neighborhood events because we believe our space should belong to the people who live here.”

Specific claims can be proven or disproven. They’re riskier. But they’re also the only way to sound like yourself.

Know your actual why.

Here’s the test: if you swapped your brand name with a competitor’s on your mission statement, would anyone notice?

If the answer is no, you’re performing the script.

Every brand in your category probably believes in excellence or customer experience or innovation. That’s table stakes.

The question is: why do you believe it? What’s the story underneath the value? What decision or experience led you to that conviction? That’s where differentiation lives. Not in the value itself, but in the specificity of why it matters to you.

I know this is harder than it sounds. It’s easier to use the language everyone else is using. It feels safe.

And AI has made it easier than ever to generate perfectly adequate brand messaging that sounds like everyone else’s perfectly adequate brand messaging.

But here’s what I learned interviewing dozens of celebrities over nearly a decade, including three conversations with Drew Barrymore:

The thing people remember is never the rehearsed answer. It’s the moment when someone says something they haven’t said before.

The same is true for brands.

The brands that break through are the ones willing to do the work to sound like themselves. Not like the category. Not like the AI output. Like themselves.

It takes being deliberate about staying current and focused on what matters now, not falling back on what’s always been said.

But that’s the only way to avoid sounding like everyone else.

Just ask Drew Barrymore.