I have seen so many “learnings” posts and recaps from Cannes I am afraid that any posts about it are turning into a… counter signal? How many people who weren’t there… truly care about the insights specific to the show? You hear this with Coachella, but people still consume the content because it’s timely, there’s drama, people are hot and wearing insane outfits and there’s an element of lifestyle and fame. But Cannes Lions… Is perhaps too niche for the amount of posts about it this year.

I debated not writing about it, but decided instead to focus less on the show and more on the value. To start, I’ll talk about it deeper when we have the edited videos back, but the house I hosted with Darkroom was a huge success.

10 creators living under one roof, packed panels on real modern marketing issues (how organic and paid are becoming closer together, how to build a marketing org chart in the AI era), 500 people in and out of our CPG Garden on Tuesday.

This year my biggest goal as a creator was more community, particularly IRL and after our tour earlier this year and now Cannes, I’m feeling great about it. LA, we’ve got something brewing for you this fall next, and if any of you are in South Korea, I’m considering a meetup there as well, get in touch!

In this week’s HYPER we touch on

• my passionate dissertation any big company and agency readers to move away from what I’ll call “crony marketing” that old Cannes represents and embrace quantifiable modern practices that tie your marketing more directly to dollars, emails and internet resonance

• agentic storefronts and the latest rollout from our friends at Swap

• the art direction of French luxury

Let’s begin.

Virtual Try On & Agentic Storefronts

This segment is in partnership with Swap

So last week we saw one of the most interesting ecom launches I can remember.

WILLY CHAVARRIA and Adidas dropped their World Cup collection exclusively on an agentic storefront (powered by Swap)… and it 2x’d their biggest ecomm sales day ever on launch.

I watched my friend Ashwinn virtually try on the clothes via the site, and immediately felt like the future was here. Shoppers land and an agent guides them through discovery, fit, virtual try-on, and checkout in one flow. This is the drop: https://www.swap-commerce.com/willy-chavarria-agentic-storefront

I love talking about Swap Storefront because its an AI win that CMO’s and marketing leaders can present to leadership with real data. Across the 20+ brands implementing on-platform Swap is tracking: 2x conversion rates, 3x time on site, 20% fewer returns.

For virtual try-on specifically: 58% of sessions end in add-to-cart, with 20% converting to purchase. LFG.

If you’re running a brand and want to understand what’s possible: swap-commerce.com/book-a-demo

Crony marketing

There is a certain type of marketing leader, and team that really resists quantification, especially in big legacy brands.

They understand that as long as they do some things, there’s some degree of marketing effort, everything’s just gonna… kinda work. They either focus on easily achievable metrics that don’t really matter that are easy to put on a slide, or the adjustments of the tactics, like an expanded media by in the Southeast.

They’ve resisted the era we’re in now where you can really stack meta, google, youtube, tiktok, snap, applovin, connected TV plus creator, plus events, plus email, geo-based retargetting, and basically build a quantifiable, scalable machine that’s ultra effective but… hard.

And Cannes in particular is always a good reminder to me, of why some are so resistant to change.

First the agencies. A lot of agencies get inventory from media partners they are responsible for packaging and selling to their clients there’s deals cut around this and a lot of that inventory sucks, it drives terrible result comparative to above, but theres a huge economy around providing it.

Then multiply that by the illusion of familiarity, gets ads on websites or publications people know wasn’t a bad idea in the past. But now, the state of banner ads, interstitials, AI traffic being counted as real, and buying anything from traditional media online becomes a terrible buy.

And then of course, the cronyism something like Cannes embodies: buy enough inventory you get VIP to the concert, you’re on the yacht, the dinners continue, of course we’ll work that in the media budget, this is sales 101.

But there’s a divide now, the future is squarely here and it plays out in the South of France.

I hosted a panel with Manychat, WisprFlow and Dara Denney on how organic and paid media work hand in hand and everyone was adamant to the crowd watching to maintain 30% or MORE whitelisted ads from creators and other accounts for scaling efficacy.

I talking on a panel with McDonalds and Unilever (two of the savviest big brand powerhouses when it comes to modern marketing) where they were talking about the power of local, storytelling driven initiatives by region, that then scale up when they acquire organic attention.

This is for software, ecommerce, services. If you’re on the retargetting yacht getting sold a bill of goods, and the future is happening right next to you, it gets awkward.

And what happens is, they get exposed. Darkroom, who hosted our house, thrives on this. Every month more and more massive brands around the globe go “our old agency is not giving us modern methods and quantifiable analytics” and Darkroom, and closes them. It is a shifting of resources from the old guard to the new guard that can actually speak their language versus just pitching the “we connect brands and creators” offer that I heard 1000 times.

But right now the biggest opportunity for anyone in this space is the comms gap with elder marketing leadership brand side and agency side. I was at a TikTok party where an agency owner admitted I was the first creator they ever talked to IRL.

I met an agency with Youtube as a client who I was their first Youtube they talked to. These are not exaggerations, in fact these people weren’t even ashamed of it, they just exist at a different place on the adoption curve and their clients have done… fine without needing to embrace the tactics disruptors are using to break out.

We are existing in parallel world, and someone or something needs to brings them together.

And my tone on this in writing, content and in person has always been a little inflammatory. I am, frankly, disgusted when brands waste money and at how antiquated many of these methods are, I have made plenty of jokes over time at Havas and Saatchis expense, chastised VP friends for the cursed Puck or Verge media buy they may as well have lit on fire.

But while that was the right tone to position and tell the youth and entrepreneurs what to embrace, its not what gets the old media and agency world to successfully survive the shift, and education is ultimately my goal here, to be on the leading edge of marketing tactics for everyone, to give real playbooks for change.

Step 1

Determine your performance to brand marketing split in budget and time/team allocation, and find alignment on that with leadership and the team itself

• Not every brand can be completely performance dedicated, nor should they be. Is that 90/10 for a lean operating software startup? 50/50 for a brand in mass retail spending tens of millions a month and lost in the chaos theory of marketing?

Step 2

Rally all your services or internal work around North Star metrics that matter

• CAC: customer acquisition cost (measured comparatively to lifetime customer value)

• CPL: Cost to get an email or qualified lead (an excellent metric to immediately improve marketing efficacy is driving campaigns to signups and lead magnets and assigning them a value. I’ll write about an incredible one of these Motion did soon)

• Social intent (saves and shares of influencer, creator and organic content

• Influencer EMV - not perfect but a better goal than impressions or views on other networks

Step 3

• Map out acquisition channel priorities, who is responsible for them, with direct stakeholders for each metric on each platform

• Work back from those metrics to the actions, from outreach, to briefing, to media buying, to approval bottlenecks to make SOPs with as little resistance to action as possible for team members to follow

• Set expectations as to the speed and volume of rollout and measurement (I like to run this on a Daily, Weekly, Monthly priority/metric framework of what is worth measuring and reporting on which of those cadences)

• Anyone or any agency that doesn’t want to be held accountable in this manner, you need to move on from, this is the reality

If you remember anything from any of my newsletters, it should be the push to live and die by quantified modern marketing tactics versus what is easy, lives off relationships or incentives, or is in everyones comfort zone. The lines are clear.

The Art Direction of French Luxury

Ending on a lighter note entering the weekend, my latest Youtube details the art direction tactics of Jacquemus, and how brands use the aesthetics of luxury to build their resonance.

Until next week,
Oren

Everything is overwhelming.

Have you listened to the _____ podcast about how ____ is falling apart?

Midjourney launched MRI’s this morning.

You’re not building an AI app?

Snapchat has $2200 glasses that are completely unwearable.

“The rich are preparing for collapse.” Thanks Prof G.

It’s a Nike commercial but it’s good because it’s from a Safdie.

Clav is hosting mogbattles in Miami.

There’s multiple captions on IG carousels now…

Just a handful of hundreds and hundreds of headlines stretching the human brain every morning till night.

But somehow…

This last week I’ve felt like I’m in a flow state.

The information superhighway of announcements, ads, inquiries, group chats and tasks just sort of melded into a beam of energy that I am riding without fear or consequence. An evolutionary shift where my brain has become used to the information, the pace, it is simply part of the world now, I exist as part of it, at one with the content ether.

It feels like all of this is normal now, and if it isn’t already for you, it will be soon. We are becoming innately skilled at separating chaff from signal, our minds identifying em-dashes to discard, picking out the promoted post and scrolling on. We as a modern society are becoming laser fast at discretion, I think using more of our brain power as humans than ever perhaps surprising ourselves by what technology is enabling for our cognitive abilities.

One focus I’ve had personally this year around content was to overindex on ideas. Every video needs a core concept, with a splinter of smaller thesis around it. The goal is purely for people to share as conversation pieces with their friends they’ve had tangential conversations with. To be a marketer is to gradually realize that you conversations and desires aren’t unique, you are part of a hive mind of similar demographics. Of course every millenial has thought about moving to europe, wondered if the tier 2 city is worth it, asked their spouse how those people you both folow have so much money.

To prompt conversation now, as a friend, a spouse, a creator, a brand, is to identity those topics and add to them. Present a hypothesis, defend it, evolve it. You send a Reel or a TikTok because it makes you feel seen or bring apart a shared moment, but isn’t it better when it sparks a bigger conversation? That human simulation we always want more of, that conversation that goes beyond regurgitating a podcast take or a cursed Atlantic ramble.

As we get good at deciphering these, the bar for creative work gets ever higher. I break it into a framework

• Immediate signal: in a world where we consume so much everything needs to pass an immediate legitimacy test in its method of production and how it’s presented. If you dont understand the medium or use the wrong visual layout that mismatched the typical user experience, you’ve probably already lost

• Sorting validation: everything then quickly gets assigned an identity. Pro or anti-AI, silicon valley or new york adjacent, momtok, gamer. If it applies to you, consumption is comfortable

• Social index: from there, is it important enough to serve as a baseline for something else? a conversation between friends or peers, the inspiration to take action

• The element of interest: is there something special here? better? somehow transcendent in a world of bars that spiral every higher?

Quick housekeeping

Film with us!

We are looking for more brands for the series I host with Hubspot where we spend a day workshopping your funnel! If you’re above 7 figures in revenue and running any degree of paid or organic acquisition in any category... submit here.

Join me at Cannes with Edelman

Wednesday I will be speaking at the Brands & Culture villa at Cannes with Edelman, come discuss a topic I am very passionate about... earned media being wildly undervalued. I’ll be speaking with the CMO of McDonalds LATAM and the Head of Marketing Transformation, Home Care for Unilever, so there will be some diverse perspectives on the topic.

Mystery in the Riviera

One thing that bothered me just slightly about Cannes Lions event promotions last year, was that for an industry celebrating marketing and creativity it was an absolute sea of beach themed flyers. Maybe if we’re lucky a title concept.

So this year, we unveiled our Creator House lineup as one should in the French Riviera, with a noir murder mystery carousel.

Full design here.

Everyone is serious about “experiences” this year, so if that’s the case, whats your standard to fit the index above in the first section? In a world where everyone can design an incredible brand easier than ever with collaboration tools and intention, shouldn’t the standard for everything be a good brand, especially if you participate even tangentially to the “taste economy”.

For our event experience, it started with the brand identity for the Darkroom house and its promotions, and it will go up a notch shortly with the content.

Intellectual Influence is Hitting It’s Stride

I made a joke about intellectual influence in a recent video, with a picture of Dua Lipa, got a number of comments asking what it meant. For the non-terminally online, Dua is a… rather accomplished book influencer. And changing the duality of what poster and influence means in a world that loves and is starving for intellect. Any take contrary to that does not have your best interest in mind, its fear mongering. The people want stimulating conversation.

I’ve embraced this, and my content (short and longform) has been on a bit of a tear.

Boy Internet vs Girl Internet, 1m on IG.

Luxury vs Larping, 1m on IG.

High society is… skipping dinner

What is the perfect house size, or city location, for modern life?

These videos have 100k+ SHARES between them. Conversation starters.

The internet has never been more interested in involved, conversational content as they are now.

They want mini-youtube videos that they can use to start conversations with their friends. We’ve shifted Cut30 quite a bit this year to hone in on this.

They don’t care about anyone’s cute life, their GRWM, its just more noise, maybe you follow a few for mindless thoughts, a relationship you already have, but if you want to tear through the ether with your ideas. This is your time. The internet’s hottest videos are 2-3 minutes long. They’re from urban planners, sociologists, engineers, teachers.

This is the best content moment we’ve ever had.

One of my favorite recent Cut30 success stories is from Var, she got it immediately. Talk about ideas, back them up visually, have a unique point of view, make conversations friends will share, that will intrigue them. She’s sharing carousels of Thoreau and Oscar Wilde.

@var.aunevikThe internet seems to be obsessed with Jonathan Anderson right now, or maybe it's just my algorithm...? But it made me think about why that is. I think we find it intriguing that something so extravagant and out there can come from someone who dresses pretty.... normal. We often think we have to sort of resemble the work we put out, but I would argue it is almost more exciting when you don't. When you are a little unpredictable, so people start to wonder where all that came from

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She started in April. The algorithms wants conversational inspiration from people who take their journey seriously whatever it is.

It is a unique moment in time, don’t miss it.

I’ll be checking in from the Riviera next week, the next Cut30 starts Wednesday, see you in the next edition.

Oren

Last night, hundreds of you joined the June community call where I talked about the creative direction shift: how personal brands need creative direction more than brands.

Brand campaigns now are anchored by personalities: models, influencers, team members, founders.

And now marketers from SaaS to CPG to venture capital are putting personalities at the forefront. They’re running podcasts, they’re promoting their releases on LinkedIn, they’re making videos, they’re hiring creators, they’re hiring UGC, they’re briefing creators for ads.

Level one of this was creative strategy: how do you provide briefs and hooks for advertising?

Level two of this is bringing full creative direction principles to personal brands, small and large.

From the creator who just cracked 100k this year and really wants to be somebody to the multiple executives at companies who are now realizing their LinkedIns and occasional Instagram videos are driving an awful lot of leads.

The term creative director has become very diluted over the last decade.

From people at fashion houses or in agencies to every small brand adopting it, to the intangible person with a mysterious source of income who has it listed on their Instagram but with that comes a genuine change in its consumption.

There are far more creators, founders, and executives who are thinking about the principles of branding, launching, aesthetics, and world-building than there are brands.

It is a radical new market to be able to provide services in and to understand as you navigate a business in any category.

I’m trying something new this week. It’s a Speedrun bootcamp for one week only, $499, designed to serve two demographics.

1. If you have a personal brand and need more systems and feedback to get to the next level ...
   OR

2. if you’re a creative with some writing or creative direction chops and want to learn to offer support to personal brands as a service...

3 live calls, 10+ videos, and extensive worshipping on ideation, and creative direction for personal brands whether you are one or are working for them. We might do it again, we might not, it’s the first of its kinda, come lock in.

Join here.

How to become a one person marketing machine

The one-person marketing operator was talked about as viral bit around Claude’s one person growth team a few months ago… but in the modern era you’d be quite surprised how effective one person or a small team could be

Whether you’re running your own business or trying to be indispensable inside someone else’s, the playbook is the same: ruthless prioritization around the things that actually move revenue.

Here’s how to structure a week if you’re a lean marketing operator:

1. New creative (8 hrs) Ideation, briefing creators, recruiting UGC talent, assigning and following up. This is the engine. If this isn’t running, nothing else matters.

2. Performance & funnel (4 hrs) Load new creative into ads, read analytics, make notes. Don’t spend more time than this in ads manager. Meta first, then Google, then TikTok for physical products. If you’re a services business, YouTube ads are worth a look.

3. Landing pages & email (4 hrs) Match your pages to whatever messages are working. Broadcast emails, automations, abandoned cart. This is where the revenue lives between campaigns.

4. Influencer & creators (full day) Outreach, contracts, scheduling, tracking. This is its own job and should eventually become one. Until then, treat it like a discipline, not an afterthought.

5. Logistics (8 hrs across the week) Emails, follow-ups, the stuff that keeps everything above from falling apart.

That’s roughly 4.5 working days. Fill the rest with more content.

I break all of this down in-depth, on whiteboard in the video.

Lock in.

The Grid & Learning Design

In a world drowning in AI-generated sameness, we’ve all heard that “taste is the differentiator.” But I feel taste is really about understanding the foundations that built the world around us and trying it for ourselves; taste is developed by understanding what makes things work, and then making the edit that makes your work unmistakably yours.

But where to start, and gain inspiration?

I wrote about the grid, Swiss design, and using the principles of layout in the modern world here.

When we talk about personal brand creative direction… sometimes its simpler than you think.

From TikTok trend to IRL product by a payments juggernaut.

The relentless stream of popcorn buckets as merch continues… and we’re not mad.

Even in a crowded visual world, Pelle Cass still stops the feed.

Natatlie’s an incredible example of how intellectual influence is having its moment on Instagram right now.

The set is the top of funnel podcast hook, and Base has a good one, the only thing that can help with such an unsavory subject and a brand with so much distrust.

Until next time,

Oren

In this week’s HYPER I cover how creative direction is becoming more about personalities and less about brand, some serious job opportunities, and marketing initiatives that can be AI-driven that aren’t a waste of time.

Let’s get into it.

First, a few interesting opportunities:

Darkroom is hiring a Director of Creative Strategy, check it out here.

Lululemon is hiring a global creative director, here.

Thesis is hiring an ECD here.

David is hiring a senior social creator for a new venture here.

Creative Direction Shift

It’s hard to keep up with how fast social media changes, especially when you’re in the trenches creating it. I have spent every day for the last two years working on my own content and ads or organic content for brands in different categories.

I live and breathe inside of creative strategy.

I’ve noticed something in the last 90 days across all my feedback, across everything that we’re testing in terms of what performs. Almost anything that is not related to a personality underperforms content that is.

So what do I mean by that? Social media has become collections of personalities, people that are showcasing stories, humor, moments, and experiences through a whole number of formats.

But the content without people, the news carousels, the aggregation, the fancy unboxing video, the get ready with me routine, all underperform versus if there’s a personality involved, someone talking about it, sharing a story about it, if someone is getting to know them.

And this is happening at a pretty massive scale because you’ll notice that the format that most brands have is they have a couple of people on their team that make content, maybe an executive.

They have a couple of creators they rely on and then they outsource to way more affiliates and creators on top of that. This happens in software, it happens in consumer electronics, and it happens with teams of employees in B2B.

You’ve heard me break this down before but really what it is, is that a brand’s social presence is a collection of personal brands.

But why I’ve noticed what I’ve been working on has had a high degree of efficacy is that I build personal brands, both my own and the thousands that have gone through Cut30 now. When I feedback a piece of content for a brand, we’re not briefing an ad or building a personality. And then as we’ve begun to discuss more advanced strategy, breaking into new networks, trying new content techniques, it almost always comes down to: what personalities can we leverage?

Can we give this creator their own separate TikTok channel?

We’re going to start on YouTube. Who’s the creator that we put on there?

We want to do a new ad style. Is there a creator that’s an expert in it?

Operating, this means you’re less of a creative strategist for ads or a creative director for a brand and more a creative director for individuals.

The Sauce is personality management: how to help someone tell their true story, come across authentically, have their unique look and feel, set perspectives, collaborate with others, build their world around the content that you create.

You’ve heard the concept from me every time I’ve talked about influencer marketing in the last two years. That brands should think of influencers as teams.

• You have your superstar that you probably pay really well and you want to have on a long-term contract.

• You have a couple supporting players with varying degrees of efficacy.

• You have a bench of people to support them.

• You have rookies that you’re bringing up around them.

• You’re constantly having tryouts of people that you want to audition or keep an eye on and you’re scouting.

Excellent metaphor for creators. And applies for your internal on-camera and on-social media talent.

But then what is the role that’s most useful here in this era of brand marketing?

Where perhaps the campaign that has the most efficacy to drive leads is a multi-personality campaign of employees on LinkedIn...

Where to scale your software brand you need to lock in on ten awesome creators and a hundred more coming up around them…

Where whatever campaign you do is supported by multiple anchor influencers…

Where you’re building an EGC program where your employees are rewarded.

Creative strategist has been the hot button topic over the last year, so much so that 90,000 people joined Motions Creative Strategy Bootcamp that I guested in the other week, shocking numbers.

The company demand and the demand to learn it is at an all-time high and this is the starting point. Those strategist are people that can brief in this, they can add to the ad account, and they can begin to do the basics of what’s needed to support this.

But really what we need is creative directors but not for the brand itself, for the personalities the brands work with.

From the executives that they have on camera, on X, and on LinkedIn, to the team members that contribute content, to the creators they have, the sets in their warehouses, their UGC and briefing.

Creative direction for personalities is the edge.

I often have to take a breath because being deep in the trenches on this means that often you’re over your skis or just far ahead of what other companies are. So much so that even giving the advice just doesn’t help anyone, perhaps the biggest struggle I have with this newsletter.

This is even more so lately as conversations go wild around clipping, multi-account strategy, social shops, and an endless amount of things are thrown out there that brands may or may not actually need.

I often have to look at if I want to give some genuine advice about what brand should approach something. It needs to be rooted in what is really happening in the zeitgeist, what can most brands activate on.

but we see it more and more

• The founder’s Instagram account

• the YouTube to drive leads for the agency

• the LinkedIn for the website development firm

• the sales team with a DM strategy

• Creator, creator, creator.

I can firmly say that everything is about personality management whether for ads, for affiliate, for influence, or for brand campaigns.

Anyone that is not squarely operating in that space is behind the curve

So I’m taking a stab at something new. How can we help people become those creative director roles for personal brands?

• Whether that’s their own personal brand that they can think of more strategically

• Whether that’s supporting people inside their companies that create content

• Whether that’s supporting creators that get briefed

• Or whether it’s helping the new creator generation (of which there are far more than you can ever imagine) begin to learn how to scale their businesses

We’re covering that on Sunday’s Community Call. This will also be recorded. If you’re all interested in this, I’m going to be sharing my thoughts, tips, tricks, and tactics.

Join here.

Marketing Initiatives with AI that aren’t a waste of time

A question CMO’s and marketing leaders are being consistently asked is how they’re integrating AI with their teams.

The answers generally are

• marketing copy

• agentic customer service

• and then maybe something like Swap or a commerce layer

I worked with Perplexity Computer on a thorough set of actual initiatives you can build with Computer that will drive value.

First… what is Computer, and why would you use it:

Use cases:

Related, I built out a landing page copy generator that will give you copy for your product or marketing angle in 3 voices. I made this in 20 minutes with computer, I encourage you to find your own OR even better connect your site/vercel etc and be able to deploy full pages to test with your ads by angle and content.

Check it out here.

Until next week,

Oren

PS: If you’re in Cannes don’t forget to RSVP to our (loaded) strategy sessions on Tuesday: https://luma.com/84zpmtal

Let’s begin.

Darkroom & HYPER at Cannes

Clayton and I are hosting a strategy summit at the Darkroom villa in Cannes on June 23rd starting at 11am through the afternoon - along with a ton of our friends: Ashwinn, JT Barnett, Sammi Cohen, Tatum Brandt and many more.

In particular Dara Denney and I are doing a specific strategy session on how organic media and paid media are becoming more and more similar that I would love you to come see and discuss!

RSVP here: https://luma.com/84zpmtal

The Brand Dynamics of the World Cup

The World Cup lands in North America in the next two weeks, but the conversation about it domestically is at an all time low... At the same time, the attention that consumers will provide during the events is one of the biggest stages for brands who want to reach the sports consumer to do interesting things.

In this video I dig into some of the most famous disruptive moments of the World Cup in history, from Beats stealing the spotlight from official sponsor Sony in 2014 to the continued rivalries of Nike and Adidas playing out in real time, with the playbook for how brands stand out in the biggest cultural moments on the calendar.

A few absolutely legendary World Cup/soccer related ads you absolutely must check out if you’ve never seen, from the peak of Nike’s relevance to spark some creativity.

I also used Perplexity Computer to come up with a microsite of references for jersey designs, manufacturers, art direction and campaigns on the subject you can checkout here as a creative direction resource.

The Great Summer Lock In

There’s a personal conversation I have with friends from my past life before becoming creator, that’s a little controversial and more and more common: how do we get our teams to work?

My strength as an executive when I was one wasn’t incredible strategy or ideas, my primarily role since I became a manager was being able to get high levels output out of creative people. It requires buy-in, process, feedback, community, standards, support and having peoples backs. It’s hard.

But it’s gotten even harder… culturally.

We’re on our roughly fifth post-covid summer. With that comes a lot of true cultural shifts that happened in that time frame.

1. The first and most obvious is work from home, which has given a lot of people a higher quality of life, often at the expense of quality of work. It’s created ultra-distant teams, a significant gap in mentorship, and a change in the ability to rally people around a common goal.

2. The second is how the summer is treated, which is largely in tune with that same work-from-home strategy. I know a lot of companies that simply have to give up a lot... Summer fridays happens, extended vacations become more allowed. People are more distant, if anyone’s checked out, but fewer brands than ever are able to truly lock in as soon as Memorial Day hits. Not a bad thing, but… a thing.

3. Meanwhile, AI has introduced Crazy Gen X AI Boss Syndrome, where a particular cohort of elder millennials and Gen X males in particular have distanced themselves from their employees so much because of their use of AI for communication, feedback, and ideation. This has lost them relatability and respect from their workforce in a way that radically changes company dynamics in ways that they are not introspective enough to understand. The more of this they experience, the more the team member checks out in an increasingly unmonitored environment.

4. Then we have the great productivity reckoning, where company after company, from Webflow to Meta to Square, has taken the AI restructuring momentum for being able to reduce a workforce to right-size orgs they know have gotten out of control. When you look at many organizations that have adopted AI, very few of them have seen the huge productivity increases that would warrant a 20% reduction in force, for instance. But they all certainly had an extra 20%, if not more, of bloat:

   • Management layers

   • Process that didn’t need to exist

   • Culture

   • Technical debt

5. At the same time, a new era of companies has locked in on productivity, especially on the marketing and creative fronts. What a handful of people can do with UGC, organic social, inside the ad accounts with shoots, with personality, with scaling teams of influence continues to be shocking. It is disruptive even to the new generation of brands that started five to ten years ago who are leveraging the internet to stand out.

6. And because of these layoffs and the assumption that these people in those former jobs would be able to get more similar jobs to what they had, there is a massive amount of a trying-to-be-employed workforce applying for jobs whose resumes are analyzed by AI who are expecting a previous gen of companies. This is who you’re competing with for a job: more people than ever, more applicants, harder to tell them apart, and humans are not doing the reckoning.

Which brings us to this summer. You’ve probably seen the wave of what I call excuse content. People taking any cultural moment as an opportunity to say we’re over-optimized, we’re overmeasured, we should be having more drinks, taking more time outside, etc. You look at the profiles of people saying this, and almost always the same: coastal elite or influencers who repeat what other influencers say because they know it will get views. This content crushes every May because when it gets warm, it’s what the consumer wants to hear. They want to hear they don’t have to work hard. They want to have an excuse to get into summer mode.

I am here to be the bearer of hard news. This is the summer to lock in. There is an onslaught of social media guru influencers telling people to build their personal brand from Claude and ChatGPT. They are spinning out what we call the mid-layer: just sloppy content that has more presence in our feeds than AI slop. It doesn’t really help build their personal brand. It puts up a lot of fake views that have made the entry point into being a creator harder. You have to have a more unique angle. You need to really establish your personality. You need the sauce, creative direction (for lack of a better term), to be markedly different than where we were even six months ago. In this world of AI-dominated recruiting, that personal brand, that connection, that LinkedIn post matters more than ever.

In addition, if you’ve been in one of these more antiquated jobs, whether you’re still in it or you’ve lost it, where you’re not participating at the cutting edge, your marketing work does not deeply involve creator. If you’re not using AI assistance to spin up landing pages to do research, if you’re not running these campaigns to leverage modern attention and understand these tools, the gap is getting wider. The training’s not going to happen from those orgs. If you’re not learning that on your own time, you’re falling farther and farther behind into a gap that’s growing into a chasm.

One thing I remember quite clearly from last year, with how many people were checked out for summertime, is how rough a lot of Q4 was because brands hadn’t properlyplanned. The product wasn’t there, the promotions weren’t there, the campaigns weren’t there. They decided to try to start executing in September, and they couldn’t because guess what? You really want to do collabs, you really want to do rollouts, really want to have customized product or new releases. That work starts now.

And next summer, it won’t be a conversation. We’ll be facing the impact directly. Five summers isn’t a moment, it’s a trend. The initial restructurings are companies willing to act fast, most will be in the middle of the bell curve, and that ball is waiting to drop. Maybe don’t listen to the media-adjacent anti-optimizers. Maybe take advantage of the time of the biggest internet upside we’ve ever had, while we have it.

I would highly encourage, if you want to have an impact, if you are responsible for the P&L, if it’s your own brand. If you want to make sure you’re in line for the more merit-based creative hiring economy that’s growing, that this is a summer that maybe you don’t blow off. That perhaps, dare I say, you lock in.

Kitchen Sink

The Speed of David

David continues on a relentless release cadence. You’ve heard me talk about this prior with Skims, about how one of their strong points is just a truly unprecedented rollout of collabs, superstars and campaigns. David knows the same playbook.

• Ice cream launches

• Ice cream at Cannes Film Festival with Bella

• IRL shop popup

• Launch of new sister brand

• COD 2 release

• Sell out online launch

• And they’re running the clipping playbook to go along with it

This more than anything we’ve seen before, is a brand operating at the speed of culture.

Curry x Li Ning

Curry launches shoes, basketball, a full golf line and ability to sign his own athletes…. with Li Ning. We are in an inconceivable moments for old powerhouse brands, where they can get taken out from any direction on deals they should own. Nike basketball and golf should have been anchored by Steph as they bring up the next generation of superstars, but now they have to compete with every athlete from small brands, international and Adidas alike. There has never been a better time to be an upstart sports brand in a world of Baseball Lifestyle, Bandit, Represent 24-7 and a new gen of brands where the sky truly feels like the limit. Act accordingly.

With intention

I continue to be impressed by how visually stunning and thought through every nuance of Quartr’s marketing is

The Enhanced Games may have been a flop, but Bryan Johnson continues one of the truly most impressive personal brand runs of all time. Umbrella a touch of genius.

Parting shot

Until next time,

Oren

Oren here, hope you’re enjoying some end of May. You’ve probably seen anti-optimization content going viral all the last few weeks, giving people what they want… an excuse to start tapping out for summer. I cannot encourage you enough to resist, because we continue to be at a unique time of absolute creative leverage unlike any in history. Don’t let the influencers psyop their competition away, stick with us.

This week… we talk about the creator economy, and in typical HYPER fashion it is ultra tactical.

To start,

More and more people have been hitting me up asking to hire creative directors… and it’s a marked change from last year.

In 2025 people wanted the elusive creative strategist. They wanted people to get them more ads, to help with their brand social strategy. I still get a handful of those.

In 2026 there has been a far more decisive shift.

The people looking for these creative directors are personal brands looking for people to help them script and elevate.

This is a combo of creators, influencers, and executives, whether they’re posting on LinkedIn or Instagram. More and more people realize the efficacy of the core brand account is an uphill battle (that’s a separate newsletter by itself).

This is another one of those job shifts where there isn’t really a playbook. This didn’t exist five or six years ago beyond ghostwriting for text posts.

I’ve begun putting together a pretty thorough set of resources based on everything we’ve learned educating thousands of creators and Cut30, and the formats I developed with myself and with clients that have experts.

I’m going to go through a bunch of this in our June community call next Sunday if you’d like to join, sign up here.

WHY CARE ABOUT THE CREATOR ECONOMY

Today I want to talk about the state of the creator economy.

All of the “economy” terms: taste economy, creator economy, attention economy on one side feel overused but on the other hand… for people that aren’t directly participating in them it’s easy to lose sight of just how expansive some of these conversations are that are happening and how they impact us in real life as people and businesses.

The creator economy in particular is an interesting one, starting with that statistics show that more than half of Gen Z consider themselves to be content creators.

An emerging part of the workforce that would be unthinkable to anyone 40 or older to deal with that dynamic of people that create content about their work, outside of their work, or mastering a particular internet skill set.

At the same time there is an ongoing talent siphon, you will find that a lot of the most prominent people across fields from marketers to scientists are choosing to prioritize content creation over their actual careers because it’s more lucrative and they have more control, which is creating a genuine talent gap. Try to hire a marketing or organic hitter full time right now… their probably making content or prefer four clients over a job.

It’s a real thing.

At the same time more and more people are concerned about corporate layoffs in technology and the consistent lack of regard from companies like Webflow for when they do get rid of them.

This has shown up that in the back of their head they’re always wondering: should I have that thing lined up? That content I can easily activate to get attention, to get a new job, or to get money. This has led to more creators than ever, with the algorithms so heavily weighing new creators and new faces, and continued success on the part of people who are starting the journey.

What we also have now are people who have been in the game from three months to five years and are trying to figure out what are the ways to REALLY make money with content. Did you pick the right niche? What are you working through?

In this video below I put together a complete guide ranking all of the niches and the ways to monetize so that you can understand completely what this creator economy landscape looks like and if you’re a brand how you’re able to tap into this to use it to your advantage from creators to affiliates to influencers.

Now, the breakdown.

HOW CREATORS MAKE MONEY

There are six core models. Most creators use more than one.

1. Platform Payouts

The floor of creator monetization. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube all pay based on content performance. TikTok’s Creator Fund pays meaningfully in strong niches — education, auto, beauty — and some creators pull $7,500–$10K/month off views alone. The incentive structure matters: TikTok only pays on content over a minute, which is why free product mailers flood the platform. If you’re a brand wondering why creators are posting about your competitors unprompted, TikTok is funding it.

This is not a real income model, but it helps people get started.

2. Affiliate

The most underrated path to real money. TikTok Shop leads here, higher commission rates than anything else (25-40% is common), and the reason entire categories of creators now live comfortably without a single brand deal. ShopMy and LTK allow catalog-style passive linking of products you mention without formal relationships or programs. Brands running structured affiliate programs through Social Snowball are building armies of thousands of affiliates, not dozens. Cowboy Colostrum, Gruns, Dad Gang are running programs at scale most people don’t realize exist. I cover this here:

If you’re a creator in a lifestyle niche and not running affiliate, you’re leaving money on the table before your first brand deal ever comes.

3. UGC

You make the video, it never goes on your feed, the brand runs it as an ad. Platforms like Minisocial and Insense match creators to briefs for $50–$300 per asset. Brands test these in Meta and TikTok ad accounts constantly. If you have the skill to make content that converts and you’re not registered on at least one of these platforms, that’s a quick fix.

4. Brand Deals (Influence)

The most talked about and the least common. You need views, audience affinity, and a niche brands want to buy attention in. The bar is higher than most think and lower than most fear, but you have to be making content in the right category first. Brands find creators through platform search. If you haven’t made content about their category, you won’t come up (the biggest reason people dont end up with deals).

5. Creator-on-Brand Feeds

Underutilized. A brand retains a creator to post recurring content on the brand’s own channel. Monthly retainers with predictable income. If you’re a strong creator in a niche and brand deals haven’t materialized, pitch for a spot on their feed or a new dedicated account instead.

You saw me do a mini-series with CashApp like this

6. Info Products

Courses, guides, calls, cohorts. If you have knowledge worth $30, charge for it. Most lifestyle creators resist this the longest and benefit from it the most. The creators who scale past brand deals almost always have an info product doing real volume in the background. We run Cut30 on Kajabi for this for a number of reasons.

NICHE RANKINGS

Not all categories are equal. Here’s how they tier by brand deal ceiling.

D Tier — Don’t bank on it News, politics, sports commentary, music, gaming, comedy, AI-generated content, faceless accounts. The content is everywhere... but the money is not. If you’re here, love the game or go find a secondary income stream.

C Tier — Lifestyle Fashion, fitness, travel, food, motherhood, pets, interior design, local content. You can make money here. It’s competitive and the floor is low, but the ceiling is real for the top 20% that can’t make it to the top 1%. Info products are your best bet, build affinity, then sell direct. Local content is notably undervalued because local businesses are desperate for reach and there are far fewer creators going deep on specific markets.

B Tier — Business Adjacent Marketing, email, paid ads, design, AI in business, HR tech. This is where brand deals start paying real money. Brands here are selling to decision-makers who operate on software budgets. The content doesn’t get massive view counts, but the views it gets are worth significantly more per impression. New creators can realistically hit $10K/month in brand deals in this tier. Established creators regularly cross $500K–$1M a year without a huge audience. Infoproducts have massive value too (albeit less scale)

A Tier — Finance and Medical Personal finance, investing, credit, health, medical devices, pharmaceuticals. The highest CPM on the internet. You need the fewest views to generate the most revenue. Hard to build credibly, nearly impossible to lost at monetization once you have the attention.

HOW BRANDS SHOULD BE USING CREATORS

Get a creator on your main feed. Four to eight videos a month. If your social media underperforms, this is the single fastest fix. Someone who can explain your product with depth and personality will outperform anything your internal team is posting. Most brands still haven’t done this, and you just need to search for people in the niche who post regularly with sub 50k followers and make an offer. You can go higher too, just expect to pay a premium.

Run UGC through your ad account. Test it against in-house creative. Add voices: ASMR, vlog, long-form, short-form, demographic variety. The brands scaling ad spend fastest are doing it by expanding creative volume and formats, not just budget. Recruit just for this at a percent of adspend on Instagram with Tribe.

Build an affiliate program. Fifty affiliates is not a program… a thousand affiliates is a program. The brands winning on affiliate are in constant recruitment mode, top performers get paid extra for assets that convert, then pulled into ads. Your existing customers are recruited at checkout and through Outer Signal, that is where you start, then plugin Social Snowball for search.

Anchor + micro structure for campaigns. Any influencer campaign should have a few large creators to put up numbers and signal legitimacy, then A wide bench of 50k-200K creators as shots on goal while he anchors build momentum. Then more micros and new accounts find your next star.

WHERE TO FIND YOUR FIRST CREATOR

Search your customers with Outer Signal. Minisocial for UGC. Social Snowball for affiliate. Euka for TikTok Shop. Tribe for Instagram affiliate. Later for full-service discovery and campaign management. Aligned Growth for influencer programs with performance integration. Darkroom if you’re a larger brand running creator content alongside paid.

REMINDER

82% of people 18–44 posted content online last month. 64% of Gen Z consider themselves creators. The media dollars are still sitting in programmatic blocks no one clicks, managed by agencies with no idea what they’re doing.

The alpha is still enormous, act accordingly.

If you want to workshop any of this live… I’ll do extended Q&A and workshopping on our June community call next Sunday if you’d like to join, sign up here.

Oren

That industry is at a bit of a crossroads… because of wellness. A lot of people just aren’t eating as much sugar. One in eight U.S. adults is on a GLP-1. And if you look at the grey market, I would say that’s likely closer to one in five. Just my pure opinion, seeing the volumes and numbers some of these dark market providers are sharing.

Even just the one in eight is such a massive consumption shift of what people are allowed to eat and how they undertake their wellness that it will completely reshape so many markets from the snacks we see here, to restaurant eating overall, to the fitness and workout industries. It is perhaps the biggest fundamental shift in how we consume since Covid, and I think in a lot of ways it is fundamentally altering consumer habits faster and more drastically than what we see with AI, which while far more discussed, we see its impact in lesser ways.

I spoke at length about this topic in the Vangroup’s new report on luxury wellness which you can grab for free here. Includes both my essay and a number of trends, topics, and brands that they’ve compiled.

This week, I’m sharing my full archetypes cheat sheet, an important playbook for how brands approach social media. Enjoy!

Archetypes for Brand Social

In this Youtube video I focused on a key bottleneck for brands are trying to improve their social media. Often they’re trying to redo the same things or come up with a plan from scratch. When in reality they need templates for plans based on their resources.

So from there I have pulled five common archetypes similar to how you’d look at an overall brand archetype in a more traditional marketing framework that will give you a blueprint for how you could look at social media based on both your resources and how far out of the box your company is willing to push themselves.

Watch the video, check out the examples, pick an archetype, and fix your brand social media.

The Oracle

Teaching people about the world your brand space inhabits with deep expertise. Relies on a core expert or team of several.

The question to ask: What does our customer need to understand that nobody else is explaining properly?

Content:

• Historical explainers

• Category comparisons: is X or Y better for Z

• Why things are the way they are

• Predictions for the future

Ex: Front Office via Ken Sakata, Blam Motor Works, Loren Kreiss & Kreiss in tandem, Rarify

The Performer

Your content is a show. Entertainment driven, personality-first, built to be binged and shared. The product barely needs to be mentioned, its omnipresent

The question to ask: If our brand had a show, what would it be about, and would people watch it without knowing it was ours?

Content:

• Recurring character or cast series

• Skits

• Out of the box scenarios

• Hyper visual and stunt content

It HAS to be fun, dramatic or emotional, there is no halfway performer.

Ex: Derschutze, Mohawk Chevrolet, LC Sign, Nitro Bar

The World Builder

Building a mass of content that’s interesting, far reaching and surprising, far beyond the world your brand inhabits. The question to ask: Can we make something creative people love so much they love the brand right next to it

Content:

• Short films

• Fictional character series

• Immersive intellectual content

• Curation

Best for: teams and founders willing to take a risk

Ex: Death to Stock, Cluely, Fern

The Catalyst

Using content to push people toward a better version of themselves. Your content is the bridge between who they are and who they want to be.

The question to ask: What transformation does our customer want, and can our content be proof that it’s possible and guidance on how to get there?

Content:

• Training and process documentation

• Inspirational text overlays

• Community highlights and challenges

Ex: Crease Group, Based Living

The Helper

Brands that don’t have a deep expert on camera, but still want to lean on value content

Often relies on a core person, but not necessarily a super deep expert, more someone moderately ahead on the journey with you

The question to ask: What little helpful things can we do our customer will appreciate

Content:

• Visual tutorials

• Carousel stories and tips

• Story vlogs

• Interviews & curation

Ex: Kiyoko Beauty, Hashi Home, Marpipe

The Insider

Documenting the real thing with the insider look, the behind-the-scenes. Your audience has a front-row seat to a journey with something at stake. The question to ask: What are we building right now that people would actually want to watch unfold? Is there a reason anyone will care? Is it unique enough

Content:

• Follow-along series

• Story-driven carousels

• Episode-style content with a recurring theme

• Founder or team vlogs with a narrative arc

Really ask yourself - can we make this exciting enough? This is often overplayed, works best with physical products or interesting locations..

Ex: Bad Hambres, Softies Burgers, Chunky Fit Cookie, Merit, Fzotic

Want to dive in more? I’ll be workshopping creative direction live on the June Community Call.


Until next week,
Oren

Hello friends, we’re tapping in from London, where Clayton and I spent a couple of days at Pulse, a commerce-focused summit for both luxury and consumer brands.

Our friend Paul Rogers, who runs Vervaunt, an agency that operates Pulse, kindly invited us to speak about how brands should be leveraging creators.

Since most of you couldn’t make it, we’re doing a recap on two things:

1. The State of eComm based on insights shared at this event

2. Spark notes from the talk we gave on Creator Strategy

Hope this is useful for you! And huge thanks to Paul for having us.

Field notes from LDN: the state of eCom

We wanted to share some takeaways from the conference that everyone working on or with a brand that sells online should be aware of.

7 universal takeaways

1. Costs are up

You are not alone; there has been a global rise in CAC (customer acquisition cost) for performance, both Meta and Google. 22% for Meta, Google up 11%.

Customers are getting more expensive, the auction is more competitive, and we cannot overstate how important it is to be redirecting more of those dollars to organic acquisition, where you have less attribution (but far more of a competitive edge) because this is a mirror of last year’s rises.

2. Affiliate is back

1 in 10 pounds spent at retail in the UK now traces back to an affiliate. That number is growing, but it’s happening less from traditional media websites and more from creators.

Worth acknowledging that the word “affiliate” has a reputation problem. For a long time it meant Pepperjam, CJ Affiliate, leaked discount codes, garbage traffic, etc.

And that version still exists, obviously, but what’s actually expanding right now is creators making content on a percentage model, talking about products they actually use to a real audience, and getting paid when it converts.

This is also part of what we discussed, and we’ll share more on that topic soon.

3. Creator investment

There’s a 56% increase in creator investment year over year. It’s no longer fringe; we’re entering the main segment of the bell curve, where there is more creator demand than supply, and a gap in education on how to connect the dots and scale these programs.

4. All in on partnership ads

Partnership ads are up 2x year-over-year. If you’ve seen Oren’s face on ads for marketing software... those are partnership ads. They outperform in the ad account, so much so that it’s often worth a premium for a good asset or a known face, and especially for both.

If you’re running these actively, it’s worth finding your own version of partnership ads in Meta and TikTok.

5. Loyalty programs

40-55% of revenue from premium brands is driven from 8% of the most loyal customers… The question is: how are you targeting them?

LTV is overweighted to the best customers, and some random AI copy flow isn’t going to save you. Retention needs a dedicated focus, and premium brands need CRM.

In the conference sessions, the Represent team detailed how they identified bottlenecks in their tier system and focused not just on discounts but also on product releases, artifacts, and product development discussions available only to their upper tiers of loyalty.

6. AI Adoption

There is a massive gap between the LinkedIn and X posts and the reality of AI in brand workflows. In a survey of eCommerce brands, 5% say they get a high from AI, 43% medium/somewhat, 52% low to none.

Of the 48% who get some value, it’s almost entirely driven by copy and customer support. Meanwhile, the sentiment is that there are usually 1-2 enabled employees doing some great things, very little scale, and too much time wasted talking about AI and implementing something that doesn’t stick.

Meanwhile, for content, performance, and design teams, 65% are using generative AI. Whatever the resistance is online, the reality in companies is that it's everywhere, whether the customers know, see, or not.

We’ll continue to caution creatives who are vocal in their resistance that it will ultimately cost them work.

How to work with creators in 2026

Notes from our talk —

We spent our session breaking down how brands should think about working with creators in 2026. Here are some things you should take away from this.

The starting point is that the media landscape shifted, and most brands missed it. The gatekeepers, magazine editors, TV buyers, retail buyers, the entire layer of institutional authority that used to decide what was culturally relevant, have been replaced by individual voices who built their own credibility from scratch.

You can still buy a placement… you just can’t buy your way into genuine cultural relevance anymore.

That requires relationships, and relationships take time.

Most brands are operating in what we’d call the enabled layer: social platforms, paid placements, and boosted posts. That layer still works. But the organic layer is the most important one, when someone else’s audience trusts your brand because a creator they already follow has genuinely vouched for you.

But you can’t manufacture that in a single post. It compounds over time, which means the brands that start building those relationships now are the ones who’ll have a real edge in two years.

The other thing worth noting is that specialization won. The creators with real authority aren’t covering everything. They go deep on one (or a few) thing(s) and build more trust in that lane than any publication could afford to staff.

The brands worth studying right now are the ones that have this instinctively. Jacquemus turned its fashion show invites into collectibles, resulting in a massive earned media play.

Huckberry is giving its UGC creators financial upside by rewarding them with a percentage of ad spend that drives conversions.

And NYX Beauty has built a massive compounding strategy by sending product to creators with zero creative direction, fully trusting that each creator knows best how to speak to their audiences.

All of these examples are meant to show the power and impact of working actively with creators as part of your strategy.

All you have to do is recognize that the landscape has changed, make a plan for how you want to interact with them effectively, and build it into your marketing plans as a core component, not an afterthought.

We’ll share the framework brands can use to work with creators in another newsletter.

How to structure your offer as a creative

In last week’s YouTube, I talked about how a lot of creatives I know are really good at the work… and have no idea how to sell it.

And the reason is not that they’re bad at business. Nobody ever explained how selling actually works, so most of them have been winging it for years.

Your core offer should be a sentence.

I make brand identities for DTC founders for $8,000 in three weeks.

I write landing pages for SaaS companies for $2,500 a page.

Not “I do design, branding, copywriting, whatever you need.” Nobody buys a capabilities deck in the social media era.

The reason this matters more than most people realize: when a client has to book a call just to find out if they can afford you, half of them don’t, smart offers get them through the door faster.

What makes an offer work.

Once you think in this framework, now you need to position: better, faster, or cheaper. Pick at least one. Ideally two.

If the work is genuinely exceptional, lean on that and charge accordingly. But look at it honestly. Most people aren’t in the “better” category yet and that’s fine. Speed and price are real levers. A sprint format, a locked deliverable, a one-week turnaround.

Full video here.

Content and influence is in an odd place. For years everything from AI to new gen creators to new social networks threatened the death of influence…. and it somehow continues to be more important than ever. But a couple of trends are reshaping how we should think about personalities in the attention economy.

First people are recreating influence in the aggregate with creators at scale… but it’s HARD. You’ll see a lot of the popular brands that are scaling that are now doing the podcast circuit talk about using thousands of creators every month making content about their brand (Bloom, Gruns, Comfort, Cal.ai). Where they will use a lot of volume of low views to make up for not being able to anchor with more traditional influence. This is an excellent strategy but it requires absolute and complete dedication to systems execution and scale for a concept that most marketing teams still can’t even explain to their finance department.

At the same time there is extreme shiny object syndrome. News media is overly influenced by X, and X is having a conversation about clipping because they are overly influenced by the clippers themselves (whose content performs on the platform). A lot of executives are starting to ask “should be clipping our content?”. The problem with this is the content was never good enough to perform to begin with so then certainly isn’t good enough to clip. Every single brand conversation about this is a distraction.

Then on the influencer end things are… frothy. I’ve been served a lot of content recently with what we’ll call “cute day” or “lifestyle” influencers complaining that no one cares about their content and they get no reach anymore. A lot of the comments are, “Yeah, no one cares about your cute life anymore.” The idea that with an aesthetic, a well put together apartment and travel schedule you could continue to find success on social media without driving value, having an extremely charismatic personality is being stress tested. That entire class of early adoption will only see a handful survive.

It’s the same thing with the luxury influencer, the person whose success was based primarily on having either the resources, the debt, or the connections to show off a lifestyle that was so aspirational. The backlash on these now is almost constant. I like to call this the Rimowa Effect.

When people are influenced to buy purchases that they can’t afford and they realize those purchases don’t actually give them self-actualization, they really wish they had that money back and bought the $300 luggage vs. the $2,000 luggage, they begin to develop an innate resentment around the complex that convinced them that in the first place. This is happening en masse. The middle class should not be luxury consumers. They are buying out of their price range disproportionately because of influence and the backlash is here.

But what this does mean is a feast for the influence that is left with resonance and credibility, whether established or new. Because there are only so many authentic voices, those authentic voices are more paid attention to than ever. And brands are beginning to understand that those relationships and their values span beyond clicks and go into affinity and conversation driving that can change the trajectory of their business. In 2026 there is an infinite desire for relevance and really only one class of people that can deliver it: influential people on the internet.

In this HYPER we talk about two topics:

1. What advanced tactics brands should actually consider in the influence world

2. In era of more intellectual influence conversation all the ideas have migrated off of Substack or X and now happen on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, the written media is a place to recap the video ideas. Journalism then laps up the extra days or weeks later.

3. The rise of the yapper as someone who can simply communicate their ideas through speaking without a bunch of production has given a very low bar for those who are interesting, who do have that perspective, be able to talk, grow, and succeed, either pushing their business, themselves, or monetizing. I get into that with a step-by-step guide for the “yap” format (and you can kick off with the free 3 day challenge Alex Garcia, Landforce and I are hosting this week).

There’s never a dull moment in the attention economy but we’ll be here to talk you through it.

Oren

Advanced Influence

In previous HYPER editions I’ve talked before about the basics of influencer marketing, developing your initial roster, testing anchor and micro-influence and building interesting content and putting spend behind it. But if you’re already there, what takes you to the edge of what’s interesting?

I dive in below, in partnership with Later (who can execute this for you).

SERIES

The most durable influencer content isn’t a one-off. It’s a recurring series, in the creator’s voice, with your brand embedded as a recurring sponsor or even a “branded set.” Think about how a show has a presenting sponsor: same energy. The advantage here is compounding: the audience builds an association between the creator’s content they already love and your brand showing up inside it, every time, without it being multiple sporadic ads

The brands getting this right are using tools like Later with Later’s EdgeAI to match on more than demographics, they’re predicting which creators have the right audience composition before a dollar is spent.

TEAM

Stop treating influencers like individual contracts and start treating them like a roster. If you have high-performers, get them making content together. For me and most creators I know, the surprise factor of two people who don’t usually collaborate showing up in the same video is an almost guaranteed win. The audience isn’t just consuming content, they’re watching a relationship they didn’t expect.

Think of it the way brands used to build sponsored skate teams. You didn’t just sign one skater. You built a crew that worked together.

IRL

The IRL tie-in is criminally underused. Brief your creators to host a themed event around your brand, not as a brand activation, but as their own content. The prep vlogs, the confessionals, the day-of. that’s four to six pieces of content, most of it organic-feeling, before the event even starts.

I’m waiting for a bank or finance brand to sponsor a “Man in Finance” dating event with the right creator attached. As all these themed meetups and lookalike concepts continue to draw people out they’re perfect for content.

WAVES

Algorithms spike around cultural moments, and the brands who understand this are placing creators at the World Cup, at Coachella, at Davos, even when their product has nothing to do with the event. The event is just the attention vehicle. Build your brand content calendar around the internet’s calendar, not just your own product launches.

PIPELINE

The college-to-creator pipeline is real and accelerating. Alabama. University of Miami. These campuses are producing influencers at an astonishing rate and serving as launch pads for product drops. The brands paying attention are signing these creators early, the way NIL changed college athletics sponsorship, and supporting their growth before the price goes up.

If you want to build any of this with actual infrastructure behind it, not just the ideas, Later can help you execute. Their platform gives you data on what drives not just views, but revenue, and their award-winning team launch campaigns from ideation and execution for top brands

You can schedule a free strategy call with them here: Learn more about Later →

How to Yap

I published a full YouTube on this, and I want to give you the distilled version because I think it’s one of the most slept-on way to start participating in the creator economy right now.

Yapping is talking on camera, just an iPhone, no fancy camera, and to start at least, no graphics. And despite how simple it sounds, it’s become the primary mode of business communication, personal brand building, and audience development in 2025.

Why this matters more than most people realize

The number one benefit I got from starting to make content wasn’t the followers or the revenue. It was becoming a better communicator. Thinking about what message I’m trying to get across, how to dismantle the objections someone has before I even say the main point, how to carry someone from where they are to where I want them to be. I cannot overstate the power making hundreds of videos gives you in helping communicate in all aspects of life

The three formats worth knowing

Standard yap: sitting, iPhone, captions. That’s it.

Walking or car yap: more candid, more like a FaceTime. Harder to start with because there are too many variables, but useful once you have reps.

Graphic yap: you overlay images or video over your footage to keep attention. Shoot for one visual roughly every two seconds. This is the format that performs best at scale (templates below)

Notebook yaps: You can also use a notebook or whiteboard to help facilitate the conversation with notes and frameworks written out you reference

The five frameworks that make up 90% of good yap content

Strong take: say something is the best or worst and defend it. Forces conviction and generates response.

Strong take into education: use the take as a hook, pivot immediately into the breakdown. That’s how you avoid being clickbait without sacrificing attention.

Small epiphany: the relatable observation. “Have you ever noticed...” builds camaraderie faster than almost anything.

Humor: a bit, a critique, a funny scenario. Underrated when you have a voice for it.

Story time: a thing that happened, told as a narrative. Oldest format in the world for a reason.

Two script styles to start with:

The yap map

Every day, before you scroll, spend a few minutes mapping what happened. Meetings that surfaced good questions, conversations from lunch, ideas that came up in the shower, things you saw in your feed that you had a reaction to. Your goal is three to five ideas a day. Not fully formed scripts. Just prompts. You’ll be surprised how fast that list gets unwieldy.

The one tactical thing most people skip

Redo your opening at the end of the session. By the time you’re done recording, you’re warmed up. Go back and shoot the intro again. It’s almost always better.

The barrier to starting has never been lower. The ceiling on what talking into your phone can become has never been higher.

If you want to try your hand at your first videos with the Cut30 community, our FREE 3-day content challenge starts tomorrow, sign up here: https://cut30.co/first-10k-views-challenge

Until next week,
Oren

Welcome friends. This week was a busy one. Oren reminded us of our place as plebeians the way he schooled us on the pronunciation of luxury names, while Clayton reignited the olive oil wars with a review on taste vs. tackiness, going purely off the brand packaging.

Look, we’ve already pushed an email this week, which you can find here ICYMI.

So this evening, as you slide into the weekend, we’re gonna do something different and give you a little scene report email on the vibes in Paris as we welcome spring with open arms.

Let’s dive in.

Where I went in Paris (24-hour edition)

I’ve been to Paris many times before, and twice in the last month. But as it turns out, I am often there for work during fashion weeks, which means the city is infiltrated with bi-coastal elites who flood the wine bars, tobacco shops, and vintage stores in search of that je ne sais quoi.

But my last two visits, both 12-24 hours long, were fun moments that let me slow my experience down and visit spots I’d otherwise not have time for, so I’m ungatekeeping a few of them here.

Keep in mind, this is neither a complete guide to Paris nor is it meant to cover the whole city. It is simply my experience spending time in the Marais (mostly).

More tips over time, but this should be good for now!

Shopping

Husbands Paris (tailoring)

If there was a store that could revive the wearing of the suit in public settings (bar, Drake’s of London), these guys would be the ones to do it. The tailoring here operates in a kind of parallel timeline, as if you’ve stepped on the scene of a Wes Anderson film.

Silhouettes are considered, proportions are interesting, and the staff treat you like a person rather than a transaction. I left genuinely reconsidering my relationship with structured clothing.

Distance Athletics (running)

Distance has built something that feels closer to a concept store than a performance retailer. Their own objects and apparel sit alongside collabs and limited-run goods,

They also have outposts in Lyon, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and Iten, which tells you something about the community they're building and the creative eye they have for being a globally-minded brand.

But they keep it 100 and have an independent spirit to everything they do, no matter how big those ON or Nike bags may be.

Yvon Lambert (books + art)

Walk in for the books, stay for the cocaine and heroine salt+pepper shakers. That's the move at Yvon Lambert. The selection is vast, ranging from art and romance to photography and color theory, and it's genuinely one of the better places in Paris to stumble across something you didn't know you needed.

Ofr. Paris (books + art)

Perhaps an even greater book shop than the one above, Ofr. is the kind of shop that makes you want to read more, make more, and think harder about what you're putting into the world. The magazine and book selection is obsessively curated, and the gallery component gives it a different weight than your average cultural retail space.

And as one friend told me when we walked out, “the owner is a hardcore socialist who figured out how to make money.”

Sums up the French, I’d say.

Merci (multi-brand retail)

This is an absolute mecca visit to make when in Paris. Merci has been doing the French countryside aesthetic long before it was a reference point for everyone else. The store's full-range retail format (clothing, objects, home goods, its own linens, and pottery) works because it’s both coherent and comprehensive.

There’s no doubt we’ve lost the art of the department store, but curated retailers like Merci still offer hope in a sea of terrible curation.

Underrated item: the tote program. Slaps. Especially these minis.

Nuovo and Erem Vintage (vintage)

Both shops punch above their weight in terms of selection. If you're looking for old Prada, Margiela, Calvin Klein, or Céline at a price that doesn't require a conversation with your accountant, these are the spots. The edit is tight and the quality holds up — not the kind of vintage rail you have to dig through hoping for luck. Worth budgeting time (and some euros) for both.

Buttes Snack Bar (wine bar and restaurant)

This is a proper natty wine bar (for those who partake) with a dinner menu that changes often and hits every time. Mussels in harissa bouillon, gochujang wings, and one of the few places that could persuade me to eat asparagus.

The kind of neighborhood spot that makes you wish you lived around the corner. Don’t forget to bike downhill after dinner and you can see the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the distance.

Bambino (listening bar)

I'd heard about Bambino before I went, which sometimes works against a place, but not here. The room is doing Tokyo jazz cafe meets London club, and the food (charcoal-grilled, a little unexpected) holds its own against the atmosphere.

The sound system is serious, and the vinyl wall is immense. By Friday at 11, it turns into a dance bar, and it’s all downhill (in a good way) from there.

Dreamin Man (coffee)

Dreamin' Man may be one of the more talked-about coffee shops recommended when you go to Paris, but it’s far from performative. The owners are no-nonsense, focus on the craft, and the more I visit Paris, the more it becomes my default spot to anchor a morning around. Long live Dreamin’ Man.

I’m fully aware that Paris rewards the slow visit. Not the fashion week sprint or the 24 jaunt, but this is a nice little hit list to explore as a baseline if you’re in a time crunch.

Let us know what we missed!

Leave a comment

This week, we’re going tactical. I break down e-commerce metrics you or the brand you work for should be obsessed with, we have a special guest collab to help break down… uh, collabs, thoughts on Coachella and the Masters, and how we’re testing Live as the media landscape shifts.

Let’s dive in.

Oren

Metrics marketers and creatives need to know

There has been a lot of conversation about Grun’s sale for $1.2 billion last week, I’ve talked before about why I love their positioning so much

One of the numbers that stood out most to me, and is most important for all of you to read and learn about, is the metric that was the North Star of their scale: a 3:1 CAC to LTV.

If you aren’t familiar with these terms, I’m going to break them down below. It highlights a really important trend in where we are creatively, with the rise of creative strategist jobs, and new and much discussed positions like growth operators and “profit engineers”. Marketing has grown more quantified than ever, both in how we’re able to measure the results of organic media and how we’re able to quantify influencers, get sales back from affiliates, and measure the return on ad spend across every platform: Meta, TikTok, Google, Apple, Applovin, Youtube Snap… and savvy brands have a command center where they can look at the cost they’re getting customers for the creative that’s working and work with their team of video editors, creators, and designers to do more.

A few terms to highlight you absolutely need to understand:

1. ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). If you spend one dollar on an ad how much money do you get back?

2. Savvy marketing teams then look at return on ad spend as it relates to first order profitability. After the cost of your product, the cost of the ads to get the sale, and the cost of the creative that you are making, is any money left over on that first sale? If yes, amazing... but this also isn’t required for companies who are dialed in on their metrics savvy with their cash (more below).

3. The CAC to LTV number that I highlighted prior is about measuring the cost to get a customer compared to how much they spend over time. For instance Grun’s North Star was a 3:1 ratio. If their average customer would spend a few hundred dollars with them over time, they would happily pay to acquire as many of those people as they possibly could as long as it met that 3:1 ratio. The amount of their first order didn’t matter at all. They’re looking at a complete picture.

4. To be able to operate like this, brands need to be dialed in to their cash conversion cycle. Basically if you order product, how long does it take to arrive and when do you pay for it? For instance sometimes you may have to put a deposit down. Sometimes you may have to pay for it all up front. Sometimes you may have terms where you’re allowed to pay for it even after delivery. Same thing with your advertisement: once that product lands, how long does it take to sell and what cost are you selling it for and then when do you have to pay for those ads... and then when do you get that cash back?

If you’re a brand owner or marketing leader and you get this, I also want to make sure you know that your team does. Not everyone on your marketing team is spending their free time listening to Taylor Holiday podcasts, even if they should. Giving them synopses, doing a lunch and learn, explaining things like the above in a few clear terms is crucial.

Afew notes that will be impactful for you:

1. If you aren’t measuring your numbers like this for e-com, it’s time to start.

2. If you are a creative or a marketer and you want to make more money, you need to get close to the money. Be savvy on these terms and be creating things that actually impact them. I’ll happily cover more on this. Go through lift, developing metrics for organic whatever will be helpful to you will be put inside these newsletters

3. if you have positive numbers like this, you’re able to do this math and it pencils out. Right? Push it. If you’re stuck in an era where you have to correspond to a forecast, you have a specific marketing budget and it’s not fluid based on how much money you will make. You’re never going to achieve the scale of these types of brands.

I made a short-form video about this today.

When you really start dialing into the cash conversion cycle, what happens is you get stuck. Meta used to allow you to pay your ad spend on credit cards so you could accumulate points and you could get some time to pay it off but now they’ve moved to invoicing, making it even harder to scale. Especially when so much capital that’s available to these brands is at such high rates for things like inventory funding.

In the video I detailed how one small business banking solution, Highbeam, offers an Ad Spend manager that always makes sure your ads get paid and also will do 30, 60 or even 90-day terms on ad spend. While that video was sponsored, this segment isn’t because it’s a common enough problem that people are dealing with that I think it’s worth highlighting solutions. You can learn more about Highbeam and their Ad Spend Manager here: https://www.highbeam.com/ad-spend-manager

The internet was ablaze this weekend at Justin Bieber’s Coachella set but far more interesting to me was the combination of his brand, his wife’s brand, their individual brands Skylark and Rode, and how they co-promoted together and with their friends to make the most of that moment across all of their commercial endeavors. I dive into the blueprint for how they think about the overlap of their personal brands, their consumer brands, and what’s happening in culture in this week’s Youtube video. don’t let the teeny bopper subject matter turn you away. This is direct sauce on art direction and building in the premium personal brand and influencer brand era.

The Anatomy of a Great Collab

This week, a collab with Bimma Williams, on strategies for great brand collabs, designed by the legends at Darkroom/

The US vs Lululemon

You’ve heard me ask several times why some of these progressive sportswear companies like Lululemon haven’t dipped into more natural materials, embraced 100% cotton or linen when obviously consumer trends are shifting that way. In previous videos I’ve highlighted natural alternatives because I’ve asked so much about them, but today we saw actual legal action filed against the forever chemicals inside some of these clothes. Interested to see what the findings actually play out as but one of the biggest positions inside apparel in our time will be the counter positioning using more natural material to synthetic activewear. I doubt Lululemon would be the final scapegoat here either.

The Live Media Boom

Landforce and I have been experimenting relatively extensively with Live, working on what is the best toolkit for releasing Live content? We’re using Riverside here to start, but I’m zoned in on how do you clip it, how content travels, whether horizontal and vertical, and we’ve been testing quite a bit. I’ve been bullish on live for a long time, I think many people will remember when The Brandfather started as a live show mostly because I was so intrigued by the format. You’ll see again and again that most live shows will trickle into more typical podcasts because it is an undertaking for production and requires a lot of effort. In the wake of the TBPN acquisition and seeing how live streamers dominate the consumer news cycle, being on the forefront, I feel like we have to take this seriously. In our first week of test content I’ve had a number of great performing clips.

Two of my favorite topics:

How to find any brands suppliers (so good, brands thought Landforce had trade secrets)

The intellecutal content boom:

I am a firm believer that in today’s social media world you cannot accurately speak on strategy or cover what is happening if you are not participating in its creation. Things are too nuanced and happening too fast so as always I’m on the front lines, doing it.

The Brandfathers recap The Masters and Coachella marketing

Ashwinn, Jordan and I dig into the cultural moments of last week.

Subscribe now

Our TED Talk for the day

Checking in from one of the worst weeks in marketing, the first week of April - Oren is recapping how the dream of New York luxury grocery lives on in Tokyo, while Clayton hops between cutlery stores and ateliers in Paris. The lads are storemaxxing.

April Fools has always been a bit of a gambit.

Manager asking, “What are we doing for April Fools?” Bad jokes that don’t necessarily get customers excited… and now in the AI era, it’s far worse when you can simply mock up a product idea with a prompt.

What actually constitutes as a joke that people will pay attention to?

Related: One of the most overused words of the last year is authenticity.

Turning on the iPhone and getting the founder (or McDonald’s CEO) on camera… just as what we’re seeing now is that authenticity isn’t really what users want.

First… they want the tea. If anything is dominating feeds this week, it’s everything happening with Summer House. The internet is still a sucker for a good old-fashioned drama.

It’s coming fresh off the heels of The Bachelorette scandal, and there is more relevance of reality TV and mainstream media conversation than one would think possible in 2026, done by the perfect melding of social media stars and mainstream television and injection of playing good old-fashioned drama that doesn’t feel associated with existential doom of politics or markets.

Compliment this with the latest acquisition news of Open AI buying TBPN.

TBPN is media, but not a journalistic endeavor; it is a show full of unbridled optimism, curiosity, and excitement for discussing technology in a world where the media focuses on whatever it can find to tear down and belittle.

Tech journalism has found that really only fear and anger get the views it needs to hold on for just a little bit longer. The media consumer now understands, after watching enough rage-bait, that the constant teardowns they watched from mainstream tech coverage are just a technique to have them consume more out of fear.

The business consumer is too educated for that now; there’s a reason I’ve never been sent Wired or Verge articles in group chats over the last two years, but I get a constant flow of TBPN. We want to be excited.

By going in the opposite direction of what seems like anti-tech tech media coverage, the TBPN squad, which we’ve written about ad nauseam in this newsletter for their dialed-in approach to media, delivered positive instruction and built high energy toward a 9-figure exit.

In a world now where everyone shares their real selves on iPhone videos, you’ll be surprised what a relentlessly optimistic or contrived drama will do to give the viewers what they want: traditional TV tropics, just not put together by massive corporations with a Hollywood agenda.

As every “new media” influencer or group chat spirals from the news's opportunity, and every tech and VC wonders how to build a real media play. This seems like a fitting time to break down my four C’s of influencer marketing - the art of utilizing personality inside the marketing conversation.

From there, we’ll continue to discuss the other throughline at hand in the modern cultural conversation of retail experiences.

We also dive once again into what journalism and PR look like in the modern age, and you’ll find all of it below.

Let’s get into it

The Four C’s of Influencer Strategy

This newsletter segment is in partnership with Later.

Something is happening in influencer marketing right now that I find genuinely exciting. Brands are getting creative and celebrity, influencer, designer and cultural ambassador are all blurring.

The Influencer report

Valentino signed Sombr. The 20-year-old behind “Back to Friends” is now a brand ambassador for one of the most storied fashion houses in the world.

A 23-year-old is redesigning Slazenger live on TikTok. Alexei Hamblin started a series of roasting “dead” sports brands he found in Sports Direct. Instead, Frasers Group brought him in as a consultant to reimagine Slazenger, a brand founded in 1881 that needs a new lease of life. He’s documenting the entire rebrand on via short-form video

Katjes appointed Jake Shane as Chief Creative Officer. The German candy conglomerate (about a billion dollars in revenue from gummies alone) is entering the US market, and they’re giving (at least some of) creative keys to a 26-year-old comedy creator with 3.9 million TikTok followers and a hit podcast. He’ll lead brand voice, campaign strategy, and cultural positioning for the entire US launch in 2026.

Reformation dropped a Divorce Collection with Laura Wasser. Hollywood’s most famous divorce attorney has represented Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian, and Britney Spears. Reformation hired her to front a post-Valentine’s Day campaign about moving on, feeling sexy, and starting a new chapter. L

imited edition “Dump Him” sweatshirt with proceeds going to a family law center. Not about followers but about a cultural anchor that signals the right thing to current and target Reformation audiences.

The 4 C’s framework

I think about influencer strategy in four buckets, let’s call them The Four C’s.

Culture: brings relevancy. You’re tapping into someone who carries weight in music, sports, or media. Valentino signing Sombr is pure culture. He wore the clothes because they matched his identity, and now Valentino gets to borrow that energy. When Nara Smith becomes the face of an algae oil brand and it somehow makes perfect sense, that’s culture working.

Creative: is when someone with influence actually designs, builds, or creates for you. Not just posts about your product. Makes it. Hamblin isn’t doing a Slazenger sponsorship. He’s redesigning the brand in public and building a new sub-line from scratch.

Core: is the traditional play. People who post about your niche and products, paid to do their best, boosted with paid spend, ideally in coordination around a campaign.

Category: is the wildcard. It’s using specialists to reach specific, unexpected, or test markets. Jake Shane doing Katjes isn’t a traditional CPG play. It’s putting a comedy creator in a C-suite role to reach an American audience that has never heard of this European candy brand.

If any of these scenarios sound weirdly good, it’s because they are. And the reason brands are getting better at this is that the discovery and tracking behind influence is improving. Tech is being used to quantify what used to be gut feel.

Why I Work With Later

The influencer platform Later has built its own proprietary AI engine called LaterEdgeAI. It’s trained on data that actually matters: 16M+ creators analyzed to predict performance, 136B annual impressions showing how content lands at scale, and $2B+ in verified influencer-driven purchases tied to real outcomes.

That last number is the one that should get your attention, because all channels are becoming increasingly measurable, whether your goal is awareness or sales.

Later strategizes, produces, and manages influencer campaigns end-to-end. They’ve done it for Nike, Chewy, Habit Burger, and more. If you’re looking to build or level up your influencer marketing, the link is here.

Learn more about Later here.

The Blankstreetification of physical retail

Loved this insight from Twitter-famous writer, David Perell, on why establishments like Blank Street just work. What other brands would you put into this bucket right now?

Leave a comment

What outdoor brands understand about art direction

If anyone understands good art direction within content, it’s outdoor brands. From upstarts to more established companies, these are a few things they just get that other companies can apply to their own situation.

1. Color. They understand how to incorporate color in a way that feels both loud and natural. Part of this stems from the product itself, and the other part stems from how they pair colors to create tension for the customer.

2. Movement. They know how to place their models in natural environments and settings, and what actions

3. Narrative. They create storylines within each post that loop you into a greater point, and they do it both in the studio and in nature. You attach yourself to specific characters or connect with different environments, which only allows you to build a deeper relationship with the customer.

Consider the following examples to illustrate our point.

The State of Public Relations

Ashwinn, Jordan and Oren talk about media, PR and a scene report from Shoptalk.

As always, thank you for reading,

Clayton & Oren

First, a housekeeping reminder, the next Cut30 starts today if you want in on learning short form video and following in the shoes of hundreds and hundreds of successful creators you can join here.

I just got back from Tokyo with the family. Fresh eyes, a lighter wallet, and a few things worth discussing about brand in the modern age.

Primarily, when everything is copyable, identity becomes the last advantage.

Japan figured this out before we did, partly because China’s been duplicating everything next door for decades. The stark differences in retail experiences, branding, the craft of product between Japan and the rest of the world are significant.

One of the more interesting examples is Family Mart hiring Nig (the BAPE founder, current Kenzo artistic director) as their creative director.

Because in a market where every convenience store has similar experiences, and they're all on every corner, competing both for local and tourist traffic, the brand that has an identity wins. And possibly, that ubiquity and brand value can be the start of something bigger. They already have a branded apparel line called Convenience Wear, treating owned product lines as a core part of the convenience store experience. Now they’ve launched new retail experiences focused just on that, have a full slate of collaborations, and are expected to have new interiors updates starting this year.

Perhaps the most interesting creative director jobs will show up in the most unexpected places.

In this HYPER.
- I’m redesigning all my various websites, and share a bit of how and why
- Further breakdowns on branding insights from Japan
- A dive into pricing psychology tactics worth knowing for your brand

Let’s begin.

Web Design Workflow

In partnership with Framer.

This year, one of my focuses is synching all the elements of my personal brand and brand extensions online.

My primary methodology for almost everything nowadays is to ship and catch up to “brand standards” later. I wouldn’t have done 1000 videos over the last 1000 days (which feels insane but what I’ve actually made) without starting with done is better than good.

We’ve had 2500 brands and creators through Cut30 and the logo is from a designer on Upwork.

But all mad-dashes must come to an end, and this year I’m turning it all into a brand.

The first focus… websites.

We just launched the new Cut30 site in Framer.

All my recent community calls are also in a Framer flow. Their forms sync direct to Kit or to Kajabi via API. We’ve matched all the styles to my Insagram carousels and video backgrounds.

And through doing this, I can’t recommend Framer enough. See that little pencil icon on on the right of the screenshot above? I can just click that and edit any of the text on site or drag any objects live and it edits it responsively. I don’t even need to touch a backend.

I hired a developer/designer easily off of Contra, and then a more affordable admin for basic changes there, too theres an easy support community.

When we started and I wanted to get a site live quick I used this template below and we were live for a webinar promo in under 20 minutes.

If you’re a creative who wants a portfolio site that doesn’t look like everyone else, a freelancer who wants to add web to your toolkit of what you offer, or a business looking for a better website, you can learn more about Framer here:

https://framer.link/orenmeetsworld

What to learn about the branding and commerce of Japan

The learnings about branding (and inspiration for design) in Japan is essentially endless.

The above Youtube video breaks down what’s happening there from a brand and consumer culture standpoint, convenience stores with creative directors, department stores that embarrass anything we have in the US, and a North Face that somehow outperformed its American parent.

I visit Beams, who took American workwear and Ivy League style, made a better version of it than we ever did, and turned it into a multi-floor destination where a Ziploc collab sells out next to Japanese ceramics and imported denim.

We go by the block of North Face experiences, where Goldwin took North Face, brand that was close to bankruptcy in the ‘90s ,bought the perpetual trademark for Japan, built 12 sublabels, a 3D body scanning custom service, and turned it into a $670M business running parallel to the global version.

Plus Muji, the anti-brand, Don Quixote, the chaos destination and more.

The thread: every one of these brands found a way to build a world. A point of view, a curatorial lens, a reason to show up that no one else can replicate because it’s theirs.

Pricing Psychology: Behind the Numbers

The carousel I excerpt below on pricing psychology was very popular. In content in general I’ve been looking more and more into explaining “why we buy” and sharing both consumer knowledge for awareness and tactics for brands to position.

Today I’m going to go through some of the concepts of pricing worth knowing.

Anchoring

The first number someone sees reframes every number they see after it. This is why pricing pages almost always show three tiers: a high anchor on the right, a mid-tier in the center, and a low option that exists mostly to make the center feel justified. The decoy is there to make the real product feel reasonable.

Retail does the same thing. Luxury department stores stock a $900 candle not because they expect to sell a lot of them but because the $200 candle next to it now reads as accessible. The anchor does not have to be your product… but it helps to have it in the frame. Every Best Buy has three pricing tiers in every category for a reason - good, better and best (look at this next time you’re there).

Price as a Quality Signal

People do not have perfect information about product quality's specially online. So they use price as a proxy. In study after study, consumers rate the exact same product as higher quality when it is more expensive. Makes sense, this is a reasonable heuristic in a world where you cannot feasibly test many things before buying.

The implication is that underpricing is a brand problem vs just a margin problem. If your product is priced below category expectations, customers assume something is wrong with it. Premium pricing, when backed by the right product and brand signals, actually reduces buyer skepticism rather than increasing it.

Brands that undercharge often spend more on marketing to overcome the doubt their price creates.

Charm Pricing vs. Rounded Pricing

$9.99 versus $10. The difference is $0.01 and the psychological distance is much larger. Prices ending in 9 consistently drive higher volume in mass and value categories. But in premium and luxury categories, the opposite is true. Rounded pricing signals confidence. It says the brand is not trying to trick you into thinking $9.99 is a good deal. It is $10 and it is worth it.

The Decoy Effect

When you add a third option that is priced close to your most expensive product but offers noticeably less, it makes the expensive option look like a better deal. Most subscription pricing pages use this without labeling it. Three options: a small, a medium, and a large. The small exists to justify the medium. The large exists to make the medium feel like the smart choice.

Loss Aversion in Pricing

People feel the pain of losing $100 more acutely than they feel the pleasure of gaining $100. Pricing strategy can activate this asymmetry. Limited runs, seasonal collections, and member-only access frames the purchase as a way to avoid losing out rather than a way to gain something. This is why fashion drops work, you are purchasing the prevention of future regret.

Patagonia does the same thing in a different way: the lifetime warranty is structured as a permanent protection against future loss. You are buying a jacket, and the guarantee that you will never have to buy another one.

Until the next edition,

Oren

A happy Thursday to you all. This week, Clayton unpacked how rock climbing became a status symbol through fashion, while Oren explored Tokyo’s famous Karimoku Research Center, a listening room exhibition featuring Devin Turnbull’s work.

In this HYPER edition, we talk about world building in sports, influencer tactics, Oren reports live from Shoptalk… and protein cereal.

Let’s begin!

World-building is…

Taking over the Casino de Madrid to host a football match as the backdrop for your new collection.

That’s what Pompeii (a Madrid-based clothing brand) did for their most recent sport-themed collab between them and Club América, based in Mexico.

And they simply did not have to go this hard.

Rumour has it the Baroque-inspired ballroom cost around €9,000 to rent out for the shoot, an amount which brands easily spend on location-based shoots. And we talk about this all the time, but brands often sell their creativity short by not thinking through the details. When, instead, they should be renting out ornately designed ballrooms.

We talk about this all the time, but brands consistently sell their creativity short by not thinking through the setting. The product is only half the story. The environment you put it in is what makes people stop and pay attention.

Pompeii could have shot this in a basic studio, and nobody would have blinked. Instead, they created tension between the product and the place, and that tension is what made the whole thing memorable.

If you’re a brand planning a campaign right now and your shoot location doesn’t make someone do a double take, you might want to rethink it.

How to build your own influencer strategy

Every brand asks “what marketing should I concentrate on first,” and then quickly to, “where do I scale?”

Here’s the path we suggest…

1. You need to get one profitable scaling channel of the two below

Owned organic social - getting views through your own social media and team accounts, typically on IG or TikTok

Paid ads - paid advertising on online platforms - most often Meta, Google, or TikTok

2. Then from there, you graduate up

Add on external parties that pour the fuel on the fire of both of the above giving more conversation happening about your brands online organically, and giving you more tools to advertise in step 3

Paid influence - paying influencers to promote your product

Seeding - giving product away for free

3. As these succeed, utilize that content as part of your paid funnel

Whitelisting - running ads on others content about your product, shown from their account

Repurposing - taking content from the network it started on (a TikTok shop influencer post for example) and testing it on other networks

90% of brands pushing both online and retail sales don’t need to do more than the playbook above, and instead need to focus on the scale and quality of the execution there, and shifting it in real time as the goalposts of content online change.

In section two especially, brands have a hard time figuring out the playbook.

How do you quantify influencer marketing?
What tools should I use for my programs?
How do I negotiate without compromising the relationship?
What KPIs should I report to my org?

Who can help me execute this?

To help with this, our friend Josh and the team at Aligned Growth Management, an influencer management agency who have worked with Ghost Energy, Hexclad, FabFitFun, Owyn, Heart & Soil put together a detailed Influencer Marketing playbook free guide that breaks all of the above down.

Grab it below and get your blueprint to properly integrate influencer marketing into your brand’s growth arc.

Grab the guide here

This segment is in partnership with Aligned Growth Management

Live from Shoptalk

This is Oren, reporting to you live from Shoptalk, a conference that is focused on connections and solutions for the retail and ecommerce industries, featuring the biggest players selling consumer products.

A few notes on the discussion on the show floor.

We are in the age of incredible tools, and the announcements are coming so fast and furious that every marketer feels overwhelmed and has no idea what even to look at. It’s basically a job just to keep up with whats happening and can be implemented.

One standout - I am there with Klaviyo for their release of Composer, a very useful tool for email marketers that will generate full email And SMS campaigns using your brand kit, website and assets, completely ready to go in Klaviyo, with segments and campaign setup.

Even better is that this same tech will show you optimizations and issues in your flows, and you can simply... ask them to fix it and deploy. The time you spent deep in automation setup and optimization is now being able to be done just by asking in chat. Pretty incredible, and you can get on the waitlist here.

Disclosure: I am promoting this feature via video, but sharing here because… its great.

The second big note is brands are realizing the dissonance in their spend and what’s happening in the world. The recurring topic that came up with marketers at massive brands I talked to is their programmatic spends and agency budgets are full of waste, they know smaller brands are savvier and doing more with less, and their caught between the large agencies with the clout and scale to win their RFPs and the smaller groups with the savvy to help them market correctly in the modern era.

There’s a reckoning coming.

And last, most execs don’t know what live selling is, and certainly haven’t seen it happen, so Whatnot had the lads selling watches live on the internet direct from their booth. Fun activation.

The protein(ifcation) of everything

Who needs good old-fashioned Magic Spoon protein cereal when you can have… ground beef-infused protein… cereal?

Look, we didn’t have ground beef cereal on our bingo cards for 2026, but here we are.

Does it taste good? Not sure. And also not sure if I’d want to find out, but one thing is for certain: a single box if $14, and it’s currently sold out.

And the reality is that it points to a bigger trend we’re noticing on the product side in CPG: the proteinification of all things (yes, that’s a new word).

Starbucks has been rolling protein-infused coffee drinks over the last year.

DAVID (yes, that David) is putting protein in ice cream. So is Natty, in a push to dethrone the Halo Tap.

On a mainstream level, Costco’s protein bars have become a cultural phenomenon. Even water brands are getting in on it. It feels like every legacy category is getting a “now with protein” remix, and consumers keep buying it.

The wellness-to-fitness pipeline has completely shifted how we shop for food. If you look back five years ago, the old playbook was about removing stuff: no sugar, no gluten, no dairy, no artificial anything.

Now, we’re in a moment of addition. People don’t just want to avoid the “bad,” they want their food to actively do something for them. And protein is clearly one of the easier ways to solve for this.

And thinking through the mechanics of this, it almost feels like a cheat code. Adding protein to an existing product lets you charge a premium, reposition it in the wellness aisle, and tap into consumers who’ve already been primed by the fitness content they consume on social media.

But does this have staying power, or is it the CBD, where everyone rushes in, pumps the market with mediocre products, and then consumers move on?

Feels like a toss-up. Protein does seem stickier because it’s tied to something fundamental (i.e., people want to be strong and healthy).

But the brands that will win long term are the ones that make it taste good and feel like a real product, not a supplement with better packaging.

In the meantime, enjoy your $14 bowl of ground beef cereal.

Why BTS works as a content medium

We’re obviously seeing tons of creators use IG as a primary channel for building brands, as an extension of the content they already make. CatGPT is launching a creator studio where people can come in and build things out of a huge warehouse, and she’s creating massive FOMO by inviting you into the journey through showing you what the space actually looks like.

This German design studio made a video showcasing their work by revealing the process of outfitting a physical space, the labor and detailing that went into it, and how it all came together.

Meanwhile this content creator in Seattle breaks down how much it actually costs to open a second location for his coffee + tea bar.

It really doesn’t matter what you want to make content about. There is simply a through-line, angle, and anchor piece of content for anyone who wants to yap. So find whatever that is, and start recording!

Quick hits

• Framer has launched their “State of Sites” industry report on websites with results from surveying 1900 professionals.

• Darkroom is looking for a senior director for their content studio, a very unique role for someone content savvy.

• A good thread on why not to ignore Youtube ads

Until next time,
Clayton & Oren

My next community call is Tuesday, we’ll be doing live training and workshopping on building brand social media plans, join us here (these have been a lot of fun): http://creativedirector.net/creative-ops

And speaking of which…

Every brand I respect right now has something in common.

They stopped thinking about content as a marketing function and started treating it like a product.

Red Bull didn’t invent action sports. They replaced a TV genre that died. What used to live on Tosh 2.0 or Ridiculousness now lives on their Instagram.

The development of this has just as much attention, if not more, than the product itself.

The question isn’t whether this applies to your brand. It does. In a world where software can be duped, any brand’s supply chain can be hunted down, it is definitively a time when the people behind your company and its distribution both of product and of media matter more than ever.

“Just hire a social media manager” is the most expensive mistake you can make right now.

Not because social media managers are bad. Because one person doing everything, posting, briefing, shooting, editing, reporting, ideating, is a machine that leads to trash content

The move is pods.

A pod is a minimum two-person unit. One strategist, one creator. The strategist writes briefs, pulls analytics, manages the posting calendar, and runs coordination. The creator shoots, records, and edits. They don’t swap jobs. That separation of left brain and right brain is where the output actually gets good.

That core pod then expands. Three to four external creators getting briefed in on a retainer or per-video basis. Some of that content goes to organic. Some gets sparked into your ad account. The strategist runs one-on-ones, a weekly creative review, and a monthly analytics pull. You know what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Then you add more pods.

One for TikTok. One for founder content. Shared resources: editors, designers, sit across all of them. Eventually you have a creative director holding vision across the whole thing.

The brands doing this right are running a media company inside their marketing org.

The goal for a two-person pod: 10 strong creative concepts per week. Five going to organic, five going into the ad account. Some overlap. From there you iterate.

On March 24th, we’re gonna go through all the questions you have about building systems like this in a brand live. Don’t miss it.

Join the live call here → https://www.creativedirector.net/creative-ops

Making better content by understanding shot types

If campaign footage is looking impossibly good right now, even from creators with a phone and small budgets, it’s not luck. It’s a combination of understanding shot language and knowing the tools to replicate it.

In this video I described how you need to update your vernacular to help make better video. Lets get into how to do it

If you want to focus on retention (increasing watch time, which impacts overall content performance on social media), it’s worth having a library of techniques you can use when creating, and also know you have a technology suite to help you in post.

Here’s a few good examples to start with, and workflow on how to get more and use them.

Subscribe now

Shot types starter kit

Bolt Cam is a motorized camera arm that moves up to 6 feet per second in any direction. The result is that otherworldly speed you see in high-end campaign footage. Replicable in AI generation if you describe the motion correctly.

Focus shift is when the focal point moves from one subject to another within the same frame. Simple technique, massive emotional impact, especially between two characters or objects.

Parallax is the visual effect where a foreground and background move independently, creating the illusion of depth. Think of it as the camera revealing dimension rather than just moving through space.

Dolly zoom is the disorienting effect where the camera physically moves one direction while the focal length adjusts the opposite way. What you’ve seen in moments of shock or realization in film. It creates that stomach-drop feeling of the world shifting beneath someone.

A tracking shot follows a subject in motion, keeping them centered while the environment changes around them.

The Freepik workflow

About 90% of the examples I’ve generated in the video above start with either a single still frame or a start and end frame. That still image can be a photo, a screen grab from existing footage, or a reference image you’ve collected.

From there the process is:

Pick your shot type from the list above. Pick your model (I’ve had the best results with Seedance, but test your own). Then describe it the way an art director would brief a cinematographer. What is the camera doing. What’s the focal point. How fast is it moving. What’s happening in the background.

That specificity is everything. Vague prompts return vague video.

My actual cheat code

I keep Eyecandy open in every production. It’s a reference library of shot types and transitions used by cinematographers. When I need a hook, a hero moment, or a transition that hits differently, I pull something from there.

The bridge to Freepik is simple. I drag a gif from Eyecandy into the Freepik Assistant and ask it to describe the shot in prompt-ready language. Then I take that description and apply it to whatever image I’m working with.

My prompt for the assistant: “Describe this gif so i can use the prompt to generate a similar video effect on a different image” and then I have a great setup prompt to use for effects and transitions.”

Exploded Views Pro tips

For product exploded views like in the video, the prompt structure matters more than people realize. You want to describe the disassembly in sequence, specific components lifting away in a specific order, each part suspended and legible.

a. Example prompt: Then the decomposition begins — the headphones smoothly and elegantly disassemble in mid-air, each component separating and floating apart in slow motion: the glossy shells drift outward, the felt cushions lift away revealing the internal drivers underneath, the headband segments separate one by one fanning out, the tiny screws and magnets and mesh grilles all suspended in space, perfectly organized, every single part visible and floating in a constellation around where the headphones were.

b. I will then ask Claude for a realistic list of parts that are internal to the product, and ask it to list those out in an order of the build that is accurate that I can give to Freepik to generate the exploded view realistically.

Learn more about Freepik here: https://www.freepik.com/spaces

The video above was sponsored, but this newsletter is put together just for value.

Subscribe now

The Brandfathers Discuss Storytelling, Mainstream Ads & The Rising Value of Creative Talent

You’re regular dose of deep dive marketing conversations from Oren, Ashwinn and Jordan.

From around the web:

As always…

I am training creative strategists and marketing teams for brands and agencies how to navigate the new world with Creative Strategy

and teaching anyone how to be a creator who actually gets views in Cut30.

Thanks for reading.

-Oren

This week, Oren is in Japan and testing brand agents while Clayton is back visiting our friends at Knees Up in London.

Thanks to everyone who came to the community call in early March. Oren’s next live workshop is on Tuesday, the 24th, on how to actually make a content plan for brands in 2026.

Sign up here.

This week, we’re getting into product positioning, the branding of technology, and the tactics behind whitelisting.

Let’s begin.

Is your product boring, or do you not know how to brand it?

So many brands and creatives resort to mediocrity in their product positioning. But if we’ve learned anything over the last few years, there is always room for a challenger brand or product to step in and shake things up, regardless of the category.

Because the way you position your product is the competitive edge nowadays, and countless brands out there are proving us right. Here are some that we love:

Margin Global took products we all use (deodorant, body washes, fragrance) and used phenomenal art direction to make personal care feel luxurious.

Craighill took a pair of SCISSORS, a thankless utility tool in everyone’s catch-all drawer, and elevated the materials and colors, now managing to sell out of this same product tenfold.

And Unlikely Dry Goods took the humble grocery tote and turned it into crinkled-up butcher paper that operates more like a collectible than something you’d carry your milk and eggs in.

What’s unique about each of these examples is that they achieved the same thing in different ways:

1. Margin used art direction to get there

2. Craighill used material elevation to get there, and

3. Unlikely Dry Goods used product distortion for theirs

The moral of the story is that if you want to reach new (or existing people with your products) you need to remember that the competitive edge is in how you position your product.

A guide on how to whitelist your content

We got a super positive response from the influencer guide we sent out from AGM a few weeks ago, so we’re back with more, this time taking a deep dive into the topic you asked the most about: whitelisting

What is whitelisting?

It’s when a brand runs paid ads through a creator’s account, rather than its own. So instead of seeing a video from “BRAND X” in your feed, the ad shows up as if it’s coming from a creator you follow (or one you’ve seen recently), but it’s extended, boosted, and targeted to more people.

If you’ve seen an ungodly amount of Oren showing up in ads from Anthropic, Death to Stock, or Foreplay… that’s whitelisting at work with him as the creator.

Why does this matter?

Because trust travels. Creators already have the audience, the voice, the credibility and they most often stop the scroll better than a brand. The higher the hook rate on an ad, the more spend it gets, which has more potential for scale and success.

So, when you whitelist, you’re not just borrowing a creator’s content, you’re borrowing their relationship with their audience. And that is infinitely more effective than a brand shouting from its own account with zero context.

Brands often even test this with employees and founders, just because human accounts perform better.

A free guide on whitelisting

To help more brands optimize this for themselves, our friend Josh and his team at Aligned Growth Management have put together a thorough, free guide on exactly how to kickstart your whitelisting program, covering all of the points below.

1. What is whitelisting and why you should test it

2. The 3 methods of whitelisting (and how to execute with each one)

3. How to make whitelisting a scalable, incremental channel

4. How to find creators and influencers for whitelisting

5. How to contract influencer partners for whitelisting

AGM is a fantastic influencer management agency that’s worked with brands like Ghost Energy, Hexclad, FabFitFun, Owyn, Heart & Soil, and more.

Grab the free guide here

This segment is in partnership with Aligned Growth Management.

Your product photos don’t have to be boring

Related to the above, we’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Most brands shoot their products the exact same way… a white background with clean lighting. But that’s a safe way to look like everything else, and no one cares.

But to us, the best product photography taps into world-building, whether it’s subtle or overt.

So, here are five principles to help you and your teams operate with when you’re shooting product photos.

1. Shoot it in the environment it belongs in. If you make outdoor jackets, put them on grass, not a mannequin. The context does the selling for you.

2. Let the packaging create dimension. Some brands have packaging that’s so well-designed it doesn’t need to be unboxed. Shoot it sealed or shoot it wrapped; but let the presentation be the photo itself.

3. Shoot it where you’d actually leave it. Jeans hanging on a door handle. A jacket draped over a chair. It mirrors real behavior, which makes the viewer see themselves in the image without thinking about it.

4. Create tension with the product. A silver chain wrapped around a coffee bag. Tension between objects creates visual interest that a plain backdrop never will.

5. Tell a story with what’s around it. A flat lay isn’t just a product arrangement. It’s a character sketch, and each object adds a layer of personality.

The throughline across all of these is that great product photography comes down to the world you put it in. So stop showing people what it looks like and start showing them what it feels like.

The Marketing of Technology

We’re now in the era where anyone can build the idea; any technology moat can get taken. This applies for physical products and much as software, and tech is feeling the biggest ripple effects.

Technology now is an intense game of distribution, of resonance, of personality and tribalism and the engineers, for the most part, absolutely suck at it.

Those who can maneuver, (I'll point to Claude's influencer marketing here as an excellent example), can gain vastly oversized shares of key market demographics.

In this video Oren dives in to important branding decisions from Apple, CashApp and Teenage Engineering inside their various arcs that helped them catapult above entrenched competitors without a pure product differential, and how to think more about the branding and marketing of tech headed into the rest of 2026.

Parting shots

If Erewhon opened a Padel club in Libsoa, we imagine it would look something like what Salto Studio created.

The Chanel ad campaign feels… alive.

Did not have Budweiser CPG packaging 10/10 on my 2026 bingo card.

Enough time has passed post-Brat for another generator contender to emerge.

We have so many topics in the queue around the new internet, pricing, archetypes, back soon!

Hyper <3’s you

This week, Oren is talking about how businesses use workshops and courses to support their revenue and customer lifetime value, and Clayton is showcasing French tableware.

This week, some of our favorite concepts and inspiration around the internet.

Let’s begin.

Rise of the Etsy influencer and monetizing your hobbies

Embroidered tableware. Egg carton mezze platters. Dutchcore tilework.

Ten years ago, if you crocheted, threw pots, or hand-painted ceramics, it was simply a hobby. There was no empire to build. Just a love for the craft. You probably sold stuff to friends, or had a nice little Etsy side hustle.

But all that’s changed to the point where hobbyists have become the new designers, in a way. The internet didn’t just give makers a distribution channel; it gave craft a status symbol, both for the maker and the customer.

We’ve obviously talked a lot about the rise of makers and people gravitating toward things that visibly came from someone’s hands.

The bigger shift: “maker” is becoming a more credible creative title than “designer.”

If you have a hobby and want to monetize on it, now’s a great time to be making content about it.

What we can learn from Nike ACG’s rebrand

Nike just pulled out a rare W with the relaunch of ACG, their in-house outdoors brand, and we need to talk about it.

ACG (All Conditions Gear) has been around since 1989, but it never fully got the attention or love it deserved. Which has been disappointing to watch, because it’s genuinely one of their most powerful assets as a large brand (and one that’s struggled immensely in recent years to define its identity).

But this month, Nike went all in on a rebrand of ACG, giving it the flowers it deserves and a much-needed reboot to serve the lanes it operates best in, like trail running, hiking, and exploration.

Naturally, Wieden+Kennedy (Nike’s long time agency partner) executed the rebrand, and they went full on world-maxxing in the process.

For starters, they tricked out a heritage Italian commuter train, painted it head-to-toe in ACG’s signature orange, and turned it into a rolling basecamp called the All Conditions Express.

The route went from Milan’s Centrale station into the Orobic Alps during the Winter Olympics (Feb 4-8), taking athletes and press on guided trail runs while offering them access to gear labs and recovery stations.

Then they brought on Jannik Sinner, the heir-apparent to Rafael Nadal, to be the conductor and punch tickets on board. Which sounds random until you realize Sinner was an elite skier growing up in the Dolomites before tennis was ever in the picture. He’s not a celebrity cameo. He’s an outdoor athlete coming home.

Nike leaned into that backstory with a bespoke one-of-one outfit through their Nike Atelier program; a custom GORE-TEX ACG jacket, A.I.R. vest, and dip-dyed Zegama trail shoes. There were no tennis references, instead they focused it as an homage to where Sinner grew up in Northern Italy.

And as they rolled this out the last month, I’ve been thinking about a number of ways they nailed it. Here’s where I landed…

1. You can rebrand old ideas. It’s obvious that ACG had morphed into a fashion play over the years, which has a segment, but it lost its core. And instead of killing the whole thing when the brand felt stagnant, Nike redirected it back to the foundation. If your product line or positioning has drifted, perhaps it’s time to think about niching down again.

2. Show, don’t tell. Nike didn’t just tell people ACG was a performance brand again. They showed it. Caleb Olson won Western States in the Ultrafly. That’s not a campaign. That’s proof.

3. The activation is the product. Recovery labs, gear demos, alpine trail runs, all happening inside the experience. For smaller brands, this is the principle worth stealing: don’t separate the marketing from the thing. Make the experience and the product the same story.

There are countless legacy brands shouting into the void right now, trying to force their product lines and categories into something they’re not. And while not every brand has Nike’s budget, the principle is the same: sometimes the move isn’t reinvention.

It’s returning to what made you great in the first place.

How On went from unknown to $3B in revenue

On just hosted a giant press trip for the launch of their newly opened factory in South Korea, where 32 fully automated robots are producing their newest products in a fraction of the time it would take humans to do it.

Basically a robotic arm sprays an ultrathin upper onto a shoe in roughly 3 minutes, which effectively replaces a traditional manufacturing process involving 200+ manual steps.

And to give you some perspective, this Busan facility gives On’s LightSpray production capacity 30x its original four-robot setup in Zurich, putting output in the hundreds of thousands of units. Which is wilddd.

But what’s most interesting for us is how it changes the math for the whole company.

One of On’s co-founder, Caspar Coppetti, mentioned the the current output only represents 3-4% of the facility’s total capacity, and they’re already exploring additional factories in Asia, North America, and Europe.

Oh yeah, and On announced they hit $3 billion in revenue in 2025.

For a company that’s SIXTEEN YEARS OLD, not bad, huh?

Ultimately, I think what this shows is just how massive the outdoor and athletic market is, how much green space exists for small to mid size brands, let alone behemoths like On, and how you can literally scale a brand by relentlessly focusing on making an insanely good product if you sell the message properly.

PS - if you want to hear more about the press trip and factory, our friend Chris from Dot Dot Dot wrote about his experience on the trip here on his newsletter. Tap in.

3 creator-founders you should follow right now

Ronning

Magnus, the founder, has done an amazing job taking you BTS of what it takes to run a clothing business, from his budget report videos showing how much he spent in a month to these factory videos where you see how products are actually made.

If you’re making your own products you should be using your page to do the same thing on a personal level. It builds really strong brand affinity and let’s people see the more human of you.

Sour Milk

is a newer CPG brand making a probiotic yoghurt, and the founders Elan and Kiki have positioned themselves in a unique way to take you on the journey starting the brand and what each phase looks like, including unsexy parts like asking friends to help them package things.

CatGPT

This is perhaps one of the greatest case studies for what being good at yapping gets you in life. CatGPT (I believe her real name is Catherine?) has been making technology and AI focused content for a while, and she lays a nice blueprint for how to evolve from a niche topic into selling an actual product.

Which in her case is Physical Phones, a bluetooth powered device you can use to take real phones calls instead of being on your phone.

Licensing - how does it work?

There is more confusion than ever about collaborations, licensing and how brands working together with various intellectual property works. The Brandfathers brought an expert on this week to break down the basics:

As always, thank you for reading,

Clayton & Oren

On social this week, Clayton reveals what yuppies do in NYC while Oren is procuring rare plants in LA. Perhaps, we’ve become stereotypes of ourselves?

But today, Clayton breaks down how to use art direction as a lever for growth, and Oren unpacks ideas about personal brand and social media as tools for creatives to drive revenue, with a quick note on the psychology and structure of proper pricing, and how to use it as a marketing tool.

P.S.

Oren is hosting a community call this Sunday, a live training on exercises for creative strategy on organic social media for brands, plus taking questions.

Reserve a spot here.

Let’s begin.

It’s time to level up your art direction

Most brand imagery looks the same right now. Rinse and repeat with the clean backgrounds, a centered product, and maybe a model standing there, looking off-camera.

And while it might feel safe, nobody remembers it.

But the brands and creators doing interesting visual work right now aren’t necessarily spending more money. They’re thinking differently about what a product photo or campaign can do.

So, let us explore some guiding principles we follow when creating content for a product campaign. The goal is to shift your brain from viewing art direction as an afterthought to a creative practice your prioritize.

1. Tie it to movement

The easiest upgrade to any shoot is giving your subject something to do. A jacket looks fine on someone standing still. It looks alive on someone mid-stride, climbing over a fence, reaching for something on a shelf.

Movement creates context. It tells a story that the viewer fills in themselves, and it makes the product feel like it belongs in a life rather than a lookbook.

Static shots communicate “here is the product.” Movement communicates “here is what it feels like to wear it.”

2. Create illusion with the product

Show people something they can’t see with their own eyes. A transparent jacket that reveals how lightweight its construction is. A cross-section that exposes the layering. An angle that makes familiar materials look alien.

This isn’t gimmick territory; it’s using visual language to communicate what a spec sheet can’t. When someone looks at your image and understands something about the product they wouldn’t have otherwise, you’ve done your job better than any caption could.

3. Turn the intensity dial up

Take one element and push it to an unreasonable degree. Supersize the product for a normal-sized person. Light it on fire. Freeze it in a block of ice. Drop it from a building.

The point isn’t shock value. It’s creating an image with enough visual tension that people have to stop and process what they’re looking at. In a feed where everything is polished and proportional, the disproportionate is a weapon.

You don’t need every shot to be dialed to ten, but having one or two that are gives you something people actually talk about.

4. Be weird on purpose

There’s a difference between “creative” and actually weird. Most brands aim for the first and land somewhere forgettable. The ones that commit to genuine strangeness, the kind that makes someone tilt their head or screenshot it to send to a friend, are the ones building real recognition.

This creates polarity, which is the point. Not everyone will love it. But the people who do will remember you, and that’s worth more than universal mild approval. Safe work doesn’t travel.

5. Own a backdrop

Pick a setting or visual motif and make it yours. Shoot everything in a garden. Only use industrial kitchens. Always include one piece of brutalist architecture. The specific choice matters less than the commitment to it.

Over time, that recurring element becomes a signature. People start associating the environment with your brand before they even clock the product. Format builds recognition, and recognition builds trust.

This is one of the lowest-effort, highest-impact moves in art direction, and almost nobody does it consistently.

6. Shoot it messy

The instinct is always to clean everything up. Straighten the collar, smooth the fabric, remove the wrinkle, fix the background. But intentional messiness communicates something that perfection can’t: realness, energy, a sense that the product exists in the world and not just in a studio.

Piled on top of each other. Crumpled on a chair. Half-unpacked from a bag. Worn in and slightly dusty. These images feel human, and human is what cuts through right now. The most memorable product imagery often looks like it wasn’t trying that hard, which, of course, is its own kind of art direction.

Next time you’re planning a shoot, look at the mood board and ask yourself: would I stop scrolling for this? Not ‘does it look good.’ Not ‘is it on brand.’

Would it actually make someone pause?

If the answer is “probably not,” you already know what to do. Throw something out and replace it with a decision that makes you a little uncomfortable. That discomfort is usually the thing the final image was missing.

How to make money with your personal brand

I’ve made a lot of tactical, information-based content about social media, but I'm constantly asked: how do you connect that to money? Notoriety in your career is gratifying…

But how do you use it to get work as a creative, execute brand deals, structure offers, and work for brands?

In this video, I talk about the updates to what is succeeding in content today on short-form networks, and how to think about leveraging that for revenue.

How to use pricing as a marketing tool

Thoughts on pricing products to maximize customer lifetime value and give a brand its best trajectory.

Thanks for following along.

Oren & Clayton <3 you

Hyper Reports

Check out our market reports. We spend many hours researching markets, categories, and brands & products within the consumer space so you don’t have to.

• The guide to making great Merchandise — HERE — a guide to finding and producing your own merch

• Reports on Running, Golf, and Tennis — HERE — a guide to each sport, the market opportunities, and how to launch your own brand

This week, Oren’s talking about how TV ads have become far more measurable, while Clayton is reviewing Korean ceramics.

In this HYPER edition we talk about the changing nature of influence and celebrity and how brands of all sizes can look at the new world, plus the psychology of luxury, and our hunt for America’s next top snack.

Let’s begin.

Start Making Video Content on Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn

The 20th season of Cut30 kicks off today. If you want to learn short form video creation, come do it with a supportive community whose helped develop hundreds of winners of all ages and backgrounds. Join 2000+ creators who have done everything from learn how content works, to build their personal brands, to get featured in the NYT from their content.

We start tonight, join here.

Snack brand?

Andrea from Snaxshot, Taylor Lorenz and I are partnering with Air at this year’s Expo West to find American’s next top snack. If you’ve got a food brand and want to enter to win investment, support and have a general fun time with the team, you can apply here!

If you’re at Expo West you can also attend the event from the same link.

HYPERINFLUENCE

We are in a very interesting time for influence. People have begun to understand a few key things:

1. Modern algorithms reward engagement between people and brands, whether it’s collaboration posts or conversation. They pick up on it and show content to consumers based on this cast of characters a brand has.

2. At the same time we have a lack of mainstream stardom with the exception of Zendaya, Timothy Chalamet, Sydney Sweeney and a few mega stars. The next level of celebrity talent is more akin in reach to middle-tier influencers than how we looked at celebrity prior.

3. Music is interesting and globally relevant. K-pop in particular is an interesting case study. Every member of BTS now represents a different competing luxury house. RM at Bottega Veneta, Jin at Gucci, Suga at Valentino, J-Hope at Louis Vuitton, Jimin at Dior and Tiffany & Co., V at Celine and Cartier, Jung Kook at Calvin Klein, Chanel Beauty, and Hublot.

This is interesting because the K-Pop fandoms are more active. They don’t just like posts. They track stock movements after ambassador campaigns. They organize buying campaigns around drops. They’re consumers who treat ambassador announcements like calls to action. And there’s a ripple effect: The fandoms of K-pop are followed around the entirety of Southeast Asia and the US and Europe.

There’s an opportunity for brands to look at some of the emerging subcultures that are next to make interesting plays in the meantime. With the popularity of Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show, there’s a huge opportunity in the tiers of Spanish-language artists below the well-known Rosalía, Karol G, and Bad Bunny to be ambassadors of Spanish-language culture globally for brands. While we’ve seen a cultural relevance of Afrobeat and Amapiano as musical subcultures that cross over between both the tasteful culture-forward populace and both African and African American consumer groups.

4. Creative Directors are building lineups that go with them. When Jonathan Anderson took over Dior recently, he named ten new ambassadors, most of whom he’d already had a relationship with from the web. In the first seven weeks of 2026, Dior named ten new ambassadors: LaKeith Stanfield, Josh O'Connor, Drew Starkey, Taylor Russell, Florence Hunt, Sophie Wilde, Ever Anderson, Mike Faist, Sam Nivola, and Will Price.

This is a point I’ve always tried to make: That in creative direction and creative strategy, your rolodex is as important as your skillset. If you can, as a head of social or a creative director, plug into a campaign and be able to bring in creatives who will drop everything and work for you even when they’re busy. Or even at a smaller level, if you have that rolodex of video editors, carousel designers, and fast-turn creators in whatever niche that you work in, you can quickly bring them into projects at reasonable rates.

That skillset alone is what separates you inside the current hiring environment.

Smart marketers need to look at their creative talent as teams that move with them across projectsand brands similar to what we saw from Jonathan Anderson.

And then creatives themselves need to think about how can I position myself on the roster of these decision makers as they move?

Whether that’s people that manage influencer campaigns for brands, creative directors, or decision makers who would hire your talent. This is the era of squads. I’ve mentioned that term before but the idea of creative groups and creative hubs is more important than ever because algorithms reward the interaction and because it’s harder and harder to stand out in the noise online unless your content is absolutely amazing. But if you’re positioned in the right groups that are moving, you come along with it.

I’ve seen this in my own life. I have a group chat of just other creators of a certain size inside my niche. Another one for just people operating fashion brands. One for influencers that are doing a million dollars a year or more. These groups aren’t ultra active. But in that one or two times a month when someone really needs something or when you’re participating in a complex dilemma, those people are there and they’re always recommending each other. This has always been how it is - a network.

What’s changed is the ability to connect with it on the internet based purely on how social you are and if other people like your content and vibe online.

In the absence of big celebrity people are making bets as well. This happened at Chanel when Matthew Blazy picked Ayo Edebiri. Her career is accelerating, they can ride the wave with Louis Vuitton signing Chase Infinity - a very different approach from their work with Zendaya. At the same time, we’re seeing an interesting approach with the Nike Skims collab. Both brands are really interesting points in their arc: Nike working hard to maintain relevancy and gain back what they’ve lost in the market share of activewear, Skims with a relentless approach to influence and collaboration but needs something else to make that next step.

Their front for the 2026 campaign Lisa from BlackPink, back to the K-Pop angle, - a sign that the global shape of the brand is as important as either of the brand’s roots. If I was a brand looking at this now, I’d be thinking through these things:

1. Discovery bets - who can you get at the right point in your arc between who is that and a household name in your niche. You lock in early, get credit for discovering them, and pay a fraction of what established stars cost.

2. The rollout - you’ll see what some of the stars Louis Vuitton signed have already been dressing them, seeding this by having them at events doing some light content before the official ambassadorship was announced.

3. There’s an entire arc from there - what they’re wearing, stylist involvement, crossover ad campaigns. Brands need to think the same way these relationships run deep and they run more than posts.

4. There’s a lot of different ways you can participate in and then outside of the core niche that are eally interesting. Meta knows what to do with ad targeting for people already buying your consumer products. Finding popularity in tastemakers that reach across categories who can talk about what you do in context of what they’re putting together makes a lot of sense.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance this year of looking at your brand’s world like a network that starts with just the creatives involved and goes all the way up to influence and celebrity at whatever tier your brand is at, and how do all those pieces work together as a content, advertising, in real life, and brand building universe.

The Psychology of Luxury

I’ve been doing a new video series on short form about the luxury codes, the psychological factors around belonging, knowledge, taste and quality that convince consumers to spend a premium. Full deep dive on Youtube here:

As always, thanks for reading.

Oren & Clayton

Check out our market reports. We spend many hours researching markets, categories, and brands & products within the consumer space so you don’t have to.

• The guide to making great Merchandise — HERE — a guide to finding and producing your own merch

• Reports on Running, Golf, and Tennis — HERE — a guide to each sport, the market opportunities, and how to launch your own brand

A balance of brands rooted in the reality of product experimentation, and a future of the tools that are defining what and how we concept.

Let’s begin.

A brand misunderstood

In Europe, Stone Island is understood differently than the US.

There’s a lived-in knowledge around it. A generational familiarity. People didn’t discover it through pop culture moments or resale spikes; they grew up seeing it worn, beaten up, passed down, argued over.

In Amsterdam, where I (Clayton) reside, I brush shoulders daily with older Dutch men (plumbers, the owner of the local hardware shop, etc.) who often wear the badge.

But in the US, the brand is often reduced to a few things: a logo, a badge, a flex item that floats in and out of cultural relevance depending on who’s wearing it that year.

That reading isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s certainly incomplete.

So, to understand Stone Island, you have to stop reading it as “fashion” and start reading it as research.

The reason Stone Island matters isn’t the same reason a lot of contemporary “luxury” brands matter. It’s not about storytelling first. It’s not about positioning.

It’s about process, and we can trace that philosophy back to its origins.

Massimo Osti and the obsession with process

Massimo Osti founded the brand in 1982, and never started Stone Island around a look. He built it around a question: What happens if we treat garments like experiments?

From the beginning, Osti approached clothing the way an engineer or industrial designer might. He was obsessive about materials. About how fabrics reacted to stress, weather, washing, dyeing.

He wasn’t interested in making something precious. He wanted to see what happened when garments were pushed to their limits.

That mentality (of constant testing, iteration, and failure) is still the backbone of Stone Island today.

But let’s back up.

How it spread

By the mid-1980s, Stone Island had been adopted by the paninari—Italian youth who gathered around Milan’s fast-food joints and treated clothing as a form of identity. They wanted gear that looked expensive but wasn’t delicate. Stone Island fit.

From there, the brand migrated north.

British football fans traveling to European matches brought it home, and by the late ‘80s, Stone Island had become a staple of terrace culture. It wasn’t marketed to these groups. It was discovered by them, passed between cities, traded in pubs, and worn as a badge of taste and toughness.

Through the ‘90s and 2000s, that association deepened. Stone Island became associated with hooliganism, firm culture, and a kind of masculine intensity that overshadowed the product itself. For many people, especially outside Europe, that’s where the story ended.

But the brand kept working. The R&D never paused. While the mythology grew louder, the lab stayed quiet.

The proof is in the puddingproduct

Garment dyeing is what we’ve known the brand for, but it wasn’t for the vibes. It was a way to recontextualize finished pieces and see how color behaved when applied at the end of the process rather than at the beginning.

And in an industry where so many brands lead with narrative because they don’t have much else to stand on, Stone Island does the opposite. The story comes after the work.

And whether you agree or not, that’s why the brand feels closer, philosophically, to American institutions like Filson, Patagonia, or L.L. Bean than it does to most modern luxury labels.

Innovation isn’t just a tagline for a campaign; it’s the infrastructure.

Avi Gold, founder of Better™ Gift Shop in Toronto, put it plainly when we talked about where Stone Island sits today.

“In true Stone form, it pretty much sits above what everyone else is doing,” he told me. “The reason a lot of us got into the brand was because of their approach to fabrics, techniques, applications. They made timeless garments that withstood the test of time and continue to do so.”

What stood out wasn’t just reverence for the past but also an emphasis on continuity. Stone Island doesn’t romanticize its archive. It reworks it. Old techniques resurface decades later, adjusted, refined, stress-tested again. The same curiosity, applied repeatedly.

“With the rise of accessibility and everyone trying to make product or have a ‘brand,’” Avi continued, “Stone is one of the few brands that continues to stand outside the box and prove themselves through fabrics and their overall approach. It’s like wearable art.”

That idea (proof through product) is increasingly rare. Especially in a market flooded with premium branding and thin substance.

Community as a form of research

And Stone Island is one of the only brands that treats community not as “marketing,” but as another research surface. The clearest proof is the brand’s own framing: Community as a Form of Research, a campaign concept that puts real devotees at the center rather than hired faces.

The point is not celebrity, it’s evidence. When you photograph people who have lived with the clothes for years, you get a different kind of credibility, and a different kind of information.

What pieces do they keep.

How do they wear them.

What do they return to.

The campaign’s interviews, guided by Hans Ulrich Obrist, turn fandom into field notes, and the short film The Compass Inside makes the same case from another angle: this brand is built through the people who wear it and the people who make it.

That’s what Avi is picking up on.

Stone Island’s community is not a vibe layer added at the end. It’s part of how the brand pressure-tests relevance over time, in the same way it pressure-tests fabrics, dyes, and finishes.

Utility, experimentation, and meaning

Detroit-based Artist Tyrrell Winston approaches materials differently, but the overlap is striking. His work often centers on found objects… things already worn, marked by time, embedded with history.

“When materials wear and change over time, it becomes part of the story,” he told me. “Stone’s fabrics act in a similar way.”

That perspective reframes Stone Island’s obsession with experimentation. It’s not about perfection. It’s about allowing garments to evolve.

“I have no interest in art without experimentation,” Tyrrell said. “That doesn’t mean making things haphazardly. It means not being afraid to go places others haven’t, even if that comes at the cost of not ‘nailing it’ for a while.”

That willingness to be uncomfortable, to fail publicly, and to prioritize learning over immediate payoff is baked into Stone Island’s DNA. And it’s why the brand resists simplification.

Value, in that sense, isn’t fixed. It accrues.

“So much contemporary art could be perceived as nothing if it wasn’t for the story and context,” Tyrrell added. “Stories that stand the test of time become more important than the object, but in turn, they elevate the object.”

Stone Island understands that balance. The product carries the story, not the other way around.

Stone Island rewards your curiosity

Stone Island doesn’t explain itself loudly. It doesn’t flatten its ideas for mass appeal. It rewards curiosity. If you want to understand it, you have to spend time with the product. You have to care how things are made.

That’s why it continues to resonate across such different groups. Football fans. Artists. Designers. Engineers. Collectors. People who don’t dress alike but share a respect for process.

Stone Island isn’t timeless because it looks the same year after year. It’s timeless because it never stops innovating. The brand is a reminder that in a world full of empty promises, the rarest thing is still proof.

And Stone Island, above all else, is proof.

How to do those mockups we’re seeing blow up

The highest performing content on the designer internet now, is collabs that don’t exist.

You probably saw this one first, by the time it hit critical mass, it had moved from beyond its starting post (below) and AI content aggregators, and into mainstream where it wasn’t even mentioned it was a concept, people assumed it was real.

272k likes

The trend continued - this one was hot on its heals, performing nearly as well, picturing Loewe in kids products… 161k likes

And now about to outperform the original, the Miu Miu x Smeg…232k likes

All of these are AI, they gain massive attention for their creators and for the brands themselves, and I wondered…. How easy is this to do?

Below I’m sharing some of my Freepik workflows to do similar items

Freepik works in “spaces” very similar to a board or canvas in most software.

Firs, you, create a space.

Then load in references, which you connect with nodes and execute an image generation, video generation, alteration, which you can select settings for, rerun at will, and then run groups of items through using their “lists” function.

I have been using this a lot to do flats. It actually pains me the amount of time I have spent in my life in Illustrator doming this to have it now just be…done. The exact workflow I’m doing as I plan my next shoe bag releases.

My prompt: “Create precise product-design flat technical drawings from the reference photos. Match exact shape, proportions, contours, panel lines, seams, and functional details (buttons, ports, hinges, fasteners). Remove all branding, logos, decorative patterns, and text. Do NOT add dimensions, annotations, scale bars, watermarks, or extra text. Use neutral white background, vector-like consistent linework, flat neutral gray fills, subtle grayscale material shading only. Align and scale all views consistently for direct use in modeling. Keep strictly faithful to the original geometry.”

But getting to these collabs, simply generating a fabric or image swap is very very easy, I’m working on some interior ideas and have been doing this just to visualize couches in our space and seeing if I can use some custom material from my brand work potentially.

I bring in the materials, render out couch angles, connect them with a node to a image generation and prompt“render the couch with this fabric, which is a closeup”.

If you want to show your ideas but don’t have the budget… now is the time to show them on social media and at least get attention.

And if you are a designer, get a ton of your time back, but also realize this is happening across the board, and leading to. A ton of “technicals” that aren’t very useful for manufacturers, and a complete democratization of people being able to send items for production that would previously have been way out of their league.

I would note that the actual intense obsession with the user experience is paramount, the slant and placement of the pockets, how the object fits in a hand, the size grading.

The knowledge of materials, their application, their availability becomes paramount, designers who are able to survive through a mass democratization of their craft will be far deeper in supply chain than ever before.

Marketing, Approved

The latest Brandfathers podcast is live and tackling an important topic: how to actually get your interesting marketing initiatives approved. 20m, recommended.

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