Oren here this week. Clayton and I are in London filming season 2 of Creative Operations, our series with Air where we talk to businesses and individuals about the current state of creative work. There’s a tube strike, so we’ve been biking around the old world, the light gleam of sweat bringing a taste of reality to our longform content.
We've sat down a dozen brands here including Earl of East, About:Blank, Tala, Manors and Niwaki to incumbents like MUD and tech like Appear Here. The series will release later this fall, and be an intimate look at how these brands actually work and develop their strategy across product, creative and brand experience. More soon!
In this newsletter — more marketing prompts, the A-Z of personal brand and why the convo about Beauty is growing louder and louder.
First, a few highlights from this week online worth knowing:
Miu Miu shipped creators branded mics, introducing a new creator status symbol which somehow was not the most interesting pr kit I saw this week.
this Gentle Monster carousel is the talk of the town for conceptual content
Instagram is ending the hack where brands and creators were uploading their winning reals again and again via trial reels but limiting reach on duplicate uploads.
The new on-site interaction in e-commerce… is AI enabled haggling
Let’s begin.
Marketing Prompts
We got quite the positive response last week from the Brandfathers "how to build a second brain for your marketing" video, discussing creating a custom GPT withyour brand context to be able to come up with ad and landing page angles.
This isn't just a nice concept, this is the beginning of a bigger shift in enabling brand marketers, ecom teams and creative strategists to really supercharge their efforts. That was just level 1, and the remaining levels are coming increasingly fast.
Related - the Hubspot team put together an interesting resource - a set of very thoroughly fleshed out marketing prompts for Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT. You enter your brand's context, and it puts together the kind of things that would have taken extensive work from multiple team members. I talk about this more here and you can grab that for free here after filling out this form: LINK
The ability to pull context from the internet, combine it with provided brand context, and then provide AI frameworks to think strategically on top of that, then end out with tactical actions, pre-organized in your brand voice… We're in a very different era for brand marketers.
One of the most useful things you can be doing right now is putting together a package of your "brand context" you can easily use to leverage scenarios like this - reviews, copy, brand guidelines, existing angles and exercises. It’s worth getting good at this now.
Personal Brand in 2025
One of the most interesting topics I've reflected on over the last few years of making the shift from marketing executive to content creators is the levels of personal brand. I just started making content there was no aspiratin or marketing plan, no furutre vision I had carefully organized. But since then, as things have rapidly expanded, I've thought a LOT about it. What's worth it and not, where the leverage is, how you grow, and I’ve also noted that there really aren't lots of thorough blueprints for this in the new internet era. Theres tools to get you to go zero to one to make content, or to think abhout how to present yourself on line, but frameworks, funnels, positoning, foramts, money making, most of the info is outdated at best.
In this video I break down "The Art of the Personal Brand" a complete outline of how to think from concepting, to starting, to expanding to really going for maximum impact. Whether its a jump off point for yoru business or just a touchpoints for your careerr, I think you'll find it really valuable.
Beauty by the Numbers
As many of you who I've talked to know, earlier this year I took a position as Creative Director at beauty investment firm &vest. Why this industry? I was introduced to the industry working with Vaan - while I was creative in residence there they worked on Rhode, Hourglass, Markeup by Mario, REM beauty and many more. I immediately began looking at it as the marquee web and social industry by which other industries will likely follow. We did our Beauty & Body, Online research report last year and really dived in. A dozen store visits ith peole in industry - extensive brand and consumer researt h and I was sure this was an induystry where creative strategy has a afar outsized impact.
Frankly, the adoption and numbers are staggering., Beauty and personal care are surging in not just the US, but across the world - UK, India, China, Asia. Luxury brands like Dior and Louis Vuitton are dedicating sophisticated strategies to engaging customers in the category. The crossover between health and wellness and generation increasingly particular about what they put on and in their bodies is a major product turning point. And most importantly - independent brands are growing fast, showcasing the room for new players in the market.
We're beginning our social media journey beyond LinkedIn today - and I broke down a few of these numbers in a carousel to help understand the nature of this shift HERE.
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.