Brands
Distinctive assets, provenance, creativity and the weekly shop: what still earns the right into the basket when everything else is automated.
Brands
+1
Oct 5, 2026
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6 min read
Two Strangers, Twenty Years.
This week in 2006, Dove put a 75-second film called "Evolution" on the internet, and Google agreed to buy YouTube. The two never met.
AI
+1
Jul 23, 2026
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6 min read
The Truth Harvest
What a day in a pea harvester teaches about the one asset AI cannot copy
AI
+1
Jun 2, 2026
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5 min read
The Croisette Test
Three questions to ask any vendor selling "agentic AI" in a cabana at Cannes
AI
+1
Mar 23, 2026
•
6 min read
The Taste Test
Three precise reasons AI cannot originate creative work that matters, from someone who can only tell
AI
+1
Feb 24, 2026
•
6 min read
Megaphones and Mirrors
A correction to my Unilever critique: influencer marketing is an infrastructure problem, not a format problem
AI
+1
Jan 28, 2026
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4 min read
Be The Corner Store, Again.
The price of scale is closeness. What AI's adolescence means for how we choose to use it.
Brands
+1
Nov 5, 2025
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4 min read
Google Learns to Love
Pomelli and Canva Grow build brand understanding into the platform before they optimise. Agencies' third line of defence just got thinner.
Brands
+1
Nov 3, 2025
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4 min read
Creativity is Killing DDB
Omnicom retiring DDB isn't the death of creativity. Instead it's creativity's natural selection, and your agencies are next in line to be tested
Brands
+1
May 27, 2025
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3 min read
The Leffie: The Problem with the Industry's Rarest Award
Work that wins both a Lion and an Effie is vanishingly rare with one clear double-gold in a year and that scarcity is creativity's effectiveness crisis in plain sight
Brands
+1
May 1, 2025
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6 min read
Why Unilever's All-In Influencer Bet is Wrong.
Fernandez's premise that big brands are "by default suspicious" gets trust backwards and 50% of the budget on influencers looks past the AI-mediated future
AI
+1
Mar 20, 2025
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5 min read
No Longer an Empty Chair
AI isn't making marketing less human, it can put a consumer voice in Bezos's empty chair and give marketers back their job as the consumer's champion
