There’s a movie in China right now called Niu Lai. It’s about a cow. It was animated in software architects use to draw buildings. It cost something like $200 to make. A guy made it over five years with help from his mom.

It’s the film story of the summer.

By all accounts, this thing is bad. Gloriously, historically bad.

I haven’t been able to screen it here in Austin, TX, but I’ve gotten a hold of a few clips showing the cow moving like a video call that’s freezing.

It’s already been called the most profitable movie of all time.

But here’s what I think actually matters. When people who lined up to go see it were asked why they went, half of them called out the making of, not the script. They’re excited that some guy actually made this. With his hands. No AI. Five years. And that was enough to get them out to the theater.

That may be the bar now. Not good. Not polished. Just real. Just made by a person who gave a shit for a long time.

We are so starved for anything with a pulse that a bad cow movie is out here beating The Odyssey at the box office. Sit with that.

Theaters are making handmade posters for the film.

The community is already making merch.

People are so hungry for the real thing that “a human clearly made this” is now a selling point strong enough to pack theaters.

Everyone’s running around trying to make everything smoother, faster, cleaner. And the internet took one look at a jerky little cow and went yeah, that one. The one from the guy and his mom.

Craft, once again, is what matters to us. Real, dedicated, human craft. The end result doesn’t have to be perfect or polished. Shit, it doesn’t even have to be good. Niu Lai sure as hell isn’t. It just has to be yours, and it has to be real, and people have to be able to tell humans bothered to make it.

That’s the bar. Go trip over it.

Thanks for reading my little bit of people slop!

Micky

Everything you make can now be made by someone else. Probably faster. Almost certainly cheaper. And close enough that the average person flicking past it on Instagram isn’t going to stop and inspect the stitching.

The recipe leaks. The pattern gets traced. The factory making your bag may very well be making somebody else’s version a few benches over. The tannery selling you the beautiful leather is happy to sell beautiful leather to a company you’ve never heard of that plans to undercut you by Tuesday.

This isn’t necessarily nefarious. It’s just how much of modern manufacturing works.

And it creates an uncomfortable reality for anyone building a brand in 2026:

Great product is the ante.

You still need it. A bad product gets sussed out quick. But just being good gets you into the game; it doesn’t guarantee you get to stay there.

The thing that’s harder to reproduce is all the accumulated stuff sitting around the product. The people who know you. The stories they’ve told about you. The weird associations they’ve formed with you. The reasons they chose you the second, fifth and twentieth time.

Everything else is probably for sale somewhere further down the page.

The Prostitution of the Label

For a long time, we outsourced a lot of trust to words on labels.

“Made in Italy.”
“100% cashmere.”
“Organic.”
“Handmade.”
“Small-batch.”

Each one gave you a reason to believe in the thing without having to know much about the company making it. They gave you a reliable shortcut. You didn’t need to know the factory, the farmer, the supply chain or much of anything about the company. The label told you what kind of thing you were holding.

That shortcut isn’t working quite as well anymore.

“Made in Italy” can mean a lot of different things depending on which part of the manufacturing process you’re talking about. Luxury supply chains that are sold to us as monuments to old-world craft have repeatedly turned up labor practices that feel decidedly less romantic once you see them.

“100% cashmere” can be printed truthfully on a $2,000 sweater and a $95 sweater.

Same words. Very different sweater.

But the more interesting change isn’t what companies are doing. It’s what customers know.

I’ve watched people online identify what they think is the factory making an expensive bag, find similar suppliers halfway around the world, compare import records and then spend 400 comments arguing about the grade of leather.

They may not always be right.

That’s almost beside the point.

A generation of customers has learned that there is a receipt to pull.

Factory footage is everywhere. Import records are searchable. Entire creator businesses now exist around telling you where things are made, what materials are actually being used and what somebody probably paid to manufacture them.

And the language has changed with it.

GSM. Microns. Margins. Materials. Manufacturers.

Vocabulary that used to belong to the people making the thing now shows up under a TikTok made by somebody sitting in their car.

Provenance used to be part of the mystery you were paying for.

Now people want to see the paperwork.

Which creates a different problem.

Death by 1,000 Cuts

Once competitors figure out how to get close to your product, the marketing isn’t especially hard to study either.

Meta will happily show them the ads you’re running.

Your website is public.

Your pricing is public.

Your packaging is sitting on a shelf.

Your influencers are tagged.

Your reviews can be read.

Your media strategy can often be inferred if somebody is obsessive enough and has a couple of browser tabs open.

And so categories begin collapsing toward the same visual center of gravity.

The same font.

The same photography.

The same landing page structure.

The same tasteful shade of beige that at some point apparently became the international color of “premium consumer startup.”

Then the signals get copied too.

Reviews get seeded. Reddit threads get suspiciously enthusiastic. Influencers are paid to “discover” something. Founder stories become a media format. Craft becomes a content pillar.

A little tell that customers once used to distinguish the real thing from the bullshit gets discovered by marketing and, six months later, everybody is doing it.

That’s the problem with proxies for quality. Once they work, somebody turns them into tactics.

Customers have gotten pretty good at noticing.

The Belief System Built By Your People

So, what, if anything, can still be trusted?

Increasingly, only real people.

GTFO with a claim written on packaging. Certification marks don’t mean shit. Beautifully art-directed films explaining why the thing in front of you is special can be more suss than the absence of any explanation at all.

It comes down to a person.

Somebody that bought it.

Then bought it again.

They wore it until it looked like theirs.

They put it on the counter when friends came over. They brought it on the trip. They ordered another one when the first one finally died. Somebody asked about it and they recommended it without a referral link, an affiliate code or a small disclosure at the bottom of the post.

That kind of endorsement is stubbornly difficult to industrialize.

More importantly, it builds.

A person tries something. It sticks around long enough to become familiar. Maybe it’s the shirt they always grab. Maybe it’s the hot sauce permanently sitting on the table. Maybe it’s the running brand that somehow became part of their Saturday morning identity.

Somebody notices.

They try it too.

Do that enough times and something changes. The product is more than just an object being purchased and becomes something people identify themselves with.

That’s where the gap between you and the copycats can actually begin getting wider.

A competitor can get remarkably close to your material, your silhouette and your packaging. Give them just enough time and they can probably reverse-engineer the pricing, photography, website and media plan too.

What they don’t get with the factory order is the ten years of people who already give a shit about you.

This is the part a lot of companies aren’t really designed for.

You can’t buy your way into it before the quarter closes no matter how much the new PE ownership pushes for it.

For decades, we treated brand like the wrapper and product like the proof. The real work happened in the formulation, the engineering, the manufacturing, the spec sheet. Then somebody came along afterward and figured out how to package all of that into a story.

That relationship is changing because access has changed.

The specs aren’t secret anymore. Anybody with a phone can compare them, look up the manufacturer and find someone willing to make something suspiciously similar.

The harder thing to compare is how much people care.

The Religion Of You

Bakery is a creative agency that’s worked with cult brands like Grillo’s Pickles, Liquid Death and Tree Hut.

One of the things we’ve learned from being close to brands like those is that belief is incredibly slow.

And, inconveniently, it asks for a different kind of work.

For a long time, most of the craft went into the thing itself.

The recipe.

The material.

The engineering.

The manufacturing.

Brand arrived later to make sure everyone understood why all that work mattered.

We don’t think that’s enough anymore.

If the product itself is becoming easier to approximate, more of the craft has to move outward into everything surrounding it.

The event you absolutely didn’t need to throw.

The unique packaging detail that would probably be easier and cheaper to remove.

The inside joke your customers somehow adopted.

The collaboration that makes perfect sense to your people and almost none to everybody else.

The way the social account talks.

The thing you make that isn’t for sale.

The place you choose to show up.

The place you very deliberately don’t.

The hundred decisions somebody in procurement could look at individually and reasonably ask, “Why are we spending money on this?”

Because taken individually, none of them are the brand.

Together, they become a world.

And people are surprisingly good at recognizing a world.

They know how it sounds. They know the people in it. They know what’s funny there. They know what doesn’t belong. Eventually they can spot it from across the room without ever seeing the logo.

We used to treat most of this stuff as the extremities of the brand.

We’re increasingly convinced the extremities are the thing.

The product tells me what you make.

The rest tells me why I should want yours.

And when that surrounding world gets strong enough, you start escaping the feature-by-feature comparison that governs everybody else in the category.

There are energy drinks.

And then there’s Red Bull.

Nobody walks up to a bartender and says, “Can I have a vodka and energy drink?”

They order a vodka Red Bull.

That’s an absurd amount of brand equity.

The product obviously still matters. Red Bull does what it says it does. Mostly, make you jittery and more likely to suffer a cardiac event.

The rest is Formula 1 and cliff diving and Flugtag and athletes jumping out of the stratosphere and a thousand other choices that have almost nothing to do with explaining caffeine.

That’s the new work.

And it requires the kind of obsession companies traditionally reserved for making the product itself.

Maybe more, because the boundaries are much less obvious.

You can’t put “cultural meaning” into the media plan in January and ask for it to be delivered by Q3.

This is the pyramids in Egypt. You build one thing. Then another.

Some of them work and some don’t.

You keep going long enough that people begin to understand what you’re about without needing the explanation anymore.

Eventually, if you’re lucky, they start carrying some of the world-building for you.

That’s when things get interesting.

Because somebody is eventually going to make something remarkably close to what you sell.

Maybe uncomfortably close.

They may even make parts of it better.

The question is what your customers do when that happens.

Do they start comparing specs, or do they start defending you?

Even when defending you doesn’t make much sense?

That’s the part we’re interested in.

Obsessive, irrational belief.

Because in a world where almost everything else can be copied, that kind of belief may be the only durable advantage left.

And now, I believe we must end it here. Bai! 👋

Down 0-3 in this spring’s Eastern Conference Finals, with his season basically done for, Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson went to the numbers for comfort. By the analytics, he told reporters before Game 4, his team had actually won two of the three games it had lost.

Read that back: Won the games they lost.

Hey, it’s what the data said, right?

They went on to lose Game 4 by 37 and got swept.

Here’s the part nobody with a nice dashboard wants to hear. The expensive mistake in business isn’t bad data. Bad data is the easy villain, the one everybody already knows to be scared of. The expensive mistake is good data, trusted way past the point where it’s still telling you the truth.

Josh Hart said it cleaner than any strategist ever has. Asked about analytics, he said, they’re like “a lamppost to a drunk person. You can lean on them, but they won’t get you home.”

Data can’t understand speed

One number quietly runs the entire NFL draft: the 40-yard dash. Nothing predicts where a receiver gets picked more tightly. Same for tight ends, same for the giant offensive tackles. Run a fast 40 and you get paid. It’s the first line of the resume, the thing scouts see before they see the player.

Small problem, as explained by Michael MacKelvie. Of every event at the combine, the 40 is the least connected to what receivers actually do once real games start. Dead last out of six. The number that decides the money has almost nothing to do with the job.

You can watch this fall apart in real time.

Puka Nacua ran a slow 40. He was worse in the shuttle, and in the three-cone drill, the test that measures the bendy, change-of-direction speed football is actually built on, he was close to dreadful. On paper he was a fifth-round shrug. He went out and broke rookie receiving records that had stood for two decades.

Josh Naylor sits in the second percentile for sprint speed. Twelfth slowest man in baseball out of 537. He stole 19 bases in his last 54 games anyway, third most in the sport, including one off the best pitcher alive in an elimination game. Slid in safe. A camouflaged cheetah, if a cheetah were built like a beer-league catcher.

Kyrie Irving plays fast almost never. By the tracking data he sits in the bottom few percent of the league for time spent at speed. He’s also one of the most uncoverable guards alive. He doesn’t run past people. He hypnotizes them, and by the time they blink he’s already gone.

None of this data is wrong. The 40 times are accurate to the hundredth of a second. Lasers, chips in the jersey, the works. The percentiles are real. They just measure the wrong thing, because fast contains feel.

Feel is the processing. The milliseconds a receiver saves reading a coverage, the timing a runner steals off a pitcher, the rhythm that drops a defender into a trance. None of it shows up in a straight line, and all of it is the part that actually wins.

You could lay a perfectly preserved athlete out on a table and learn everything about the hardware. The muscle, the fast-twitch fiber, the body fat down to the decimal. You’d learn nothing about the software that was running inside them. Whether the guy could play.

That’s your data. Your dashboard. It’s an autopsy. It tells you what the body was made of. It can’t tell you what your product or your brand could do.

Marketing got freakishly good at timing fast

Somewhere in the last fifteen years, marketing stopped being about what people feel and started being about what a CFO could be shown on a screen. The work didn’t change first. The excuse for the work did.

Paid social did most of the damage. Meta and Google turned the whole discipline into a slot machine with a reporting UI. Pull the lever, watch the number. Now an idea doesn’t have to be good, it has to be provable by Friday and attributable to the dollar. Ideas don’t die because they’re bad. They die because they’re hard to measure in week one.

This is timing fast, and we have gotten scary good at it. We clock the click, the view, the seven-day conversion window, and then we call the stopwatch “performance.” It’s the 40-yard dash in a deck. A precise, expensive measurement of the wrong thing.

Found fast is everything the dashboard can’t see. Taste. The read on status and desire that somebody built over fifteen years and couldn’t fully explain to you if you held a gun to their head. The best marketers were never analysts. They were idea people with freakish emotional intelligence who got the culture before the culture knew it wanted them. You can’t autopsy that.

Rory Sutherland nails the mechanism. Companies love data, he says, and not always for what it tells them. They love it for cover. A data-driven call can always be dressed up as rational, so nobody ever gets fired for one. His line: “it’s much easier to get fired for being irrational than it is for being unimaginative.”

So the safe play wins, every time, for years. Here’s the trap he names that almost nobody sees coming. Optimize for a metric in year one and sure, it helps. Optimize for the same metric in year ten, while every competitor optimizes for the identical number, and you wake up inside what he calls corporate isomorphism. Everybody’s company starts to look like everybody else’s. Same products, same pricing, same flat little voice. A market commoditized and undifferentiated by the exact discipline that was supposed to set you apart.

Look around. Every brand feels generic, every campaign feels focus-grouped into a coma, everything sounds the same. That’s your dashboard doing precisely what it was built to do, quietly optimizing you into one of a thousand companies in the same gray puddle.

Why clean data still lies

Even when the numbers are honest, a few things stay true that the dashboard will never volunteer.

It shows you what people did and never why. The why is where every decision worth making actually lives.

Data only describes the past, even when it shows up in something close to real time. It’s always a report from a world that already happened.

So the only future it can hand you is the past, drawn forward in a straight line. It’ll tell you the trend. It will not tell you the second the trend is about to snap, which is usually the only second that matters.

Ever since the New Coke fiasco, this has been the textbook case. The research was clean. Real taste tests, run properly, said people liked the new formula better. The data was right and the rollout was a national embarrassment, because no spreadsheet had a column for how people felt about the can they grew up drinking. The numbers measured the tongue. The market was the heart.

That was 1985, and we never stopped doing it. Jaguar torched a century of heritage last year for a rebrand that tested as bold and landed as a punchline, all pastel minimalism and no roaring cat.

Sonos rebuilt its app to please the roadmap instead of the people using it. The new version broke the one feature customers actually opened it for. Sonos spent the next year apologizing.

Tropicana did the smaller version back in 2009, swapped its iconic carton for a cleaner design and watched sales drop about 20 percent before it crawled back to the old one.

Every one of those calls looked airtight on a slide. Every one of them missed the only variable that mattered, which is how it would feel.

More data doesn’t save you, either. Usually, it does the opposite. In 1973, two researchers named Slovic and Lichtenstein fed professional gamblers more and more information while tracking how good their bets got. Some data beat no data, fine. But past a certain point, every extra input made the bets worse, not better. The confidence kept climbing. The accuracy fell. They felt smarter and bet dumber.

We forget how new all of this data is. A hundred years ago, a person generated maybe three data points in an entire life. Born, married, died. Enough to fill a headstone and nowhere close to enough to tell you what a single Tuesday of that life actually felt like. We’ve spent twenty years convinced the cure for that kind of ignorance is volume. It was never volume.

Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.

Zillow is the cleanest version of the real failure. It let an algorithm buy houses at scale because the numbers looked airtight, right up until the model misread the market, the company swallowed a loss in the hundreds of millions, and the whole business got shut down. Nobody fed it bad data. They fed it good data and let it drive.

That’s the pattern under all of this. A data-led decision is wrong more often than any company will put in writing, and it’s most wrong on exactly the decisions that matter most, the ones about why people do what they do. The fix isn’t less data, but instead taking data out of the driver’s seat.

A need for speed usually drives this data-led fixation. But, here’s the part all that speed gets wrong. The fast that actually wins is usually slow first. U.S. Special Operations Forces have a line for it: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Rush and you make the error that costs you the whole job. Move with intent and you build the kind of momentum that beats the people who sprinted off the line.

The same thing is true of work worth making. Slow is sitting with the emotion you’re trying to create and the feeling you want someone to leave with. Slow is naming the behavior you actually want to change and being honest about how you would really get there. Slow is taking the time to make something worth putting into the world, instead of something you can defend on Monday. That’s the exact part a weekly dashboard punishes, and it’s the only part that compounds.

The teams that got good at “finding fast” already made this move. They got cognition-led. Markeers have the same option sitting right there and most refuse to take it: study how people actually pay attention and decide, instead of staring at what they clicked last Tuesday.

You can be science-led too, which is not the same as data-led, no matter how often the two get mistaken for each other. Data is a record of what already happened. Science is a hypothesis about why, tested on purpose. Watching a number climb is bookkeeping. Forming a theory about people and putting it in the market is science, and only one of the two has ever produced conviction.

Use the data the way the drunk should use the lamppost. For light, not for directions. Let it show you the ground around your feet. Don’t ask it to walk you home.

The work that wins still comes from the part no dashboard can see. The marketers who go get it, who lead with cognition and test like scientists, are about to have the only edge left worth having.

Hope this is of some help and can aid an industry whose only job is to matter, matter. 🚀

You’re at a conference. Or maybe it’s a podcast in your earbuds on the drive to work. Or a LinkedIn post someone on your team just dropped into Slack with a “this is spot on.”

A very successful person is explaining how they achieved greatness.

They’re articulate. They’re specific. They have a system with a memorable name. Maybe even a neat diagram. By the end, the path sounds so clean and so obvious that you start to feel behind.

Like everyone else already knows this.

Like the answer was sitting in plain sight and you somehow walked past it.

That feeling? It’s a damn trap.

It’s not because the person is lying. Most people telling these stories believe them completely.

But what they’re giving you usually isn’t a roadmap. It’s a revisionist rationalization connected to all the facts by only the thinnest beam of main character energy.

An outcome happened. Their brain connected the dots afterward. The lucky breaks became decisions. The dead ends disappeared. The timing looked intentional. The messy parts got compressed into a sequence that feels logical and repeatable.

Then the story gets told enough times that it starts to feel true.

And because they won, we assume they must understand why.

The reason they’re on stage isn’t that they have the best advice.

It’s that they’re still standing. That’s it.

We keep handing the microphone to whoever is most certain they know why, and mistaking their confidence for evidence.

The marketing industry has been running on this rotten fuel for decades. And it’s the reason most of us are listening to exactly the wrong people.

The Fox and the Hedgehog

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote a line about 2,500 years ago that philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned into one of the most useful ideas in modern thinking: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

The hedgehog has a formula. A framework. A thesis that explains everything.

The fox is skeptical of grand theories. The fox holds multiple ideas in tension, tolerates contradiction, and changes course when the evidence shifts.

In the mid-2000s, researcher Philip Tetlock spent 20 years tracking 284 experts and over 80,000 predictions. The hedgehogs, the confident ones with big theories, were the worst predictors. Often worse than random chance. But they were the most quoted. The most booked. The most confident.

The foxes were better. Much better. But foxes make terrible podcast guests. They say things like “it depends” and “there are multiple factors” and “we can’t know for sure.” Nobody screenshots that for LinkedIn.

The marketing industry has a hedgehog problem. And it’s been costing us for decades.

The Hedgehog Parade

If you've been in marketing for more than a decade, you've lived through at least four revolutions that were each supposed to be the last one you'd ever need. Each with their own prophets, their own acronyms, their own set of “new rules of the trade”, and, ultimately, their own expiration date.

The technology changes, but the confidence doesn’t. And it doesn’t stay on stage. It migrates to our feeds.

LinkedIn has become an open mic night for hedgehogs, a place where people post slide carousels about “the one framework that changed everything” and VPs of Nothing In Particular write 800-word parables about what their Uber driver taught them about leadership.

It’s gotten so predictable that r/LinkedInLunatics, a subreddit with over 600,000 members, has become a kind of accidental anthropological experiment, cataloging the most brazen specimens of hedgehog self-promotion in real time. People know this is broken. They can smell the performance. They just keep scrolling past the lunatics and stopping on the next post that promises certainty.

In 2012 it was digital transformation. If your brand wasn’t digital-first, you were dead. In 2016 it was programmatic. Let the machines buy the media. Human judgment is the bottleneck. By 2019 it was DTC. Cut out the middleman. Build a brand on Instagram and a Shopify store. In 2024 it was generative AI. Why hire a creative team when the machine can make 10,000 ads before lunch?

Each wave came with its own confident prophets. Its own keynotes and podcasts and LinkedIn manifestos. Its own formulas. And each wave left behind a graveyard of brands that followed the formula and failed anyway, while the survivors wrote books about how the formula worked.

Countless CMOs and VPs of Marketing sat in those audiences, heard the hedgehog, and thought: well, it worked for them, so it must be the only way. They reorganized teams. Reallocated budgets. Killed programs that were quietly working. All because someone confident told them the future had arrived and they were behind.

The hedgehogs weren’t always wrong about the technology. They were wrong about the certainty. Digital mattered. Programmatic has a role. AI will change things. But none of them were the formula. None of them replaced the need for judgment, taste, and tolerance for ambiguity. The hedgehog just couldn’t say that, because “it depends” doesn’t sell keynotes.

The Confidence Tax

In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger documented something that should be required reading for anyone who books speakers at marketing events: the less you know about something, the more confident you are that you understand it. Incompetence doesn't just make you bad at something; it makes you too bad at it to realize you're bad at it. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect.

They ran experiments testing people on logical reasoning and grammar, then asked participants to estimate how well they’d done. The worst performers massively overestimated their abilities. The actual experts slightly underestimated themselves.

The implication for marketing is uncomfortable. The people most eager to tell you how technology will transform your brand, or how programmatic will solve your media problems, or how you don’t need an agency anymore, are statistically likely to be the ones who understand these things the least. The people who actually know what’s happening are too busy qualifying their statements to make a good keynote.

When you hear a speaker at Cannes say, “AI will change everything,” the question worth asking is: will there be popcorn to go with this performance?

Why We Keep Going Back

Here’s where it gets structural.

Psychologists John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji developed what they called System Justification Theory: the finding that people, even those disadvantaged by the status quo, tend to rationalize and defend existing hierarchies. We don’t just tolerate the current system. We actively construct reasons why it’s right.

Applied to marketing: once you’ve followed the hedgehog, you have a psychological investment in the hedgehog being correct. If the confident voice on stage was wrong about programmatic, then the two years you spent rebuilding your media operation around programmatic were a bet, not a strategy. If the DTC playbook was overhyped, then every brand that gutted its wholesale relationships did so on bad advice. That’s terrifying. So instead of questioning the hedgehog, we defend the system the hedgehog built.

This is how “best practices” calcify into dogma. Not because they keep working, but because admitting they’re not working means admitting we were wrong to follow them in the first place. System justification turns yesterday’s confident prediction into today’s unquestioned assumption. The hedgehogs don’t even need to keep talking. We’ll do the defending for them.

Play Poker, Not Chess

Annie Duke, the former professional poker player turned decision strategist, makes a distinction that most marketing leaders have never internalized: chess is a game of perfect information. Every piece is visible. There’s a theoretically correct move in every position. Poker is a game of incomplete information, hidden variables, and luck.

Marketing is poker. You’re making bets with imperfect data, against competitors you can’t fully see, in a market shaped by forces you can’t control. But the hedgehog tells you it’s chess. That there’s a right answer. A formula. A playbook that, if executed correctly, guarantees the outcome.

The difference matters enormously. In chess thinking, a bad outcome means you made a bad decision. In poker thinking, a bad outcome might mean you made a good decision that didn’t work out this time. The CEO who fires a CMO after one quarter of soft results is playing chess. The board that gives a brand-building strategy three years to compound is playing poker.

And most of our industry’s “proven strategies” aren’t even drawn from a representative sample. During the Second World War, the US military studied bombers returning from missions over Europe. The planes were riddled with bullet holes, clustered in the fuselage and wings. The brass said: reinforce where the holes are. A statistician named Abraham Wald said the opposite. Reinforce where the holes aren’t. The planes you’re looking at are the ones that survived. The ones that took hits in the engine or the cockpit never came home to be studied.

This is survivorship bias. And it’s the foundation of every marketing “best practice” ever reverse-engineered from a winner. We interview the CMO who tripled revenue. We don’t interview the 50 CMOs who ran the same playbook and got fired. We study the brand that went viral. We ignore the thousands that posted the same content into the void. The conference speaker, the podcast guest, the LinkedIn thought leader? They’re all planes that made it home. And we’re reinforcing the wrong parts.

Sociologist Duncan Watts proved this with his Music Lab experiment at Columbia. He gave over 14,000 participants access to 48 songs by unknown bands. One group rated them independently. Eight other groups could see download counts. If quality alone determined success, the same songs would have won every time.

They didn’t. One song ranked 26th in the independent group but hit number one in a social group, and number 40 in another. Quality created a floor and a ceiling. But within that range, it was randomness, social influence, and timing. The same dynamics that drive markets, brand adoption, and cultural relevance.

The formula is always a retrospective narrative. Never a forward-facing prediction. As Rory Sutherland put it: we are wrong about psychology to a far greater degree than we are about physics, so the biggest gains come from understanding perception, not optimizing mechanics.

The Cost of Hedgehog Culture

The hedgehog parade hasn’t just been wrong. It’s done real damage.

Over the past 15 years, the loudest voices in marketing have systematically devalued the things that actually drive results: better storytelling, better craft, better design, consistency over time. The quiet, hard, unglamorous work of making people feel something when they encounter your brand.

Effie and System1’s research across 1,265 campaigns is unambiguous. Campaigns with high emotional response and high distinctiveness dramatically outperform. Creative consistency over multiple years compounds brand effects. The brands that hold their positioning, keep their creative partners, and invest in showmanship over time don’t just do a little better. They do a lot better.

But those are fox answers. They’re qualified, nuanced, built on evidence that takes years to accumulate. No one gets a standing ovation at SXSW for saying “keep doing what’s working, invest in better creative, and be patient.”

Meanwhile, the hedgehogs sold a different story. One where craft is overhead. Where creative thinking is obsolete. Where the algorithm will handle it.

You saw it when Coinbase’s CEO publicly claimed their Super Bowl ad could never have been made by an advertising agency, as if the entire profession had its head in the sand. Then Kristen Cavallo, CEO of The Martin Agency, produced the receipts showing that her agency had, in fact, generated the concept. The hedgehog was so committed to the “we don’t need the old way” narrative that he couldn’t see what was right in front of him.

You see it with Elon Musk, who has repeatedly dismissed the value of marketing while being perhaps the most prolific self-marketer alive. He’s turned himself into more of a celebrity than a business person. He sired children with a famous musician. He raised his eyebrow at everyone at the Met Gala. He bought his own social media platform. He made himself inseparable from Tesla and SpaceX to the point where the man is the brand campaign. That’s not “no marketing.” That’s marketing so total it doesn’t recognize itself as marketing. The billionaire hedgehog who says you don’t need advertising while conducting one of the most expensive personal brand exercises in history.

The hedgehog doesn’t just give bad advice. The hedgehog makes it harder for brands to invest in the things that work, because hedgehog culture treats craft, storytelling, and creative consistency as unsophisticated. As relics. As the stuff you did before you got serious about what’s next.

The research says the opposite, but that’s fox territory.

There Is No Formula (And That’s the Good News)

So if there’s no formula, what is there?

There’s learning. As much as you can, from as many angles as you can, about your category, your customer, your culture, your competitive set. Not to find the answer, but to get better at recognizing the right bet when it shows up.

There’s consistency. Not doing the same thing forever, but holding a position long enough for it to compound. The Creative Dividend data is clear: brands that maintain creative foundations over time build stronger emotional response, stronger distinctiveness, and stronger business results. Compound creativity is real. But it requires the patience that hedgehog culture explicitly discourages.

There’s managed risk. Not recklessness, but a deliberate practice of testing ideas at the edge of what feels comfortable. The fox doesn’t avoid risk. The fox sizes it. Knows what cliff is worth jumping from and what cliff is just a cliff. Every great brand moment involved someone making a bet that couldn’t be justified by a formula. It was judgment, taste, and courage in the face of uncertainty.

And there’s readiness. Luck is real. Timing matters. Moments of chance will come. The question is whether you’ve built the brand, the team, and the instincts to recognize them and move.

None of this fits on a slide with three pillars and an acronym. And that should tell you it’s closer to the truth.

The fox doesn’t promise you a formula. The fox promises you a better way of thinking. One that tolerates ambiguity, respects evidence, stays curious, and doesn’t pretend that confidence is the same thing as competence.

The hedgehog will always be more entertaining. The hedgehog will always get the keynote. And by all means, be entertained by them.

But if you’re trying to build something that actually lasts, stop listening to the loudest voice in the room.

Start listening to the one that says: it depends.

Stay foxy, my friends👋🦊

There’s an ad I love that I ran into again on LinkedIn recently, posted by one of the original creatives who made it.

It was published by The Martin Agency in the early 2000s for Dick Gerdes Recruiting. A simple grid of portraits, same man, different styling, each one with a different agency name underneath. Crispin Porter. Wieden+Kennedy. TBWA\Chiat\Day. Goodby Silverstein. Fallon. And, of course, Martin themselves. The headline: “Where do you see yourself?”

It won at One Show. More than that, it captured something specific: the agency you work for shapes who you become as a creative. There are places with personality, taste, and standards. And then there’s everywhere else.

But I think it goes deeper than the people. These agencies change the brands they work with. The type of work a brand becomes accustomed to making. The standards and criteria seep in over time. That’s a different kind of superpower, and not something I’ve seen many awards shows or industry lists actually cover.

Seeing the Dick Gerdes image again while on my sleep-aid edible got me thinking. The list of agencies that carry that kind of weight has shifted since the early 2000s, some would say significantly. So I thought about what my version of that image would look like today. Same concept, different names. The agencies I’d want to see myself in. The ones I think imprint themselves on a brand’s ethos and soul. Uncommon, Gut, Mother, Preacher, Highdive, Mischief, Rethink. And yeah, Bakery. Hey, Martin made the rules, not me.

That image, and the aforementioned edible, is what prompted this piece. Less a signal for creative talent on the hunt for their people, more a field guide for the brand leaders itching to find a real advantage in a multi-dimensional universe of machine generation, influencer saturation, channel noise, measurement theater, and the galactic fog of agency positioning statements.

What I’d Actually Look For In An Agency, Were I A CMO

Content and production have been commoditized.

The question of whether you can make something is off the table. Everyone can make something now. AI can generate. Platforms can distribute. You can put work in front of millions of people for a fraction of what it cost five years ago. The tools are plentiful and they enable everyone equal ability to create the exact same thing.

Gross.

A lot of people will go looking for the shortcuts, either unaware or unfazed by how they’re chucking the old art of standing out and inspiring people straight off a cliff. Efficiency over resonance. Output over meaning. Volume over anything worth remembering.

But a few will recognize that genius and effectiveness live in the scarcity. If everyone is generating the same thing, then what’s cool, relevant, and valuable is 180 degrees the other way. That’s always been true. Modern tools just made it more obvious.

If you’re still reading this, I hope you’re one of the few.

And if you are, the only question that matters is whether what you make with your creative partners is any good. Or better, great.

That question comes down to four things. Not capabilities. Not headcount. Not the size of the production budget.

Four things.

Taste, Criteria, Standards, and Craft.

Taste. The ability to recognize what’s intensely interesting versus what merely looks decent. Taste is the filter that runs before any brief, any concept, any execution. It’s not aesthetic preference. It's a calibrated sense of what resonates, what endures, and what gets attention without paying the dull tax. You can’t teach it. You can’t manufacture it. You can only look for evidence of it in the work an agency has already done, and importantly, in the work they chose not to do.

Criteria. If taste is what you feel is right, criteria is how you prove it. The specific, repeatable tests an agency applies to its own ideas before anyone outside the room sees them. It's what separates shops that consistently produce good work from shops that occasionally stumble into it.

Standards. This is what happens when taste and criteria meet resistance. Standards are what an agency holds onto when a client pushes back, when the timeline compresses, when the budget shrinks, when the politics get complicated. A lot of agencies have taste and criteria. Far fewer have the willingness to fight, to walk away, or to say no when it actually counts.

Craft in execution. The idea is only as good as what it becomes. This is where most work dies. Not in the concept, not in the strategy, but in the gap between the idea and the thing that ends up in the world. The agencies worth your money understand that execution isn’t implementation; it is interpretation. Every decision made in production either adds something or takes something away.

In a world where content is cheap and distribution is automated, these four things are the only real differentiators left. For agencies and for the brands that hire them.

Finding the right agencies at the edge of the marketing universe

Most CMOs hire agencies the wrong way, and it's understandable why. The filters they're using aren't designed to find the right partner.

They hire for capabilities. For reputation. For size. All three are perfectly reasonable. And unfortunately, deceptive.

Many end up hiring for cost. The most dangerous one, because it means you’re optimizing for the wrong thing before the work even starts. Those marketers should probably stop reading now.

Some hire for chemistry, which sounds right until you realize that chemistry built over a few Zoom calls and a pitch meeting is mostly performance. Everyone is charming when they want your business.

None of these filters get at the thing that determines whether the work will be any good.

So, what’s a better way?

Aim for taste.

And the standards that come with it.

Taste is harder to evaluate. It doesn’t get presented in a creds deck. You find it in what an agency chooses to show you versus what they leave out. In how they talk about work they’ve done versus work they wish they’d done differently. In whether their opinions are real or calibrated to what you seem to want to hear.

Standards are simpler to spot. Does the work look like the agency gave a damn? Not just the award-winning work. The everyday work. The stuff that didn’t make the website.

Get those two things right and the other variables tend to follow.

CMOs Can Make The Search Simple By Refocusing

Regardless of which agency you decide to entertain, don’t spend much time on credentials. Ask twelve questions. The answers tell you what you need to know about taste, criteria, standards, and craft.

Listen less for the answers themselves. Listen for how the agency thinks.

On Taste

“What would you fight us on creatively?” You’re not looking for bravado. You’re looking for specificity. An agency with real taste knows exactly where its line is and can name it. Vague talk about “protecting the work” doesn’t count. What, specifically, would they go to the mat for?

“Which brand would you rather be working with right now, and why?” This reveals desire and discernment at the same time. You’re asking them which brand, today, they would prefer over your own. It’s not a gotcha question about loyalty. It’s a window into where this agency could take you. An agency that can’t answer with real enthusiasm either hasn’t thought about it or won’t say the true answer in the room. Both are problems. So is blind flattery. What they choose tells you what they value. Why they choose it tells you how they see the world and your potential place in it.

“Forget impressions. How do you know if something will actually get attention?” Metrics are easy to cite. This question asks for the agency’s actual theory of attention, the intuitive, experience-built sense of what makes someone stop. Agencies with real taste have thought hard about this. The answer sounds nothing like a media plan.

On Criteria

“Walk me through how you decide if an idea is good before it goes into production.” You’re asking the agency to reveal its internal evaluation process, the criteria it applies before any outside eyes see the work. Generic answers about “brief alignment” or “stakeholder review” simply tell you the agency has a process. Specific answers about how they ensure great work gets developed tell you the agency has standards.

“What’s your definition of a great idea, in five words?” Constraints reveal clarity. If the definition can’t survive compression, it usually isn’t precise enough. You’re not really grading the answer, but the confidence and readiness with which it’s delivered. You want to know they spend time thinking about this.

“When does your process fail?” Only agencies that have examined their own work can answer this honestly. You’re listening for self-awareness. An agency that can name its specific failure modes, the conditions under which their process breaks down, has thought carefully about how to prevent them.

On Standards

“Tell me about a time you pushed back on work because it wasn’t good enough, after the client approved it.” Client approval does not equal the work being good. Agencies with real standards know the difference and act on it. You’re listening for a specific story. If they can’t name an instance, they may not have held the line when it mattered.

“If we hate the idea but you’re convinced it will work, what do you do?” There’s no right answer, but there are wrong ones. An automatic “we’d revise” is wrong. What you want to hear is whether the agency distinguishes between a taste disagreement and a strategic one, and handles each differently.

“What’s the most common way clients unintentionally lower the quality of your work?” Make sure you’re asking about this situation with them in mind, not the industry at large. This takes courage to answer honestly in a pitch. The agencies who answer it anyway have seen the pattern enough times that they can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Listen for specificity, and for whether they include themselves in the diagnosis.

On Craft in Execution

“Show me a piece of work that got better in production. What changed and why?” Most agencies show you work that survived production. This question asks for work that was elevated by it. Agencies that understand craft know that every decision made between concept and final output either adds something or takes something away.

“How do you make sure the original idea survives the process?” You’re listening for specific practices. Generic answers about “staying involved” are a yellow flag. Specific answers about creative ownership, production relationships, and approval structures are what you want.

“Where would you typically ask us to over-invest versus under-invest in production?” An agency that has thought carefully about craft can tell you, without hesitation, which production decisions change the quality of the work and which ones don’t. This also tells you whether they treat craft as a strategic variable or just a budget line. Keep in mind there are several good answers to this. Different agencies lean on certain craft visions and superpowers to deliver incredible work. This is where you find out what those non-negotiables are.

Who Should CMOs Ask These Questions To?

In the vast, often confusing universe of agencies, a few stand out as truly worth your attention.

This is my unsolicited selection. Organized not by size or reputation but by what each shop is actually built to do well. A few are independents. A couple aren’t. The model matters less than the output.

Agencies Known for Cultural Brand Building

Agencies that understand brand-building as a creative discipline, not a strategic exercise. These shops make work that people remember and integrate into the cultural vocabulary. With these agencies, the discipline isn't in building theater around a brand’s core product. It's in understanding the product well enough that the work and the thing become inseparable.

Uncommon Studio — The most interesting creative agency operating in the UK and NYC right now, and increasingly a global reference point. Work that is visually and conceptually distinct from anything else in market. Brutally high standards.

Mother — Thirty years in and they still produce work that doesn’t look like anyone else’s. They once made their small size feel big, and now that they’re big, nothing has changed. That’s a great thing. Longevity and scale in the creative industry usually mean compromise. Not here.

Collins — If the brand system needs to be beautiful, rigorous, and hold up across every touchpoint at scale, Collins. No one better at making identity work feel inevitable.

David — Consistently brilliant at work that gets talked about in rooms where the brand isn’t. They’ve been doing entertainment-adjacent brand thinking before most agencies had a name for it, and the cultural instincts that drive that work make them a natural fit here. I’d trust Pancho Cassis and Daniel Lobaton with my brand any day.

Bakery — One of the few independent agencies consistently building culture-first ideas that translate into real business outcomes. The discipline here is finding the product truth, what a brand actually is to their audience, rather than what it wants to be in a boardroom, and building outward from there.

Agencies That Excel at The Big Creative Idea

These are the shops built around the big, ballsy idea. The kind that earns coverage, starts conversations, and gets written about long after the campaign ends.

Gut — Probably the most awarded independent agency of the last five years and the work earns it. Funny, culturally intelligent ideas with real strategic backbone. The Burger King work alone redefined what a challenger brand could do. Their runs with Fernando Machado on the brand side are Phil Jackson/ Michael Jordan stuff. Anselmo Ramos and Gaston Bigio have built a taste discernment powerhouse that can rival and beat any network.

Preacher — Rob Baird, Krystle Loyland, and Seth Gaffney built one of the original shops in the current wave of serious independents, and they did it on their own terms. Our Austin neighbors. Stubbornly themselves. Work that earns attention rather than buying it. And the Preacher Gallery as proof that building a creative business doesn't have to mean abandoning what made you want to do it in the first place. They’re sure to bring some Texas heat to any project.

Mischief — They prioritize fame, brand clarity, and simplicity above over-targeted noise. The spectacular simplicity of their ideas is consistently elevated by taste and craft. There’s a reason you’re tired of hearing their name everywhere, at all times. And no, that reason isn’t exclusively Oli McAteer. It’s the stylized firepower coming from Greg Hahn, Bianca Guimaraes, and Kevin Mulroy.

Rethink — Canada’s now worst-kept secret. The Kraft Heinz relationship is a masterclass in how a creative partnership sustains itself without losing its edge. Aaron Starkman, their Global CCO, said to a publication that their best work comes from “shallow holes.” That’s what he called the flurry of text ideating they do with their clients. That indicates pretty deep trust and meaningful relationships being built in the name of great work.

WorkInProgress — Look, these guys were able to walk out of Crispin with the Domino’s business before they had even purchased desk chairs and Macbooks under the WIP name. Impressive. More impressive, they retained it and grew a business around it. Almost a decade after, Evan Russack and Matt Talbot keep doing some of the most interesting brand voice work in the US right now. Sharp, self-aware, and they understand that the best advertising connects across a system of touchpoints.

Highdive — Chicago-based and chronically underrated in the national conversation. The work is sharp, the ideas are massive, and they’ve quietly built one of the more consistent track records of any independent shop in the country. They’ve grown far beyond a big moments agency to become a serious partner to serious brands.

Smaller Agencies with Outsized Impact

These two belong somewhere on every serious list of shops doing exceptional work right now. Neither is large. Both are operating at a level that makes size look like the wrong variable entirely.

Isle of Any — Taste, criteria, and execution above almost everyone on this list. The kind of agency that makes you reconsider what a small team is capable of when the standards are high enough and the work is the only thing that matters.

Quality Meats — Fast, funny, culturally alive, and proven in big moments. Incredible work that has been top of the mound multiple times at the Super Bowl and Cannes.

Both are proof that in 2025, if the work is good enough, headcount is just a number.

Agencies With Scale & Global Reach

Sometimes the problem is big. Multiple markets, complex stakeholders, brand governance that needs to survive contact with reality across a hundred different contexts.

The Martin Agency — Back to the agency behind the Gerdes creative that got me writing this in the first place. Kristen Cavallo is back as CEO and that matters more than most leadership news in this industry. She built the structure behind some of the most culturally resonant work of the last decade there. I’d bet on her to do it again.

Ogilvy — The honest answer when a brand needs global coherence without sacrificing local relevance. There are pockets of excellent creative work inside Ogilvy that punch well above what you’d expect from a holding company shop.

McCann — When McCann is working at its best, it certainly delivers on its Truth Well Told promise. The True Color of Heinz is recent proof the creative ambition is real. Again, for me it’s all about the people and the belief system inside the organization. With Danilo Boer and Andrés Ordóñez as Global Creative Leads, I’m convinced we’re going to see fireworks from McCann.

Emerging Creative Agencies On My Radar

The holding company era is unwinding and the talent is walking out the door with it. These are some of the more interesting new places that talent is landing. Each one is early. Each one is worth knowing about before they're impossible to get a meeting with.

Pufferfish — Founded by two Mr. Beast alumni. Not a content studio pretending to be an agency, but people who built things that captured hundreds of millions of views and understand viscerally what makes audiences choose to watch. The thinking here is different from anyone else starting out right now.

Geezer Creative — Built specifically for the 50-plus demographic, by people with 25-plus years of experience. That combination sounds obvious in retrospect and almost nobody was doing it intentionally. Founded by Karen McKinley, former ECD, Leo Burnett; Brent Rivard, former CMO, Internova Travel Group; John Kieselhorst, former head of creative, Fact & Fiction. I’m keeping tabs on this group that recognized that the most overlooked audience in advertising also happens to have the most money.

Beers With Friends — One client at a time, five-day sprints, senior talent only. Less overhead, less politics, faster work. The founders came out of Wonder and Code3 and built the agency they wished had existed when they were clients.

The Shortlist Of Agencies I'd Call (If I were a CMO).

These are the creative agencies I’d call for a brand that wants to make work that matters, with people with deep creative instinct that is fueled by an undying love for what they do, here’s the honest list.

*Eight, because five felt like I was leaving out people I’d be embarrassed to leave out.

Uncommon Studio — Nils Leonard is lifting the argument for taste and craft for the whole industry, not just his own shop. The addition of Lisa Smith to lead design is one I’m tremendously envious of, and it will make them a visual craft superpower for some time. They keep making the most discerning agency creatives jealous of the work they put out and the freedom they seem to have carved out for themselves. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d be banging on their door until they gave me a job.

Mother — What strikes me most isn’t the longevity. It’s that the network expansion hasn’t diluted anything. Most agencies that grow globally use scale as an excuse for inconsistency. Mother uses it as a distribution system for the same uncompromising standards. Network agency history has taught us how hard that is to pull off. And yet, Mother still feels like Mother.

Isle of Any — The work they’re putting out right now is some of the best of the past 12 months by any measure. What makes that remarkable is the size of the team doing it. Small groups only operate at this level when there’s no room for anyone who doesn’t share the same obsessive criteria. No excuses. No corner-cutting. Just genius work, in painstakingly crafted detail.

Mischief — The industry talks about them constantly, and the reflex is to assume that means it’s all hype. If anyone is thinking that, they’re not paying attention. When you actually look at what they’re doing, it’s impressive. The work keeps earning the conversation and they’ve made it a point to tie it to effectiveness. Fame-first thinking with the executional standards to back it up with consistency, topped with proof it all fucking works, is beyond rare.

Bakery — Yeah, I realize I’m not unbiased, but leaving us off this list would make me a loon. Bakery is creative criteria seen through a cult-minded, product-led, earned-first lens. Built for brands with real product truth and the ambition to build something that lasts. The ability to not just advertise things but co-create them, injecting the story into objects being meaningfully entered into the world, sets this shop apart from most. Sure, chaotically independent, highly opinionated, and relentless. But I love it.

WorkInProgress — Most agencies will tell you they think holistically about a brand. WorkInProgress actually builds that way. The system they’ve developed isn’t a constraint on creativity, it’s the infrastructure that keeps creative quality consistent across every touchpoint, not just the flagship work. That’s a different kind of discipline and a harder one to sell to clients who want the Super Bowl spot and nothing else.

Gut — What I keep coming back to with Gut is that they figured out how to be prolific without becoming formulaic. A lot of agencies that win a lot start making work that looks like their own awards entries. Gut keeps finding new ways in. The Globant merger raised eyebrows. The work since has answered the question.

Rethink — I know what you’re thinking: “Of course you added the A-List winner this year.” But truthfully, I’ve been watching the work and the approach out of there for a while. The Heinz work alone is defining for this generation. There’s an approach to telling a single story across quarters, seasons, even years of a brand’s program that I respect. Their CRAFTS framework sells itself as disciplined and measured. I’m not fooled. These people are clearly chasing wild ideas.

If, like me, you’re looking into the best creative agencies right now, there are dozens of options. The ones above are the teams I’d call. From their founding beliefs and the DNA of their people, those agencies are built to make behavior-changing, culture-shifting work, not just ad campaigns.

The Gerdes ad was about finding the place that shapes you. This list is the same thing for brand-side folks. The agency you choose doesn't just make your ads. It becomes part of how you think about what your brand is. Pick one that challenges you, thinks beyond the deliverables, and pushes the work. Pick the one that makes you better.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.🐬

Micky

Somewhere in the last 18 months, the content bubble burst. Most brands just haven’t looked at the damage yet.

AI didn’t make content cheaper. It made it free. And when something becomes free, markets find a new scarce thing to value. That’s economics, not technology. It’s just how scarcity works.

Effort became rare. Proof of human craft became valuable.

The tells are everywhere

Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas campaign didn’t fail because the visuals were slightly wrong. It failed because the choice communicated something the brand never intended to say: that this moment wasn’t worth a human’s time. That 70 years of holiday cultural equity could be approximated by a prompt and a render farm.

The audience didn’t have language for what bothered them. They just felt the math behind the decision. SamDoesArt does a painstakingly detailed job of going over the eek factor below.

Meanwhile, Heineken buys a Times Square billboard that reads the best way to make a friend is over a beer and the internet treats it like a counter-manifesto. It arrived at exactly the moment a company called Friend.com was covering New York subway stations with ads selling AI companions to lonely people. Heineken didn’t need clever copy. Showing up as human was the contrast. Human had become the creative strategy.

By the way, those Friend.com ads made quite a few enemies in the Big Apple, some who decided to treat the billboards to a dose of human prose.

Even the people building the tools figured this out

Here’s a detail worth sitting with. Anthropic, the company that builds Claude, recently hosted an Anti-Ai Slop pop-up in NYC’s West Village. No generated content. No devices. Just people in a room, talking to people.

Anthropic spent their Super Bowl buy making fun of OpenAI for planning to run ads in ChatGPT. The irony worth noting: the spot they made to announce themselves to the world used a human agency (Mother), human director, human crew, human actors, and no visible AI whatsoever. The people building the most capable AI on the planet decided their biggest cultural moment needed to look unmistakably handmade.

When the people who build this stuff start treating human presence as something worth protecting and worth paying for, you’re watching a market correct in real time.

The new creative brief: show the fucking work

The brands winning right now aren’t just avoiding AI. They're showing what it cost to make things. Process has become the proof. The behind-the-scenes has gone from bonus asset to being a main deliverable.

Absolut and Tabasco shot their latest collaboration entirely on film. No digital shortcuts. The making of it is as much the story as the work itself.

Wieden+Kennedy’s post caption with the Behind The Scenes literally begins with “100% Craft. 100% Heat.” Showing off the intricate builds of miniatures, costume design, and pouring prop lava. Blood, sweat, tears, and Tabasco.

The Coinbase “Your Way Out” spot aired during the Oscars. Director Oscar Hudson and creative company Isle of Any built a world that looks entirely digital but is live action throughout: real people in hand-painted costumes choreographed to move like NPCs, sets deliberately pixelated and shadowless to mimic low-polygon game graphics, masks of characters printed back onto the actors’ own faces, all of it captured in-camera. The film looks like a digital simulation, but it was crafted in the exact opposite way.

Romain Gavras did something similar with the Gener8ion x Yung Lean short film. The music video/ punk opera piece blew up online, not because of its concept but due largely to its craft. One sequence, Lean standing still while the students around him erupt into choreographed chaos, shot with the kind of precision that takes weeks to rehearse and can’t be generated. People shared it because you could feel the work inside it. Some of the most common questions online surround how they may have shot it. Is it really one shot?

This handmade sensibility was front and center at the Super Bowl, too. Bad Bunny’s halftime set wasn’t a spectacle of screens and projections. It was built. Physical. Theatrical. The kind of production that requires hundreds of people to make something that only exists once, live, in real time.

The BTS footage wasn’t official, instead coming from audience members attending the game and posting in real time. However, it became its own cultural moment with thousands of creators posting and commenting about the set works because everyone wanted to see how it was done.

The Loudest Thing Some Brands Can Say Right Now Is No

Dove committed publicly to never using AI to create or distort women’s images in advertising, extending a 20-year Real Beauty promise into a specific, testable pledge.

Aerie followed their lead.

Equinox is telling people to question everything but themselves.

These aren’t just brand values. They’re a strategic response to an audience that now asks, as its first instinct, whether a human gave enough of a damn to make this.

So, what does winning in this market look like?

The share price of Fast and Generative has crashed.

We’re at content hyper-saturation.

A post now costs less time to make than it takes to watch.

Regurgitated content is heading towards monopoly money status.

Worthless.

There’s simply no value in delivering what most of the audience can create themselves with 20 minutes and a cup of coffee.

Some brands will still try to photocopy the Mona Lisa on cardboard and peddle it as an original.

But they’ll lose.

The point here is not to push a moratorium on AI tools. It’s to highlight that the signal of care now has to be more legible then ever. Audiences don’t need to see receipts for every production decision. They need to feel that something was at stake. That a choice was made. That the thing in front of them cost someone something real.

Where are the blood, sweat, and tears?

Content that costs nothing communicates nothing. It’s just a photo of a fireworks show. A Temu version of thought, care, and craft.

And business-wise?

The most expensive thing a brand can do right now isn’t paying for human craft. It is promoting their values on the cheap, in a way that pushes people away from the equation entirely.

The brands that win won't be proving they're human. They'll be making things so specific and irreplaceable that nobody thinks to ask.

That’s the new brief.

Not better AI.

Better proof you give a royal shit.

K, bai. 👋

A first-edition Charizard Pokémon card sold for $420,000 in 2022.

It’s made of cardboard. The Pokémon on it is fictional. The game it belongs to is 25 years old. And the person who bought it almost certainly isn’t going to play with it.

That transaction is either irrational or it’s revealing something important about how humans assign value. Spoiler: it’s the second one.

People have been collecting things for as long as we’ve been people. The ancient Romans collected Greek art. The Medicis collected everything. Your grandfather collected baseball cards. Your nephew collects Funko Pops. And somewhere in your city right now, a grown person is spending serious money on a pair of sneakers they will never wear.

Brands look at this behavior and, correctly, see an opportunity. Most of them, however, then proceed to completely misunderstand it.

What brands think collecting is

Here’s the standard brand playbook for collectibility:

Make something. Make fewer of it. Call it limited. Watch people scramble.

It works, sometimes, short-term. Robert Cialdini documented the Scarcity Heuristic decades ago: the more difficult it is to acquire an item, the more value it appears to have. This is real psychology. And it’s everywhere in brand strategy now. The drop, the limited-edition collab, the waitlist that exists primarily to be a waitlist.

On November 18, 2017, Adidas dropped the Yeezy Boost 350 V2 in Semi Frozen Yellow. It cost $220. It sold out in approximately 15 seconds. Within hours it was listed on StockX—the self-described “stock market of things”—for between $590 and $1,100. Supreme legendarily took this further than almost anyone: branded nunchucks, dog bowls, and bricks. Yeah, bricks. The box logo could turn anything into a collectible.

This works. Until it doesn’t.

The problem is that scarcity alone is a mechanical trick, not a foundation. It creates wanting. Wanting is temporary. And brands that build on it exclusively are one inventory decision away from collapse. When Adidas restocked the Yeezy Boost Zebra the price leaned out within days. Years of hype, erased in a single supply chain call.

We’re watching the same movie play out right now in real time, with a wide-eyed, rabbit-eared plushie.

The Labubu lesson

In spring 2024, Labubu—a gremlin-like plush toy created by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung and sold by Chinese toy company Pop Mart—went from niche collector’s item to global mania after Lisa of Blackpink began wearing one on social media. Within months, Rihanna and Dua Lipa followed. Pop Mart’s revenue from the Monsters IP hit ¥6.3 billion (roughly $870 million USD) in the first half of 2024 alone.

The mechanics were textbook scarcity: geo-targeted drops, app-controlled lotteries, blind boxes with undisclosed odds. A rare human-sized Labubu sold at auction for $150,000. Pop Mart’s stock soared.

Then came the cracks. Counterfeit rings in Shanghai moved thousands of fakes. Resale prices dropped more than 50% in some regions. Pop Mart’s stock began falling while the broader international index rose. Labubu dolls started appearing in thrift stores and dumpsters.

The diagnosis isn’t hard to make. Pop Mart built on scarcity and celebrity without building a world. There was no mythology beyond the design, no community infrastructure beyond social media buzz, no stakes beyond the dopamine of the blind box. As Forbes noted, when the counterfeit crisis hit, “early collectors saw their community diluted when fakes undercut secondary values and eroded trust.” Scarcity managed poorly doesn’t just undermine the economics. It implodes the emotional equation entirely.

The Labubu arc is a live autopsy of what happens when you build a collectible on want rather than meaning.

Scarcity creates wanting. Wanting is temporary. Meaning is what makes someone pay $420,000 for a piece of cardboard.

What collecting is actually about

In 2025, Martin Reimann at the University of Arizona published research in the Journal of Consumer Research that reframes the entire psychology of collecting. His finding: people collect not because they want things, but because they want order. Collecting is a response to chaos. A psychological mechanism for asserting control over an uncertain environment.

After COVID-19 began, Reimann’s team found a measurable spike in crowdfunding support for collectible products. “At its core,” Reimann says, “collecting isn’t just about things. It’s about creating structure in uncertain times.” People during the pandemic, suddenly unmoored, turned to collections—to the satisfying logic of sets and completion—as a way to create structure when the world had stopped making sense.

The “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” tagline isn’t just clever marketing. It’s a precise description of a psychological need. Pokémon understood, maybe instinctively, that the appeal of a collection is its completeness—the holistic, finite, orderable entity it becomes when you have them all.

There’s a deeper psychological layer underneath the ordering impulse. Clinical psychologist Anna Zacharcenko describes collectibles as functioning like what psychologists call transitional objects—the same mechanism that makes a child carry a favorite blanket. Adults use them to take a sense of security through the world, to create a portable extension of self. The blind box’s specific power isn’t just scarcity: it’s the dopamine loop of near-misses. “Oh I was so close, I must keep trying.” That’s not collecting, it’s playing the slots.

The distinction matters because it separates durable collecting behavior from fad behavior. Transitional objects endure because they mean something stable. Slot machines are exciting until they’re not.

In 1981, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published The Meaning of Things, consisting of years of research asking ordinary people which objects in their homes mattered most to them and why. The answer was almost never about monetary value or even function. It was about what the object meant. The rocking chair that belonged to a grandmother. The trophy from a childhood race. The vinyl record that was playing the night something important happened.

People use objects to construct and maintain their identities. What you keep, and why you keep it, is the story of who you are and who you want to be.

Rory Sutherland notes that an engagement ring serves no practical purpose as an object. Its value is entirely constructed. But that constructed value is more real than the material value, not less. The ring means something. The thing it means is expensive to fake.

Walter Benjamin called this the “aura” of an object, and did so before TikTok appropriated the term. It’s the sense of its unique existence in time and place that no reproduction can replicate. A print of the Mona Lisa is not a lesser Mona Lisa. It’s a completely different category of thing. The original contains time. The print only contains image.

Collectibles are objects with aura. The question is where the aura actually comes from.

Crafting aura

This is where most brands go wrong, because they think they can manufacture aura the same way they manufacture scarcity.

They can’t.

Aura comes from three places: story, community, and stakes.

Story is the history that accumulates inside an object. A first-edition Magic: The Gathering card from 1993 contains inside it the entire mythology of the game, the memory of when you first opened a booster pack, the cultural moment of a generation discovering that cardboard could contain whole worlds. Richard Garfield, who designed the original game, deliberately built in rarity, not just scarcity; while you could get a pack anytime, some cards appeared far less frequently than others. The rarity worked because it existed inside a world that people genuinely loved and could access otherwise at any time. The scarcity of some cards amplified something that was already meaningful.

Most brands skip the world-building entirely and go straight to the scarcity. Labubu is the most recent and most instructive example of what happens when they do. The mythology was thin to begin with. An "ugly-cute" aesthetic and some vague Nordic folklore references didn’t leave much to fall back on when the scarcity mechanics stopped working. Pop Mart had the chance to build something else. Story and content behind the characters. Museum-exclusive editions at the Louvre, collaborations with Keith Haring, deep dives into Kasing Lung's original Monsters lore. The ingredients for a world were there. Instead, as Forbes put it, "scarcity reigned; content and connection cooled."

Community is who else cares. The value of a Pokémon card is partially what you can sell it for, but mostly it’s the invisible web of people for whom it also means something. Collectors aren’t just buying objects. They’re buying membership. As Adam Alter, marketing professor at NYU Stern, puts it: “When you own a scarce, fashionable product, you align yourself with an esteemed social group. You’re investing in your social image.” You get both the private knowledge of owning something rare and the public signal of displaying it.

The streetwear world understands something about community that most brands don’t: its members are exquisitely sensitive to authenticity violations. “Once a brand loses exclusivity, people shy away from it,” says Walter Harvin, editor-in-chief of Uncommon magazine. “If it’s a streetwear company it has to have some kind of authenticity, some backstory.” The wrong celebrity endorsement, a perception of being watered down, a restocking decision that feels careless. These aren’t just marketing missteps. They’re betrayals of the community’s identity. You can’t fake your way into being a sought-after brand. Just ask sneaker brands.

The kicks market is cooling significantly in 2026. Jordan 1s that commanded $500-600 premiums in 2023 are now trading near retail. Mike Sykes II at the Business of Fashion is sanguine: “Fashion just generally moves in cycles.” He’s probably right. The community around sneakers is real and durable. What’s cooling is the speculative premium attached to manufactured scarcity. That premium was never the foundation. It was the froth.

Stakes is the third element, and it’s the most underrated. The most durable collectibles exist in a world where something is genuinely on the line: craft, competition, history, meaning. Baseball cards started as a legitimate archive of a sport that mattered. Magic cards were tokens in a game that required genuine skill and strategy. Pokémon cards carried with them the entire emotional weight of a generation’s childhood, and they served Reimann’s ordering function—finite, completable, structurally satisfying. When people collect these things, they’re not just acquiring objects. They’re investing in a world where the stakes are real.

Brands that manufacture collectibility without stakes produce things people want for a moment and discard without guilt.

The “study” Bakery ran in 2021

In March of 2021—thirteen months into a global pandemic, at the precise moment when Reimann’s research suggests people most acutely turn to collections as a source of order—Bakery launched a card game.

We called it Brandia: Heroes of Marketing. It had a fantasy theme like Magic: The Gathering and had a battle component, but had unique game rules we developed. Each of 52 cards featured a real marketing leader, illustrated in fantasy garb—mind you, this is before AI and each was hand-painted—with stats and abilities. The cards were released as a physical pack in a leather-bound case containing brass coins necessary to battle opponents with. We also created a limited-run of NFTs—hey, it was 2021, ok?—with proceeds going automatically to each featured leader’s chosen charity.

We built an algorithm to select the 52 honorees based on risk-taking and innovation across channels. Super Bowl spots alone scored low, mastering TikTok scored higher. We did it because we wanted to celebrate the people who actually push the industry forward.

We knew we were having fun and celebrating our industry while doing it.

What we didn’t fully know was that we were also running an experiment in what makes collectibles work.

Brandia had story: the game existed inside a genuine mythology about who deserves to be celebrated in marketing, and why. The algorithm wasn’t arbitrary. It reflected a real point of view about what good work looks like and the marketers who consistently find themselves behind it. Each card was a position, an argument. The collection had a logic that said: these 52 people, and not any others, and here is why.

It had community: the 52 honorees each had real audiences who cared about them, who now had a physical object that encoded their hero status. When Matt Pechman, then-CMO of Shiner Beer, described a participation-trophy “best of” list being turned on its head, he was naming exactly the feeling a great collectible creates: this thing is different. This thing actually means something. The community around Brandia wasn’t manufactured. It was inherited from the real relationships, real reputations, and real followings of the people on the cards.

It had stakes: charitable proceeds weren’t a marketing footnote. They were the mechanism. Every transaction did something real in the world. Every resale triggered another donation. The cards carried the weight of causes people cared about, which meant collecting them was also an act of doing something good. That changes the valence of ownership in a way that manufactured scarcity never can.

And it had one more thing that most brand collectibles lack: it was a real game. You could play Brandia. The objects had utility. They lived in a tradition with all the cultural gravity that tradition carries, which made collecting feel natural and serious rather than manufactured and temporary.

We launched it in a moment of collective disorder, built it on real people and real stakes, and it held together because the foundations were real. We didn’t create it out of strategy, but out of instinct. But looking back at the research—Reimann on order-seeking, Csikszentmihalyi on identity objects, the Labubu implosion, the sneaker market cooling—it turns out instinct was pointing at something true. Something that stayed with us and informs much of what we do today.

What brands should take from this

The global collectibles market is worth more than $400 billion. People are not running out of appetite for things worth owning.

But the appetite isn’t for objects. It’s for meaning, community, and stakes, with objects being just the vessels. More precisely, the appetite is for structure, for the satisfying sense of order that a well-designed collection provides when the world feels uncertain. People collect things that help them make sense of where they are.

The brands that crack collectibility in the next decade won’t start with a product and manufacture scarcity around it. They’ll start with a world that people want to live in and find objects that carry that world’s weight. They’ll build community infrastructure, not just community aesthetics. They’ll put something real on the line, not just a limited run number.

A card that belongs to a world worth belonging to. A sneaker that represents something about your personal experiences. A print that documents an event that will long live in your memory.

The $420,000 Charizard isn’t irrational. It’s a completely logical response to an object that contains a world, belongs to a community, and provides—for the person who owns it—a small but genuine form of order in an uncertain one.

The question brands need to ask isn’t “how do we make this scarce?”

It’s “how do we make this matter?”

(Except NFTs. You can’t make those matter.)

In February 2026, a seven-month-old Japanese macaque named Punch became one of the most talked-about beings on the internet. He’d been rejected by his mother at birth, given a stuffed orangutan by his zookeepers as a surrogate, and filmed wandering the edges of his enclosure alone, clutching the toy to his chest while older monkeys chased and cornered him.

People didn’t just think Punch was cute. They saw themselves in him. The loneliness. The clinging to whatever small comfort is available. The trying to belong somewhere that keeps pushing you out. In the middle of an exhausting news cycle and the general weight of being alive right now, this tiny, vulnerable creature became the best thing on anyone’s feed. #Punch hit 2.8 million posts. The zoo’s monthly visitors doubled. No campaign. No press release. Just a baby monkey with a stuffed toy, doing what the best cultural moments do: giving people permission to feel something.

And then the brands showed up.

Within days, dozens of companies were posting Punch-themed content. Haldiram’s. Flipkart. Delhi Police. Netflix India. Urban Monkey. Max Fashion. All racing to attach themselves to the moment. Solidarity graphics. Pun-based creatives. Logo placements next to a motherless animal clinging to a plush toy for survival.

The whole point of Punch was the interruption. A moment of raw, unsponsored tenderness cutting through the noise of everything trying to sell you something. And here was everything trying to sell you something, interrupting the interruption.

One brand had a legitimate reason to be there: IKEA. Their DJUNGELSKOG plush orangutan was the actual toy Punch was holding. The connection wasn’t being manufactured. It was as real as it could get. IKEA nudged it forward by renaming the toy “Mamá de Punch,” donated it to the zoo, and let the story do the rest. It worked because it didn’t feel like marketing.

Everybody else was performing in proximity to a feeling they didn’t earn.

But this is what “showing up in culture” actually looks like for most brands. Not participation. Intrusion. And the audience can always, always tell the difference.

It’s the culture trap most of the industry is stuck in it.

The word nobody can define

“Culture” has become the most prestigious, least specific word in marketing. It gets dropped in briefs, decks, and keynote speeches like a trump card. We need to show up in culture. We need to be culturally relevant. We need to create culture.

Look, at Bakery we’ve been guilty of saying all those things plenty of times.

But what does it actually mean?

At its most honest, culture is just the water everyone’s already swimming in. It’s the collective set of behaviors, references, aesthetics, and conversations that a group of people share at a given moment. It moves fast. It doesn’t ask permission. And it certainly doesn’t wait for a brand’s legal team to approve a tweet.

When marketers say they want to “participate in culture,” what they usually mean is: we want to react to whatever’s trending and hope some of the attention rubs off on us. This is a reflex, not a strategy. And the data on how well it works is not encouraging.

Kantar research shows that a brand’s involvement in culture accounts for roughly a quarter of purchase decisions. Yeah, that number gets conveniently cited a lot. What gets cited less is the asterisk: that figure describes brands people already perceive as culturally embedded, not brands that jumped on a viral moment last Tuesday. There’s a difference between being part of a culture and commenting on a culture. It’s the difference between the person telling the joke and the person in the back going, “Ha, that’s so me.”

Culture is a guest pass. Cult is a membership.

Here’s the distinction that changes everything: culture is horizontal. It spreads wide, moves fast, and belongs to nobody. Cult is vertical. It goes deep, compounds over time, and belongs to the ones that built it.

A brand-chasing culture is trying to insert itself into someone else’s story. A brand building a cult is writing its own.

Consider the difference between two skincare brands. One sees that “skin cycling” is trending on TikTok and rushes to produce content about it. Posts a reel. Gets moderate engagement. The trend passes. The brand moves on to the next thing. Nothing was built. Nothing was remembered.

Then look at CeraVe. In 2024, CeraVe didn’t chase a trend. They manufactured a conspiracy theory. They cast Michael Cera, a man with zero skincare credibility, at the center of a campaign that asked: what if Michael Cera was CeraVe? The idea was absurd. It was also grounded in something real: CeraVe is developed with dermatologists, not celebrities. By weaponizing the celebrity skincare playbook against itself, they turned showmanship into doctrine.

The result: 32 billion impressions in four weeks. CeraVe’s highest sales week on record. A 2.4x increase in category engagement during the Super Bowl period. And in System1’s effectiveness research, the campaign was classified as a “Cult Hit,” one of the most desirable quadrants in their Advertising Planning Matrix.

CeraVe didn’t participate in culture. They created a belief system, dramatized it with conviction, and let people choose to join.

Bakery did something similar with Tree Hut.

By 2024, Tree Hut’s TikTok community was already doing something strange and beautiful: fans were opening tubs of body scrub, scooping out the colorful product, and stretching it vertically like pulling cheese from a pizza. They called it the Goop Pull. Nobody asked them to do it. Nobody paid them. It was a ritual that had invented itself.

Most brands would have “leaned into” this. Made a hashtag. Run some creator briefs. Moved on.

Bakery traced the actual angles of the best Goop Pulls from TikTok screengrabs and used them to redesign the brand’s logo. Not a campaign asset. The logo. The lines fans were already making with their hands became the lines of the wordmark, which became the visual system across an 800-SKU relaunch. Then the brand cast 30 of its most devoted community members in a Super Bowl commercial.

The fans didn’t just influence the marketing. They became the brand architecture.

That’s not culture-chasing. That’s cult infrastructure. Taking an organic ritual, recognizing it as doctrine, and building the entire brand expression around it. The result: Tree Hut is now the number one body scrub at Target, Ulta, and Walmart, outperforming brands with exponentially more budget and decades more heritage.

What a cult actually is (and isn’t)

Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about manipulation, coercion, or anything sinister. We’re borrowing the structure, not the ethics.

A cult, in the brand sense, has five components. Every brand that inspires disproportionate loyalty and irrational preference has most or all of them:

Doctrine. A point of view so specific it repels some people. Not a mission statement. Not a purpose platitude. An actual belief about how things should be, stated clearly enough that people can disagree with it. Trader Joe’s believes grocery shopping should feel like an adventure, not a chore. Liquid Death believes water should have all the energy of a beer brand. Patagonia believes you shouldn’t buy their jacket if you don’t need it. These are not positions everyone would take. That’s the point.

Rituals. Repeatable behaviors the brand creates and owns. The Trader Joe’s treasure hunt for seasonal products. The Duolingo streak. The Erewhon smoothie of the month. Rituals turn customers into participants. They give people something to do with the brand, not just something to buy from it.

Symbols. Distinctive brand assets deployed with obsessive consistency. The Liquid Death tallboy can. Duolingo’s owl. The GEICO gecko. System1’s research on Compound Creativity shows that brands with consistent creative foundations see a 96% lift in distinctiveness and a 72% lift in differentiation compared to inconsistent brands. Symbols don’t just look good. They compound.

Commitment. The willingness to stay the course when everyone else pivots. Yorkshire Tea ran the same creative platform for over seven years, keeping TV ads live for an average of 700+ days each. The result was a 15% annual increase in ad distinctiveness, ultimately making them the UK’s number one tea brand by value while maintaining a price premium. As their agency put it: “Proper brand-building takes time. Putting the same message out there again and again, in the same way.” This is the opposite of how most marketing departments operate. That’s why it works.

Community. No, not a Facebook group or a Discord server, necessarily. The feeling of belonging that comes from shared belief. When someone carries a Yeti cooler or wears an Arc’teryx jacket or orders Kith’s latest collaboration, they’re signaling membership. They’re saying: I’m one of these people. Rory Sutherland calls this “costly signaling,” the principle from evolutionary biology that the meaning of a signal is proportional to what it costs to send. Wearing the logo is the signal. Paying the premium is the cost. The combination is the belonging.

The evidence is annoyingly clear

You’d expect a piece like this to lean on vibes and brand-love rhetoric. But the data is actually quite stark.

The Effie/System1 Creative Dividend research analyzed over 1,200 award-winning campaigns across the US, UK, and Europe. They found that “Cult Hit” brands, those with strong creative quality even at lower media spend, report market share gains at 41%. That’s nearly identical to “Growth Engine” brands (43%) who have both strong creative and heavy media support. And it dramatically outperforms “Paid Noise” (33%) and “Busy Work” (32%), which are the quadrants where most “culture-chasing” brands end up.

The consistency data is even more compelling. Brands in the top 25% for creative consistency report a 110% lift in brand distinctiveness and a 50% lift in differentiation compared to the bottom quartile. Trust, which has risen from the 7th to the 4th most important brand effect for business results over the past decade, shows the starkest gap of all: zero campaigns from low-consistency brands reported trust gains. Not low gains. ZERO!

This is what cult-building looks like in a spreadsheet. Commitment compounds. Consistency builds trust. Trust drives commercial results. And none of it requires a cultural moment.

Why culture-chasing fails (structurally, not just creatively)

The problem with chasing culture isn’t just that it produces cringe content, though it does. The problem is structural.

Culture moves on a different clock than brands. A cultural moment has a half-life of days, sometimes hours. Brand memory structures take years to build. When you orient your entire marketing calendar around reacting to culture, you’re optimizing for a time horizon that’s fundamentally incompatible with how brands actually grow.

Every time a brand pivots to chase a new moment, it resets. New message, new tone, new visual language. The audience has to re-learn what this brand is. And research shows they mostly don’t bother. The Creative Dividend data found that brands with multiple creative team changes see their advertising become less emotional and less distinctive over time. Every pivot is a tax on memory.

One thing cults aren’t known to do is pivot.

In his book One Plus One Equals Three, Dave Trott tells the story of Burberry, which once had a genuine cult following. Then management began licensing the brand indiscriminately: 23 separate licensing deals across the world. The Burberry check appeared on baseball caps, dog collars, baby clothes. It became a punch line. Angela Ahrendts, brought in to fix the damage, spent millions buying back every one of those licenses. Because as Trott puts it, “Part of the value of a premium brand is perceived exclusivity. If everyone has it, it isn’t exclusive.”

Burberry had a cult. They traded it for cultural ubiquity. It nearly destroyed the brand.

Empty culture-chasing, now at machine speed

If culture-chasing was already a losing strategy, AI is about to make it worse.

The bottleneck used to be production. By the time a brand noticed a moment, briefed a team, got approvals, and published something, the moment had often passed. That lag was frustrating for marketers. It was also, quietly, a mercy. The slowness of the process filtered out the worst impulses. Not all of them. But enough.

That filter is gone now.

With generative AI, any brand can produce a visual, write a caption, and publish a response to a trending topic in minutes. The time between “this is trending” and “we posted about it” has collapsed to nearly zero. Which means the question is no longer can we show up in this conversation, because everyone can. It’s now, and always has been, should we. And the honest answer, for most brands in most moments, is no.

The brands that struggled to be culturally relevant when it took three days and a creative team are not going to become culturally relevant because they can now do it in three minutes. Speed doesn’t fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that they have nothing original to say and no cultural permission to say it. AI just lets them say nothing faster, more often, and at scale. Fun!

Forget, for a moment, about how according to Interactive Advertising Bureau, 52% of Millennials and Gen Z consumers are either undecided or skeptical about AI-generated advertising. The real danger of AI-powered culture-chasing isn’t only that it produces bad, untrustworthy content. It’s that it trains organizations to believe that speed of reaction is the same as relevance. That proximity to a moment is the same as earning a place in it. Every AI-generated trend-jack that gets posted reinforces the habit of reaching outward for borrowed meaning instead of building something worth reaching toward.

The brands with a cult don’t need to move fast. They’ve already built the thing people are looking for.

The cult-building question

So here’s the reframe. Instead of asking “how do we show up in culture?” start asking different questions:

What do we believe that our competitors don’t? Not what you sell that they don’t. What you believe. Doctrine starts with conviction, not differentiation.

What would our most devoted customers do even if nobody was watching? That’s your ritual. Not the behavior you’d like them to adopt. The one they’re already doing, or would do if you gave them the structure.

What can someone recognize about us in two seconds without reading a word? That’s your symbol. If the answer is “our logo,” you haven’t built distinctive assets. You’ve built a stamp.

What have we been believing long enough that it's starting to compound? If the answer requires a scroll through last year's brief to remember, that's the problem. Campaigns can, and perhaps should, change. The belief underneath them shouldn't.

Who are our people, and how do they find each other? Community isn't a channel you launch. It's what happens when people who share a belief discover they're not alone. The brand's job is to create the ingredients for that discovery: the visual shorthand, the inside language, the rituals that only make sense if you're already in. Liquid Death didn't poll metalheads about boring water. Duolingo didn't assign streaks as homework. Tree Hut didn't recruit Goop Pull creators. They seeded the outlines of a structure and made the belief recognizable enough that like-minded obsessives could find each other on their own.

The uncomfortable truth about “creating culture”

Here’s the part nobody in the industry wants to hear: most brands cannot create culture. Creating culture requires the kind of influence, originality, and timing that can’t be bought, planned, or guaranteed.

But building a cult? That’s craft. It’s plannable. It’s measurable. It compounds.

Going back to IKEA, Punch the Monkey wasn’t the first time the brand stumbled into a cultural moment it didn’t engineer. In 2017, Balenciaga released a $2,145 tote bag that was, unmistakably, a blue IKEA FRAKTA bag. The internet noticed immediately. IKEA responded with a print ad explaining how to identify an “original” IKEA bag (price tag: $0.99). The moment was effortless. It was also decades in the making.

IKEA didn’t get lucky twice. They’d been building the cult for 40 years. They’d made themselves so synonymous with affordable, democratic, well-designed home life that when a baby monkey in Japan needed comfort, it was an IKEA toy in his arms. When a luxury house wanted to signal ironic accessibility, it was an IKEA bag they reached for. The brand didn’t chase either of those moments. The moments chased the brand.

That’s what happens when you’ve been relentlessly clear about who you are for long enough. You stop needing to insert yourself into the conversation. The conversation comes to you.

You define what you believe. You build the rituals and symbols that express it. You commit to saying the same thing, in the same distinctive way, for longer than feels comfortable. And you let the people who share your belief find each other.

That’s not a cultural strategy. It’s a belief system with a business model.

Now. Who’s ready to slice open their palm first?

👋 ok, bye now.

1. Dressed to the Nineties

The Coachella uniform has changed. Not dramatically, not overnight, but noticeably enough that it’s worth paying attention to.

Low-rise jeans. Bikini tops. Hoodies tied around the waist. The general vibe was less “styled for the grid” and more “dressed for a long, hot day where I might actually want to enjoy myself.” Puffy pirate shirts and ponchos showed up as the statement pieces. Not because they photograph well on a ring light, but because they look good and you can survive 14 hours in the sun wearing them.

Something is shifting in the relationship between getting dressed and getting seen. Whether the selfie is actually becoming less important than the experience is debatable. But the outfit calculus is changing. People are optimizing for how they feel at hour nine, not how they look at hour one.

@gapFunny how that works.   #GapCoachella #GapHoodie

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Brand shoutout: Gap’s investment in their activation was clearly well-researched. There were a lot of their hoodies bopping and bobbing around. Their moment is clearly real and they’re at the places they should be. Smart.

2. More Youth, Less Swoosh.

Here’s one that screamed at us: Nike was seriously underrepresented at Coachella this year. Especially on younger attendees.

What sneakers were covering sweaty feet instead? Converse. Hoka. Vans. A surprising amount of Gola, Golden Goose, and Coolway. Even Skechers had a visible presence, though some of that was clearly seeded. (They sent shoes to a wave of influencers before the festival. It worked well enough that we’re now watching for a broader Skechers moment, should that be a possibility.)

This isn’t a “Nike is dead” story. It’s more interesting than that. It’s a story about what happens when the biggest brand in a category starts reading as the default instead of the choice. When everyone owns Dunks, Dunks stop saying anything about the person wearing them. The brands that showed up strongest were either comfort-first (Hoka, Skechers) or personality-first (Gola, Golden Goose). Both are more specific than Nike right now. And specificity is what people reach for when they’re trying to signal who they actually are.

Beyond sneakers, tall boots were everywhere. The generational split was clear: Gen Z went moto, millennials went Western. Both camps committed to the bit in 90-degree heat. Ouch!

3. The Brand Takeover Was Real. And It Worked.

The sheer volume of brand activations this year was staggering. Gap, Khloud, 818, Coke, Absolut, Soho House. The investment was visible and unapologetic. But the interesting part wasn’t the scale. It was the range of how brands chose to show up.

Pinterest earned a lot of love from younger crowds by building a phone-free experience. In a world where every brand activation is designed to be posted, Pinterest built one designed to be felt. That’s a counterintuitive flex from a platform that literally exists to collect and share images.

And the brand footprint didn’t stop at the festival grounds. Off-site activations drew lines of people who didn’t even have festival tickets. Rhode World was invite-only and a genuine hike from the main event, but it was still one of the most talked-about and most coveted destinations of the weekend. When people are willing to trek through the desert to visit your pop-up, you can feel good about what you’re building up-funnel.

The takeaway for anyone paying attention: Coachella isn’t just a music festival with brands attached anymore. It’s becoming a brand experience festival with music attached. The companies that understood that distinction were the ones people actually wanted to spend time with.

Few things are more gloriously hilarious, naturally ridiculous, and ultimately, real.

A person singing in their car at a red light. Eyes closed on the high note. Then they see you. Then they become someone else entirely.

Farts. Funny in 1900 BC Sumeria. Funny right now. Four thousand years of civilization and we still can't keep it together in the face of flatulence.

Armpit hair. Just there. Doing what? Who the hell knows.

Someone slipping on ice. Henri Bergson wrote a whole philosophy about why this is funny. The philosophy is less funny than watching someone slipping.

All of this is real. All of it is natural. All, ungovernable. The reason it’s funny is the same reason it’s important: you can’t control any of it. There’s great comedy in the surrender of being a human on Earth.

We are, every single one of us, absurd. We’ve tripped on our own feet. We’ve pushed doors that said pull. We’ve said "you too" when someone said happy birthday. We’ve all checked behind the shower curtain for the invisible murderer. We are weird, goofy beings who do unhinged, clownish things.

I mean, milk, am I right? Someone looked at a cow; a big, wet-nosed, thousand-pound animal just standing in a field. They looked at the udders. Dangling…glistening. Their next thought?

I’m going in.

Worse, they convinced other people to do the same. And they just... agreed. Then we put it in every refrigerator on the planet. We put it in coffee. We give it to children. We made cheese, which is somehow even weirder. Definitely one we’ll need to explain when the aliens show up.

It doesn’t matter if you’re as brainy as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as elegant as Anne Hathaway, or as athletic as LeBron James. You’re a goober and so are they.

I mean, you, right now, a grown adult, still spell “Wednesday” as Wed-nes-day in your head. Every time, you silly bastard.

This is the raw material of being a person.

And corporations, and the brands that need to relate to people, won’t touch it.

Not because they don’t get the joke. Because the joke requires giving up control. And a brand that has spent $40 million on consistency guidelines, legal review, and a 47-person approval chain cannot, by definition, surrender to anything.

That’s the tragedy. The funniest, most magnetic brands have always been the ones that figured out how to let go just enough. To leave a rough edge. To admit that life is ridiculous. They know it. They know you know it. And they let that be the common thread.

Most brands would rather be forgettable than undignified. Their board of MBAs prefer remaining safe, predictable, and invisible. They'd choose to say nothing over risking looking silly. And that is the silliest thing of all.

So, as strange, awkward and dopey as you may be, you'll never be as asinine as a brand that spent millions trying not to be.

Stay dumb and fun, everyone. 👋

A car is the second most expensive thing most people will ever buy. More expensive than a college education. More expensive than a wedding. More than most people have in their savings account.

And yet, somewhere in the last decade, the car industry decided this purchase should feel like choosing a dishwasher.

The blandification is real. Walk through any parking lot in America and try to tell a Hyundai from a Honda from a Toyota from a Kia without squinting at the badge. Most can’t. Aerodynamics, crash regulations, and a fatal case of groupthink have smoothed every edge off every vehicle on the road. It’s Jim Carrol’s wind-tunnel theory come to life: when every car is optimized for the same variables, every car converges on the same shape. The same smooth crossover. The same floating tablet on the dash. The same featureless interior where physical buttons used to live.

The shift to electric only accelerated the problem. Not because electric is bad. Electric is and probably should be the future. But the industry used electrification as an excuse to strip away everything else that made a car feel like something. The powertrain changed, and the personality went with it.

No buttons. No character. No soul.

No tension between what a car is and what it wants to be.

And then there’s the advertising.

Every Car Ad Is the Same Ad

You’ve seen it. A car drives down a winding mountain road. Or through a rain-slicked downtown. Maybe a horse runs alongside it or a bull stares at it from a nearby field. A voiceover says something about “the road ahead” or “redefining what’s possible.” A logo appears. You forget it immediately.

It’s almost as if car brands had access to ChatGPT before the rest of us. Automotive advertising has become a category of mutual plagiarism. Everyone is referencing everyone else’s work, and no one is referencing anything real. The result is a $35 billion annual US ad spend that produces almost nothing memorable. According to System1 research across 1,265 Effie-winning campaigns, automotive ads sit at 41% neutrality. Not the worst category. Just... the most mediocre. The most “fine.”

And mediocrity is expensive. The same research shows that the most emotionally neutral campaigns deliver 40% lower ROI than ads that make people feel something. The car industry isn’t just boring. It’s paying a premium to be boring.

Meanwhile, On the Track

Here’s what makes this genuinely strange: people have never cared more about cars as cultural objects.

Formula 1 went from a niche European sport to a global cultural phenomenon. Netflix turned it into a soap opera with 200mph set pieces and 20 protagonists with jawlines and rivalries, and now it’s one of the fastest-growing sports properties on the planet. NASCAR, long dismissed as a flyover-country relic, is pulling in Michael Jordan, coastal lifestyle brands, and a younger, more diverse audience than anyone expected. Motorsport is having a full-blown cultural renaissance.

The audience is right there, telling the industry exactly what they want. They want drama. They want identity. They want to care about what a car means, not just what it does.

And the industry is handing them a silent crossover with a 15-inch touchscreen and a subscription-based heated seat.

The Exceptions Are the Proof

Not everyone took the blandification pill. A handful of brands looked at the same landscape and made a different choice.

Slate is building an EV that actually feels like something old and new all at the same time. Their Truck ships with crank windows, no touchscreen, and an analog dash. Starting around $20,000. While every EV startup tries to out-Tesla Tesla, Slate went the other direction: the vehicle is a platform, not a finished product. Over 100 planned accessories, open-sourced designs, a full SUV conversion kit. Physical knobs instead of touch menus. A body that doesn't dent and invites you to make it yours. In a category adding complexity, Slate is the only brand subtracting it.

Cadillac didn't just sponsor an F1 team. They said screw the media buy and muscled their way onto the grid, becoming only the 11th constructor in modern F1. It says: we are the kind of company that doesn’t belong here, but Kool-Aid Man’s their way in anyway. What can be more American than that. At a time when most legacy automakers are running from anything that feels risky, Cadillac placed a massive bet and drove toward the most culturally charged motorsport in the world.

Toyota’s GR GT3 is a bet on driver emotion when the rest of the industry is betting on autonomy and screens. The Gazoo Racing program is Toyota saying, out loud, that driving should still be an act of joy, not a supervised commute. In a category full of brands trying to out-quiet each other, Toyota is making something loud on purpose.

Mazda’s rotary sports car might be the most irrational decision on this list. Rotary engines are impractical. They’re inefficient. They’re also beloved by a specific, obsessive community of people. And they will love Mazda forever for doing this. Nothing about that is engineering logic. That’s exclusively brand logic. It’s the automotive equivalent of a band reuniting to play the album their fans never stopped asking for.

Four brands. Four different plays. One shared instinct: be interesting or be invisible.

What a Comeback Looks Like

The frustrating part is that automotive brands knew how to do this well. They’ve seemingly just forgotten.

BMW knew it in 2001 when they hired real film directors to make The Hire, a series of short films starring Clive Owen that treated a car like a character in a thriller, not a product in a commercial. It was Wick before Wick and content before “content” was a word the industry knew and overused.

Honda and Wieden+Kennedy knew it in 2014 when The Other Side let you toggle between two parallel stories by pressing a single key, turning a Honda Civic into two completely different cars depending on which version of the driver you chose to follow.

Audi knew it in 2019 when they cast a cashew in a Super Bowl spot, made you care about it, then pulled the rug out from under you. (Strangely, the whole ad can be interpreted as a one-minute argument for this entire Substack piece.)

Jeep knew it in 2020 when they put Bill Murray back in Groundhog Day, repeating the same day with a different adventure behind the wheel each time.

These weren’t just good ads. They were proof that car brands can make culture, not just buy media.

And it’s not only about film. The experience design space is wide open. Imagine a Waymo or robotaxi offering curated Halloween tours through your city, narrated by Jenna Ortega or the hosts of My Favorite Murder or the AI-reconstructed voice of Vincent Price.

Imagine 100% safe test-drive popup events built entirely on sim rigs, where anyone can drive a brand’s entire lineup on a virtual Nürburgring and take home video of their best lap. These aren’t fantasies. They’re business models waiting to happen.

The tools, the audience, and the cultural moment are all right there. The only missing ingredient is the decision to be interesting.

The Choice

Cars are identity products. They always have been. Your first car was a story. Your parents’ car was a worldview. The car you drive now says something about you, whether you want it to or not.

The brands that remember this will win. Not because they have the best range or the fastest charging network or the most aerodynamic silhouette, but because they’ll be the ones people actually want to be seen in.

The rest will become appliances.