Today, much of the most influential thinking in marketing and branding centers on How Brands Grow and the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, commonly grouped under the banner of evidence-based marketing. Its principles have become the strategic lens through which contemporary marketing, branding, and advertising are increasingly evaluated. Penetration, mental availability, physical availability, category entry points, distinctive assets: these have become the prevailing language of marketing seriousness.

Empirically, I find this remarkable.

During my final years in the business, fragments of Ehrenberg-Bass thinking would occasionally surface in conversation. Beyond that, I cannot remember How Brands Grow being invoked in any meaningful way during the development of an actual brand, marketing, or advertising strategy. Classic marketing philosophy certainly was. Segmentation, positioning, differentiation, competitive advantage, customer motivation, and brand purpose were part of the regular vocabulary of the work; How Brands Grow was not.

My last agency assignment was running the Verizon business at McCann. Verizon had a marketing budget measured in billions and a business that touched virtually every aspect of marketing, branding, media, and advertising. Yet I do not recall the principles of How Brands Grow being incorporated into the strategic process in any substantive way. I cannot remember more than a handful of people working on the business ever mentioning the book, much less using its principles to shape the work.

How can this framework now be treated as marketing’s operating system when that description runs counter to almost everything I—and probably millions of other advertising professionals—experienced during our working lives?

One answer is that How Brands Grow may be more prominent in marketing commentary than in marketing practice. It has become the language through which strategies are judged after they have been created, rather than the guidance by which they are created. A second answer, and the one Byron Sharp would probably offer, is more interesting: marketers do not have to understand the laws of buyer behavior for brands to remain subject to them. Gravity operated before Newton identified it.

My experience, therefore, does not disprove How Brands Grow. It raises a different question: Can a body of research developed largely through retrospective analysis predict what will happen in a genuinely new category before its hierarchy has been settled and its winners identified?

Artificial intelligence gives us an extraordinary opportunity to find that out in real time.

AI is not simply another product category. It is the most important branding category of our lifetime. It is more than a product; it may become the technological layer through which people work, learn, search, create, shop, communicate, entertain themselves, and make decisions. The brands built around it will help determine not only which companies capture economic value but also how billions of people understand and relate to machine intelligence.

Lucky for us, the category is forming before our very eyes. Consumer behavior has not yet calcified. Brand loyalties remain fluid. Use occasions are multiplying. Products are being developed at an extraordinary pace. And the principal competitors have entered the market with strikingly different combinations of brand meaning, fame, distribution, inherited equity and product capability.

We rarely get a brand laboratory this visible—or this consequential.

The essential argument of How Brands Grow is that marketers habitually misunderstand why big brands are big. We defer to arguments about intensely loyal customers, superior differentiation, carefully selected targets, and deep, meaningful customer relationships. HBG evidence suggests a less romantic explanation. Brands become big because more people buy them. Their customers may be somewhat more loyal, but loyalty is largely a consequence of scale rather than its cause. Smaller brands suffer “double jeopardy”: they have fewer buyers, and those buyers tend to purchase them slightly less often.

Through this perspective, growth comes principally through penetration. Brands must reach all category buyers, including many light buyers who purchase infrequently and may give the brand very little thought. They grow by becoming easier to remember and easier to buy—by increasing mental and physical availability. Advertising works less by transforming people’s convictions than by refreshing memory structures. Distinctive assets matter because they allow distracted consumers to recognize a brand. Differentiation may exist, but consumers generally see far less of it than marketers do and commonly buy from a repertoire of broadly substitutable brands.

The larger Ehrenberg-Bass platform has expanded this thinking through category entry points: the situations, needs, and motives that cause someone to enter a category. A brand with strong mental availability is not merely famous in the abstract. It is linked in memory to many of the moments in which the category becomes relevant.

These propositions create observable predictions for AI. The company with the most compelling positioning should not necessarily become the largest. The brand with the most passionate users should not outgrow the brand with the most users. Temporary product superiority should matter less than marketers assume. Broad reach, easy access, strong memory structures, and association with multiple use occasions should matter enormously. Consumers should use repertoires rather than form exclusive relationships. And the largest AI brand should show somewhat greater loyalty largely because it has greater penetration.

So what does the emerging AI market look like through the lens of How Brands Grow—and where does it resist the theory?

ChatGPT begins with the most valuable advantage identified by How Brands Grow: mental availability. It has become the name millions of people use for consumer artificial intelligence. Just like “Googling” something, people now use “ChatGPT” as shorthand for using AI. The brand has established memory links to a range of needs: explain this, write this, plan this, summarize this, teach me this, help me decide, help me create, help me think.

OpenAI reported in late 2025 that ChatGPT was serving more than 800 million weekly users, with adoption extending well beyond the original technology audience. Its own usage research found that people were increasingly turning to the product for everyday information, practical guidance, and both personal and professional tasks. That is penetration, and it is the foundation upon which the rest of the brand is being built.

OpenAI’s positioning—the democratization of capability—fits naturally around this behavioral advantage. The promise is that intelligence-derived power is no longer reserved for experts, programmers, and wealthy institutions. Anyone can now undertake work that was previously beyond reach. It is an emotionally expansive position and allows ChatGPT to span a wide range of category entry points.

Its weakness is the other side of its breadth. “Human possibility” is a territory every AI company can claim. ChatGPT may ultimately discover that category ownership is not the same thing as a distinctive position. Yet How Brands Grow suggests that this matters less than classical strategists believe. If ChatGPT is the first brand retrieved from memory across the greatest number of situations, its position need not be intellectually exquisite. It needs to remain famous, recognizable, and easy to use.

Claude represents the most direct challenge to that proposition. Anthropic has built the sharpest positioning in the category -- AI for people who still value the work of thinking: a collaborator for difficult intellectual and creative problems rather than an escape from them. Its current language—“the AI for problem solvers,” “a space to think,” and “keep thinking”—does something positioning is supposed to do. It selects a cultural territory, identifies a kind of user, and implies an antagonist.

Claude appears to inspire strong affinity among writers, programmers, researchers, and sophisticated knowledge workers. Its users often do not merely use it; they advocate for it. Under conventional brand theory, that is a formidable starting point. Claude has meaning, preference, and a constituency.

Under “How Brands Grow,” it is incomplete. Claude cannot become a mass brand by deepening the devotion of people who already prefer it. It must recruit enormous numbers of light, occasional and comparatively indifferent users. Its strategic problem is not primarily loyalty. It is penetration.

Claude provides a particularly useful test. Can differentiated positioning and genuine preference overcome a substantial disadvantage in fame and distribution? Or will its devoted following prove to be what HBG research would predict: commercially valuable, culturally influential and numerically insufficient?

Gemini begins from the opposite position. Its brand meaning is less sharply drawn, but its physical availability may become overwhelming. Google has positioned Gemini as personal, proactive and powerful—the next expression of the company’s longstanding promise of helpfulness. Most importantly, Gemini can be integrated into Search, Gmail, Photos, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Calendar, Maps, Workspace and the rest of Google’s informational architecture. It does not need to persuade everyone to visit a new destination. It can appear within activities billions of people already perform.

This is where the AI category may update the meaning of physical availability. For packaged goods, physical availability means distribution across stores, formats, locations, and occasions. When the product is digital, the store shelf is an operating system, a browser, an inbox, a document, a search result, or a phone. Availability means being embedded at the point where a need arises, with as little friction as possible between intention and use.

Gemini may never achieve ChatGPT’s independent cultural status and still become enormous. It may only need to be present when people search, respond to an email, review a document, organize a calendar, or use an Android phone. Gemini could become less a consciously chosen brand than an invisible utility—something closer to electricity. Which raises the more interesting question: for much routine AI use, does availability need to create preference at all?

Meta is running a related experiment on an even larger social canvas. Meta AI can be integrated into WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger—within the communications and relationships that already structure much of daily life. Meta describes its ambition as building a more personal AI that people encounter throughout its family of applications.

Meta’s structural proposition is potentially distinctive. ChatGPT may know what a person has told it. Google can know a person’s information and activities. Meta can claim knowledge of interests, relationships, communities and social behavior. It wants to create an intelligence that understands not merely what you ask, but the context of the life in which you are asking it.

The obstacle is obvious. Meta may possess the best raw materials for personal intelligence, yet be the brand people are least inclined to trust with it. Classical positioning theory says that’s a profound brand problem. Ehrenberg-Bass thinking suggests that Meta’s distribution advantage (availability) may drive enormous usage even without widespread affection for the brand.

Microsoft belongs in the experiment as well. Copilot has struggled to achieve the cultural clarity of ChatGPT or Claude, but Microsoft can embed it in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the daily workflow of institutional life. Microsoft calls it “AI built for work,” a modest proposition supported by extraordinary access to the places where work actually happens. But then again, Microsoft’s enduring business success has long depended, in part, on its own version of physical availability: being embedded in the systems and applications through which institutions operate.

These companies are not merely pursuing different marketing campaigns. They are wagering on different theories of growth.

OpenAI is betting that category fame and broad mental availability can be extended into durable leadership. Anthropic is betting that trust, intellectual seriousness and a clearly defined relationship with the user can produce disproportionate preference. Google, Meta and Microsoft are betting, in different ways, that distribution and embedded behavior can overcome a deficit in independent brand meaning.

The outcome will tell us something important about the old argument between positioning and availability. If Claude’s clearer meaning produces exceptional growth, classical strategy will have evidence on its side. If Gemini, Meta AI, or Copilot gains massive adoption without achieving comparable cultural preference, HBG’s account of availability will look prescient. If ChatGPT retains its lead despite competitors periodically surpassing it in technical performance, mental availability will have demonstrated just how durable a market asset it can be.

The category-entry-point competition may be even more revealing. AI is not one use occasion. It is potentially thousands. “Help me understand this” is different from “help me write this,” which is different from “find this,” “make this,” “decide this,” “organize this,” “talk this through with me” or, increasingly, “do this for me.”

ChatGPT is attempting to occupy the broad territory of general assistance and capability. Claude is strongest in demanding tasks like writing, coding, and analysis. Gemini can connect itself to search, information, and personal productivity. Meta can attach AI to communication, discovery, and relationships. Copilot can own institutional work.

The brand associated with the most frequent entry points should have an enormous advantage. But AI also gives us a chance to examine whether all entry points are equal. Claude may own fewer occasions but more consequential ones. Copilot may lack cultural salience while being embedded in highly valuable enterprise behavior. ChatGPT may become the generalist people consult first but not the specialist they select when the stakes are highest.

Much of the foundational Ehrenberg-Bass evidence came from repeat-purchase behavior in mature categories, particularly packaged goods. AI is a service, a platform, a tool, and potentially an operating layer. Product differences can be significant, even if they are temporary. Quality can change dramatically with a model release. Users can move among competitors at almost no monetary cost, yet accumulated history, memory, personalization, and workflow integration may eventually create substantial switching costs. Employers may choose the brand on behalf of workers. Governments and educational institutions may shape access. Free products, subscriptions, APIs, and enterprise contracts all coexist within the same category.

The category itself is also expanding explosively. That makes it difficult to separate growth achieved by stealing share from growth produced by riding the market’s expansion. A company can gain millions of users and still lose relative position. Penetration must therefore be measured against an unstable and rapidly expanding definition of who the category buyer is.

If How Brands Grow holds in a category this different from those from which much of its evidence was derived, its claim to generality becomes considerably stronger. If it does not, AI may help define the boundaries within which the theory is useful.

We should begin keeping score now.

That means looking beyond model rankings, advertising campaigns, and the passions of technologically sophisticated users. We should track actual penetration; unaided brand recall; the needs and situations associated with each brand; use generated through embedded distribution versus conscious selection; recognition of distinctive assets; movement between free and paid usage; and the degree to which people use one brand or assemble repertoires.

We should also distinguish between usage and brand building. If someone receives a Gemini-generated answer inside Search without consciously choosing Gemini, Google has increased the utilization of its technology. Has it grown the Gemini brand? If an employee uses Copilot because it appears in Word, is that penetration, distribution, or merely a feature interaction? If Meta AI is placed inside WhatsApp, does repeated exposure create a memory structure or produce the digital equivalent of walking past an overstocked shelf?

Evidence-based marketing should welcome these ambiguities. The point of an empirical framework is not to provide a new vocabulary with which to make old assumptions sound scientific. It is to generate predictions that expose the framework to the possibility of being wrong.

That is what makes AI so valuable to marketing. We are not examining the rise of Coca-Cola, Apple, Amazon, or Nike after decades of history have obscured the contingencies, making each outcome appear inevitable. We are present at the beginning. The positions are visible. The distribution advantages are visible. The category entry points are forming in front of us. We can record what each theory predicts before we know who wins.

Technology creates capability, but does not determine how that capability will be understood, trusted, or incorporated into everyday behavior. Brands do that work through product design, language, distribution, advertising, and customer experience.

The conventional wisdom is that the AI race will be won by the company that builds the most intelligent model. The history of marketing suggests otherwise. The largest brand may be the one that makes its version of intelligence easiest to remember and most differentiated, easiest to encounter, and relevant to the greatest number of human needs.

Artificial intelligence is routinely described as the greatest technological experiment of our time. For marketers, it is something else as well: perhaps the greatest live experiment in brand growth we will ever witness. The subjects are billions of people. The variables are penetration, mental availability, distribution, distinctiveness, differentiation, loyalty, and use occasion.

For once, the experiment is not buried in historical sales data or reconstructed after the winning brand has made its success look inevitable. It is unfolding in public, every day.

We should pay attention to the evidence before the doctrine tries to explain it for us.

It is time we start blaming and holding accountable the real culprits behind this untenable and worsening condition: the delivery apps, such as Uber Eats and DoorDash, whose algorithmic business models, built to maximize speed and volume, sow chaos on urban streets and dehumanize workers into data points on a map.

Our anger at the riders is not accidental. It is one of the delivery apps’ greatest marketing achievements.

Uber Eats is one of the most celebrated advertisers in the world. Its campaigns have collected Cannes Lions, D&AD Pencils, Clios, Webbys, One Show Pencils and Effies. In 2026, “Football Is for Food” won the Grand Effie as the most effective marketing campaign in the United States, and Uber Eats was ranked the country’s most effective brand.

And what is all this award-winning advertising designed to accomplish? Simply, more. More orders. More customers. More reasons to demand more products, delivered from more places, at more hours of the day.

The advertising industry calls this creative effectiveness. Demand generation. On the streets of New York, it looks much more like the generation of chaos and exploitation. Every successful campaign sends more deliveries through a system whose physical costs the platforms refuse to own. It puts more riders under more pressure on more crowded streets, without requiring Uber Eats to acquire a single vehicle, employ a single courier, insure every delivery, or accept responsibility for the resulting disorder. The advertising does not just promote the business model. It accelerates it, and ensures that we blame the system’s most vulnerable participants for the consequences.

Uber Eats and all the delivery apps have persuaded us that they are not operating enormous commercial delivery fleets. They are platform apps: clean, frictionless technology connecting customers, restaurants and supposedly independent workers. When the food arrives, the platform gets the credit. When the delivery produces danger or disorder, the driver gets the blame.

The positioning is the central deception of the business.

The apps’ value (convenience) is achieved by concealing their human infrastructure. They reduce workers to dots moving across a map, because the service feels effortless only when the person performing the labor remains invisible.

The invisible fleet

Imagine if Verizon dispatched thousands of technicians across New York but insisted it had nothing to do with their vehicles, training, insurance, or conduct. Or, if FedEx claimed that the people carrying its packages were unrelated entrepreneurs who happened to use the same software.

Uber Eats couriers are also a mobile field force. The platform recruits them, sets the terms of every order, tracks their movements, calculates their compensation, measures their performance, and can restrict their access to future work.

Yet the apps have structured both their operations and their brands to make this workforce disappear.

The disappearing act is economically essential. Operating an actual delivery fleet is expensive. Vehicles cost money. Maintenance costs money. Insurance, training, workers’ compensation, safety equipment, and downtime cost money. A conventional delivery company must recognize such expenses as part of delivering its product.

The app delivery model pushes much of that expense downward onto individual couriers and outward onto the city. Workers supply or rent the vehicles, purchase batteries, and assume physical risk. The public suffers the consequences of sidewalk riding, illegal mopeds, and battery hazards. The platform retains the revenue and the customer relationship.

A large, flexible workforce, available without the obligations of conventional employment, is economically essential to the platforms. In New York, that workforce is heavily composed of immigrants and people with limited economic alternatives. The apps did not create immigration or economic insecurity. But they did construct a business model that recognized that this labor pool existed, built an operation capable of absorbing it, and structured the relationship so that the most vulnerable participants would bear its greatest risks.

Uber calls this flexible work. I call it a business model that located the people least able to refuse its terms, then rebranded their vulnerability as independence.

Dehumanization by design

The courier presented to a customer is barely a person. A camouflaged missile silently coursing through city streets and sidewalks in every direction. A dot on a map. We watch the dot and become irritated when it stops moving.

This is interface design, but it is also marketing. The interface determines how we understand the transaction.

This dehumanization serves the company twice. First, it makes the service easier to consume. Convenience would feel different if every order forced customers to confront the labor, the danger, and the economic vulnerability required to fulfill it.

Second, it directs blame away from the platform. When a rider travels the wrong way down a street, we do not yell at an algorithm. We yell at the human being in front of us.

The corporation is nowhere to be seen, even though it created the trip, established its economics, and monitors it from beginning to end.

That may be the apps’ worst offense. They do not merely exploit workers; they erase their humanity in the customer’s eyes, and profit when public anger stops at the person on the bike.

Marketing is the business model.

Marketers often talk as though marketing and operations occupy separate worlds: the company creates a product, and marketing tells people about it. Here, that distinction collapses. Marketing is how the delivery-app business model manifests itself.

New York City now estimates that roughly 400,000 bike deliveries occur every day. That volume did not descend on the city as a natural phenomenon. It was cultivated. Billions of impressions, celebrity-filled Super Bowl commercials, discounts, notifications, memberships, and frictionless interfaces trained consumers to regard immediate delivery as an ordinary feature of urban life rather than an occasional luxury.

Advertising cannot claim credit for changing consumer behavior and then declare itself irrelevant to the physical consequences of that change. If a campaign wins because it generates unprecedented demand, the fulfillment of that demand belongs inside the story of the campaign.

The morality of frictionless convenience

Similarly, a company cannot treat workers as integral when generating revenue and incidental when assigning responsibility. It cannot create the trip, define the transaction, track its execution, profit from its completion, and then behave as though the resulting dangers are someone else’s problem.

Uber Eats produces exceptionally good advertising in service of a business model that becomes more destructive as the advertising becomes more successful.

The real marketing achievement of the food delivery apps is persuading us that the company delivering it does not operate a delivery fleet, that the human beings doing the work do not constitute a workforce, and that the consequences of its business do not belong to the business.

It’s time for New York City to start regulating the business model itself, not just the environment in which it operates.

Lubricated for Liftoff

Why Is the Air Travel Experience Nothing More Than One Long Bar Crawl?

Recreational cannabis is legal in Illinois. But fat chance you’re able to score a 5mg gummy at O’Hare Airport before boarding. You can, however, treat yourself to several Bloody Mary’s with breakfast, a scotch or two before heading to the gate, perhaps some champagne in the lounge. And then, of course, the flying bar that is a 737.

Federal law explains the cannabis part. Why the alcohol part seems completely normal needs a little explanation.

Alcohol and commutation don’t ordinarily go hand-in-hand. As much as we would like to, you don’t get served a Cosmopolitan upon boarding the B59 bus. Nobody (hopefully) approaches the Holland Tunnel thinking this would be an excellent time for an Old Fashioned. Yet somehow alcohol has become the defining feature of airports and airplanes. The lubricant of air travel.

To understand why, it’s useful to view the situation through the sacred artifact of modern marketing: the customer journey.

Arrive at airport: Bar.

Clear security: More bars.

Wait for flight: Have a drink.

Enter airline lounge: Complimentary drinks.

Board plane: Champagne, if you’ve paid enough.

Reach cruising altitude: Drinks cart.

Meal service: Wine.

After dinner: Perhaps another.

Arrival: Good luck finding your luggage.

Viewed this way, the air travel customer journey begins to look less like transportation and more like a carefully choreographed bar crawl with an airplane ride in the middle.

How did alcohol become so deeply embedded in flying that we no longer find any of this peculiar?

Today we talk endlessly about brands and culture. Brands must understand culture, participate in culture, react to culture, earn a place in culture. Culture is treated almost like weather—something happening out there that marketers need to monitor and respond to.

But marketing can do something much more powerful than participate in culture. It can create it.

That’s what appears to have happened with alcohol and flying. In the early days of commercial aviation, airlines had an unfamiliar and somewhat terrifying technology to sell. They didn’t market flying simply as transportation. They borrowed the codes of ocean liners, grand hotels and private clubs—other travel-adjacent categories. Liquor helped transform the experience of trudging through an airport and sitting inside a metal tube for several hours into something sophisticated and glamorous. Remember how people used to get dressed up to fly?

Then regulation took hold, which meant carriers could not legally compete on price. So they competed on everything else: schedules, meals, service, and liquor. Two generations of American flyers learned what flying was during forty years when the only way an airline could win your business was to try to create a better experience than the other guy.

The liquor brands didn’t do this alone. Airlines, airports, hospitality companies, and alcohol marketers created a mutually reinforcing commercial system. An experience that became the cultural norm. Drinking stopped being something that happened while flying and became part of what flying meant.

After decades of reinforcement, the behavior has become so normalized that we no longer recognize it as a constructed behavior at all.

Put a cannabis counter next to Gate C17, however, and imagine the questions. The shock to the cultural norm that marketing created.

This is not an argument for cannabis or against alcohol. It’s an observation about the extraordinary power of marketing not just to tap into culture but to create it. We often talk about the great achievements of marketing in terms of brands built, products sold, or market share captured. Maybe we should think bigger - The diamond engagement ring; Orange juice at breakfast; The coffee break. Customer experiences created and curated by marketing that create cultural norms.

The ultimate achievement of marketing may not be persuading people to buy something. It may be getting them to forget that the behavior was ever marketed to them in the first place.

When I first read about it this morning, I thought: that’s one of the dumbest business and branding decisions in recent history. Is there an appetite (market) for bad, American-Mexican food in Mexico? Are there Panda Expresses in Beijing? Au Bon Pains in Paris? Is there even a Taco Bell in Mexico City?

The answer is no. And for good reason — it’s hard to sell ersatz food in its country of origin. Beneath the salsa and sour cream of the announcement, something pretty fascinating is at work here.

Chipotle isn’t selling Mexican food to Mexico. It isn’t really selling food at all. What’s implicitly on the menu is America’s greatest and most powerful export — appetite. The driving values of what’s left of American Exceptionalism, whittled down to the commercial efficiencies of commoditized consumer culture. The same recipe fed to — and happily devoured by — the millions who flooded American cities last month for the World Cup. A commodity infinitely more valuable than a loaded burrito bowl (extra sour cream, please).

Chipotle’s CEO assured us the chain enters Mexico with “deep respect for the country’s culinary heritage,” citing research that “showed there was strong interest in high-quality, freshly prepared food” served with “customization and convenience.”

The first Chipotle in Mexico recently opened in San Pedro Garza García, an affluent suburb of Monterrey and one of the wealthiest municipalities in Latin America. Roughly two hundred people queued up — some arriving four hours early, in blistering heat. Asked whether he’d ever heard of the brand, one person in line answered: “The pepper, yes.”

What, exactly, are they lining up for?

American values, wrapped in foil

When we talk about American values, we typically speak in the language of our founding: liberty, equality, self-determination, the pursuit of happiness. Noble stuff. Not all that marketable anymore, globally.

A second set of American values — quieter, and more easily exportable — has conquered the earth without firing a shot or signing a treaty: the values of American consumerism. Abundance as birthright. Reinvention as a national pastime. The unshakable belief that anyone can have anything, customized, on demand, at any time (“Have it your Way”). These values are enshrined in the purest expression of American Exceptionalism we’ve got left — the fast-casual franchise restaurant.

Consider what’s encoded in a nine-dollar burrito bowl.

Democratized consistency. Andy Warhol identified this fifty years ago: “A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke…” America’s radical little promise was that everyone gets the same product. The franchise is egalitarianism ordered at a counter.

Standardized individualism. Chipotle never just sold you a burrito; it pioneered “build your own,” at speed. Infinite personal choice, delivered through a rigidly uniform machine. Freedom inside a frame. Individualism, mass-produced. Is there anything more American than that paradox — total self-expression running on total conformity?

Efficiency as a virtue. We took Henry Ford’s assembly line, pointed it at lunch, and call it freedom. Time saved is the closest thing American capitalism has to a sacrament.

Cleanliness as next to godliness. Ray Kroc was famously obsessed with the bathrooms; the franchise as the American Dream licensed — the system that lets anyone own a piece without having to invent a thing.

When America exports a franchise, it’s exporting far more than food. It’s exporting a set of American values — modernity, aspiration, order, choice — with dinner as the delivery format.

Losing on values, winning on hash browns

If you want to see this value proposition spring into action, you needn’t look further than this year’s World Cup.

While the tournament rolled across America, the most-watched footage often wasn’t the soccer. It was grown European men reduced to tears over a Waffle House — a Dutch supporter going misty over hash browns “scattered, smothered, covered.” They weren’t going gaga over the “high-quality, freshly prepared food.” The thrill was consistency, scale, friendliness, endless choice — American consumer culture as a lived experience.

Which is exactly what Chipotle is about to export south of the border — and, though I can’t believe I’m saying it, probably very successfully, if they play their cards right.

The World Cup was that very export moving in one direction: the world coming to America to gorge on it. A Chipotle in Monterrey is that same export flowing the other way — the franchise going out to find the appetite on its own soil.

So no — Chipotle in Mexico probably isn’t the dumbest decision in recent history. It’s actually a very inspired business decision that, despite the corporate diarrhea of their press announcement, reflects an incredibly self-aware understanding of their brand.

We keep score of American power in the usual currencies: military bases, the reserve-currency dollar, and the market caps of a handful of tech companies. But the most durable thing this country ever built is something else. It’s consumer appetite — manufactured, portable, endlessly customizable, and craved even by people who’d never admit to wanting anything American at all.

Rome left the world its roads. Britain left its language. America may end up leaving something more sustainable: craving itself, sold back to every corner of the earth. The empire of values is a hard sell; The empire of appetite is easier because it’s open 24 hours with a drive-through window.

This has probably been the wrong collective ambition, as we see every day across the social media universe populated with artificially competent writing and content that’s occasionally impressive, sometimes useful, but rarely ever really satisfying.

My ongoing LLM ghostwriting experiments generally get the facts right; structure content coherently; and, thankfully, provide exquisite grammar. The derailment, however, generally starts around the second or third paragraph, when the prose suddenly drifts into a distinctive (yet generic), soulless, but uber-rational voice that has colonized LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, and a good portion of the internet.

For a long time, I thought this was an operator problem - my prompting, lack of context, or inadequate “training,” whatever that means. I gave ChatGPT examples of my writing. I described the cadence I especially dislike and told it that an endless succession of one-sentence paragraphs was deeply offensive. I asked for fewer signposts, fewer manufactured punchlines, longer paragraphs and a more observational tone.

And yet, more AI pabulum. I would beg it to stop as it rambled on.

Eventually, and mostly by accident, I changed the assignment. Instead of saying, “Write this article,” I began saying, “Help me figure something out.”

Our conversation changed almost immediately. We stopped going back and forth on openings and conclusions and started talking about and dissecting ideas. Instead of asking my LLM to write something for me, I asked it to be my challenger board. Be the defense to my prosecution. Together, we looked for contradictions, patterns, and facts that refused to fit together. Whatever article I was working on would sometimes disappear for an hour while we worried about a smaller, more useful question: What is this piece really about?

That idea was not fully formed in either of our minds. It emerged through disagreement. ChatGPT proposed explanations I rejected because they assumed facts we did not know. I pushed back on claims that felt too easy. It reframed observations I had made from experience and connected them to financial and strategic patterns I had not yet articulated. Most of the conversation never appeared in the eventual draft. It made the draft possible.

After these types of discussions, whatever I was working on literally wrote itself for me.

It was only after I stopped asking ChatGPT to write like me that it finally began writing like me.

Not because the model had finally mastered my sentence length, punctuation, or vocabulary. It started sounding more like me because “style” became the residue of a way of thinking versus a catalog of literal habits. My voice was not hiding in syntax. It was embedded in the questions I asked, the distinctions I cared about, the assumptions I resisted, and the observations I found interesting enough to pursue.

I started my AI journey treating large language models as ghostwriters. That seems like the least interesting role they can play. Relatively good prose is no longer an especially scarce commodity. What is in short supply is an observation worth making, a pattern worth following, and the judgment to know when an argument is true.

People worry that AI will replace writers. I think it will replace solitude. The machine is extraordinarily useful for extending a thought, testing it, contradicting it and showing where it might lead. The human remains responsible for the obsession that started the conversation, the judgment that governs it and the decision to publish what survives.

I wrote this essay with my AI partner. That is not a disclosure appended to the argument; it is the argument. The idea was mine, and this was written by me, but emerged from conversation, challenged in conversation and drafted from conclusions neither of us reached alone in quite the same way.

The mistake we make with AI is using it as a substitute for having something to say, rather than as an incredibly effective way of figuring out what to say.

Andy Grove—one of the godfathers of the modern technology industry and an unusually perceptive business philosopher—once observed that one key to innovation is to “take a little bit of your future and make it part of your present.”

I had the privilege of meeting Grove several times while working on the Intel business. He was our client. Trying to sell advertising ideas to Andy Grove was one of the most intellectually demanding experiences of my agency career.

A week ago, while researching the history of advertising agencies in the Hartman Center archives at Duke University, I thought about Andy’s line—but in reverse.

Surrounded by the accumulated record of an industry at the height of its creative confidence, and thinking at the same time about the challenges agencies now face, I realized the business has unknowingly inverted Grove’s wisdom. Reverse-mortgaged its past—its history, its accumulated knowledge, even its own idea of itself—to make the future consume the present.

Everyone has a theory about what ails the advertising agency. Artificial intelligence. Holding companies. Procurement. They’re all real, and each has reshaped the business.

These are symptoms, though. The disease underneath is stranger. And sounds like an absurd paradox - The agency’s real enemy is marketing itself.

Not marketing communications—the activity agencies have always practiced—but marketing as a discipline. More specifically, the body of marketing theory agencies have gradually adopted over the past several decades as their own operating system.

Tectonic Shifting

Over the past three decades, the intellectual center of gravity in marketing has quietly moved.

The discipline has become more empirical, more behavioral, more interested in what people do than in what things mean. Its questions have changed. We spend less time asking why a brand matters and more time asking whether it is remembered. Less time thinking about persuasion and more about availability. Less about differentiation and more about distinctiveness.

Marketing’s pivot from Freud to Behaviorism.

Marketing has become a field of binary choices, each apparently settled by evidence: penetration or loyalty. Reach or targeting. Brand or performance. Long or short. Differentiation or distinctiveness. A discipline inherently meant to be integrative is now a construct of artificial polarities.

A complete marketing model needs both — a theory of what things mean, and a theory of how they become available and experienced.

Three Simple Words

I’ve always taken a reductionist view of marketing – connect people to propositions and experiences that produce valuable and profitable outcomes for marketers and consumers alike. And deliver that in the form of a pleasing experience.

As an agency practitioner, this notion translates into a very tangible client marketing mandate: “create a more favorable selling environment.” The forever agency brief. Marketing as the lubricant to the gears of commercial activity.

Most agencies co-opted this into proprietary operating systems such as “Brand Stewardship,” “Creative Business Ideas,” “The 6Cs,” and more. Points of view on advertising based on a marketing point of view.

The best articulation of this, in fact, the simplest definition of advertising, is the three words I looked up at on the wall during my final agency gig – Truth Well Told. McCann coined it, all the way back in 1912, but whatever any agency called it, it was the approach.

Truth is a claim about the product. It says there is something real to be found, that the first job is discovery, not invention. Well Told is a claim about craft. It says that how the truth is expressed is not decoration laid over the message but the thing itself.

Joyous Surrender

When the humanist theory of marketing gave way to the empirical one, agencies were more than willing to jump on board. New marketing was quantitative. It measured things agencies had always struggled to measure. It brought a welcome discipline to questions that had too often been answered by intuition or hierarchy. Planning frameworks gradually absorbed the vocabulary of contemporary marketing science until agencies eventually began describing themselves in terms of ideas that had not originated within their own discipline.

The industry traded the lubricant of meaning for the grease of availability. Grease is cheaper, and you can buy it by the barrel and measure how much you pour in ounces. And it works, the way grease works: things slide. Right up until someone with a real meaning, well told, shows up and makes your frictionless, forgettable, endlessly available brand feel like exactly what it is.

A Backward Look

The documents in those boxes at The Hartman Center — the briefs, the strategy memos, the correspondence — were the record of an industry that once understood itself. They were organizations concerned with understanding people; with culture, psychology, and meaning; with the real work of making sense of the world well enough to help a client find a place within it.

I went to Duke to research a book. I came home with something I hadn’t expected: a renewed pride in being a Meaning Maker and a clear view of the path back. What sits in those boxes in North Carolina isn’t a museum of how advertising used to be done. It is a record of what the business actually is — waiting for the industry to remember it. Every agency leader should make the trip.

Advertising has always been a business obsessed with the future. It looks ahead because its real product isn’t information or persuasion; it’s a promise. And promises, by definition, are kept in the future.

Advertising is one of the principal ways a culture imagines what’s next. It introduces unfamiliar products and ideas, then wraps them in stories that make them feel desirable, familiar, even inevitable. Long before most of us experience the future, we’ve already encountered it through advertising.

What advertising has never seemed particularly interested in is remembering its own past. The industry has always had a curious habit of treating yesterday as little more than a nostalgia concept or an anniversary campaign. It venerates great ads, but rarely pauses to examine the institutions that produced them or the conditions that made them possible.

That reluctance is especially striking today, as the industry races towards its latest attempt at reinvention.

I spent this past week at the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University, researching The Meaning Makers, a project on the history of the American advertising agency. Housed within Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Hartman Center contains what is widely regarded as the world’s largest collection devoted to advertising and marketing.

Each day, I sifted through boxes of agency history spanning the rise of the creative revolution through the advent of the holding company era. Agency business plans, creative briefs, strategy memoranda, correspondence from agency executives like David Ogilvy, Lester Wunderman, and Burt Manning, client presentations, organizational charts, research reports, speeches, internal newsletters, and the countless working documents that rarely survive once the campaign is over.

This wasn’t an archive of advertising. It was a record of how advertising agencies thought. These documents revealed organizations concerned with understanding people. They explored culture, psychology, research, organizational design, client relationships, creativity, and strategy. Advertising was the visible output. The real work was making sense of the world well enough to help clients find a meaningful place within it.

The story that unfolded from these boxes carted out in front of me was one of watching agencies wrestle, in real time, with questions that remain surprisingly familiar today. How do you earn a client’s trust? How do you organize creative people? How do you turn research into insight? How do you build an institution capable of consistently producing ideas that shape culture? Questions that sought to assure them as to what business they were actually in.

Eventually, I asked one of the archivists the obvious question: “How did all of this end up at Duke?” The answer turned out to be the most revealing discovery of my entire trip.

The Hartman Center’s remarkable collection began as the archive of J. Walter Thompson. Over decades, JWT had painstakingly preserved its own history: campaign materials, internal correspondence, planning documents, photographs, films, presentations, and the institutional record of one of the agencies that helped invent modern advertising. Someone, at some point in JWT’s history, believed these materials mattered. They understood that an institution’s history wasn’t simply a record of where it had been; it was part of its identity.

That identity changed after WPP acquired JWT. The agency’s new owners saw this invaluable archive as nothing more than an unnecessary expense. Waste to be cut. John Hartman, a Duke alumnus and former advertising executive, learned what was happening, persuaded Duke to preserve the collection, and arranged for an eighteen-wheel truck to carry it from Madison Avenue to Durham.

Almost overnight, advertising’s new vanguard erased its old vanguard from the industry’s collective memory

Much of the industry’s current conversation around agency reinvention assumes that the future will be determined primarily by new technologies and increasingly efficient ways of producing marketing. Those developments matter enormously, and every agency will have to master them. If agencies ultimately define themselves as highly efficient producers of marketing assets, then AI may indeed represent the future of the business.

But if their real purpose is to help clients understand culture and build brands that create meaning, as their predecessors did, then perhaps the clearest view of a path to reinvention may not come simply by looking farther ahead but by looking backward, recovering what it once understood about itself, and remembering the actual business it used to be in.

Somewhere inside J. Walter Thompson, generations of leaders believed their work was worth preserving because they understood that institutions derive part of their strength from remembering who they are. This may be advertising’s real challenge today. Not that it has forgotten how to make advertising. It has forgotten what made advertising agencies matter in the first place.

Groucho Marx’s famous epigram — “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” — has never felt more contemporary.

Private members’ clubs are everywhere, offering some combination of culture, conversation, wellness, networking, creativity, and belonging. New York, the epicenter of elitist cocooning, resembles a luxury shopping mall devoted to the retail sale of human connection.

What makes the line feel especially current, though, is the way it catches our tangled relationship with belonging itself.

Membership is a clever product. It promises selected encounters rather than random ones, peers rather than strangers, a place where everyone has already cleared some combination of cultural, economic, professional, and social filters. The friction of public life is engineered out, while the comfort of familiarity goes up.

Quietly, our definition of belonging is drifting from participation to membership. Membership is a relationship with people you choose; participation is a relationship with whoever happens to be there. Membership is something you buy. Participation is something you do. One is a transaction. The other is a practice.

Cue Groucho.

This was brought into stark relief for me when I recently stepped away from a long career in advertising. Like most people finishing a long chapter, I thought I knew what I would miss—the work itself, the intellectual challenge, the people, the triumphs, even the routines.

What I did not expect was that what I miss most is simply the conversation. The third space, both physical and spiritual, that an institution, a culture, like an advertising agency, affords to its people.

Agencies, for all their faults, were remarkable social institutions. At their best, they were second and third place at once. People came together ostensibly to make advertising, but that was only part of the alchemy. Ideas circulated—stories accumulated. Friendships outlasted the jobs that started them. The agency was a business, certainly, but also a community organized around a shared curiosity.

Other, creative organizations operated similarly – newspapers, universities, media companies, even department stores. None of them existed only to produce the thing they produced. Their deeper work was to give people a reason to gather. The work mattered. The conversation mattered more.

Enter the Kibitzer Club. A third space for the second act, if you will. Despite the name, it’s not really a club at all. The opposite of one. No clubhouse, no membership committee, no waiting list, no annual dues. Less an institution than a disposition. A kibitzer takes part. Asks the question, offers the observation, tells the story, stays curious about the people in the room, and contributes for the plain reason that contributing is the whole point.

Professional culture is very good at assigning people value while they hold a formal role. The title confers legitimacy. The organization confers identity. The career confers status. Then one morning, the role goes away, the machinery that did all that conferring stops. The third space that once welcomed you in is now off-limits. You are no longer a member.

People leave the advertising business carrying decades of knowledge, relationships, judgment, and hard-won perspective. What the second act removes is the institution that once organized all that experience. What it offers in return is the freedom to put it back into circulation on your own terms.

What if the second act is not a retreat from the conversation but a deeper entry into it, and what if experience is not something to be retired but something to be kept moving? What if belonging has less to do with being admitted than with showing up and joining in?

The boom in private clubs confirms that people still want connection badly enough to pay for it. The market heard that signal and answered it with membership. The better answer, and the one available to everyone, is participation.

The agency, as a magical third space, was never just a physical location. It was a sensibility you carried with you, a mode of attention. A willingness to enter into conversation with the world. A habit of intellectual and social generosity. A standing commitment to other people and their ideas, including the people you would never have picked and the ideas you walked in disagreeing with.

The most meaningful kinds of belonging have never depended on membership. They have depended on participation. You cannot buy your way into them. You can only show up and take part.

Welcome to the Kibitzer Club. Because in the end, the thing we are all looking for may not be a room at all. It may simply be the conversation going on inside it, and that conversation is open to anyone willing to join it.

A club even Groucho would join.

Attend any multi-day marketing offsite, and invariably the first order of business is an introductory exercise designed to reveal an embarrassing personal detail that your colleagues otherwise wouldn’t (and probably shouldn’t) be aware of.

I always took this warm-up seriously and went with one of my two go-tos: accidentally blowing up my neighbor’s car when I was twelve; accidentally spending the night in the Beverly Hills jail while entertaining my agency clients. And I wondered why I was always viewed with a bit of trepidation at these gatherings.

Another, less embarrassing exercise is to answer the question, “If you weren’t in advertising, what would you be doing?” Here, I typically went the conservative route and registered as an “investigative journalist” for all the obvious reasons.

But the real answer, the thing that would have brought me the same fulfillment and intellectual stimulation, was a criminal detective. Solving a marketing problem with creative thinking has always struck me as the same process and the same brainpower as solving a crime: understand the motive, research the context, interview the suspects, relive the crime, gather the evidence, and argue the case.

This orientation may have something to do with my early experience with crime, growing up in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side in the late sixties and early seventies. I don’t want to say my neighborhood was unsafe; it was an integrated, intellectual island built and guarded by the University of Chicago, which by 1969 had bulldozed a good portion of the surrounding blocks in the name of urban renewal and fielded its own private police force. The adults, many of them connected to the U. of C., regarded Hyde Park as a liberal experiment in how people might live together. But it was also a tense, anxious place, bounded on one side by the beauty of the lakefront and on the others by some of the roughest, most devastated ghettos in America.

It was in this environment that I found myself watching TV on a hot afternoon in late August. I was eight years old. My brother, watching with me, was about to turn thirteen. We were ending our summer as we had begun it, loafing around the neighborhood, doing basically nothing, while our single mother was at work. My brother controlled the TV, which meant we were probably watching either Dark Shadows on Channel 7 or the Three Stooges on WFLD, Channel 32. Neither of us was paying much attention when we heard two loud pops. “What the hell was that?” I asked my brother, who didn’t look up from the set. The portable black-and-white sat in the dining room, whose windows faced an alley that ran the length of the block. A few seconds after the pop-pop, I went to the window and saw a man running down the alley, clearly fleeing. As he ran the hundred yards or so toward our apartment, then past it, I got a very good look at him. Whatever had happened, the image of this guy’s face locked itself in my brain.

A few minutes later, the police began to gather at the far end of the alley — the spot the man had been running from. Something compelled me to go outside and walk toward them. I found a cop standing at the edge of the scene and asked him what happened. “Old lady got robbed and shot.” I thought for a second. “I saw the guy,” I said.

Thus began my insider’s introduction to the Chicago Police Department and the discipline of criminal detective work — an education I’ve drawn on ever since.

After establishing that I had indeed witnessed the crime, the officers on the scene had me wait around until the detectives arrived. Now the real work was about to begin.

That night, they took me to the precinct house, where they took down my formal statement and had me work with a police sketch artist on a drawing of the suspect. The rendering was faithful; what I saw on the sheet of paper matched the image locked in my brain — the one I can still see today.

Now that they had the suspect generically identified — a tall, thin Black man in his twenties with a short, squarish haircut — all we had to do was find him. Unfortunately, that description fit tens of thousands of men on the South Side.

The detectives, who were white, deployed a basic strategy: use me like a hunting dog, driving me around the Black neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park in the hope that I might spot the man on the street. It was a needle-in-a-haystack search with a strong racial bias overlay.

This went on for a while. School had resumed — I was in third grade now — and the detectives would come every day at 3:15 and wait for me on 55th Street outside Bret Harte Grammar School. In their clunky cop car and bad beige suits, they looked exactly like the kind of men the school assemblies warned us about. My friends must have thought I was on parole. We would drive around for about an hour, and periodically, they would ask me if anyone looked familiar. It seemed wildly haphazard, but what did I know, then, about detective work?

My babysitting detectives timed the operation so they could drop me off right around dinner, when my mother was arriving home from work. This had less to do with the case than with my mom, who was young, single, and very attractive. They would hit on her, then horn their way into dinner with us — attempting to advance not the investigation but their own sleazy advances.

After two weeks of this — two weeks of my mother and me trying to be good, cooperative citizens — the folly of the investigation began to wear on us. We were just about to tell the police that we had done everything we could and would appreciate being left alone, when they showed up one day and said, “We got him.”

Given what had preceded this declaration, we were skeptical. They explained that they had caught a man committing another crime and matched him against the police sketch. They were certain he was the guy. They wanted me to come to the station and identify him in a lineup.

I stood behind the one-way mirror as four men, all of whom looked alike, ambled into position on the other side of the glass. Each stepped forward for a few seconds. Each looked something like the man I had seen running in the alley, but none of them was him. Despite the detectives’ certainty, they had the wrong man.

That didn’t deter them. They insisted this was the killer and pressured me to confirm it. After some back-and-forth, they told my mother and me that they were arresting him anyway. Right or wrong, this man was going down for the murder, and the police were asking an eight-year-old to testify falsely.

At this point, my mother — worn down by weeks of the detectives’ attentions — said, “Enough.” She told them we were done cooperating with the investigation. We left the station and made our way home, though I don’t remember exactly how; the police certainly weren’t driving us anywhere now, and my mother didn’t have a driver’s license. So much for the words painted on the side of every Chicago squad car: “We Serve and Protect.”

I never found out what happened with the case; we had no further contact with the police. I would swear, though, that I saw the guy — the actual killer — on the street a few months later.

The Chicago police and I had further encounters once I started driving. Like the night I was pulled over for doing the speed limit and politely asked the officer what I’d done. “You know, it’s late, and my partner and I haven’t eaten dinner yet.” A decade on, at least the brand was consistent.

In 1969, my only knowledge of advertising came from the Creative Revolution spots running between the Stooges and Dark Shadows — Alka-Seltzer’s “Mamma mia, that’s a spicy meatball!,” Benson & Hedges’ elongated cigarettes snapping in elevator doors. It would be years before I could see what detective work and advertising work have in common, and where the comparison ends. But my weeks as a witness shaped how I practiced the trade for four decades — beginning with the recognition that a creative brief is, in fact, a witness statement: an honest account of what you actually know and see, not what someone wants you to see.

Detective work and advertising are both searches for the truth. Bill Bernbach believed the most important quality in advertising was an understanding of human nature. The police lineup taught me the corollary early: the hard part isn’t finding the truth — it’s holding on to it when the people on your side of the glass want to hear something else.

A lusty roar went up — in German, in Dutch, in a half-dozen Slavic tongues — as Gerd Müller turned in the box and beat the Dutch keeper to win the 1974 World Cup for West Germany.

I was watching the match on closed-circuit television at the old Chicago Stadium, with my father — German, and soccer-obsessed long before there was such a thing in America — and several thousand other immigrants and first-generation Americans like him.

Welcome to World Cup Fanfest, circa 1974, on the West Side of Chicago.

We had all paid fifteen dollars apiece, a considerable sum at the time, for the privilege of watching the West Germany–Netherlands final in black and white on a screen perhaps fifteen feet high and twenty feet across. We sat on folding chairs arranged atop the covered hockey ice in the old Stadium, as if we had all turned up at a German or Polish social club on the Northwest Side and found a television switched on. As a sports-entertainment experience, it was pure function, no frills.

For the men in that arena — and it was almost entirely men — the arrangement made perfect sense. This was the only way, the only venue, to watch the world’s biggest sporting event in a country that barely acknowledged the sport’s existence. The World Cup belonged to another world then.

For a thirteen-year-old boy, it was a bewildering and wonderful introduction to international soccer, even in those makeshift circumstances. Though they were strangers to me, the men around me that afternoon seemed to know one another’s languages, their histories, their grievances. There was an unspoken bond of loss and renewal that connected these now-American soccer fans. They understood the stakes of the match in ways I did not yet grasp. What I remember most clearly about the entire experience is the feeling of being transported to a different place and time.

Fifty-two years later, the World Cup returns to the United States under very different circumstances. It arrives not by closed-circuit feed inside an aging hockey arena but as the largest sporting event ever staged on this continent: forty-eight competing nations, sixteen stadium venues, three host countries. It will be everywhere — on every screen, in every bar, across every feed — ringed by official fan festivals, branded and ticketed and engineered down to the playlist, each one built to manufacture exactly the thing that Chicago Stadium produced in 1974 for nothing. Magic.

Unfortunately, the dominant storyline going into this year’s tournament is neither magic nor wonder, but greed, unchecked commercialism, and a flagrant, in-your-face reminder that we live in a polarized world of haves and have-nots. While technically a nonprofit, FIFA is estimated to rake in over $8 billion by the time the final whistle blows at MetLife Stadium on July 19th.

The marketing around the 2026 tournament is the largest in the history of the sport, and arguably in the history of any event. FIFA has nearly sold out its entire commercial inventory and expects the highest sponsorship revenue ever generated for a standalone sporting event — as much as $2.4 billion, more than a third above 2022. WARC Media projects brands will pour an additional $10.5 billion into global ad spend designed to create, well… magic.

Of course, magic is a difficult thing to scale. And even harder to manufacture. In 1974, no one in Chicago Stadium had come to participate in a “customer experience.” No one had been promised a festival. There were no sponsor tents, no influencer platforms, no limited-edition merchandise drops, no official hashtag, no food village organized around “global flavors.”

The communion was actually a byproduct of scarcity, not abundance. You could not buy it because there was nothing to buy beyond the ticket. The meaning came from the fact that everyone in that arena had somehow found their way there. Each person understood, without saying it, that this gathering existed because the surrounding culture did not yet know what to do with them, or with the game they loved.

Scarcity is the last thing anyone would associate with the 2026 World Cup. But scarcity was also what made the magic free in 1974. Abundance has a price, and the price is that the feeling now has to be sold to us. We have become a country that can stage anything and stumble into nothing.

Scandals, rip-offs, complete disregard for the fans — screw it. I can’t wait for the World Cup to start. I plan on fully immersing myself in it for the next five weeks. And as I do, I will be reminded of a dark arena, a grainy screen, and a few thousand strangers yelling in languages I didn’t understand who didn’t need a festival to feel like they had become a part of something. Because the magic was never in the spectacle. It was in the room. And you couldn’t buy a ticket to that — except, once maybe, for fifteen bucks.

By the start of my senior year at Indiana University, I had completed all the course requirements for my Political Science degree. So I decided to see what an academic spin looked like on some of my favorite subjects: I took a class on Post-Bop Jazz, a seminar on Urban History in the 20th Century, and Advertising Copywriting 101.

Only one of those classes would alter the trajectory of my life.

I thought copywriting might be a fun diversion. It was offered through the School of Journalism. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my professor, Phillip Ward Burton, was a pretty big deal in the advertising business. In fact, we were using his textbook for the course, appropriately titled Advertising Copywriting.

Professor Burton took a liking to my writing. He started dropping hints that I might have a future on Madison Avenue. I was thinking more in terms of law school or a government position. Advertising seemed less like a career path than a vaguely glamorous detour. But as my amateurish spec ads continued to garner Professor Burton’s approval, the possibility of advertising — this mysterious world I barely understood — began to feel less absurd.

It came as a total surprise, just before graduation, when Professor Burton approached me and said he wanted to arrange an interview with a former student of his who was now working at an ad agency in New York.

“I would love that,” I said, not remotely grasping the full consequence of what was about to unfold.

Professor Burton’s former student wasn’t simply another former undergrad. He was Anthony C. (“Tony”) Chevins, then President & CEO of Cunningham & Walsh, the 16th-largest advertising agency in America at the time.

I had never been on a job interview in my life. I came from a family of musicians and academics and had barely ever stepped foot inside a conventional business environment. Though I could write with a certain degree of sophistication and maturity, I was as naïve an ingénue as ever entered the ad business.

Yet here I was, scheduled for a series of interviews more befitting a senior creative director than a 21-year-old kid who looked barely old enough to drive.

The interview had been arranged weeks in advance, which gave me more than ample time to catastrophize over every conceivable thing that could go wrong.

It was scheduled for a Friday afternoon in August. I was coming from Chicago. The plan was to drive East with a friend to Washington, D.C., then take the train to New York. A road trip to my professional destiny — what could be more adventurous?

The interview was on the calendar for 2 PM. I would first meet with Mr. Chevins, then the agency’s Creative Director, and finally the Head of HR. I understood what these people’s titles conveyed, but I had no idea what they actually did. I was interviewing for a profession I didn’t understand.

In 1983, Cunningham & Walsh was located at 260 Madison Avenue. The corner of 39^th Street. The place was classic Mad Men: a mid-century modern office occupying several floors inside an older Manhattan building. Framed ads lined the walls like museum pieces.

I arrived at the agency twenty minutes early, announced myself to the receptionist, and sat down, desperately hoping the air conditioning would dry my full-body nerve sweat before the interviews began.

At 2:15 PM, Mr. Chevins’ Executive Assistant emerged from reception, greeted me warmly, and escorted me into the CEO’s office.

His office was enormous. Easily twice the size of my first two New York apartments combined. Chevins sat comfortably behind a gigantic desk. I sat opposite him, though given the scale of the furniture, there was a considerable physical distance between us.

I sat there.

He sat there.

After his assistant had introduced me — “This is Mr. Sonnenfeld” — and deposited me into a chair, Mr. Chevins did not say a word.

This went on for an uncomfortably long time.

He then started pressing buttons on the control panel on his desk, causing the window shades to descend and a small bar to emerge from a cabinet. I watched with awe and terror. In all my catastrophizing of bad interview scenarios, I never accounted for this.

Still not a word. It was the most awkward silence in the history of awkward silences.

What was he doing?

I, of course, was incapable of speaking. My exciting road-trip adventure to Madison Avenue was rapidly devolving into the real-life version of the dream where you arrive naked for a final exam you forgot to study for.

After a minute or two of this bizarre standoff, Mr. Chevins suddenly rose from his chair and motioned for me to follow him to a wall on the opposite side of the office.

There hung a large photograph of Chevins seated at the head of a conference table, surrounded by roughly fifty Japanese executives, all dressed in black suits, white shirts, and black ties.

It was at this moment that the CEO of the 16th-largest ad agency in America uttered the first words of the first interview of what would become my professional career:

“This is my family.”

That was his opening salvo. Not a question, but a statement — an odd one — that clearly required a response.

Had I possessed even a shred of composure, I might have replied, “Gee, I don’t really see the resemblance.”

Instead, all that could come out was: “Huh?”

Apparently satisfied that he had psychologically dismantled me, Mr. Chevins finally descended to earth and conducted something resembling a normal interview.

He explained that Cunningham & Walsh had recently won the Mitsubishi account — thus the photograph and “family” remark. I showed him my portfolio, which consisted of a three-ring notebook filled with my best spec ads. My favorite was an ad for rug padding — yes, rug padding used to be advertised — with the headline: “Beneath Every Great Rug is a Great Rug Padding.”

He whipped through the portfolio for perhaps thirty seconds, mentioned off-handedly that it looked like I could write, said a few kind things about Professor Burton, and suggested I take some classes at the School of Visual Arts and come back to see him in a year.

And with that, he wished me well and passed me on to his Executive Director. A half hour later, I was on my way back to Penn Station to catch the train back down to Washington, D.C.

I’m still not entirely sure why he conducted the interview the way he did. One possible explanation is simply that it may not have been wise to schedule a job interview with an advertising executive at 2 PM on a Friday afternoon in 1983.

But maybe this was his way of testing me. Advertising people of that era believed the business was less a profession than a world unto itself — one governed by instinct, performance, confidence, and the ability to make sense of confusion in real time.

The office, the hierarchy, the oversized personalities, the cryptic rituals, even the awkward silences — all of it conveyed that agency life possessed its own mythology and culture.

That world could be ridiculous. Often it was. It could be arrogant, exclusionary, self-important, and deeply dysfunctional. But it was also alive with eccentricity, ambition, creativity, and human drama.

It makes me sad that most people now enter professional life through portals, platforms, algorithms, and applicant-tracking systems. Their first interaction with a company is often not with a person but with a workflow.

I’m sure that’s more efficient. But somewhere along the way, entering the advertising profession stopped feeling like entering a world — or joining a family, however strange and dysfunctional that family may have been.

And that’s a shame.

I awoke in Beijing on a Saturday morning, well-rested after a week of meetings, dinners, drinking, and general agency shenanigans. It was 2008, and I was in China to help set up the office of Enfatico, a brand-new global advertising agency that WPP was attempting to build from the ground up — a fantastical ambition of epic proportions. Our launch manifesto opened with the boast: “Enfatico is something that has never existed before.” We were the agency of the future.

Sixteen months later, despite all the fanfare and confident press releases, the agency of the future would be a thing of the past.

That morning, though, my focus wasn’t on the future but on the past. I was about to leave for Shanghai, a side trip that would prove infinitely more consequential than the misguided corporate exercise that had brought me to China in the first place.

My father, Peter Sonnenfeld, was a German Jew. In late 1939, he and his family fled Germany for the only place on earth that would take them: Shanghai. The Japanese-occupied International Settlement was, for a brief and improbable period, one of the last open ports in the world that did not require a visa. Thousands of European Jews escaped there because there was nowhere else to go.

Shanghai in 1940 was a city under siege — crowded, chaotic, corrupt, and improbably cosmopolitan. Refugees packed into overcrowded districts while cafés in “Little Vienna” still served Sachertorte and coffee.

My wife often accompanied me on international business trips when agency life sent me somewhere interesting. After the week in Beijing, we planned to spend a few days in Shanghai as tourists. But I also wanted to see the place my father had once described to me — this distant, foreign city where he had spent five formative years as a child refugee during the war.

The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum sits in what was once the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in the Hongkou district, on a quiet street that had once stood at the center of what the Japanese occupiers euphemistically called the Designated Area for Stateless Refugees — what became known as the Shanghai Ghetto. Roughly twenty thousand European Jews lived in the surrounding lanes between 1941 and 1945.

We arrived tired, hungry, and drenched in sweat after wandering Shanghai all morning in the heavy summer heat. Every visitor to the museum was assigned a young Chinese guide wearing a name tag around their neck.

Ours was a woman in her early twenties who introduced herself in careful English.

Her name was Elena.

Elena is my daughter’s name. It is not especially common in the United States and, I later learned, extremely unusual in China.

My wife and I looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

We explained why we had come. I mentioned my father’s name, the year, and the family. Elena told us the museum maintained a database of Jewish residents who had lived in the district during the war. Would I like to look?

The database sat on a desktop computer running a Chinese version of Microsoft Windows. Someone helped me navigate it. The resident records themselves were in English. I scrolled down to “S,” and there they were: my grandparents, my father, my uncle, and two great-uncles. Ages. Occupations. Address.

818 Tongshan Lu, Number 15.

I asked Elena where it was.

“Not far,” she said. “You can walk.”

I had come to Shanghai hoping, at best, for only a vague sense of where and how my father had once lived. The neighborhood where my father was a Lilong — a network of narrow lanes hidden behind a single opening off the street, lined with tightly packed two-story dwellings sharing walls and courtyards. Once you stepped through the entrance, the city outside disappeared. No one spoke English. Our presence stoked a curiosity. We were later told that, as far as anyone there could remember, we were the first Americans to enter that alley since 1953.

Just finding my father and family in the Museum database and then making our way to the Lilong exceeded my wildest expectations for what I hoped to discover.

Then the real miracle happened.

As we were beginning to make our way out of the Lilong, a young Chinese woman approached us.

In English, she asked if she could help us. “Are you looking for something?”

I told her we were trying to find Number 15. Explained that my father had lived there during the war.

I’m not sure she fully comprehended this context, but smiled and said, “That’s my house.” “Would you like to see it?”

The apartment sat at the top of a narrow staircase that required ducking to climb. It consisted of two small rooms and a tiny outdoor porch that served as the kitchen. It was hot inside. Her parents were there. Her father, who spoke no English and seemed entirely unconcerned that he was wearing only underwear, smiled politely and invited us to sit. They tried to offer us food.

Through the daughter, I tried to explain who I was, who my father had been, and what had happened in this neighborhood between 1939 and 1945. I didn’t mention that I was in China creating the agency of the future.

The parents nodded politely. I do not think they fully understood the Holocaust as history, or knew that their alley had once served as a refuge for stateless Jews.

They understood, though, that we were grateful to be there. That seemed sufficient.

The walk back to the street took less than a minute. My wife held my arm. Neither of us tried to speak. I immediately called my brother, “You’re not going to believe where I just was…”

I have spent a great deal of time in the years since trying to make sense of what happened that afternoon, though I am not sure “sense” is the right word for it. Any one of the coincidences would have been improbable enough: the museum, the database, the address surviving, the apartment still standing, the English-speaking woman stepping out at precisely the right moment.

Taken together, they resist ordinary explanation.

The apartment in Shanghai is still standing. A family still lives there.

I went to China seeking to plant a seed of what the future might look like. I came back instead with an intimate sense of what the past felt like.

Despite its myriad missteps and miscalculations, the advertising agency is nothing short of remarkable. At its best, creating meaning for brands and value for our culture and economy.

But speaking of economies, look at all the different fleeting variants the ad agency has had to navigate over the past few decades - The Digital Economy. The Mobile Economy. The Social Economy. The Attention Economy. The Sharing Economy. The Creator Economy. The Subscription Economy. The Platform Economy. The Streaming Economy. The Experience Economy.

That’s ten reinventions in about twenty-five years. Madonna only managed eight.

Each reinvention meant agencies needed to hire new people (sort of, sometimes), learn new acronyms, stand up new departments, and demonstrate fluency they did not possess. Every wave left the ad agency a little less sure of what it had been built to do.

It was like watching someone redecorate the same room every six months without ever actually living in it.

Now comes the Dopamine Economy. And it might be the ad agencies’ biggest challenge yet.

All these previous economies, temporal as they may have been, essentially changed the media landscape - the channels, the metrics, where the ads showed up, and how they were measured. What didn’t change that much was the consumer. The human being on the other end of the bargain was still making fairly rational, considered brand choices. Building preferences in response to the meaning those brands expressed.

That seems to be going out the window now.

Americans wagered $165 billion on sports last year. Billions with a capital “B.” Prediction markets processed $44 billion and are growing by the second. Robinhood now has over 27 million accounts. You can bet on whether the Fed will use a specific phrase in a press conference or whether an influencer will post more than fifty times in a week. Nearly every app on your phone — Instagram, DraftKings, Robinhood, TikTok, ChatGPT — is a different lever on the same slot machine. The whole day is one continuous pull for that next dopamine hit.

This is not just a new media environment. It’s an entirely new consumer psychology. What’s changing is very simple: people’s ability to wait. The acceptance of delayed gratification.

The dopamine economy is systematically dismantling that willingness. A brain trained to expect a reward every seven seconds — the next scroll, the next bet, the next like — doesn’t engage with a brand the way it used to. Brand-building lives in the gap between wanting and getting. When that gap disappears, there’s no room for meaning to develop. What’s left is merely a transaction.

Today’s consumer certainly still believes in things. And passionately. Climate. Justice. Authenticity. Community. But they don’t express those beliefs through brand preference as much anymore. They express them through identity performance — what they post, who they follow, what they share, what they boycott. The brand is no longer the vehicle for identity. It’s but one prop among many in a continuous personal broadcast. Tesla’s brand value collapsed by more than a third in a single year, not because people found a better car, but because owning one stopped performing the identity its owners wanted to project.

So here sits the advertising industry. Ten economies deep into its perpetual existential identity crisis. Challenged by a consumer who still believes in things but no longer needs advertising to express those beliefs. A consumer who is losing the neurological patience to let a brand mean something. A customer base, simultaneously more idealistic and more addicted than any previous generation, swiping through life at a speed that makes the thirty-second television commercial look like a Tolstoy novel.

The previous economies required agencies to change their operating models. The Dopamine Economy requires much more than that. It’s asking agencies to figure out how to create meaning for brands when their audience is affording them no opportunity to do so.

VW put out the clarion call as one of the best taglines in recent memory – “Drivers Wanted.” Perhaps the ad agencies’ new strapline needs to be something along the lines of “Ideas Wanted?”

It was a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2005, and I was losing a war of attrition with my own children.

We were on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — my son, eleven, my daughter, seven — and we had been walking for what felt like the entire length of the island. My wife was at work, unusual for a Saturday. The kids were hungry. I was carrying two jackets, a half-eaten bag of pretzels, and the exhaustion that comes from solo parenting. I had negotiated us past a toy store, arbitrated a dispute over who got to press the crosswalk button, and was calculating whether we could make it home before someone had a meltdown, including me.

My phone rang.

The caller ID read “Unknown,” which usually meant my wife was calling, so I picked up without looking. I had the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder while I fished a napkin out of my pocket for my daughter.

“Hello,” I said.

“Is this Stephen Sonnenfeld?”

“Yes.”

“This is Steve Jobs.”

There is a half-second in moments like that where your brain scrambles for an explanation that preserves the world as you understood it thirty seconds ago. A prank. A wrong number. Someone with a very dry sense of humor and too much time on a Saturday. But the voice on the other end of the line didn’t sound like someone joking. It sounded like someone who expected you to know already why he was calling, and whose patience for the part of the conversation where you caught up was limited.

Apple, he said, was looking for a new Vice President of Marketing. My name had made its way to him. He wanted to know if I was interested.

I was standing on a noisy sidewalk on Columbus Avenue. A bus was idling at the curb. My son was pulling on my sleeve. My daughter asked if we could get ice cream. I told Steve Jobs — I told Steve Jobs — that this was a terrible time to talk, and could he possibly call me at home tomorrow? He said he would. We hung up. I stood on the sidewalk, holding the phone, and tried to explain to my children what had just happened, only to be immediately overruled by the ice cream question, which, in retrospect, was the right priority.

I called my wife. I opened with the only sentence available: You’ll never believe who just called me.

The next afternoon, right on schedule, he called again. He told me that the creative director at Chiat/Day, who had named the iMac, conceived the Think Different campaign, and was as close to Jobs’s aesthetic sensibility as anyone in advertising, had recommended me for the position. The call was brief and transactional. At the end of it, Jobs asked me to come to Cupertino.

I was excited. Obviously, but I wasn’t starry-eyed. I wasn’t sure I wanted California, or Apple, or another extended professional detour to the West Coast. I had spent four years working on the Intel business and knew the Bay Area well. I liked my life in New York. I liked my house. I liked my job. I was building something good at a young agency called McGarryBowen, and the founders — Gordon McGarry, John Bowen, and Stewart Owen — were the kind of people whose names on the door actually meant something, which was becoming increasingly rare.

Still, you don’t say no to a meeting with Steve Jobs. Not in 2005. Not ever.

A few days later, I boarded a plane to San Jose with an agenda that read like a visit to the Advertising Hall of Fame: Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of worldwide marketing. Ron Johnson, who was building the Apple Stores. Lee Clow, the legendary creative director of TBWA/Chiat/Day, who made the 1984 Macintosh commercial. And Steve Jobs — first.

* * *

I arrived at Apple’s campus in Cupertino around midday. After lunch in the company cafeteria — which was impressive in the particular way that everything at Apple was impressive, which is to say it was designed to make you feel that even eating a sandwich could be an experience worth caring about — I was escorted to a conference room adjacent to Jobs’s office. The room was spare. A table. Chairs. The light coming through the windows was flat and white, the way it gets in the Valley in spring. I sat down and waited.

A few minutes later, he walked in.

He was wearing the uniform — the black mock turtleneck, the Levi’s 501s, the New Balance sneakers — and he was thinner than I’d expected, with the coiled, restless energy of someone who has somewhere more important to be but has decided, for the moment, to be here. He sat down across from me. He did not smile. There was no small talk. There was no “How was your flight?” or “Tell me about yourself,” no easing-in of any kind.

He asked about my current role.

I told him about McGarryBowen. I told him about JPMorgan Chase, whose advertising business I was building. I was proud of the work. I told him about a corporate campaign highlighting Chase’s role in community development, about recreating the bank’s brand identity from a fragmented collection of legacy assets into a coherent, modern one.

He stopped me.

“What’s so good about any of that?” he said. Anyone can throw money at causes. What is Chase doing that’s actually good for the world?

I didn’t have an answer that would satisfy Steve Jobs. I’m not sure anyone did. And we were just getting started.

He picked up my résumé. Studied it the way a doctor studies an X-ray — not reading it so much as diagnosing it. Then he went through my career, account by account. IBM at Ogilvy & Mather. Intel at Euro RSCG. Nearly a decade on two of the largest technology accounts in the world, at two of the most storied agencies in the business.

His verdict was immediate and total. I had not, he said, produced or been associated with any great work.

I tried to defend myself. I described the complexity of the clients, the organizational politics, and the hundred small battles you fight inside a large agency to get good work approved, produced, and aired. He dismantled every argument the way you’d take apart a poorly designed product — systematically, without emotion, identifying each structural flaw and holding it up for inspection. What I described as solid work, he called garbage. What I framed as organizational complexity, he interpreted as personal failure. Why wasn’t the work better? Why hadn’t I made it better? Each answer I offered only seemed to confirm his diagnosis.

The interview lasted forty-five minutes. It felt longer. It felt like being deposed by a prosecutor who already had the verdict and was building the record.

Finally, cornered, I tried the only thing I had left. “Steve,” I said, “it’s clear you don’t like the work. But I don’t think it fully represents who I am or what I’m capable of.”

He paused. For the first time in the conversation, he looked at me not as a résumé but as a person. Then he said the line that would stay with me for the rest of my life, that would sit in the back of my mind through a dozen more positions and a dozen more agencies and a dozen more compromises, that would eventually become the question this book exists to answer.

“I don’t have a problem with the work,” he said. “What I can’t accept is that you did this for so many years and still got up every morning and looked at yourself in the mirror.”

Game, set, match. An interview as moral reckoning. A few minutes later, it was over. We shook hands. I walked out of the conference room in a fog, barely registering that I had five more hours of meetings ahead — with Schiller, with Johnson, with Clow, with people who, under other circumstances, I would have been thrilled to meet. I went through the motions. I flew home. Two days later, I sent a polite thank-you email. Jobs replied almost immediately: “Thanks for coming out. I don’t think you’re right for Apple.”

That much was already obvious.

* * *

For a long time, I took the encounter at face value. Jobs had looked at my career and found it wanting. I wasn’t good enough. That was the simple version, and it had the advantage of being easy to understand: he operated at a level of creative conviction that most people — most companies, most institutions —could not sustain. For him, compromise wasn’t realism. It was a failure. Period. End of discussion. Very few human beings can live that way. It was immediately clear why Apple could.

But there was another way to hear what Jobs said in that conference room, and it took me a while to understand it.

Jobs believed in the work. Not in the way that advertising people say they “believe in the work” — as a professional aspiration, a line in a mission statement, a thing you tell clients in pitch meetings. He believed in it the way a priest believes in the gospel. Absolutely. Without qualification. Without the escape hatch of “given the circumstances,” “considering the client,” or “relative to the category.” The work was either great or a moral failure. There was no middle ground.

At that point, I had spent twenty-one years in the agency business. I believed in good work. I fought for better work. I cared about craft. But I had also learned to live in the middle ground — the vast, comfortable space between greatness and mediocrity where most advertising lives: the work is professional, competent, and strategically sound — and utterly forgettable. I had learned to call that space survival. Jobs called it looking in the mirror.

He was right.

What Jobs did at Apple was what the great advertising agencies had done at their best — manufacture meaning. Take a product, a thing, an experience, and make it signify something so much larger than itself. A computer as a philosophy. A phone as identity. A store as a temple. Jobs did it with an absolute refusal to compromise that no institution — no agency, no holding company, no organization of any size — has ever been able to sustain.

That’s the paradox the agency business never solved. The golden-age agency existed to do at scale what Jobs did by force of personal conviction — create meaning for clients who couldn’t create it for themselves. And for a long time, it worked. The belief was in the walls. It was structural, not personal. You didn’t have to summon the conviction to do great work every morning. The institution summoned it for you.

But scaling conviction requires compromise. More clients mean more people, more processes, and more distance between the standard and the work. The agency grew, and the belief thinned. The names stayed on the door. The conviction quietly walked out of it.

Jobs never compromised, which is why there was only one Apple. And why the institutions that tried to do what he did across dozens of clients and thousands of people eventually couldn’t hold the standard, not because the people failed, but because the institution stopped demanding from them what Jobs never stopped demanding from everyone around him.

His question: How do you look at yourself in the mirror? Or put another way, “What kind of value do you create?— was the question the entire industry had stopped asking itself.

I think we’re still looking for the answer.

* * *

Shloime, a pious old merchant, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Seeking help, he goes to Shul every week and prays to God to win the lottery. Weeks pass. No winnings. Desperate, on the verge of collapse, Shloime makes one last appeal: “God, please, what’s it to you, just once, let me win the lottery…” Finally, in the middle of Shloime’s fervent prayer, a booming voice from Heaven calls out: “Nu, Shloime — buy a ticket already!”

I used this joke with clients many times as an allegory. It never landed. Nobody ever wanted to hear the truth in it because it speaks to the heart of what has plagued the agency business for over half a century: pricing strategy. When it comes to paying for creativity, everybody wants to win, but nobody wants to bear the cost that winning requires.

The entire ad industry has been praying to win the lottery forever. It has never bought a ticket.

The Accidental Genius of the Commission

For most of the twentieth century, agencies operated on a 15% media commission. The agency placed the ads, the media charged the client, and the agency kept 15%. Simple. Automatic. And accidentally brilliant — because it solved a problem that may have been unsolvable any other way: how do you price an intangible?

How do you put a dollar figure on making a car mean intelligence? On making a pair of sneakers mean aspiration? On making a can of soda mean rebellion? You can’t. And the beauty of the commission was that it never tried. The agency’s compensation was pegged to the media investment, not to the creative output. Nobody had to stand in a room and argue about what an idea was “worth.” The question was structurally irrelevant.

And that freed agencies to do something remarkable. They could assign multiple creative teams to a single brief. They could develop a generous number of ideas and throw most of them away. They could staff up with a deep bench of senior and junior talent, allowing the juniors to learn from the seniors over the years — the apprenticeship model that built the golden-age creative departments. They could take the kind of creative risks that produce transformative work, because the economics didn’t punish risk-taking. The commission didn’t just pay for the work. It created the economic conditions that made the work possible.

It had flaws. It rewarded agencies for spending more on media rather than for being more effective. It made agencies lazy about efficiency. It was an imperfect mechanism. But it did one thing that nothing since has replicated: it funded the creative capability without requiring that capability to justify itself in measurable, productivity-based terms. It protected the intangible from the tyranny of the measurable.

It was the ticket.

The Surrender

The commission didn’t die overnight. A 1956 consent decree cracked the legal foundation by prohibiting the industry from enforcing a fixed rate. But the practice persisted for decades because it worked for both sides. As late as 1982, 71% of the largest US advertisers were still paying commission.

The real erosion started when TV ad rates climbed through the 1970s and 80s. Agency incomes rose along with inflated media costs — without any corresponding increase in effort. Clients noticed. Procurement departments — a relatively new force in the client-agency relationship — saw agency compensation not as an investment in capability but as a cost to be managed. And when media buying began separating from creative, the commission lost its structural logic. Why should a creative agency earn a percentage of media spend that is no longer controlled?

By the early 2000s, the commission was dead. In its place: the labor-based fee. Hours. Bodies. Rates. The most valuable thing an agency produces — an idea worth billions in brand equity — is now priced like plumbing.

The moment you price creativity by the hour, you’ve told the market it’s a commodity measured in time. And the market’s rational response is: how do I get the same output in fewer hours, at a lower rate, from less experienced people? That’s not the client being evil. That’s the client responding logically to the pricing structure the agency accepted.

Everybody Else Bought a Ticket

Here’s the part that should make every agency person’s blood boil.

Every other creative industry has at least tried to figure this out.

Hollywood pays writers and directors with backend participation — residuals, royalties, a percentage of the commercial value of what they create. The guilds enforce it. A screenwriter who writes a franchise worth billions doesn’t get paid by the hour. They get paid a fraction of the value they helped create.

Musicians own their intellectual property and collect royalties every time a song is played, streamed, licensed, or covered. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC enforce collection. The creative output is treated as property with ongoing value, not as a service rendered.

Architects charge a percentage of the construction cost — typically 5 to 15%, scaled to the magnitude of the project rather than to the hours spent on drawings. A firm designing a $500 million building earns more than one designing a $5 million building — because the creative judgment required is proportionally greater, even if the hours aren’t. Sound familiar? It should. It’s structurally identical to the 15% commission the agency gave up.

Book publishers pay advances against royalties tied to sales. The publisher is betting on the commercial value of the creative output.

Private equity takes 2-and-20 — a 2% management fee plus 20% of profits above a threshold. Compensation is structurally tied to value created, even when it isn’t.

In each of these industries, creative output is treated as property or as value. The pricing mechanism ties compensation to some measure of the work’s commercial impact. The creator retains a structural claim on the value they helped generate.

Their fortunes haven’t all turned out as hoped. But they not only prayed — they bought tickets.

The Death Spiral

Michael Farmer, in his great book, Madison Avenue Manslaughter, documented what happened next with greater precision than anyone else. Workloads exploded — digital, social, content, programmatic, data, CRM — while fees steadily declined. The agency’s response was the only one the fee model allowed: juniorization. Replace expensive senior talent with cheaper junior talent. Freeze salaries. Downsize. Do more with less. Then more with even less. What Farmer calls “disinvesting in capabilities at a time when clients’ marketing challenges have never been greater.”

This time, it was the agency, not the client, praying to win the lottery without a ticket.

So both sides stopped buying tickets.

The clients wanted golden-age work at contractor prices. They wanted the output of a deeply staffed, senior-led, creatively governed institution — but they wanted to pay for it by the hour and negotiate the rate down every year.

The agencies wanted to be valued as strategic partners, not treated as vendors. They wanted respect, creative freedom, and long-term relationships. But they surrendered the one thing that would have given them leverage — pricing power. They let procurement set the rates. They competed on cost instead of value. They prayed every day to be treated differently, and never did the one thing that would have changed anything. They never bought a ticket either.

Why could the agency business never wrap its collective head around the concept of pricing power? The industry so desperately wanted to be seen as a highly disciplined profession, but never answered the question that every other profession answered, however imperfectly: how do I monetize what I do?

AI Isn’t the Answer. It’s the Final Compression.

Now AI shows up, and the holding companies are promising it will finally fix the economics. New operating models. Radical efficiency. Compressed production. Output-based pricing.

But AI is neither the solution nor the problem. It’s a variable to be solved for in the giant mathematical word problem that is the agency compensation model. If your product is hours of human time, any technology that reduces the need for human time reduces the need for you.

The agency business has no guild. No backend. No structural protection. No pricing power. It has hours. And hours are the one thing AI makes worthless.

WPP cut 7,000 jobs last year. Omnicom cut 7,000 more. Dentsu cut 3,400. Forrester projects US creative agency employment will drop 15% by the end of this year. Everyone is blaming AI. Almost nobody is asking why the industry was structured to be this vulnerable in the first place.

Buy a Ticket

The next chapter — if there is one — starts with someone buying a ticket.

A new economic model that ties the agency’s compensation to the value it creates, not the hours it takes. That gives the agency ownership or participation in the brand equity it helps build. That treats the creative output as intellectual property with ongoing value, not as a deliverable to be invoiced and forgotten.

Assuming the agency can figure out exactly what its value is.

Until then, we’ll all keep praying.

And the heavens will keep saying the same thing.

P.S., And don’t get me started about the business lessons gleaned from my second favorite joke of all time, McGregor the Scotsman.

Tesla never ran an ad. Never engaged in any type of marketing. Never used an agency. Never needed one — or so the story went.

The brand was built entirely on belief. Not a tagline. Not a visual identity system. Not a media plan. A belief — in one man’s vision of the future. The story went something like this: a brilliant, slightly unhinged entrepreneur was going to outthink the entire auto industry, save the planet, and make electric cars cool in the process. It was a story about ingenuity. About American innovative exceptionalism. About climate and environmental responsibility. And — let’s be honest — about what it said about you if you bought one. Owning a Tesla meant you were smart, forward-thinking, and on the right side of history.

That story was the brand. The belief in that story was the only thing Tesla ever had. And it was worth $66 billion. That sense of belief made Tesla the 12th most powerful brand in the world in 2022. That put Tesla above what we think of as some of the most powerful brands in the world, Disney, Nike, Coca-Cola, and BMW. Brands that have spent trillions, over decades, to build their belief systems.

Today, Tesla’s belief, or brand if you will, is worth (only) $28 billion. A 4 out of 10 recommendation score — meaning most Tesla owners won’t even tell their friends to buy one. Sales are declining for the second straight year. Dealerships vandalized. Former evangelists are selling their cars and posting about it on social media.

And yet the cars haven’t changed. The technology is the same. The charging network is the same. The product that made Tesla the most valuable automotive brand in the world is, functionally, the same product it was three years ago.

So what changed?

The belief changed.

The ingenuity narrative collapsed when the product lineup went stale. The American exceptionalism narrative collapsed when Musk aligned himself with political figures who seem bent on dismantling the very institutions that made American innovation possible. The climate narrative collapsed when the man who built the electric car company went to work for an administration rolling back environmental protections. And the status signal — the thing that made a Tesla a statement about who you are — didn’t just fade. It inverted. The car that once said “I care about the future” started saying something a lot of people didn’t want to be associated with.

The product didn’t fail. The belief broke. And when the belief broke, there was nothing underneath it. No decades of brand-building to fall back on. No accumulated cultural equity. No institutional memory of what the brand meant independent of one man’s behavior. Just a car with a logo that used to mean something.

This is what makes Tesla the purest brand case study of the century. Most brands have layers — product quality, distribution, advertising history, accumulated cultural meaning built over decades by teams of people across institutions. Coca-Cola could survive a terrible CEO because the brand was constructed over 130 years through work that exists independently of any single person. Nike could survive controversy because “Just Do It” lives in the culture, not in one man’s Twitter feed.

Tesla had none of that. The belief was the whole thing. The most efficient brand-building strategy in history — until it wasn’t.

If there's a more compelling case that a brand is nothing more — and nothing less — than a belief, I'd love to hear it.

The word “huckster” has been around since the Middle Ages — it originally meant a small-time peddler hawking goods on the street. In 1946, a novel by Frederick Wakeman, The Hucksters, gave it a new target: the advertising man. A year later, it was made into a movie starring Clark Gable as the consummate slick Madison Avenue advertiser. The label stuck.

It stuck because the advertising business has never been able to explain what it is. Never been able to shake the suspicion that it wasn’t quite legitimate. Not the way real industries were legitimate. Lawyers have the law. Doctors have medicine. Accountants have GAAP.

The advertising agency’s value was never like that. Not even close. It lived in something far harder to pin down — judgment, taste, cultural instinct, the irreducible human act of a writer and an art director sitting together and making something out of nothing. The ability to translate ordinary products into narratives, identities, and symbols that reshaped American life. The ability to manufacture meaning — and do it in a way unlike any other American business organization ever created. Trillions of dollars of brand equity created, cultural movements ignited, and business categories invented from nothing. Advertising agencies were, by any measure, among the most remarkable enterprises our economy has ever produced.

And yet, from the very beginning, agencies and the people who worked there have had to go through life with a massive chip on their shoulders. What should have been their competitive moat — creativity — ironically became their vulnerability.

So the industry did the only thing it knew how to do. It tried to manufacture meaning for itself. An unending quest to turn the advertising business into a profession: research departments to make the work feel scientific. A dizzying rash of proprietary frameworks with capital letters and trademark symbols. The repopulation of agency workforces with credentialed MBAs and former consultants. And when digital arrived, dashboards and attribution models that finally — the industry believed — closed the gap between art and science.

None of it worked. The respect never arrived.

The more agencies invested in process, the less they invested in creative risk — eroding the very capability that had once made them invaluable. The more they structured themselves like other businesses, like their clients, the less they behaved like the culturally porous, creatively governed, institutionally peculiar organizations that they actually were. The pursuit of legitimacy didn’t just fail to deliver respect — it actively destroyed the capability that deserved respect. The industry hollowed itself out from the inside, chasing approval from people who were never going to give it, while abandoning the one thing that had always been its own justification: the ability to see a brand the way the culture would see it, before the culture saw it that way.

That capability was the agency’s real legitimacy. It needed no credentials. It was its own justification.

Agencies were never going to be lawyers, accountants, or even consultants. They were always going to be something more interesting and more difficult. The tragedy is that they’ve spent half a century trying to be the easier thing — and they still can’t name the harder thing they left behind.