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.

@orenmeetsworld

Oren John 🛠,🛠 on Instagram: "Celebrity, influence, design and…

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.

@orenmeetsworld

Oren John 🛠,🛠 on Instagram: "For a look at the future of reta…

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.

@askcatgpt

CatGPT on Instagram: "WELCOME TO MY DREAM CREATIVE STUDIO ✨🎨💻…

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.

@casestudios_official

case studios on Instagram: "Day 059/100 showing our Work as a D…

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

Instagram

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.

@everydayuniform

@everydayuniform on Instagram: "One of the worlds oldest indust…

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.

@getsourmilk

sourmilk on Instagram: "after santa comes the postman 💌

holid…

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.

@askcatgpt

CatGPT on Instagram: "I’m committed to bringing down my screen …

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

@studio.misoo

studio miso on Instagram: "Would you buy this .. or just stare …

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

@aluncreative

Amit Lunenfeld | AI Content + Aesthetic Tools on Instagram: "Th…

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

@aluncreative

Amit Lunenfeld | AI Content + Aesthetic Tools on Instagram: "Yo…

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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Over the coming weeks I’m zoning in on the changing nature of influence and distribution, and the models brands and creatives can use to approach it. This includes macro-factors of how influence used to function, from how hotels became the leverage point for soap and shampoos, to the levels of connoisership involved in establishing yourself to be able to talk knowledgeably about say… caviar, truffles or cashmere.

But as always, it will also be tactical. We’re seeing Gen 3 of the influencer playbook being written by brands in real time. You’re probably seeing on your algorithm Claude’s extremely savvy brand positioning in tech marketing by using a relentless stream of artistic and creative women as their core influence demographic, a counter position to the “men in dimly lit rooms saying this model will change everything” AI breakdowns of the last few years. The campaigns concept, execution and most of all scale is nothing short of beautiful.

Meanwhile, in dark marketing Higgsfield is getting heat for their relentless undisclosed promotions on X (the ArcAds playbook). AI companies are choosing to completely disregard the rules to compute, the generation that read Super Pumped as a handbook coming into business unit ownership.

The Claude campaign has by-products too. If you’ve seen a wealth of new, super smart creators educating about design, art, and complex topics with well written essays that portrays knowledge and scripting that’s shockingly nuanced - you’ve hit the Claude creator algorithm. Harder to validate versus the easy ChatGPT tropes, pleasurable to watch and learn from, and further democratizing and already democratized medium. Luckily creator media still has the market share of the falling trad media establishment to take from, there is room for all to get far more than 15 minutes. I’ll save the question of “does it matter how something was made if we enjoy it?” question for a later time.

In this HYPER we’re going to talk about influence marketing basics for brands in 2026, and then deep dive into one of my favorite brands that show that even before all of our modern tools and algorithms, the “rules” of linear brand building don’t matter: Commes Des Garcons.

First…

I am hiring closers. Sales experience required.

My influencer management is hiring a Talent Agent.

Darkroom is hiring a ton of creative roles including Associate Content Director, (New York), a Managing Director for their content studio and paid media Creative Strategists.

Brick is hiring an Art Director.

Let’s lock in.

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Influencer Marketing Every Brand Should Be Doing in 2026

Influencer marketing is on fire, and we like to regularly look at how brands should evolve their thinking. I just did a video with Later discussing this, and break down the concepts in full below.

@orenmeetsworld

Oren John 🛠,🛠 on Instagram: "The era of squads, volume, irl a…

What’s working now looks… practical. It’s less about “finding the perfect creator” and more about building momentum with people who already fit your world.

Here’s how I’d approach it in 2026.

1. Double Down on Seeding (But Do It With Intention)

Giveaways and product drops should be designed with social in mind. That means packaging that looks good in someone’s home, notes that feel human, and an experience that makes sense to post. Not because you ask, but because it’s easy, because it will perform.

If you’re retail or hospitality, physical invites are still wildly underused. A well-designed card, early access, or a small IRL moment goes further than most paid posts.

And if you have something successful, don’t underestimate your potential volume. There are far more creators than people realize, especially in specific niches and regionally. You don’t need a handful of big names. You need a lot of people who genuinely like the product and are happy to share it, and most programs can scale far bigger than you expect.

Tactically, this works best as an ongoing program:

• A rolling seeding list, not one big send

• Regular refreshes, with tracked responses and 1:1 communication from your team

• Whatsapp or group chats with your most engaged people

Those people matter later, because the best graduates are excellent candidates to be paid to support your launches.

2. Move From One-Off Posts to Recurring Presence

One post doesn’t do much... Repetition does.

The brands doing this well are turning influencers into recurring parts of their content, not just placements. The question isn’t “what post should they make,” it’s “what’s the format we can keep coming back to together?”

That could be a recurring series, a shared theme, or something simple that shows up regularly on your feed or theirs. When collaborations stretch over time, pricing usually comes down and the content gets better because there’s actual context. I’ve been talking a lot about “Signature Series” that we coined the idea for in Cut30 in 2024–and brands can use influencers to do this with them. I’m doing this as we speak with a series of content with CashApp as an influencer myself, helping them break down more nuanced topics.

There’s also a bigger version of this: social shows. More brands are experimenting with lightweight, repeatable formats built around a creator or a small group like we’ve seen with All Saints, Opal, Alexis Bittar and many more - if you have some genuinely creative people in your influencer world, support them in a creative vision that plays out on your channels together.

3. Start With Influencer Customers

Some of the best influencers you’ll ever work with are already buying from you.

Before reaching out cold, look at who’s tagging you, replying to emails, commenting consistently, or showing up as repeat customers. These people convert better because they already care.

This is mostly a research problem, not a budget one:

• Search your brand name on social

• Look through tagged posts

• Cross-reference your email list or customer data

Outreach changes when someone already likes the brand. It becomes a conversation, not just a pitch, and you’ll have way less nuance around messaging.

4. Bring Influence Into Real Life

Digital-only programs hit a ceiling, fatigue of attention is high. Part of why you saw Clayton and I go on tour to meet yall (in partnership with Air, just like we discuss here)

What’s been working better is pulling influencers together in real life and letting the content come from that. Events, studio days, small trips, hosted dinners, or creators hosting their own communities under your brand.

The point isn’t the event itself. It’s the downstream effect. Content, relationships, shared moments, and the way those things travel online afterward.

We’re seeing more interest in groups and dynamics, not just individuals. Friend groups, squads, recurring faces. If your brand can be part of that, it compounds quickly.

The Throughline

None of this is complicated, but it does require patience.

Influencer marketing works best when you stop treating it like a channel and start treating it like relationship infrastructure. Build slowly, stay consistent, and let it stack.

And if you want help doing this at scale, platforms like Later can help you:

• Find and connect with creators

• Manage campaigns end to end

• Tap into full-funnel support when you need it

They have a platform and a team that has done exactly what I've described for brands making a big splash on social like Unilever, Habit Burger, El Pollo Loco, and Chewy.

You can book a free strategy session HERE.

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This segment is in partnership with Later.

The Model For A New Era

Graza got our attention and then has relentlessly dropped chips, collabs, mayo, going from a brand in a category to a brand across categories. They aren’t angling to compete with other olive oils.

Rhode dominated skincare, then launched viral iPhone cases… almost casually?

Satisfy charged outrageous dollars for running shorts, then sold one off cars… and now exercise food?

Influencers are grabbing roles in companies, successful brands, popups, testing the limits of their power. And for some, they’re shocked how far it goes. The relentless Kardashian machine. The expanding empires of pop stars in beauty and beyond. YouTubers in food.

There’s a model for this. For how far cultural currency can go when backed by creative genius.

It’s Comme des Garçons…

A SUB-LABEL EMPIRE

One brand. Twelve lines. Each with its own designer, price point, and audience.

Homme Plus for runway. SHIRT for elevated basics. BLACK timed perfectly to streetwear’s rise. Junya Watanabe got his own universe, Noir Kei Ninomiya built hers.

Rei Kawakubo didn’t scale one idea. She built a system, each planet with its own gravity, its own orbit, all held together by a singular creative vision and a web of relationships and influence

ICONOGRAPHY: THE HEART

The brilliance wasn’t just the design, hey brought one aspect of an intangible fashion empire mainstream. The heart lives on striped long-sleeves, on Converse collabs, on pieces that cost $100 instead of $1,000. It became the entry point to the CDG universe, a gateway drug to the mainline, and reached saturation that now leads to snobbery from the tasteful, both with the miracle of having essentially zero blowback to the actual CDG brand and essence.

And they hammered in this resonance with COLLABS

Nike. Converse. Supreme. H&M.

Hype chased CDG, and they got to work out in public the question of what even is avant-garde at scale?

DOVER STREET MARKET

The ultimate concept store, started as another creative extension

Her philosophy: “Beautiful chaos.” Brands stacked together, art installations interrupting retail-the shop that many have paid tribute to but none have replicated. No logical flow or merchandising playbook, pure energy and discovery.

Why sell just your brand in stores when you can sell them all?

Speaking of which… I think we need less brands and more dealers.

The last decade everyone started a brand. DTC economics made it easy—find a factory, slap a logo on it, run Meta ads, call yourself a founder. I’m partially responsible here, But the result? A thousand candle companies. A thousand “timeless basics” labels. “we’re different” you’re actuactly the same.

What we really need is help sorting through it all.

That’s what a dealer does. They travel. They find. They edit. They say “this, not that” with their own reputation on the line, and not just with words online, with dollars in inventory.

A play for brands whose taste and influence goes beyond its product base, and for influencers who realize founder shit requires a product knowledge they dont have against a field of people who have learned a ton.

Do you have a point of view strong enough that people would trust your edit? Could you build a business on “we find the best stuff” rather than “we make stuff”? Will you put your own money on the line behind your decisions... and make it worth it? There’s power and fiscal success there. Something I think Shopify Collective is untapped for.

Which leads us to… CDG GUERRILLA STORES

Berlin. Reykjavík. Warsaw. Athens.

CDG opened pop-up stores in non-fashion neighborhoods, each designed to run for exactly one year. Raw spaces. Minimal fit-out. Then gone. A perfect model to be brought back for today’s temporary culture

When Prada copied the model, Kawakubo killed it. If it could be replicated, it wasn’t interesting anymore. Works for her… for us… maybe we double down

CATEGORY EXPANSION: ANTI-PERFUME

While luxury fragrance chased flowers and musk, CDG launched Odeur 53, a scent with 53 notes including “burnt rubber, oxygen, nail polish, and sand dunes”.

Then came Concrete. Sold in a bottle made of… actual concrete.

Positioning against perfume as seduction and positioning perfume as concept and art object. A natural play for the distribution era.

This is the blueprint. Not a brand that expanded. A brand that built infrastructure for infinite expansion while never compromising the core.

The question for today’s cultural brands isn’t whether they can extend into new categories. It’s whether they have a Rei Kawakubo, someone with the vision to know which extensions make the empire stronger and which ones dilute it. And if you don’t have it, in true moneyball fashion “can they recreate it in the aggregate”.

To the above note we started with, the “squad” era is real. In the world where anyone can become a star through content, where we get more founders and rugged individuals than ever, we still need more collectives to reach the potential of the era we’re in.

Graza, Rhode, the Kardashians, they’re all running plays from this book, the network of collaborators and specialists, the artists on stable. Graza with the up and coming, Rhode with the new guard, the Kardashions putting the best on retainer as patrons because they can.

The Brandfathers Are Back

This week the Fathers talk new technology, Super Bowl ads and current events.

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Until the next edition,

Oren & Clayton

3 cities, 4 workshops, 5 days.

We just wrapped a run of Creative Ops workshops in Miami, Toronto, and New York. Huge thanks to the entire Air team for putting this together.

They knocked it out of the park.

It was really inspiring to meet so many creative people building their own ventures, producing great work internally at companies, or meeting with founders in the early stages of building businesses from the ground up.

At each workshop, we got many of the same questions:

• How do we make better work without burning out?

• How do we stand out without chasing everything?

• And how do we build content systems that actually compound?

• etc

And since most of you weren’t in the room, we wanted to share a handful of tactical ideas you can apply directly to your content or marketing teams. All this is grounded in what we’re seeing, hearing, and testing right now.

5 content themes for 2026

1. We’re so back (offline)

We’re seeing that people’s consumption habits are skewed towards experiences that reconnect them to their senses.

Obviously, this isn’t a novelty.

But it feels that way because of how we’ve been conditioned to consume things over the last decade.

In-person activities are becoming the gateway to real-world participation.

According to an Eventbrite social study that just dropped, 70%+ of Gen Z and millennials are more likely to attend activations and events if they know they can participate in something vs. just purely consume that thing.

And we’re seeing this happen in real-time.

CatGPT’s famous no-phone party in LA.

@askcatgpt

CatGPT on Instagram: "I’m fully convinced this is how all parti…

Daytime coffee raves.

Birkenstock’s meditation-focused dinner parties.

Wellness communities like Usal Project curating camping retreats in California.

The takeaway is to think beyond “we should host a party at our store and serve people alcohol and call it a day.”

Instead, invest in ideas that allow people to experience things, not just observe.

Which leads to…

2. Hands-on and DIY are in

We’re also seeing this happen on both the brand and creator side.

From upcycling artist Nicole McLaughlin turning random objects into works of art (and getting paiddd for it) to Happy Mediums hobby-focused workshop classes, brands are utilizing different mediums to connect with the consumer where their product sits in the background.

@nicolemclaughlin

nm on Instagram: "knead for speed"

@gethappymedium

Happy Medium on Instagram: "A quick tour of Happy Medium :)

…

3. Behind-the-scenes is the new medium

Showing how you think > telling people what you made

There’s a real interest in seeing people’s thought-process behind why they did something a certain way.

Why did you choose this fabric?

What did your moodboard look like for this campaign?

How did you source this thing?

Behind the scenes.

And to be clear, this is different than your classic “day in the life” or GRWM content. BTS is about decision-making, constraints, tradeoffs, and showcasing your taste.

Some timely examples of this below…

@marcusmilione

Marcus Milione on Instagram: "Life in nyc running a brand @mint…

@poorboy.coffee

poorboy coffee roasters & catering on Instagram: "Bootstrapping…

@craighillcompany

Craighill on Instagram: "How to contain a square.

To make this…

4. Connection through education

Many brands underestimate the value of using education as a sales gateway for their products.

But inviting people into a deeper story creates emotional buy-in.

Speaker designer Devon Turnbull is doing this with 180 Studios in London, creating moments to experience music on the best available sound systems. And the product is the facilitator.

@180.studios

180 Studios on Instagram: "@daddydarkrdc taking us back to the …

Stone Island’s prototype research archive in Milan opened to the public to showcase how fabrics and materials evolve through experimentation.

You can do this through activations and events, social posts, your website, and more. But you have to own that you have something to educate people on, and then own how you share it.

5. Owning a format

AI slop has lowered the barrier to entry for everyone to make “something,” and the more content there is, the harder people are trying to hook you into the first 3 seconds of their video.

At the same time, familiarity builds comfort and trust with the viewer. And those who optimize for consistent formatting have a significant opportunity to stand out.

While the user is wandering through the algorithmic void, seeing a creator or brand whose content series they recognize becomes sheer relief.

Ronning is doing this with their 30-second skits around London.

@ronning

@ronning on Instagram: "Who said chivalry was dead?

Introducin…

Don’t overthink it: Internet Anthropology does this by creating a consistent, interesting backdrop for each of her videos that matches the vibe of the content.

@internet.anthropology

@internet.anthropology on Instagram: "Have you considered the W…

And you can do it too!

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Systems for Creatives

One of our most asked questions… how do I get organized as a creative? 11 strategies are in the video below.

The Art of the Marketing Campaign

Our friends at Darkroom designed a playbook based on the marketing campaign system we’ve been outlining in our creative ops content.

Until the next edition,

Clayton & Oren

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My kid is 9, and he and his lil Gen Alpha numbskull brethren are roasting me.

They wouldn’t click on any of my thumbnails. I have ONE decent one.

I don’t even have a silver play button. The YouTubers they watch have DIAMOND play buttons.

When I hit 100k and got the play button, my son visibly had more respect for me. And now he grills me relentlessly on how long until I’ll get to the 1M or 5M mark. His boys mostly stopped talking shit, which is a good thing, because they all practice “roasts” (which they learned on YouTube), and they are uncannily funny. I feel bad when I have to respond by cutting so deep with an insult that they burst into tears (for the Canadians and Germans reading this, that’s a joke).

But I digress.

This is an email about YouTube, and how to succeed on it as an adult or a brand that doesn’t involve playing Minecraft simultaneously.

I put out a video earlier this week about why I prioritized longform in 2025, and I wanted to expand on it here.

@orenmeetsworld

Oren John 🛠,🛠 on Instagram: "YouTube is not Instagram with lo…

To the point of why we’re talking about longform, I really couldn’t even cover the basics of the journey of the ’60s I recorded on IG in a way that would give enough value for people to love it.

And that brings me to the core outline here:

• you need time to give true education, no matter how much you think you learn by consuming short-form

• consumer interaction habits are far different on YouTube in a way that is massively beneficial for the creator

• the shifting nature of entertainment provides a massive market opening for longform

• the combination of a search-based and algorithmic platform brings a unique opportunity for concepts to get seen

• being a “personality” or “creator” is competitive, and doing the hard things before others is a win

I’m going to dive into each of these, but we’re also going to get tactical:

• concepting and preparing YouTube videos for success (packaging 101)

• understanding and riding the meta on YouTube

• how boring companies and ideas succeed

• why the podcast format intrinsically sucks for YouTube

• how often you should publish

• the role of short-form and other networks

• assembling a body of work

Let’s go for a ride.

I work extremely hard to make value-driven, educational short-form content that breaks down nuanced topics in branding, marketing, and business into chunks that succeed in 40–120 seconds. But even then, it requires someone with pretty incredible agency to actually take action from it. Really, it’s more of a catalyst to begin research for an action.

But in 10–15 minutes, I can set up why a concept is important, show examples of it done right, then actually screen-share how you and your team should do it. This is a massively superior way to actually enable an audience, and that is my number one focus as a creator: audience enablement. Are they actually doing the things I recommend? And are they succeeding with those actions?

So I prioritized longform, and it had the exact impact I wanted. The people I attracted there were far more likely to act and implement.

I found a couple of key consumer habit shifts worth calling out.

On Instagram, one of the most beneficial habits I’ve seen is that executives, founders, CEOs, CMOs, will forward my content to their teams. Directly on platform, into group chats, but mostly into Slack and Teams. People have pulled me aside at trade shows to show me their boss relentlessly slacking them my content.

I design what I do with this in mind. I love this action. I think through that target, how they consume, why they share, and what the person on the other end will do next.

But on YouTube, it’s the opposite.

I’ve been booked for more than one offsite because a team member forwarded a YouTube video of mine to their boss or dropped it into a team Slack. It’s coming from the other end. I think they’re more likely to share it because it’s a more credible piece of content. The complete details of the why and how are often broken down in my YouTubes, so the team member doesn’t have to defend it.

And with that came insights into fans.

When I started, I had a grip of younger college fans sending me photos of my videos on their TVs when I used to debut at the same time every Sunday. Not only was it appointment viewing (“Oren on Sunday afternoon”), but it was literally on their TV. I wish I hadn’t stopped that cadence, but sponsor calendars are too fluid.

Then came the next interaction pattern: lunchtime work content.

For a lot of people, at home or in the office, YouTube is on during lunch. If my content is too educational, it doesn’t really work in that context. But if it’s edutainment, easy. Marketing and branding people especially kind of like the field they work in. They want to do cool stuff and get better at it. I’m there.

All of this feeds into the bigger shift. People consume way less TV. And TV kind of sucks.

I’ll put my YouTube videos on Stüssy or Loewe up against any fashion or marketing content on streaming in terms of enjoyment value. Consumers know this. Netflix knows this. That’s why they’re courting podcasts and YouTubers. But not nearly enough brands and creators are treating this opportunity as what it is. A shift of hundreds of billions of dollars in production, advertising, and media attention to, frankly, us.

Then there’s the platform structure.

YouTube is two things at once:

• search consumption, people trying to solve a problem

• algorithmic consumption, people being served things they might enjoy

TikTok has some search culture. I even get a shockingly decent amount of IG traffic from search now. But YouTube is another level. It gives your ideas longevity. Strongly packaged videos can pop months, or even years, later.

But the biggest reason I shifted?

Green-screen marketing content has gotten insanely competitive. Hundreds of people make content like me now. I have more formats, I work hard to be better, but it naturally caps upside.

YouTube is pretty fucking hard. I won’t lie.

It’s intimidating to start and to stay consistent. You can’t train it. You’ll never see me launch a Cut30 for YouTube.

This is creative alpha.
Doing hard things is an advantage.

Creatives have gotten soft.

When I was in high school, I was in a band that alternated between the names Seeds of Doubt (bad) and Shake Your Keiki (arguably worse). But the guitar player absolutely shredded. He played so much his fingers bled regularly. Man was on a mission. I remember he had a girlfriend way out of his league, and everything felt right with the world.

My point is this. Not many creatives are playing until their proverbial fingers bleed.

They’re prioritizing “work/life balance.” They’ve let themselves go a little because they’re prioritizing themselves.

Maybe I’m just old now, but I’m more of the “obsess about something until it kills you” school of creative. And I think you should be too. Not out of masochism, but because this is the most important moment in history to act as a creative.

You have never been more respected.
Never been better compensated.
Never had better tools to promote yourself.

And now all of that is a content practice away from outcomes people in your profession couldn’t dream of decades ago. But sure, take the night off and order a lil Uber Eats.

Fuck that. Let’s make some YouTubes.

“Oh Oren, these newsletters are so long, my attention span is only a few paragraphs.”

Dig in. If you can’t finish this, you’re NGMI. Go back to dirty soda TikToks and Dan Koe notes like a lil cursed child.

I digress, again.

Do not even think about publishing a YouTube video before preparing your packaging.

Packaging is:

• the topic

• the title

• the thumbnail

Topic selection

I’ll make this simple. There are only three video types I’d recommend for a creator or brand starting out:

1. How to do ____

2. The story of ____ (with niche context)

3. I did ____ (and you can too)

How to do ____.

Easiest. Take your specialty or a hot niche topic. Literally title it “How to do X.” Then add parentheses:
(full playbook)
(step-by-step)
(idiot-proof screenshare)
(for experts)
(for designers who don’t want to admit they’re lost)

Brands especially should do everything around their niche, even if it feels dumb. These might get fewer views, but every viewer is your customer.

The story of ____.

Don’t talk about abstract topics without narrative. “The Rise and Fall of Ocean Spray” beats “Retail Marketing 101.” People want TV shows.

I did ____ (and you can too).

Wherever you are in your journey, break down something that actually happened and how it happened.

There are more formats, but these are the most foolproof. Take them seriously.

I’ve done YouTube strategy for brands across the spectrum.

For a surf brand, we did two things. First, we owned every searchable topic in our niche (foiling), even if videos only got hundreds of views. Every viewer was a buyer. Second, we complemented that with pure YouTube content. Documentaries, visual relaxation edits, athlete stories, launches.

It worked. Sales, enablement, loyalty.

Then I did a series for my friends at Air. They sell digital asset management software, which is objectively boring. But they branded around creative operations. We made a banger series. Traveling, interviewing businesses about their creative ops.The product wasn’t front and center, but it was involved. Every video funneled to a co-branded report.

Proof that literally any business can win on YouTube if they care about the content.

But in all cases, it starts with the thumbnail.

Thumbnail rules:

• big, recognizable imagery (or 2–3 images combined)

• one or two words max, hyper readable

• you don’t need to be on it, and it often hurts

• if I see your face plus text and no imagery, I already know you’re going to lose

If you’re not a designer, hire one.
If you are a designer, don’t overthink it.

Decide all of this before scripting or recording.

In the video:

• restate the title immediately

• confirm what they clicked

• outline what you’ll cover

First 30–45 seconds. Then go.

This is why podcast content usually sucks on YouTube.

Podcasts that work there either existed pre-YouTube, have massive followings, or cracked a new visual format. That is probably not you.

Podcasts meander. They don’t reaffirm the idea, they don’t outline to start. Don’t do it. Make YouTubes.

Production notes:

• don’t overthink it

• don’t make it terrible

• light, steady framing, decent audio

• visuals on screen about 50 percent of the time

I use Riverside for everything that involves more than just me on screen because:

• separate screen-share tracks

• auto audio cleanup

• clean text-based editing

• one-click handoff to editors

• live streaming support

• strong interview tools

• works with pro gear

Once you’re in YouTube, you’ll want to ride the meta.

Example: “7 Levels Of ___” videos. A lot of people ran that format. I’d allocate about 25 percent of content to meta-riding.

If you’re a brand… same thing - seven levels of surf progression, seven levels of creative operations, legal defense, building your retirement, whatever it is.

Tools:

• 1of10.com

• scrolling subscriptions weekly

• optional strategist help (not required)

Publishing:

• once a week

• maybe twice if testing

• daily is cursed, don’t do it

YouTube heavily weights how subscribers behave. Flood them and they won’t watch. That hurts you.

Promotion:
If you have a big audience elsewhere, don’t immediately push them over. Wait a few weeks so you don’t tank early signals.

Final point: Get leads.

Ask for them. End every video with a CTA. Don’t sell yourself short.

This was a lot. Not everything… just what I’ve learned.

Lock in. Make longform.

Related to the point above of making your asks… I've launched my new Creative Strategy program (which we are rebranding as "Weapons", story on that soon). It's a small group that is focused entirely on turning creatives and marketers into absolute units who can brief organic content, brief paid content, and know how to do every aspect of marketing, with an ongoing group that supports them.

I’m opening the next round next month, drop in an application here to get more info when it goes live.

Oren

Hello friends! We do hope this email finds you well. I (Clayton) am writing from 36,000 feet over the Atlantic while Oren is somewhere on the East Coast.

We're heading to Miami to kick off our North American tour this month. ICYMI, we’re hosting 4 in-person, half-day workshops (something we’d never done before!) in Miami, Toronto, and NYC. Miami and Toronto are locked in, but if you haven’t signed up already and still want to attend one of the NYC workshops next week, you can do that here.

In this week’s HYPER we’re going to share three of the five exercises we’re doing on tour, and dive into standout analogue marketing.

Today Oren broke down a few of the exercises we’re going to be doing live, and you can download the worksheets he shows for your own use here:
Download now

Breakdowns below:

Full Funnel Mapping

Purpose:
Identify where your growth is breaking.

How to run it:

1. Break your funnel into:

   • Top: Awareness

   • Middle: Education / Trust

   • Bottom: Conversion

2. Write down what you currently do at each stage.

3. Identify gaps (e.g. strong awareness, no conversion).

4. Define what an ideal version of each stage would look like.

5. Assign 1–2 tactics to fix the weakest stage first, either improving existing programs or choosing from the program matrix (this matrix isn’t perfect, just a guideline)

Content Funnel & Pillar Grading

Purpose:
Turn “content pillars” into a performance system.

If you’re new to the content pillars concept he mention its detailed it in-depth in this video.

How to run it:

1. List your existing content pillars (3–5 max).

2. Assign each pillar to:

   • Top / Middle / Bottom of funnel

3. Grade each pillar honestly (A–F) based on:

   • Reach

   • Engagement

   • Business impact

4. Identify:

   • What to kill

   • What to fix

   • What to double down on

5. Propose new pillars only after grading the current ones.

Key principle:
Don’t add pillars to avoid fixing bad ones.

Output:
A rationalized content system with clear improvement priorities.

Executive-Friendly Justification Exercise

Purpose:
Get buy-in from stakeholders who don’t “get” content.

How to run it:

1. Use the funnel + grades as proof of underperformance.

2. Show where the brand is failing (D/F areas).

3. Clearly state:

   • What will change

   • Why it must change

   • What success looks like

4. Tie changes to performance, not creativity.

Annual Marketing & Content Calendar

Purpose:
Stop reactive posting and random launches.

How to run it:

1. Create a 12-month calendar.

2. Fill in these rows:

   • Sales heat map (high vs low months)

   • Social performance history

   • Cultural moments

   • Industry events

   • Planned launches

   • Missed opportunities from last year

3. Identify:

   • Dead zones

   • Overloaded periods

   • Repeatable wins

4. Decide what kind of content belongs in each season.

Rule:
Different months require different content energy (education ≠ summer).

Output:
A realistic yearly operating plan for marketing and content.

IRL is back, baby!

If there was ever a time to double down on in-person experiences, this is it.

We’ve spent the last decade optimizing every inch of our lives; apps for everything, notifications for nothing, subscriptions to things we don’t even own anymore. And somewhere along the way, it all started to feel like a trap.

We’re watching an entire generation reassess their relationship to technology, because we’re just tired, man.

Run and hike clubs were the early signals of this, along with niche meetups over birdwatching, scrapbooking or look-a-like contests. And it’s really fascinating, because it’s hinting at something much deeper, which is a desire to participate, not just consume.

• Influencer CatGPT threw a no-phone party in LA that drew over 700 people. If you pulled out your phone, you got sticker-shamed.

• Birkenstock is hosting dinners in LA paired with meditation ceremonies designed to create a space for reflection and conversation).

• About:Blank and Nothing teamed up to host a late-night Audio Lab party in an old Georgian townhouse in London, part of an ongoing creative series built around music, curation, and experience.

• Happy Medium, an art café in NYC, built its entire brand around hobby culture and helping people get their hands dirty through crafting, painting, and pottery.

What’s great about these examples is that they feed off of participation. You have to show up, slow down, and remember what it feels like to interact with other people in a real setting.

And if you’re a brand thinking about how to show up in 2026, just remember that this shouldn’t be some trend you package up and commoditize sold.

It should be a real shift in how you decide to engage with your customers.

Do it because you want to connect and create participation, not perform.

Appreciate you reading,
Clayton & Oren

In lad news… Oren is extolling the values of Swiss Poster Design, Clayton is continuing to visit all of the most tasteful stores in Europe.

Our in person brand workshop series with Air starts next week! Miami, Toronto and New York dates are all on the calendar, you can apply to attend here.

Let’s get into it.

The short-form brand playbook in 2026

If you’re a brand trying to win on short-form in 2026, and you either haven’t cracked it yet or feel lost, this is the playbook.

Step one: pick an archetype

You need to choose a core archetype, a style your brand will consistently execute on.

If you don’t pick and stick to one, you end up with a hodgepodge of unsuccessful bullshit.

Yes, brands eventually become a blend of archetypes. Most mature brands land somewhere around three. But at the beginning, do one.

Here are the four:

1. The Expert

Position a team member or credible creator to tell intricate stories that educate people on your brand’s world, everything from cybersecurity to dermatology. Authority-first.

2. The Artist

Social-optimized, creatively directed content that’s conceptual and visually exciting. Lo-fi or immaculate production, doesn’t matter. The ideas comes first. This works best if you have a one-of-a-kind social or creative talent on your team

3. The Wild Card

Humor, memes, skits, unexpected choices. Attention-first content designed to catch what falls through the funnel.

4. The World Builder

Your core feed matters less than enabling creators, affiliates, and influencers to tell your story at scale. Earned Media Value over owned content. Distribution beats organic.

Pick one. Execute it until it works, add more later.

Step two: lock in pillars

From there, define recurring content pillars.

What are the 3–5 types of content your brand can do repeatedly, test, and improve?

If you can’t name them clearly, your audience definitely can’t recognize them.

This video covers planning and executing a pillars system

Phase 2 brands: what’s next

If you’ve got traction—pillars are working, growth is real, wins are happening—this is the next layer.

1. Get an expert on screen.

No matter your archetype, put a real expert on camera 2–6x per month. Start building recurring personalities now—you’ll thank yourself later.

One starts working? Add another.

Have them collaborate.

If it’s too much for one feed, spin up a second account.

2. Build a signature series.

Episodic social show or recurring format—either way, people should know what to expect from you.

This isn’t just for creators. Brands need this too.

Strong series share a few things:

• repeatable format

• clear narrative

• easy association

• batch-able production

Think: BAPE inviting guests in-store.

Alexis Bittar running a serialized drama.

Bilt building a sitcom.

Opal launching a whiteboard self-help channel.

Alex breaks this down here:

3. Expand the world.

Collaborate more. Get new people on screen. Enable everyone you hire: photographers, stylists, creators, to post BTS. Your experts and UGC creators should like the brand enough to naturally build it into their lifestyle.

This is how worlds scale.

1. And most importantly, zone in on your campaigns and use them to maximum efficacy with teasing, debuts, sustainment, collaboration and full social planning. Full breakdown here:

Closing wars: maximizing ROI

If you actually want to turn attention into revenue, welcome to the closing wars.

Implement ManyChat.

Brands are finally doing this. You should too. Comments → DMs for guides, drops, downloads—it compounds fast. Just don’t rush it before you have content-market fit.

Weaponize the comments.

Comments aren’t for emojis. They’re for selling. Ask questions. Make recommendations. Start conversations that turn into DMs.

Close in the DMs.

Customer acquisition is war. DMs are your best weapon. Answer questions. Proactively message ideal customers. Drop alerts, discounts, invites. This is CRM with personality.

For any service or higher-ticket product especially, where else do you get true 1:1 access to your audience?

You need to be DM-maxxing.

It’s fitting to close with the close, so that wraps up what we’re looking at ahead. We’ll see you on the inside.

Kitchen Sink

Creative technologists wanted

Color hunting dates or nothing

Claude + Blender

Video podcast lights, ranked

@riverside.fm

Riverside.fm on Instagram: "The Video Podcast Lighting Matrix! …

The new Fujifilm eras camera

@outlandermagazine

Outlander Magazine on Instagram: "This is nuuuuts, Fujifilm jus…

Everything, for social media (Lacoste mountainside tennis courts)

@outlandermagazine

Outlander Magazine on Instagram: "Nah, Lacoste is already winni…

Welcome to the new year! As always, we are committed to keeping a relentless amount of free value on the world of brand strategy, content and creative culture coming into your inbox… and we’re also continuing to bet on our predictions in our own lives-as you’ll see in our updates below.

Below is pt1 of our State of Social 2026 - this is focused on creators, we’ll be following up with the brand edition next week.

Quick housekeeping

A. I’m hosting a (free) community call on Jan 12th for anyone doing brand planning for the new year, where we’ll workshop live for an hr! Register here.

B. 🎬 The next session of Cut30 starts Tuesday, January 6th. Lock in here.

C. Reminder… Clayton and I are going on tour! Starting with Miami, Toronto and New York in January, we’re hosting (free) brand and creative workshops you can apply for here.

The State of Content in 2026

This is the part of the adoption cycle where fear sets in.

Everyone looks at the content wars and goes:

• There are so many creators, how can I possibly compete

• Everyone is getting so good at content, we don’t have a chance if we start to take it seriously now

• I see these threads that say insert social network here is dead, this must be true

• I’m too late

At every turn, for 5 years now, people have felt the same way, and been wrong, EVERY TIME.

TikTok is going to be banned (lol).

The algorithm sucks right now (but somehow others are growing...)

The truth still remains. Every minute spent consuming traditional news is being subverted by video and carousels on social networks. Every website with an interstitial or a paywall that isn’t powered by a creator frontend is in panic. There are literal billions of dollars and millions of human consumption hours that are still transitioning from this.

And every piece of traditional TV, is now consumed mostly with a phone on at the same time. Slow game? Ad comes on? Plotline slow? Every consumer is on Instagram, TikTok, X etc.

This IS a zero sum game, and content from individuals and brands is winning it. Are you? I certainly am, and would prefer if all of you were along for the ride instead of the corporations of the world.

Netflix bringing podcasts onto TV shows how scared they are of Youtube. Disney licensing its IP to OpenAI is watershed moment of realizing they simply aren’t as entertaining as the masses, and need to work with them instead of against them.

They are fucking SCARED. Of you, me, and every person who gets to leverage attention agains the big monopolies that have told us what to watch and think for so long.

Frankly... fuck them. It’s our time, and this is your blueprint to do it.

o here’s where we’re at.

2024 content was about VALUE.

Could you educate people with your content in a somewhat entertaining way. People learned about marketing tactics, about how to cook meals, workout plans, obscure hobbies. Value, value, value. This was also first mover advantage. In 2024 I could make videos about cool color combos for design and get hundreds of thousands of views, because no one else was doing it and demand was there. Now, its commodified.

2025 was about story. The storyteller thrived, an expert explaining the history of a fragrance note, the process with which a paint color comes to life, an analysis of Tom Ford’s vision change between collections in the 2000s. Value alone slowed, value wrapped in a good story, with accompanying visuals thrived. How to’s, wrapped in actual work and opinion. What you would do in a scenario... the art of the story. This was the time where first movers and old school influencers go subbed out for the actual most interesting people that chose to make content. It was the rise of the thoughtful creator, the professor who started teaching, truly interesting humans. 2025 was an incredible content year.

We (the Cut30 squad) thrived in this era, hundreds of our creators and grads dominated social feeds.

Sam explaining the rise of farm hotels

Ryan explaining the state of hospitality

Hashi Home cleverly showing the hosting lifestyle

Yaw showcasing the brands of China

Shelley showing the BTS of running a bakery

Jason breaking down the art direction of Rosalia

Garrett teaching how to take better photos

Katherine breaking down brand social success stories

Greg showing how to find your way in life as a creative

Tanglewood dentistry debunking teeth myths

Our focus... helping people share their expertise in ways people want to hear. Comparisons, stories, rankings, styles of content.

2026 is about format.

Find your angle, then become recognizable, then expand your brand.

The leading angle is still expertise.

You, where you’re at in your career or your journey, sharing stories and opinions with the context of what you know. For a brand, its getting people at your company or from the internet on screen to do the same. Stop doing cute photo shoots, trends, just post a video about your product and GET AN EXPERT ON YOUR FEED.

Now, let’s talk about the funnel.

We’ve said it again and again, because it’s true: content is a funnel. If you want to succeed, you need ways to spike the top and generate views. As long as those views are tangentially connected to your middle of funnel value and entertainment-driven content about your core topic that your audience actually enjoys… you’ve built a growth machine.

Our top-of-funnel rule is simple: the content just needs to reach the right persona, not perfectly communicate your product or positioning.

If you teach hardware design, start by speaking to people interested in tech hardware as consumers, or even design more broadly. That’s your top of funnel. The next layer down is where you zoom in on your actual expertise.

This strategy is a proven winner. We’ve seen it work again and again with creators who break out in Cut30.

If you want the direct viral tactics for brands to hit top of funnel, I break them down here:

Once you have angles that work, it’s about dialing in recognition.

The hook still reigns supreme—but in an overwhelming feed, people increasingly stop because they recognize you, not just because you grabbed attention. Once you achieve recognition, the next job is comfort.

You build that through a styled environment or “set” (which is far less intimidating than it sounds), or through a recognizable visual system. You can see this in how I’ve reframed my green screen usage, it’s not just any floating head anymore. The two on left and right are the Oren experience.

and even a thoughtful background setup (via https://www.instagram.com/internet.anthropology)

And if you’re got visual savvy and the ability to work in some production, brand it so it's yours (via https://www.instagram.com/openresidency/?hl=en)

Then it’s about expanding mediums.

How do you carry the same themes and brand language into carousels and static content?

How does that same approach travel with you—literally, into new locations, contexts, and moments?

And once you’re an established character, you can either reap the benefits within a single format, knowing you understand this new landscape, or go a level deeper and expand your world.

That’s where collaboration with other creators comes in.

Another signature series.

The bridge to long-form.

The podcast.

Clipping.

The entire ecosystem of media multiplication, capable of giving you infamy, if you want it.

So what doesn’t work:

• Doing the same shit as two years ago and complaining about it.

  I see people complain about social media, then open their feed and it’s a single static product image. Stop living under a rock, the codes are right in front of you.

• Trends.

  There are endless trends, and most of them don’t matter. You already have a world of people who want to know you. Don’t waste time borrowing someone else’s tactic.

• “Day in the life.”

  The vlog has been replaced by the story. Consumers don’t want a play-by-play—they want something genuine. Less content, better written and better positioned. If you do it, make it exceptional, make sure its you.

• Tips and tricks.

  That era is over. If it isn’t wrapped in a story, don’t post it.

• Low production.

  You have to care about the small things: dropping in images, framing, lighting. None of this is hard—but it does require intention. Nobody just turns on a camera and wins. It takes planning (and yes, we’ll give you the blueprint).

• Overproduced content.

  A waste of money. When we talk about sets, styles, or production, we never mean spending thousands of dollars. It’s about intention with the tools and spaces you already have—not hiring old-school videographers. So many people are doing this themselves because… it’s actually easy. This isn’t a dark art. It’s a handful of tutorials away. Don’t burn cash pretending otherwise.

• Faceless content.

  In the age of AI, its value has collapsed. Without human connection, it’s harder and harder to generate real leads. In the last 3–4 months, we haven’t seen a single person in our network get meaningful results without being on camera for some of their content. This matters, because it used to be optional.

  Now? You’re just noise.

• Jokes and memes

  This is great as a part of your funnel, as 1/4 of your brand content, but at then end of the day now humorous content as a core of what you’re building breeds negativity (since deprecation is what gets the views) and puts up views that don’t actually have a measure on your resonance. Use it sparingly in addition to a more rounded approach.

Does this matter?

The creator generation ripple effects are happening as we speak, and there is still so much ground to claim.

Sauz raised a round with 21 content creators on the cap table, each recognizing the others power in propelling a brand to greatness.

Tribeca Film Festival has added social media content to their selections, as social media becomes a better, more powerful place for creatives and filmmakers to bring their vision to life than a traditional film arc.

NBCU is sending 20 creators to the olympics. Paying 20 influencers their full rate to cover cultural moments is somehow cheaper and more effective than traditional methods, and we’ll see more and more cultural coverage model this.

These are three of the hundreds of examples of where our world is headed, and why the content state matters so much.

Want to act on this?

The 20th edition of Cut30, our first of 2026, starts on Tuesday for anyone that wants to learn or get better at short form content.

It’s the best in the business, full curriculum, 30 days of slack, 10+ group calls, winner after winner from personal brands to small businesses. Alex, Colin and I would love to have you

Lock in here.

We’ll follow up with the brand plan next week.

Planning your 2026 as a creative

A parting shot - I break down five strategies for how to approach your year as a creative based on where you’re at in your path. Recommended if you’ve hit Jan 3rd and aren’t quite sure what your goals are yet (or how you’ll reach them).

Appreciate you reading,

Oren

We’ve pegged 2026 as the year to invest in analog.

And as such, we’ll be hosting three in-person workshops in the U.S. with our friends at Air.

You may recognize that name, since we’ve teamed up with them on Seasons 1 and 2 of our YouTube series (in NYC and London).

Now, we’re taking it live.

We’ve always wanted to host brand-focused workshops where we unpack many of the topics we already cover in our newsletter (or in our social videos).

And look, yapping online is fun, but at some point, you want to build a connection and a community around the stuff you make.

What you’ll get

So, join us this January in Miami, Toronto, or New York for:

• A half-day, high-touch workshop designed to help you and your team(s) rethink and sharpen your creative workflows in 2026

• Real talks, hands-on exercises, and roundtable discussions led by us (Oren & Clayton) + industry guests

• Leave with your own creative ops playbook for scaling better content in less time

• Curated social hour to connect and network with other operators, brand leaders, and marketers

• Plus: Free merch + other tools to help your team ship faster in 2026

We’ve only got space for a small number of people, so be sure to apply ASAP if you’re interested.

Still reading? Here’s where to apply:

Apply for the Miami workshop

Friday, January 16
1:30 - 530PM ET

Apply for the Toronto workshop

Monday, January 19
1:30 - 530PM ET

Apply for the NYC workshop - DAY 1

Wednesday, January 21
1:30 - 530PM ET

Apply for the NYC workshop - DAY 2

Thursday, January 22
1:30 - 530PM ET

This is the third time we’ve run an awards email recapping all the crazy shit that happened in a single year.

At this point, it genuinely feels like we’re living inside a simulation… marketing moments turned up to eleven, timelines moving faster than our brains can process, and somehow we’re all still vibing our way through it.

I guess that’s all any of us can really do.

But we’re in a strange moment.

There’s no denying the collective uncertainty hanging in the air right now. Whether it’s anxiety about work, the political landscape, the accelerating reality of AI, the economic whiplash from objectively terrible tariff policy, or just a general sense that the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet.

The truth is, a lot of this noise has pulled focus. It’s distracted many of us from doing our best work, and that’s a real loss.

So this email isn’t about pretending everything was perfect in 2025. It’s about pausing long enough to recognize the ideas, campaigns, products, and moments that cut through anyway.

It’s a reminder of why we care about this industry in the first place.

So here goes.

Exceptional packaging spotlight: coffee

Coffee packaging went unnecessarily hard this year, and it deserves its flowers.

We found so many roasters that added a level of innovation, creativity, or playfulness we didn’t know was possible.

So here are a few of our favorites.

The Year of Membership Clubs

Look, obviously member clubs have long been around, but the recurring idea of “third spaces” has dominated cities like New York and London as of late, putting a pricetag on “community”, which is ultimately a status symbol.

KITH Ivy’s eye-watering $36k initiation fee.

A24’s own movie-theatre-turned-bar and restaurant.

But on the flipside, Nike and Palace absolutely cooked on their own version of a member’s club… this one, for the youth.

They opened Manor Place this year, a free, six-day-a-week community hub in South London.

The original 1800s building was flipped into a multifunctional playground; part skatepark, part football arena, part creative studio designed to enable London’s next generation.

KITH creates belonging through access. Nike and Palace did it through participation. And there’s a big difference.

Outland(ish) stuff we loved

Bottega Veneta gave us a Jenga set. For $6,000.

Miu Miu gave us a deck of Uno cards.

Designer Tina Bobbe made a pour-over kit with natural stone, resin, and glass.

And ERL’s custom tennis racket case for Venus Williams was outrageously good.

Carousel diversification

A fun application of video and static content mixing was how brands used their intro grid shot to hook people in a lookbook format. About: Blank has been known to do this, but we’ve started seeing it everywhere, cross-category.

Tiempos Running wiht their performance campaigns.

It’s become a fun, simple way to showcase the range and variety of new product releases for brands in the first shot.

Internet moment of the year

Marty Supreme became a pretty clear case study this year in how launches actually happen now. The closest we’ve gotten to something like this (successfully) was the Brat rollout with Charli XCX.

Instead of the traditional playbook of press tour and product reveal, this felt more like a calculated sequence. Over a few weeks, the thing took shape through appearances, odd little moments, and increasingly outlandish stunts that felt intentionally paced.

But what’s interesting is how much of this comes down to speed. The rollout was QUICK, almost restless, which makes sense when you consider how fragmented attention has become.

The big, strange gestures are no longer just about spectacle. They serve as anchors, giving people something to latch onto before the next thing arrives.

To be honest, this is where launches are headed across the board.

For brands, but also for creators, designers, musicians, and actors. Releasing something now means staying in motion.

Building momentum through a series of moments rather than relying on one clean announcement. It reflects how culture actually moves right now.

PART TWO IS COMING THIS WEEK!

In December the internet always feels overwhelming. Last ditch attempts to push agendas, the flood of gift guide and spending, while everyone just tries to make it the promised land… a few days to think about their rebirth.

That gap, those few weeks, are often where stars are born. That perfect idea for the next year, the commitment to a habit, that final push to hit the number. Just a reminder… it’s alright to be all in. In fact, in today’s days and times, where fortunes can shift in a single video, you should never feel bad about going for it.

This week in HYPER, we dive into UGC operational strategy, predictions for 2026, AI marketing workflows and Shopify’s new updates for brand owners.

But, fefore we dive in…

I am working on a new longform show with my friends at Hubspot where we visit businesses and work on their funnel - identifying a key place in their marketing loop where they need help and working together on a plan.

If you operate or run marketing at a growing org (let’s say, over $2m/yr?) business and would be interested, we have a form here where the team will be reviewing applicants (US only… for now!).

https://forms.gle/zj8gNfAjuc2tb5Vb8

Lets get to it.

Paid Ads Strategy

I am hosting a webinar with a number of friends and Motion next week specifically about paid creative strategy on Meta going into 2026.

You’ll leave with a list of new ideas to try, new formats to master, and a deeper understanding of what is working on social platforms (and yes it will be recorded for after!).

RSVP here.

UGC Operations

We get asked a lot about UGC - people here about it, or have tried a creator or two for ads, but don’t understand a full program. This is an overview of what to do if you want to build a legitimate, scalable UGC operation for your brand, the key is to create a repeatable system that brings in new creators, tests new formats, and builds institutional knowledge.

Think about this part of your business like a growth engine.

What makes a strong UGC program?

A well-run UGC engine should:

• Easily onboard new creators

• Regularly test new styles and formats

• Maintain a centralized creative library

• Share learnings across creators

• Incentivize both performance and community

Operational best practices

1. Segment your creator types

Not all creators are built the same. Segmenting your roster by style helps personalize onboarding, guidance, and content briefs.

Here are three common segments (create your own as needed):

• Personality creators – Think talking heads, advice, or rants to camera.

• Storytelling creators – Vlogs, narration-driven content, “day in the life.”

• Scenario/skit creators – Skits, humor, or dramatized customer scenarios.

• Visual creators - that specialize in edits or unique visual styles

Match each creator to their segment early. This makes creative guidance 10x easier.

2. Build and maintain a creative library

A centralized, living resource keeps everyone aligned and accelerates iteration. The best teams tag and organize their content like product teams do code.

Include:

• Hooks – Openers or formats that have driven engagement.

• Angles – Strategic messaging or customer pain points that landed.

• References – Links to styles to mimic or test.

• Winners – Top performers based on KPIs.

Tag every asset by creator segment, so each person sees what’s relevant to them.

3. Tight onboarding + ongoing management

Start every new creator on a trial period. Set clear KPIs (e.g. 2 test videos, 1 benchmark to hit) and tie performance to ongoing work or bonuses. Align incentives for both the creator and the internal strategist or coach guiding them.

Set them up for success with:

• Access to the creative library

• A dedicated briefing sheet that maps to their style or niche

• A simple asset tracker, like a spreadsheet, with the following fields:

Software to consider for sourcing and managing:

• Minisocial

• Superfillate

• Saral

• Insense

• Hummingbirds (retail focused)

• Upfluence

• Euka

• Social Snowball

• Grin

• Later

• Refunnel

• Archive

This is an excerpt from the longer Creative Operations guide you can grab here.

Shopify New Features

The Winter Shopify Edition dropped yesterday, with lots of new updates for ecommerce owners. I recapped the top updates in 60s if you want the quick notes.

Quick callouts brand owners will care about

• “Rollouts” means you can schedule your theme updates for new product launches, web changes etc, and also now a/b test theme changes with the same functionality

• ACH payments for B2B (I have felt this pain point many times)

• Sidekick can edit theme sections and styles now in chat, and generate and save common automation flows. If you aren’t using Sidekick I would definitely give it a shot.

Read the beautifully designed full edition.

Workflows

In this latest Youtube I talk about the creative reactions and integrations to AI, and I break down how I’m using AI tools in ways that aren’t just about stirring people up on the internet.

• Perplexity Comet for research

• Claude for 2nd marketing brain

• Excel agent mode for data analysis

• Leonardo for generative workflows

2026 Predictions

Air asked Clayton and I for predictions for next year in their new 2026 Zoltair guide.

I contributed a few, and two particular notes for you to consider below.

A. IRL 2.0

Everyones talking about IRL events, but here’s what actually matters:

• The real goal isn’t just to connect the brand to the customers, but to connect customers to each other, facilitated by the brand

• Get outside of NY and LA, real impact with community happens where its not normal

• Algorithms have regional content focuses, so content around events and regional creators, storefronts etc has outsized impact

B. Content networks

Main accounts aren’t the end-all of brand social, and often are limiting. With followers mattering less than ever for on-feed performance, experiment more.

Dedicated series accounts, social accounts, creator accounts for brands, collabs between them, use them for whitelisting.…

Savvy paid teams will use this as their creative testing ground too:

Full predictions here.

Kitchen Sink

Beechinours sound design guide

Viral out of home elevation

Effect editors from Paper

Ralph Lauren making up for the prior Team USA uniforms with some absolute heat.

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

Do you feel like... everything is getting incredibly weird?

Good, because we feel it too.

This week feels like a turning point.

Revolve launched a multi-post AI campaign of their logo projected onto places. You could watch them deleting comments on some of the more obvious, but per usual its just a wall of fan emojis.

Valentino launched a multi-part slop art series with a surrealist AI artist on main. The comments came for them and they… don’t care. Commenting about AI online is low status, that consumer means nothing to them.

Loewe broke the fourth wall with “is it AI or is it real?” on TikTok (1.4m views)and everyone smiled, its CUTE when Loewe does it.

@loeweIs @MadSal (Madeline Salazar) real or AI? #LOEWE

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All the fit pic creators are in, the end of a reality-based feed and the anti-ai comment echo chamber is nigh. Slay on the helicopter babe.

The guardrails are gone.

Meanwhile, Pantone is rage baiting us and hiding the comments as best they can (6000+ so pray for their social team), and CNBC must have hired the Galloway Guys from Cracker Barrel to do this hot mess.

There has never been more proof that the emperors have no clothes.

The positive is we’re learning what we wish we learned in school. The internet has given us an era of teachers who are simply incredible. Learn fashion from Ken Sakata, taste from Rickie, the meaning of love from Sarah, how to make your home smell better from Drew . Never been able to ask your dentist a question without it being awkward? Ask a dentist on TikTok. Testing is down in schools, knowledge is infinite in our feed. They call it brainrot, but for many its 100 chances a day at the lightbulb moment that sets them free.

We are in the land of a thousand gift guides, everyone’s personalized pics, and you may wonder “how are these all still putting up views?” and it’s because no ones going to the old places.

@thewolfinlace

Rosewood on Instagram: "Gift Guide for Art History girlies 🕯️ …

The Strategist links, the GQ article, the Wirecutter recommendation... we know they’re just peddling links, written by people who by the nature of their job are likely divorced from taste. The soul of the publications we grew up with has gone missing and will never return.

The journalist class used to be a standard of discovery, now your average TikToker over 100k sees and tries more items, with more formed opinions on how they’d fit in your house, on your table or in your wardrobe. The people want individualization, they want an aesthetic grid of items the algorithm presents to them because it knows them.

And you know what, ChatGPT is starting to know me pretty well too. When I asked it for some options for more activities when I head to Zurich, it suggested content ideas to go with it, and they were on brand.

Meanwhile in agency-land, Omnicom’s consolidation cuts 4000 creative jobs. Design media would like to tell you it’s awkward to have a personal brand, but you know what’s nice? Being able to post to your followers you can accept freelance projects for the next 90 days and have a large number of people that are interested. You can even do it in a creative way. I look forward to this random guy’s phone answering that tells us he’s back open for a few more bookings.

Meanwhile, in restaurant-land, the worst person you know just scheduled a lunch at Ronnies, because why not dine at Kith. For big brands, do a collaboration, when operating is commoditized? Why try to market your own business as an operator if youre not good at, when you could run partner with A24?

Brands are eating the world, and not just the big ones, instead it’s the ones that get it.

The status symbol of the next few years isn’t going to be offline like many predict, it’s going to be recognizable enough for anyone to notice when you can be replicated 1000 times. AI TJR (I am not linking this for your own good) works because TJR has visual ubiquity for most males under 30. AI James Harden from my friends at And Studio, works because we can immediately recognize a beard and a red jersey (thankfully the clippers and rockets colors match amiright?

In a world of media multiplied by clipping, infinite accounts, the loss of TV, a reduction in personality-driven monoculture... being memorable is a signature.

On my end I’m struggling with how do you even plan, how do you help someone strategize. What’s the proper way to relay that the .75s zoom in’s on your product reel shots could give you a 2% retail uptick next year? That we’re fighting for miliseconds, that everyones getting better at everything, that the agency that your paying isn’t just fucking lost, they couldn’t change if they wanted to because we cant build systems to properly manage employees to work in these conditions when things that are changing so radically every 90 days unless we just give up all sense of traditional hours and boundaries?

Meanwhile all the men in darkly lit rooms on Instagram tell us that THIS MODEL IS THE ONE THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING without having to answer to the raw truth of a meta ad account ROAS.

While all the newsletters seem to become AI, what to buy and repeats of someone else’s TikToks…, I’m just gonna keep up my mediocre writing about what exactly is at hand. We’ll see how it goes.

Oren

The Art Direction of K-Pop

Unrelated, the YouTube algorithm and my subscribers aren’t showing this video the usual love, but I really liked it and thought it was a super valuable look at how to get outside of your normal references set. In case you might enjoy a deep dive into the creative direction happening in Korea… here you go

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Hope everyone had a weekend full of high ROAS and smooth logistics… Today we’re going to go through some of the standout marketing of the last week, break down the latest prompts going viral, and talk about new luxury.

But first…

Today is the last day of our once yearly Cut30 promotion for our bootcamp that starts January 6th. If you’ve ever wanted to start posting short form content, or learn it to better manage creators and social media at your work or company.. you can get Cut30 for $300 off by joining now, and kickoff content with a supportive community and proven formulas for the new year.

A few of our recent grads who’ve been crushing it:

Sam has been discussing the intersection of agriculture, tourism and commerce.

Migo has been going deep on the lore behind… beer.

Dizzy Bee Marketing has been crushing with a signature series.

Ivory Sky has been growing with a wide variety of content for their boot brand.

Shelley has been getting a lot of attention for her bakery with candid reviews, and daily snapshots of her work.

Jimmy has gone viral multiple times with his subway sketches.

If you want to get started or improve on video in the new year… we’re ready for you.

Start here

What’s Happening In Black Friday and Holiday Marketing

The social shows continue, this time with a major player. Maybelline is dropping a 5 part holiday microdrama with two Netflix stars. While this is a great, savvy play for a big brand, for a smaller brand you could likely see similar results by pairing up some niche creators for the iPhone version. We have yet to hit peak social show!

I have been talking about this idea of brand as tv for a long time now, if you want my extended overview of a brand planning exercise to think about characters and dramas, its here.

Retail is getting smart about bringing the hype back - Target (and Lowe’s) both launched bundles for the first customers in line for Black Friday.

The age of “craftwerk”. I have a full video coming on this, but in a counter to the increasingly easy world of AI content, brands with budget are using it on craft… and showing it. Stripe did a pretty incredible miniature city, with documentation.

There was a pretty surprising lack of full blown campaigns for Black Friday, but one that did act on it was Set Active, who rolling out this complete boiling point to freezing point drop series with extensive content and did it as well as any brand I”ve seen.

Patagonia stayed on brand by tripling down on their anti-Black Friday campaign, per usual. There’s something to be said in a world of infinite noise to develop some consistency. I like that Pure Sport ran back their influencer anti-gifting campaign encouraging donations, and hope they never stop it. Establish tradition! Even if some years perform better than others.

Skims went ultra-candid on feed, dedicating a number or their 2x a day social posts over the late week to Kim just breaking down items on their sale on her phone in a mirror, no mic or production. Not even as collab posts…. Simple breakdowns from your known influencers, founders or just a charismatic team member.

Merit Beauty launched a card holder as their incentive (a great, low-cost alternative to heavy discounting to encourage purchases), and I enjoyed it was thought through enough that they had the meme carousel a day or so after. Tasteful, effective and on-brand.

AI Workflows

I have been working on a long-form video on exactly what creatives should be worried about and not when it comes to AI, and recreating all the effects and workflows that are becoming popular to understand them.

I made made a video with Leonardo showing everything from outfit transitions to the creator animal pics, to product visualizations. Prompts below if you want to give them a shot.

Prompts list: still images (all in Leonardo using Nano Banana)

1. “put a little mini anime version of the person sitting next to the guy on the bench”

2. “5 very realistic cute puppies in and around the girls, faces and bodies unchanged”

3. “add very realistic angel wings, rest of photo, faces, bodies, unchanged”

Video prompt for outfit transition (in Leonardo using Kling 2.1 Pro) “transition between the two photos with everything staying the same but the outfits which blend into each other” (speedramped after)

Leonard Blueprints used: Tungsten Moon relight, Product Spin Video, Frameflow, Multiview Perspective Change

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New luxury brands to watch

In my latest Youtube I go through new age brands like Beni Rugs, Slowtide, Quince, and many more that are positioning as alternatives to traditional luxury in vastly different ways.

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