Congratulations. You have just accomplished a task so complex it cannot be done by the world’s most sophisticated machines. You are superior — a Prometheus of pottering about. You can rummage. You are human. Oh, and you’re a moisturized one.

All that feeling about in an unstructured environment; the perception, reasoning, sorting, sensing, millions of messages being sent between your skin and your brain, your ability to apply the right amount of pressure to fiddle, dismiss, find, clutch, extract. That my friend is something robots struggle with and will for a while. Yet you do it every day, with ease.

Lately, there’s a lot of talk about what makes us human. Some of the chatter is a little defensive but as agentic workflows and workforces ingratiate themselves into our lives, our lives are requiring definition — and defending — from the most profound and visible contributions, to more importantly, the most inane, quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Our inner lives, the meta mind, our prosocial preferences and aversions are being examined. I concede that some people do in fact like the sycophantic stance and tone built into most chat bots. I have only ever fully trusted healthcare providers who seem genuinely pissed off, and regularly make friends with people the moment I catch a glimpse of them breaking their fourth wall. So until the chatbots are a little more acerbic, I’m out.

But in these documented (cached and archived) dialogues with bots, and in testing environments, despite all of the subReddits and scripts they’ve been trained on, there’s still that one missing piece. Even when they occasionally apologize for hallucinating or straight-up fibbing: shame.

Given so many of these powerful tools have been built and trained on American inputs, it’s actually surprising that the distinctly American cultural practice of shame (see volumes of essays, think pieces, books, and studies on how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence for instance) hasn’t been learned by the machines. Apologies? Yes. But the shame part that we Americans in particular reeeeeally want to see a shimmer of in any truly great apology? Forget it.

(See this delightful essay on research into machines and apologies. And if you get offended by rude words, there’s a few in here.)

If you’ve ever encountered someone with an injury to their prefrontal cortex, you might recognize the frustrating signs they simply lack the ability to demonstrate what we commonly understand as shame and guilt, which tend to be activated in the frontal lobe and amygdala.

And listen, I’m not saying shame isn’t a toxic and sometimes debilitating thing we deal with but we do know it when we see it. And whether or not we’re absolutely wracked with it, how we respond to it — especially in groups and communities, plays a critical role in how our social bonds and norms, guardrails and even laws, hold together.

You want to throw a bunch of shameless sycophants into your companies and communities? (Look at my self-control not saying anything about political parties here.) Good luck.

Now, you may be asking yourself, when is she going to get to the cultural importance of pooping your pants in public?

Ask any of the Armcherries in your life about the frequency of Armchair Anonymous “unauthorized evacuation” stories. The spinoff, from Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, and Rob Holysz’s insanely popular podcast focuses on “the messiness of being human” and there are hours of these stories. As the hosts roar with laughter, cringe, and ask the caller to relive the moment, something stirs in the listener. Hopefully not the rumble of an urge to go. But something else profoundly sympathetic. Something that creates meaning in the interaction between the storyteller and the listener. The choice to even tell the story says a great deal about who they are, who we are, and what Dax and his team have created.

They say that if a British person can get through their entire lives without ever tripping in public, then it’s the mark of a successful life. (I’m originally English, so I’m allowed to perpetuate this.)

And while there are countless videos of robots falling over, the robots are only learning how not to fall over again. All those signals, data points, and sophisticated probability math are creating a learning loop. But for the robot, the fall wasn’t lame. Not something it will relive at 3am each night possibly for the rest of their lives.

Pooping your pants in public? Much as we try, we can’t really learn to not do that. The things we can’t learn from, improve, or entirely ward off, bond us. The stories around them create memory structures. And celebrating embarrassing, uncoordinated, fallible, human moments is part of what keeps us human and defends our yes, superiority. And I would posit we should expect more of this in culture, as the shameless AI makes its gains.

It’s already a better story, isn’t it? As a reader, you’re already creating aren’t you? Perhaps yours is a naughty cat who has the run of the place; an imperial minister of the home, unceremoniously displacing poor old Digby. Maybe in your story poor old Digby isn’t around anymore and that’s why his bed is empty. Perhaps the cat is grieving and teaching a small child how to manage big feelings.

I love this classic creative writing exercise because it’s partly about writing but it’s mostly about the extraordinary opportunity to observe how our brilliant minds create ideas: how fast, how layered, how lateral, how nuanced, how we understand the need for tension, how we can go wildly strange, and how that creates magic.

When you type “the cat sat on the” into most LLMs, you’ll get: mat. Gemini went on to suggest a few blindingly obvious run on sentences about purring happily, what it was seeing etc, saying, and I quote, “depending on what kind of “vibe” you want.” Vibe? Vibe?!? Really, Gemini. You really don’t know who you’re talking to do you? “Vibe.” Pathetic little try-hard machine.

For those of us in creativity or comms, where the ability to write — to craft story in a way that breaks through is done via breaking patterns (making things a little strange, a staccato element) or making patterns that are wholly yours (I tend to write rhythmically, to an invisible metronome). These are tricks we use. Why? To ensure there’s something distinctly human about the voice that will appeal to a distinctly human reader (or listener).

Yes, there’s an element of our commercial work that is about writing for machines (optimizing) and entire workstreams and jobs that are just about that (SEO, GEO…). But whether you write speeches and keynotes for the CEO, write announcements and press releases for media, adlobs and scripts for marketing, POVs and white papers, your job is to humanize something technical or appeal to — and get the attention of humans.

Study this craft with as much vim and rigor as you do to keep pace with innovative tools and tech, and I think we’ll all be better for it.

As someone who gets paid to examine culture, articulate patterns, and knit it together to help explain why an idea makes sense or will “work” in a given context, I have a suspicion that our little noses are currently pressed up against the glass, looking out at something new.

Affordability.

Before we go there, let’s take a beat to remind ourselves of the twin aesthetics that have dominated in culture: “wealth porn” and “quiet luxury” — two sides of the same coin; a fixation on unrelenting affluence.

First, the spectacle and you know when you see it-ness of wealth porn. Voracious consumption of narratives and gratuitous imagery all driving at the desire of and for the lifestyles, travel preferences, and refrigerator innards of the ultra-rich.

Scripted shows like “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” “Industry,” and “Billions” offered appointment-style voyeurism into the secluded world of the 1%. Those hours unfolding with obscene opulence and a dollop of moral superiority for the viewer around how very empty these very full lives really were.

Second, the aforementioned gave way to quiet luxury or stealth wealth — the stubbornly high-status signaling that was subtle and anonymous. It was logo-less, minimalist, impeccably crafted, high-end, touchable yet you couldn’t touch it, and its value only discernible to those “in the know.” Possibly a reaction to influencers faking their way to that kind of visibility, the pivot from looking rich to being wealthy took hold, giving the actually rich plausible deniability. Yes, they could shield their gilded truth from public scrutiny, envy, anger, and even criminal investigation.

This aesthetic did what all powerful things in culture do — they objectify; they give you something to look at for long enough to realize it’s a mirror. We were locked in a period of extreme and highly visible income inequality, a discursive phenomenon of wealth, and the public’s complex mix of aspiration and resentment and now, quite predictably, the spell is breaking.

As the luxury and prestige goods market in the U.S. experienced a five-year period of extreme volatility — a sharp pandemic-induced slump followed by a robust recovery and subsequent deceleration, I was working with some of the world’s largest credit card companies and payment systems, prestige and retail brands.

Cost-burdened NIMBYism, and the rental affordability gap played out on the teams I worked with, while we toiled away on creative briefs, rummaging around for insights on what value felt like, whether maximalism resonated, or if exclusive events and sweepstakes felt worth entering. Financial doom-scrolling and giving up on big savings goals because the future seemed impossible had become the norm.

I grew up with “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on TV and here comes Temu’s 2023 Superbowl ad urging people to “Shop Like a Billionaire,” with stories of valuations and pay packages in the trillions all over the news. A million might buy you a modest condo or townhouse in an okay location but in the most competitive, expensive zip codes (like parts of Manhattan or Silicon Valley), a million may only cover the down payment.

So we started creating and aesthetically leveraging what we called “joy-dosing.” Celebrations of small, regular, hits of seemingly superfluous purchases of things like $10 bubble tea resonated, and we were rewarded with high engagement rates on content and new followers to those brand accounts. What became clear was that what once was priceless was becoming worthless, emotionally and financially, but we couldn’t quite grab onto what was being desired or expressed as a replacement.

If you work in communications, then politics is a great thing to study — the lessons are hard, fast, and kinesthetic.

Enter Zohran Mamdani: pulling off a political upset by running on affordability.

I had a quick look at some usage of “affordability” and related terms over the last few years and it has all the markings of a broader recognition that economic hardship is no longer perceived as a cyclical downturn but a structural problem in access to essential services and long-term financial stability. These ideas and the conversations around them are long-term.

Even Trump tried a few times last week to take back affordability (I’m sure in his mind, claiming he invented the term). There is a smidge of truth, in that “the economy” was a big driver of the 2024 U.S. election but worth keeping in mind that most registered voters believe their party will make the economy better and that they are doing worse, economically, under an opposing party rule. (This is why polls, people, post-rationalization, and asking people about how they feel after the fact, is not a particularly instructive science.)

What we’re seeing my friends is past hype and backlash. There is an affordability thing that is taking root. And the word, the surrounding lexicon, will begin to leak from politics, the news, the Internet, into what we adorn ourselves in, listen to, and claim to like more than anyone else and certainly before most of our friends.

So what might that look like? It could look a bit like how grunge showed up in our lives, as a reaction to 1980s hedonism.

Perhaps the music will get more introspective. Janglier. Maybe our homes and apparel will become less obtuse — something that’s neither maximalism nor minimalism. Maybe we’ll stop wearing, doing, saying things ironically because we no longer need to signal that we’re being ironic.

My job isn’t to know or craft the look and feel of affordability — or even the slang that will inevitably and quickly surround it. My job is just to point at the thing, tell you it’s all connected to other things, and inspire you to believe it’s about to change our world.

I’m talking about the creativity killers.

I’ve worked in retail marketing, brand advertising, experiential, and PR agencies. I’ve worked at (Disney) and for (client roll call) some of the most creative companies in the world. And these criminals are everywhere. Sometimes they’re good people who are just having a bad day. Other times, their idea-killing is pathological.

These are not necessarily the people who ‘come from a place of no’ but they have no access to ‘can, if.’

If you know me, then you might recognize ‘can, if’ is one of my go-to refrains. It’s why I have profound affection for great producers and engineers because they live in that space. I’ll never forget an engineer at AOL many years ago chuckling when I asked him whether something could be done, as he leaned back in his chair and said, “Oh GiGi, we can make anything. But that’s not the right question.” (I was henceforth hurtling toward a career in creative strategy, having learned the most important lesson about beautiful constraints, focused briefs, and that there could be an actual job in traversing the space between an audacious idea and its ability to see the light of day.)

Whether you work in a creative company or have creative in your title, it doesn’t matter. Creativity is actually how all problems get solved well. Creativity is what the best businesses do. It’s why I’m so passionate about making the case for creativity and cultivating the conditions for it to come about… in any context.

But let’s get back to the idea-killers. And what we do about them.

The act of killing an idea is a bit like misery — it wants company. When the eye-rolling goes from petulance to indignance, it gathers momentum. It needs people to agree that this idea isn’t feasible, it isn’t right for the brand, it’ll open up too many hurdles. The murderer will often make a personal statement of objection, based entirely on their own subjective experience of life, but quickly lure others in by saying something like, “And it’s not just me saying this, is it?! I mean, no one is going to do this, are they?”

And that’s the moment when those advocating for creative solutions, the ones hanging onto the original kernel of the idea, become weakened. The killer now is smugly flanked by others questioning the feasibility, the cost, if it’s brand safe, or whether anyone would even care or do this in the first place.

And now it’s not just a challenging idea. It’s now a bad idea. The naysayers want to call time of death. And the worst part is they seem almost satisfied, vindicated. They’ve likely lost sight of what parts of the idea they’re struggling with. And as one or two people in the room fumble with the defibrillator paddles, attempting to cauterize each objection with blindingly hot inspiration, the idea-killer has probably now turned their attention to their phone or will simply leave the room and the carnage in their wake.

At this point you’re probably wondering: a). Are we done with this metaphor yet? and b). So what? Ideas are cheap. And not all ideas are good. Some ideas deserve to die.

Here’s the thing about creativity: it’s recursive. The best ideas want debate. Ideas get better with conflict, challenge, that moment when everyone goes, “Ohhhh sh*t. We didn’t think about that.”

Ideas need to be turned upside down and asked if they still work going backwards, with feathers, underwater, in space, for double the budget, or half of it. Innovation and inventiveness are outcomes not intentions.

This is why I’m writing this. Because murderers are everywhere. You will encounter the idea-killer sooner or later. They will exhaust you. Their own pathology will try to consume your best burgeoning ideas. And you will be wise to know their patterns, how they ensnare and entrap. And how to respond so they don’t get away with murder.

I don’t recommend going down a subreddit on people who survived murder or assassination attempts but I will posit that they often come out with a kind of clarity and resiliency that makes them braver. Oh and they have one helluva story.

Another group was on their way to San Francisco for NFL content capture this weekend. And I got on the East River ferry and wandered over to a sound stage in Greenpoint, where some of my team was shooting what can only be described as a music video for a retailer.

During a break, someone said to me, “Things feel different lately. We’re good. It’s good.” And it struck me, that culture is formed in ‘the hang’ — in the shit-shooting before someone calls “quiet on set.” It’s in the bored conversations when you learn something amazing about a colleague’s secret talent or side hustle; in something as big as an admission of an unfulfilled dream or the mundanity of how they hold a fork. It’s in the bit toward the end of the day, when you’re just getting silly and delirious, and everything’s funny for no reason.

For all the talk of return to office, I have a bit of a carte blanche as so much of our work is done with an entirely different interpretation of “on site.” We’re not a production company per se but we do make a lot of stuff, and much of that has us physically up and about and not needing “hot desks” to satisfy our needs.

Don’t get me wrong, we do actually really look forward to all coming back together and being in the same space, and if that happens to be in an office, then great. Glad we have it. But the ROI on our togetherness is beginning to form much like addiction does: not in the presence of the thing, but in its absence.

FWIW my business is up over 15% from last year and the output is flawless so something about our little presence-dosing vs. persistent togetherness seems to be working.

As I left set on Friday (understanding my role was to make my exit after a certain amount of time to let the team get on with their work — and the important work of forming their own relationships), I got flashbacks of the ungodly hours and dollars spent in other organizations past on contrived off-sites and all staff meetings, on internal presentations and definition-writing, slide-jokeying, and vision-setting. And how often those boondoggles were in a vacuum; a retreat, a total aside from the work.

If you want to know your culture and set the metronome on the culture you want to build and scale, you have to go where the work happens. Whether that’s elbowing your way onto a set, the shop or factory floor. Get in line at the cafeteria or coffee bar, seek out the spaces where people are not typing or seemingly doing their jobs at all.

Go where the static is, turn the dial past the signal, pick up on the noise. This is where the addiction is formed, where the intangible is evident. This is where you can see the invisible string that tethers a team together. Find and identify that and you’ll have a much better picture of what it is that makes your team a culture. You’ll never have to host another expensive offsite or define what it is that you do while being miles away from where you do what you do ever again.

It was that night when I got to ask Bob Lutz, “What sells the car — the brand or the car?”

Lutz, who served as EVP and board member of Ford, President and Vice Chairman of Chrysler, and Vice Chairman of GM, seemed genuinely gripped by my question. He talked about the sound of an engine, the distinctly American premise of the open road; he shared a couple of memorable ads and touched on some marketing magic, but he seemed to wind his way back to the car — the car being the thing that sold the car. As the discussion settled into the hallowed walls and stained carpet of The Russian Tea Room, I could feel the question lingered, not entirely sure it had resolved itself.

I’ve since spent a good decade working in the business of brands. In that time, brand purpose became de rigueur. Societal impact and social responsibility got a box in the brief and consumers supposedly started voting with their wallets, interrogating whether the brand did the right thing (by its employees, the environment, and supply chain). Brand narrative became a whole lane and suite of offerings in marketing, advertising, and PR.

Many of the campaigns I worked on were for brands in crowded categories, and we’d often ask whether there was new news or real news driving the brief. Every so often the piece of communications was about legitimate innovation but a lot of the time the marketing centered on our ability to craft a brand story and an ecosystem for that story — one that would reliably resonate with various audiences, across different platforms. We did newsjacking (Yeah. Sorry about that). And we developed brand platforms that put the consumer at the center or deliberately tucked the product into the background, as the vaguely apologetic presenting sponsor of a “much bigger” cultural story.

I don’t regret any of that work or the impact it had but I am starting to see a shift in what’s working, what’s breaking through, and what people are drawn to. And I’m not the only one.

The brilliant Rei Inamoto recently wrote that one of the new rules of advertising was a shift from people story to product story. He writes,

In the Old World, brands used to tell Brand Stories to connect with their audience emotionally. A dozen years ago, as mobile and social media took a strong foothold across the Internet, “brand stories” shifted to “people stories.” Instead of talking about themselves, brands used their power and reach to reflect real people and their stories. That helped them be more authentic and purpose-led.Brand storytelling is shifting again but this time towards product stories.

Now, we can argue that actually in the Old Old World, the product was the story. When categories were smaller, competitors fewer, and choice limited.

Invention was everywhere. America was built on this idea of audacious ideas coming to market and capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff. (Love that line, MIT.)

Cattle were branded so that the provenance of herds crossing the plains could quickly be identified. Coca-Cola figured out their brown bottled drink should also be marked as it was crated across state lines. And whether they were storytellers or snake oil salesmen, those early advertising folk had fodder to ignite the imaginations of onlookers. Invention was what laid the groundwork for exceptionalism. And explaining to people what the thing was — the thing they’d never seen before — well, that was the beginning of the business of creativity.

So back to now. In these crowded categories and cluttered shelves there is still innovation and a lot of it. There is improvement (better for you). And there is radical differentiation. There is product news.

There’s also a good chance the public is suffering from societal issues fatigue. Or people never reeeeally cared about a brand’s stance but surveys were written in a way that effectively convinced industries and marketers that they did.

And finally, I suspect there is just too much content, too many narratives being churned out by humans and machines, creating such a glut of human-centered, cultural chatter that it’s actually causing brand storytelling blindness, if not impatience.

So I’m finding myself firmly in the product story camp. Wanting to work with brands on simply telling and framing what it is that they make and do. And beautifully explaining that what they make and do is either the first, the best, or the most different.

That’s it. That’s the brief.

Graza olive oil has been doing this brilliantly since inception (I often use them as an example in lectures and presentations). They simply put great olive oil in a squeezy plastic bottle that makes you feel cheffy and encourages a ton of usage in the process, breaking with the category of rarefied dark glass and saving liquid gold for special occasions.

The ACLU on the flipside is stuck in brand storytelling and while I love them and respect their mission, their advertising fails to tell you what the ACLU makes or does. I’d argue that’s the single most important hurdle they could overcome — plainly telling especially younger people or non-registered voters what an ACLU is and how it works (hint: it’s not a fight for democracy, a sticker and a T-shirt for your membership donation).

Like all things, the business of creativity is recursive. And I believe we’ve just re-arrived at a new era of product storytelling — a place where your product is your brand. And that’s the kind of brand strategy that will break through.

The current political climate, a seemingly endless election cycle, and a media environment that amplifies America’s binary tendencies have contributed to a cautious approach, where ideas are often diluted for fear of alienating any portion of the audience.

Not too long ago at a BrandWeek conference or something of that ilk, I was asked how long it took for a brand to rebuild trust and bounce back after a crisis. It opened up a “how long is a piece of string?” debate. We talked about “crisis creative” and the role that salience — ideas that assert themselves — can have to mitigate problems while motivating masses of consumer engagement. We got really honest about the dearth of attribution; about understanding the difference between the loudest voices on social and the rapidly shrinking delta between hype and backlash. Interestingly, a few brave folk shared that despite some royal screw-ups in the airline and hospitality industries, ticket sales remained robust, regardless of the chatter in the trades.

Fear of consumer blowback and its potential commercial impact weighs heavily and almost exclusively on marketers. (We don’t need to relitigate Bud Light.) As the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) hovers around four years, and as these roles evolve into Chief Commercial Officer positions more closely aligned with the CFO, those responsible for telling the brand’s story — charged with differentiation and growth — face immense pressure to deliver financial results in what feels like the most risk averse time in modern memory.

CMOs, often seen as the decision-makers or custodians of the brand, find themselves with less time than they would prefer to monitor the brand’s performance and the power of creativity to drive growth. Between supply chain, inflation, activist investors, ad safety, and societal issues, pragmatic meetings often outnumber those focused on irresistible ideas.

The responsibility of avoiding missteps was traditionally the domain of the Comms person. The Chief Communications Officer (CCO) would typically get invited to the fun creative meetings primarily to provide a perspective on risk and reputation, and even then they were included in that meeting because no one wanted to call Legal first.

While the CCO ultimately reports to finance, theirs is a somewhat fiduciary responsibility and because of that, they may hold more persuasive power to push for brand bravery and creativity than the CMO.

Agencies have strategically hitched their wagons and livelihoods to the CMO, attracted by their perceived buying power, bigger budgets, and yeah, often more glamorous events. However, this alignment comes with higher risk of an idea being watered down or killed if there’s even the slightest ambiguity on its ability to perform and play nice with everyone.

Meanwhile, Comms people who’ve long decried the swim lanes and fought for smaller portions of spend, mired in the less fun aspects of brand building, might be the ones to sidle up to — the ones to approach with new ideas. Burdened with the less showy aspects of brand building, they may just have a higher tolerance for creative bravery than anyone else in the C-suite at present.

I immediately marked it as spam. We’ll see whether that worked. But according to the good people at Google, “You can now get help writing a tough message, planning a party, or just having a fun conversation.”

A fun conversation? Oh fuck off.

What I don’t need is the infantilizing of my communication and connections. I’m already annoyed that Teams (our company’s preferred video/chat software) wants to add animated reactions like balloons, confetti, or thumbs up emoji over video. Despite turning off that “feature,” it still happens and I am now purely waiting to screengrab the indignity of one of those showing up whilst having a decidedly not fun conversation.

Business meetings in an MMO environment or virtual world? Look, if Jeff in Legal rocks up to an all staff as a hilarious giraffe, I’m out. I’m done.

On LinkedIn, under almost every post there’s now a little banner where their machine offers to summarize the content or explain more about something referenced in it.

First of all, a growing portion of posts on LinkedIn are the result of people getting sucked into answering questions — a little ego-dose thanks to being told they’re an authority on whatever provocative hairball the system coughs up in their feed. Treating your users as a content farm so you can jack up your engagement metrics to presumably get more ad revenue and high five in the hallways about the growth rate is… well, it’s certainly a choice.

I wonder how long it will be before our machines will simply be embroiled in conversations with another; Alexa repeatedly telling the phone’s virtual assistant “I didn’t quite get that,” pumping oodles noise online, while actual human users walk slowly away from the machines, turning those ad impressions into even more questionable garbage than they already are.

This inane LLM integration across platforms is as clumsy as AOL Keywords and Clippy were. I don’t need a chatbot explainer of every goddamn post I see. I don’t need my texts rewritten to sound, oh I don’t know, funner.

Much like the way raw materials, unfinished wood, and “touching grass,” trended against a rise in impossibly smooth, flatscreens and digital surfaces, I’m going to assume there will be a natural backlash to this hype cycle, where we’ll come to love typos, unanswered questions, and things that require us to think deeper.

But right now as we suffer through the stupid phase, where product managers have clearly lost all connection to UX people, and the actual end user — or human — I don’t mean to be all get off my lawn about it, but I implore the tech companies to include the perspective of a grown-up before rolling out these features.

This title inspired by How I Became Stupid, by Martin Page, a book I read and loved a few years before LinkedIn or Gmail existed.

This story in AdAge was talking about how increasingly, advertisers (clients) are placing more restrictions on their partners (agencies) when it comes to AI in their work but I’m not yet seeing the kind of consistent clarity coming from the client.

It’s more like a collaborative Whac-A-Mole game but endlessly fascinating. Every time we unearth a new understanding or scenario plan and play out implications, I sort of love that moment where we’re looking at each other, chuckling in awe that we’re getting a front row seat to this chapter.

Having had the benefit of navigating “Web 2.0” and “UGC” in the early 2000s, at what was then AOL Time Warner, today’s AI discussions are a lot like those we had about safe harbor, fair use; what constituted pastiche… I remember when “citizen journalists” would post content into an AIM community that we wanted to promote on the welcome page or sign-off screen and someone would catch an errant Coke can in the background… the swirl!

My friends at Viacom and MTV had it way worse and more often than we did but we all quickly adapted. Privacy policies, TOS, and guidelines would be drafted and edited into the site footers and contracts, and on we rolled until there weren’t so many things up for debate anymore. We got to move at the speed of Internet culture, making things faster, better, and very occasionally cheaper.

Whether it’s in the pages of the trades or in hallway conversations, when it comes to those brands and agencies (their creators and producers) experimenting with AI, I’m seeing plenty of lambasting and admonishing of those who mess up, but not enough material discussion.

It strikes me the only way we’ll manage around machine learning, is if we’re doing the human learning alongside it.

The fact that we’re all getting to experiment with generative stuff together, as agencies and creators, publishers, brands, and lawyers, gives me solace. Not only should we be talking with one another about what we learned when things went well — and being honest about what we learned when things went pear-shaped, we should be talking about implementing standards that serve us, collectively.

Much like how things like Creative Commons was born out of an open, collaborative Web, implemented and adhered to by (then) major platforms and players like Flickr et al., I hope we use this moment to develop the frameworks and principles together — as a community of people working in commercial creativity, where our work is mutually protected and valued.

While it’s long been argued that notions of loyalty marketing were null — its efforts misdirected and dollars misspent, I would add that the last few years of mass layoffs and Welchian corporate practices have exacerbated a societal dynamic in which people feel that loyalty is neither returned nor rewarded.

People who’ve just slipped down the rungs of Delta’s loyalty program and those who held credit cards purely for the Detla affiliate perks are starting to shop for different options. I had a quick look at Google Trends and there are spikes around “chase sapphire” “American airlines miles value” “star alliance” and related topics in the U.S. over the last month.

Like all moments of consumer backlash, the actual numbers may wind up betraying the level of chatter of this exodus but Delta’s competitors should absolutely seize this moment to do a little conquesting. They should on the other end of that search query with a compelling offer and a great, memorable, relatable, and entertaining story.

Sure, there will be newly-single frequent flyers who will be booking based on price as they figure out where to take their business on a repeat basis and there will be many travelers asking about lounge access and quality, upgrades and early boarding, complimentary beverages and other “premium” experiences. Airlines competing on this field will do fine but now would be the time to be surprising and salient.

Falling into a mental spreadsheet of comparative columns would be the logical thing to do but rather than prioritizing costs, perks and points, the airlines that Zag will likely win this window of opportunity. Yes, Jet Blue, United, and American, now is the time for you to flight great creative on TV and online. Fire up those unexpected partnerships and pop-ups.

What do you do that doesn’t ask for loyalty?

Who wants to get into a conversation about how long it will take you to possibly mayyyybe get on the upgrade list, when you could be talking about your flight experience?

What if an airline’s on-time record rewarded you with more time for hugs with loved ones, overdue drinks with your oldest friends, and spa time at the hotel to shake off the travel?

What if an incredible safety record and zero tolerance for unruly passengers guaranteed passengers a dignified, more human experience of getting from A to B?

Snacks for all? Legroom? Customer service and culture. What else should go on the board? What’s unexpected? What parts of your story have been untold in recent years, deprioritized?

What if flying with you wasn’t actually about the flight at all? What if deciding who to fly with wasn’t about who could make me feel the least uncomfortable?

What if instead of spending money on perks for a few, you directed funds to exquisite customer service for all?

There is a window of time for airlines to get creative. At minimum, drink from the firehose of data from search and social to understand the cluttered, illusionary logic of consumer choice when it comes to why people think they fly regularly with one carrier over another. And find your magic. Find the surprising reason why you stand out and make it known.

This is one of those rare moments when consumers are actually considering your business and brand. Meet them there.