The Last Summer to Lock In... Ever

the World Cup is coming... does anyone care?

Jun 02, 2026

In this HYPER, Clayton and I are hosting incredible strategy sessions with a bunch of our creator friends at Cannes, this may be one of the last summers we can lock in, the World Cup is approaching, and much more

Let’s begin.

Darkroom & HYPER at Cannes

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

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

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

The Brand Dynamics of the World Cup

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

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

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

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

The Great Summer Lock In

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

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

But it’s gotten even harder… culturally.

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

The first and most obvious is work from home, which has given a lot of people a higher quality of life, often at the expense of quality of work. It’s created ultra-distant teams, a significant gap in mentorship, and a change in the ability to rally people around a common goal.
The second is how the summer is treated, which is largely in tune with that same work-from-home strategy. I know a lot of companies that simply have to give up a lot... Summer fridays happens, extended vacations become more allowed. People are more distant, if anyone’s checked out, but fewer brands than ever are able to truly lock in as soon as Memorial Day hits. Not a bad thing, but… a thing.
Meanwhile, AI has introduced Crazy Gen X AI Boss Syndrome, where a particular cohort of elder millennials and Gen X males in particular have distanced themselves from their employees so much because of their use of AI for communication, feedback, and ideation. This has lost them relatability and respect from their workforce in a way that radically changes company dynamics in ways that they are not introspective enough to understand. The more of this they experience, the more the team member checks out in an increasingly unmonitored environment.
Then we have the great productivity reckoning, where company after company, from Webflow to Meta to Square, has taken the AI restructuring momentum for being able to reduce a workforce to right-size orgs they know have gotten out of control. When you look at many organizations that have adopted AI, very few of them have seen the huge productivity increases that would warrant a 20% reduction in force, for instance. But they all certainly had an extra 20%, if not more, of bloat:
- Management layers
- Process that didn’t need to exist
- Culture
- Technical debt
At the same time, a new era of companies has locked in on productivity, especially on the marketing and creative fronts. What a handful of people can do with UGC, organic social, inside the ad accounts with shoots, with personality, with scaling teams of influence continues to be shocking. It is disruptive even to the new generation of brands that started five to ten years ago who are leveraging the internet to stand out.
And because of these layoffs and the assumption that these people in those former jobs would be able to get more similar jobs to what they had, there is a massive amount of a trying-to-be-employed workforce applying for jobs whose resumes are analyzed by AI who are expecting a previous gen of companies. This is who you’re competing with for a job: more people than ever, more applicants, harder to tell them apart, and humans are not doing the reckoning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kitchen Sink

The Speed of David

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

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New brand from Medici (David’s parent company) 👀‼️

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Omg this is how David tinned cod came packaged. @dayjobstudios you genius!
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And they’re running the clipping playbook to go along with it
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The #1 Protein Bar company just launched Content Rewards 📈
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Curry x Li Ning

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

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In this week's Edge, we tell the story of Rollins – the world’s largest pest control group. Full cover exploration:

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