the future of brands

We think of it as three pillars: AI, human, and brand. AI brings power and speed, the human brings taste, intuition, and problem-solving, and the brand provides the framework that keeps everything on-point and relevant. Without that balance, you either get work that’s technically impressive but soulless, or work that’s imaginative but not aligned... See more

The question becomes: have they drifted so far into experience that they're vulnerable to someone undercutting them on basics?

For anyone building brands, communities, or cultural movements, this is both the challenge and the opportunity. You can keep chasing width in activations, collabs, and photo walls, or you can engineer depth by creating spaces that allow rupture from the norm. True rituals, not hollow ones. Risk that transforms. Potency is the only real measure of... See more

Ordinary life has come to give us a narrow set of permissions, usually limited to work and consumption. But potency lives in the delta between what’s normally allowed and what suddenly becomes possible in a special space.

Apple, Nvidia, and OpenAI are all leaning into an ambient, multimodal future:

• Spatial Computing: Apple’s Vision Pro is just the start — digital information woven into the physical environment.


• Voice & Gesture: Interfaces are moving beyond glass screens to talk, glance, and movement.


• Proactive Agents: Systems that act without waiting for a typed query

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The companies thinking furthest ahead are already prototyping for this world:

• Commerce will be conversational, not navigational.


• Brand interactions will be proactive, not reactive.


• The frontline of loyalty will be invisible.

In the ambient future, brands will compete not for screen real estate, but for mental bandwidth and emotional resonance.

“As with the rise of reality TV in the 2010s, personal disclosure became parasocial currency.”

If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.

“What happens when making an image and becoming one align?”